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Nature abhors a vacuum. When the
U.S. government ceased to care about controlling the U.S.-Mexican border, the region
descended into anarchy.
We now have illegal aliens and drugs moving north and Mexican drug smugglers even setting up listening and observation posts north of the border. There is an intrinsic relation
between drug and alien smuggling, with drug smugglers using illegal aliens, sometimes as drug
runners, sometimes as decoys.
But open borders work both ways.
Recently, the Mexican government has been getting upset because of
south-bound smuggling: of guns. Its preferred solution: the U.S. should
abolish the right to keep and bear arms.
Don’t laugh—if the Bush-backed
drive to marry Mexico prevails, gun control will happen.
Contributor
Allan
Wall
Allan Wall recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. He currently resides in Mexico, where he has lived since 1991. He can be reached via e-mail at allan39@prodigy.net.mx [go to Wall index] |
In Mexico, the drug cartel wars
go on and on. The last report I saw put it at 1263 slain in drug killings so far in calendar year
2007.
President Calderon, inaugurated in December, has made smashing the
cartels one of his main priorities. Calderon has shown a lot of resolve and determination, in contrast to
the passive response of Vicente Fox at the end of his
presidential term. The Mexican public seems to support
Calderon. A poll taken in May indicated a more
optimistic Mexican public than the same poll taken 10
months earlier (July of 2006), despite the fact that
killings have increased since then. In addition, 67% of Mexicans polled agreed that national security was
at risk.
Nevertheless, crushing the
cartels is an enormous challenge.
Jailing cartel chiefs doesn’t
solve the problem, since they can continue to run their
cartels from jail, or they’re just taken over by a relative, or a struggle for supremacy breaks out within the cartel.
Really eradicating the cartels
would involve going after their funds, which are
laundered to utilize a legitimate business as a cover.
It also involves going after crooked cops, of which Mexico has no dearth. It’s been estimated that half
the cops in the country are paid off by a drug cartel. [Police
corruption undermines Mexico's war on drugs, By
Robin Emmott, Reuters, May 22, 2007] Some cops actually function as drug runners and hitmen.
Calderon has chosen the army as his principal weapon against
the cartels because the Mexican army is one of the most respected
institutions in the country and the president has more
control over it than over the police. Nevertheless, the
military route poses problems as well. The Mexican army has a high desertion rate. Some
ex-soldiers find their way into the cartels, where the pay is much
higher.
And, let’s face it, part of the
problem is the enormous demand for drugs in the United
States. It’s not a simple question of evil Mexican drug dealers and innocent Americans. There is a significant
population of Americans who are voluntarily buying drugs. Americans are thus the principal financiers of Mexican
drug cartels.
Our own “War on Drugs” has
been an abject failure. So now that our own government is
more and more integrated with that of Mexico, we pressure
Mexico to go after the cartels—although we can’t even
reduce demand.
The late Milton Friedman was a critic of the war on drugs,
and the deleterious effects it has on other countries.
In 1998, Friedman described it thusly:
“Our drug policy has led to
thousands of deaths and enormous loss of wealth in
countries like Colombia, Peru and Mexico, and has
undermined the stability of their governments. All
because we cannot enforce our laws at home. If we did, there
would be no market for imported drugs. There would be no
Cali cartel. The foreign countries would not have to
suffer the loss of sovereignty involved in letting our advisers and troops operate on their soil, search
their vessels and encourage local militaries to shoot down their planes. They could run their own
affairs, and we, in turn, could avoid the diversion of military forces from their proper
function.” It’s
Time to End the War on Drugs, Hoover Digest, 1998, #2
That was in 1998. Now
the Colombian cartels have been replaced with Mexican
cartels, but the basic analysis is the same.
(Of course, Milton Friedman also said that "It’s just obvious that
you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state." They didn’t listen to Friedman on that topic either!)
As for weapons smuggling, that
goes the other way. Mexican drug cartels send people to
the U.S. to buy weapons, then they bring them back into
Mexico.
Mexico has much stricter gun laws than the U.S. There are big signs on the
border warning people about this. So how do they get
them in?
According to members of the Mexican congress, it’s because of corruption in the
Mexican Customs Department. The cartels have infiltrated
their people into customs, and so they help their cartel
companions get the guns into Mexico. In fact, about 2,000 illegal weapons enter the country daily.
And according to our own ATF, 60% of the illegal arms in
Mexico come from the U.S. (which would also mean that
40% of them come from elsewhere).
The Mexican government is unhappy with the U.S. because of all these weapons
entering its territory. Attorney General Eduardo Medina
Mora recently had this to say:
"American law seems
absurd to me, because ….the citizens can easily acquire
arms. American society lives the consequences of this on
a daily basis, and it has begun to be reflected upon as a result of that Korean not long ago." [VDARE.COM note: If an American Attorney General referred to a mass murderer by race, he’d be looking at early retirement. You are
invited to imagine what would happen if John Ashcroft
referred to the Washington Snipers as “Those
black guys,” or even “Those
Muslims,” to get some idea of how much more insensitive Mexicans are about these things.] ["Cínica",
la política antidrogas de EU; su ley es "absurda":
Medina Mora, Alfredo Mendez, La Jornada, June
15, 2007]
So the Mexican government doesn’t
like our gun laws, eh? Well, just as American drug buyers
feed the Mexican cartels, so Mexican demand for guns
feeds that market.
And although Mexican gun laws are
stricter than ours, that hasn’t stopped plenty of
Mexicans from getting their hands on automatic weapons, grenades and rocket launchers—all of which are
utilized by drug cartels.
Mexican officials want to have
their cake and eat it too. They want an open border for Mexicans to go into the U.S. whenever they want. But
they don’t want Mexicans in the U.S. to buy weapons and
bring them back into Mexico!
If you really want open borders,
you’d better be prepared for who and what comes across
them, and for whatever reason.
In fact, the increasing
integration of the two countries exacerbates the
problems.
After all, if one country doesn’t
like the drug or gun laws of its neighbors, that
wouldn’t be a problem if each were a sovereign nation minding its own business, would it?
And, consider this. If all these
Council on Foreign Relations-inspired Security And Prosperity Partnership and North
American Union developments continue apace, these border problems will be “solved” by eliminating the border.
The CFR 2005 report Building a North American Community called for
the "establishment by 2010 of a North American economic and
security community" that has a common "outer
security perimeter". It proposes that the North American Community’s "boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff
and an outer security perimeter within which the
movement of people, products, and capital will be legal,
orderly, and safe."
What our elites are moving toward
is the elimination of the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian borders and their replacement by the "outer security perimeter" around North America.
(And eventually, even that border
would no doubt be subsumed into an even larger globalist
entity).
So what would happen to the guns,
drugs and illegal aliens now crossing the border?
In the case of the illegal
aliens, they would be allowed to continue crossing
because they wouldn’t be aliens anymore.
In the case of drugs and guns,
their legality would be determined on the basis of the new legal system of the
globalized entity…not by the old-fashioned U.S. constitution.
We are unmistakably headed for
the loss of U.S. sovereignty, and the sovereignty of
neighboring countries, to be replaced by rule by a transnational globalized bureaucratic elite.
That’s what the future looks
like—if we don’t stop it now. CRO
copyright
2007 Allan Wall
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