Planning a trip to Mexico? Forget it.
In the days when my company had a newspaper in El Paso and I used to visit there on a regular basis, it always was a treat to cross the river for a few hours, have dinner and shop at the colorful markets of Juarez where haggling over prices was half the fun.
There is no more haggling. Most of those caught in the crossfire while just minding their own business aren’t even afforded the opportunity to barter for their lives.
The big Mexican city on the border — in fact that country’s entire northern region — has become an anarchic site of murder, mayhem and viciousness. It is a huge mortuary of a city where no one is safe and the silence is broken only by the sound of gunfire.
Northern Mexico is the Somalia of the Western Hemisphere with killing fields cultivated and sustained by an enormous flow of cash and weapons from the United States, a steady revenue produced from America’s huge appetite for drugs.
In Monterey recently, U.S. State Department officials there were told to evacuate their children after a private school came in harm’s way amid signs the drug cartels now control the city.
Earlier in the week, 72 migrants, 58 men and 14 women, from Central America making their way north were massacred. Within 24 hours of being assigned to investigate this horrific tragedy, two top Tamaulipas state officials disappeared. The body of one of the missing officers reportedly was found along a road. At about the same time, two explosions led authorities to speculate that the drug thugs had entered a new phase in their war with the government and society.
The unstable situation now is threatening to spill over into resort areas, adversely impacting Mexico’s vital tourist industry already suffering from fears generated by the constant news of slaughter.
Next to the economy, the escalating death and destruction toll in Mexico linked as it is to escalating alarm over immigration is increasingly becoming America ‘s leading domestic issue.
It has serious political ramifications for the Obama administration, which is faced with mounting questions about how to keep the violence from spilling into U. S. cities and to curtail the mass of money headed south every day.
U.S. customs agents are trying desperately to inspect any suspicious vehicle, including trucks carrying materials for U.S plants in Mexico, but the task is herculean given the length of the border and the enormous flow of traffic. Also, U. S. authorities know that the money is probably never going to be stopped until the market is disrupted.
Since 2006 when President Filipe Calderon took office and declared war on the drug cartels, 28,500 have died in drug-related violence and he recently said there would be more before it is over. There is an endless supply of cartel-owned police officers at the federal, state and local levels. Law enforcement officials have been thoroughly intimidated — and those who haven’t have been eliminated.
“It’s not all that complicated,” a source knowledgeable with the problem said recently. “The drugs go up and the same guys who brought them bring back guns and in certain cases money. Cartel A ships drugs to Chicago or wherever and brings home the weapons the same way. It’s not 15 guys bringing back one or two weapons each. It’s two or three guys bringing back 100. More agents on the northern end could do a lot of damage to the success of these groups.”
But until then it seems wise to stay out of Mexico.
Dan K. Thomasson is aformer editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.