The Mexican U.S. border would be an ideal place to film a Mel Gibson-Mad Max sequel where lawlessness, carnage and chaos dominate most of the scenes. A Mexican citizen has a better chance of being killed on the streets of Ciudad Juarez than he would on the streets of Kabul. Violence driven by Mexican drug wars has the potential to bring about the collapse of Mexico's already dysfunctional democracy. More than 7,000 Mexicans have died in the midst of drug cartel violence. The one constant with these drug-related murders is that they are often unimaginably brutal. Bodies often have been decapitated and mutilated after horrendous torture. Local officials who are supposed to control the drug violence more often than not are corrupt. A story emerges almost weekly linking local and federal police to cartel drug smuggling.
What is most frustrating about the Mexican drug war chaos is figuring out the truth about whether all that drug violence is moving across the borders. Spend thirty minutes on the internet reviewing every possible source of information you can locate about the threat of violence crossing the border, and you will see a trend in the debate.
One group in the debate is what I call the chamber of commerce chorus. It is a group of U.S. border town public officials in places like El Paso and Laredo who are telling us that none of the decapitated, mutilated bodies are showing up yet in their tourist destination town, so life there is swell. These chamber-generated fluff pieces read like the movie script for Jaws. Especially that scene when city officials voted to keep it quiet that a great white shark was gobbling up unsuspecting tourists.
On another side of the debate, you will find the Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck moonbat crowd. This group of hystericals are already re-supplying their end-of-time underground security shelters. The ones they never got a chance to use during the Y2K scare or the pandemic flu scare or any of those other fear-driven scares that this psychoneurotic mob routinely promotes. Then you have the shameless politico vote hustlers like Texas Governor Rick Perry using the Mexican drug war issue as another wedge to turn Americans against any Mexican crossing our border. Elmer Gantry-styled politicos like Perry will do more harm than good as we try to figure out what the new border policy should be for the next several years. One thing is certain though. We need a new, more creative immigration policy that is more reality based. And here are a few of the realities:
Every year 14 billion dollars worth of illegal drugs are smuggled through Mexico. Mexican gangs involved in drug distribution now operate in more than 200 U.S. cities. In the U.S., reports of killings and kidnappings directly related to Mexican drug cartel activity are surfacing with regularity. Intuitively, it's easy to conclude that there is nothing off limits for a group of psychopaths who are already showing their willingness to torture and behead virtually anyone in their path. Even with all the conflicting self-serving narratives developing, at the very least, common sense should lead us to wonder how many U.S. border towns are right in that bloody path.