The U.S. Role in a Mexico Assassination
The U.S. Role in a Mexico Assassination - WSJ.com
American nonchalance about drug use stands in sharp contrast to what is happening across the border in Mexico. There lawmen are taking heavy casualties in a showdown with drug-running crime syndicates. On Thursday the chief of the Mexican federal police, Edgar Millán Gómez, was assassinated by men waiting for him when he came home, becoming the latest and most prominent victim of the syndicates.
It’s no secret that the narcotics trade is like a roach infestation. If you see one shipment or dealer, you can be sure that there are many others that go undetected. The signs of an infestation are everywhere, making a joke of their 40-year claim that any day now they will wipe out American drug use.
Yet if prohibitionists should find this lack of results troubling, imagine how Mexico must view it. That country doesn’t even produce cocaine, but it became a transit route to the U.S. when enforcers had some success in curtailing supplies coming through the Caribbean in the late 1990s.
That success didn’t change the U.S. appetite for the mind-altering substances. Instead, drugs started flowing over land routes and Mexican cartels took charge. Now they are rumored to be in control of most of the traffic from the Andes northward. A U.S.-Mexican joint assessment estimates that more than $10 billion in cash from drug sales flow from the U.S. to Mexico every year.
The upshot: Americans underwrite Mexico’s vicious organized crime syndicates. The gringos get their drugs and the Mexican mafia gets weapons, technology and the means to buy off or intimidate anyone who gets in their way. Caught in the middle is a poor country striving to develop sound institutions for law enforcement.
Most of the drug-related killings since [Mexican President Felipe] Calderón took office seem to be a result of battles between rival cartels. Still, the escalating violence is troubling. The official death toll attributable to organized crime since the Calderón crackdown began now stands at 3,995. Of that, 1,170 have died this year.
Especially alarming are the number of assassinations among military personnel and municipal, state and federal police officers. The total is 439 for the 17 months and 109 so far this year. Many of these victims have been ordinary police officers whose refusal to be bought off or back off cost them their lives.
But as the murder of police chief Millan makes clear, high rank offers no safety. Two weeks before he was gunned down, Roberto Velasco, the head of the organized crime division of the federal police, was shot in the head. Eleven federal law enforcement agents have been killed in ambushes and executions in the last four weeks alone.
If U.S. law enforcement agencies were losing their finest at such a rate, you can bet Americans would give greater thought to the violence generated by high demand and prohibition. Our friends in Mexico deserve equal consideration.
Here in America, one of the saddest consequences of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs is the erosion of support for law enforcement in the eyes of the young. Older folks tell me of a day when they knew the beat cop who patrolled their neighborhood and young people would turn to that officer in times of trouble. Now, people my age and younger have a distrust for police, especially in minority neighborhoods, seeing law enforcement officers as “them” against “us”.
No responsible cannabis consumer with any sense hates police. In fact, most of us would prefer to be able to call police in times of crisis and not fear being caught with the so-called “controlled” substance that would land us prison time. It is unknown how many burglaries or assaults go unreported because the victim is a marijuana user afraid of punishment, but anecdotally I can relate many such occurrences from my friends and family.
Also, we want police and the public to be safe as well. We see no reason why a peace officer needs to put his or her life on the line busting marijuana growers who must protect their crops with guns, since growers can’t turn to police or courts to handle marijuana thefts. We see no reason why the public should face the danger of serious crimes not being responded to because an officer is too busy busting a young person with a baggie of pot.
All marijuana prohibition does is takes a popular activity and adds in violence, profit, and corruption, while not decreasing the popular activity one iota.
Tags: Mexico
