It's our fault

By Glynn Custred, CalNews.com
April 7, 2009

On March 25 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Mexican government what it wanted to hear. The United States is to blame for the violence that is terrorizing the Mexican people and that threatens the viability of their state. This situation, says Hillary, is our fault because the guns and money which fuel the violence come from the United States.

It is true that without the demand for drugs in this country there would be no drug smuggling. Gun smuggling, however, is something quite different. The truth is, out of 29,000 weapons recovered at scenes of violence in Mexico in 2007-2008, far less than half, 11,000 were sent to the United States for investigation, and among those only 6,000 were found to have originated in this country. That is only 17% of the guns that were recovered. The other 18,000 were of foreign provenance, Israel, China, South Africa, Russia, South Korea and Spain, and were thus not referred to American authorities for investigation.

Also, a number of the assault weapons found at crime scenes were fully automatic, the kind of gun not available in American gun stores and gun shows. Nor can one find in the open market in the United States the grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and anti-tank rockets that have made the war against the Mexican state so lethal. The world-wide market in firearms is large enough that Mexican cartels, which took in from 17 to 38 billion dollars last year, do not have to rely on smuggling of conventional and semi-automatic arms across the US border, bought from dummy buyers who must evade American background checks. And given the types of weapons and the quantity of munitions used, they certainly do not, at least not for more than a fraction of what has been used in the violence that is terrifying the Mexican population.

If their major suppliers are not in the United States, the cartels do not have to depend on smuggling routes that cross the US-Mexico border. Other far more convenient points of entry are seaports where bulk cargo of illegal arms can be unloaded in a country where corruption has contaminated all branches of government and reaches to the highest levels. The porous Mexico-Guatemala border also offers numerous points of entry, along routes already established for the smuggling of stolen cars, of drugs - most of the cocaine headed north comes across that border - and of guns. 

Another possible source of illegal weapons is from army deserters. According to Mexican congressman Robert Badillo some 150,000 soldiers have deserted over the last six years. How many of them have brought guns and ammunitions with them? The best known example is the elite anti-drug team, the Zetas, trained at Ft. Bragg North Carolina, that went over to the other side as mercenaries for the cartels, and which some in law enforcement say have gone into business for themselves. Another sources of arms is the police. In some communities the police have been entirely taken over by the cartels. Another source of illegal arms is the Mexican Army where, with the high degree of corruption and vast sums available to the cartels, weapons of all kinds and in bulk can no doubt be purchased from corrupt officials.  

Hilary’s mea culpa is predictable given the “Blame America First” mindset that dominates her party and its supporters. It may, however also be due to misleading statistics from The AFT (Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco), and it is perhaps also an attempt to appease the Mexican government, which blames America for everything, on the eve of closer co-operation between the two countries in an effort to deal with the problem of violence in Mexico.

If so, her appeasement has not brought her much, for just five days later Mexican president Felipe Calderón, in a press conference held during a state visit in London, reiterated his government’s position, saying that “Violence and organized crime… has to do with the fact that our border is the border with the largest drug market in the world and the main producer and seller of guns in the world.” Aside from sharing intelligence, said Calderón, the Mexican government will not co-operate with the United States in joint border management. “We do have to work together” he admitted, “but that does not imply the joint participation in military operations or even a joint participation of law enforcement agents.” The Mexican president, for whatever reason, has thus ruled out an effective way of dealing with his growing crisis.     

And crisis it is. More than 7,000 people in Mexico have been killed since January 2008 in drug-related violence, and the number is rising. The situation threatens the United States as well. In its “Joint Operating Environment Report” (JOE 2008) the U. S. Joint Forces Command warned that Mexico is one of two countries, Pakistan is the other that “bear consideration for rapid and sudden collapse.” And police and FBI report activity by Mexican drug cartels in cities like Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta.

Also, Michael Braun, former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration says that the Iran-backed Lebanon-based terrorist organization Hezbollah works closely with smugglers on the US-Mexico border. Hezbollah, he says, relies on “the same criminal weapons smugglers, document traffickers and transportation experts as the drug cartels” in order to raise money from drug sales in the United States to fund their terrorist activities. Last week Admiral James G. Savridis, commander of the U.S. Southern Command told the House Armed Services Committee that the nexus between illicit drug trafficking and “Islamic radical terrorism” is a growing threat to the United States. The current situation and still worse the possible failure of the Mexican state, thus present a growing problem for the United States.

Hillary is right in one sense. The United States is partially to blame for the crisis, for her husband’s administration, and that of his successor, George W. Bush, created the conditions under which a diverse, flexible, highly organized and increasingly brutal smuggling industry was able to develop.

The Clinton administration, partly out of indifference and partly in response to pressure from open-border advocates such as labor unions, ethnic identity political groups and left-wing organizations, refused to implement plans for more effective border control. Instead they reduced border management to little more than a symbolic show of force at highly visible ports of entry, a move that has been described as politic theater.

 The Bush administration, responding to its own constituency, mainly consumers of cheap, exploitable labor and their advocates in the Chamber of Commerce and other business associations, not only continued the Clinton policy, but virtually shut down interior enforcement of the immigration laws, thus increasing the “pull of the magnet” that is a central factor in mass immigration of any kind, legal or illegal.

The Mexican government is also complicit in the growth of this trans-border industry. Mexican elites have long regarded emigration as a safety-valve by which they export what they consider “excess population” rather than enact reforms at home. The Mexican government even created a special agency, Grupo Beta, to facilitate this exodus to protect emigrants from predatory Mexican police and natural hazards. And former president Vicente Fox once called people fleeing the failure of their country to provide greater opportunity, “heroes.”

Smugglers have no loyalties and care little about the commodities they transport, whether people, drugs, guns, anything that will turn a profit. It would be foolish to think that businesses, legal or illicit, do not attempt to maximize their income with the most efficient use of their resources. It is thus no surprise that the illicit industry that started out by transporting people clandestinely across Mexico’s northern border has developed into an enterprise, on both of its borders, so formidable that it now threatens the existence of the Mexican state, and poses multiple threats to the population and to the government of the United States.  

Both the American and the Mexican governments have focused so long on the single minded purpose of keeping the spigot of illegal immigration open, that they have not considered the consequences. Now that both governments are becoming aware of those consequences, the question is, are they capable of dealing with them in a realistic and effective manner? Calderón’s intransigence in regard to joint action on the US-Mexico border does not bode well for a solution to the growing problem.