It’s high time the US ended its ‘see no evil’ approach to Mexico
More dead bodies found in Mexico this week. As we all focus on Libya and Afghanistan, the cartels keep stepping up the violence just over the border — so perhaps the time has come for America to take a really objective look at our neighbours to the south. We could start with a quick rereading of Alan Riding’s rather good book on Mexico, Distant Neighbors. The picture is not comforting. Parts of it, near the border, are more like Afghanistan than America. There is unbridled violence, financing of corrupt activities through drug trafficking, control of what should be governmental authority by brigands or worse, and corruption all the way through the social and political hierarchy. It is North America’s own terrorist camp across the Rio Grande. It is time that we stopped thinking of Mexico just as a friendly trading partner and began to assess her potential as another terrorist breeding ground.
Are there practical differences between al-Qa’eda cells and Mexican/Colombian cartels? Fortunately some fundamental differences do exist. Militant Islam is an ideology of global conquest, whereas the cartels have no coherent ideology beyond some Hobbesian free for all — a kind of primitive social Darwinism. Most ordinary Mexicans do not identify with drug terrorism, because they are its chief victims. These factors should make the cartels easier to beat, but so far very little progress has been made.
I often think back to how all this happened. Back in the 1980s our country was poised to wage a serious battle against drugs. We actually drove air and sea smuggling traffic out of the south-eastern United States. The cartels, however, were undaunted. They moved their landing areas to northern Mexico and began to develop systems to smuggle drugs across the entire land border with the United States. When I was Commissioner of Customs for nearly a decade in the 1980s, several south-west border agents made the long trek to Washington to report on this very disturbing development. Columbian cartel figures were moving to northern Mexico and tapping into the local criminal organisations to move drugs into the United States.
I reported these developments to Vice-President Bush as the head of the so-called Drug Task Force. His office was apparently afflicted with the same wilful blindness that affects Obama’s today. The reports were dismissed as hysterical. Successive governments, Republican and Democrat, adopted this easy-to-manage ‘see no evil’ approach to Mexico. As I was told once by a senior White House official, ‘Drugs were not on the agenda in the West Wing.’
What our government would not acknowledge, then as now, is that the scale of corruption in Mexico, throughout the country and throughout government, is not just big but unfathomably massive. When I said as much before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee many years ago, I was excoriated by our Department of State and actually sued for libel by the Mexican Attorney General. The suit died when he learned that truth was a defence to libel in our courts. I am sad to say that I see no real difference in our government’s attitude today. Yes, they are sending more resources to work with Mexican law enforcement officers. But they still do not accept the fact that the Mexican law enforcement both on the ground and perhaps all the way to Los Pinos is hobbled by inefficiency at best, and rank corruption at worst.
But the US can’t ignore Mexico for ever. Soon there will be so much toxic seepage of terrorism and illegality over the border that US citizens will react very strongly. Fear and ire are already building in the south-west border states. So when will our government find the courage to take the same action toward the cartels in Mexico as it does towards al-Qa’eda in Afghanistan?
Drug lords and corrupt politicians do not respect civilised diplomatic overtures and foreign aid. They laugh at the former and take advantage of the latter. It may be time for the United States to get tough — really tough — with Mexico before our border towns revert to the violent wild west. These measures could take the form of a more formidable border barrier as well as carefully targeted direct punitive actions against the cartels and corrupt officials. This will require much more aggressive conduct on the part of the United States. And the sovereignty-obsessed Mexican government will have no choice but to change its attitude.