El Paso Times: Juárez cartels beating 10,000 Mexican feds

Trade with Mexico, via Juárez, is vital to El Paso’s economy. And we are close-knit with family and friends in Juárez; so many of us fear a loved one will be caught in the crossfire of bullets. Some have — and died.

Soldiers haven’t stopped gangland-style murders, now about seven daily right next door.

And not just some soldiers — it’s 7,500 soldiers plus 2,300 federal police officers. That’s 9,800 law enforcers who haven’t ebbed the rampant killings. There have been 130 just this month, and 2,300 in the past 18 months.

Drug-trafficking expert Victor Clark told the Associated Press that the thousands of soldiers and federal police do little intelligence work.

Not only that, but Clark notes:

“I see two wars, the visible and the invisible one. The visible one is the dead that the media reports on every day, but the dead are just cheap labor. The invisible one is … the business class and the politicians who really benefit from the millions that the drug trade generates …”

It has long been suspected that profits from illegal drug trading stream into many walks of Mexican life — and into politics and business. Some take the money. Some look the other way.

It’s a shame to say that drugs are a major part of Mexico’s economy, and that could be why soldiers and police can’t beat the drug cartels.

In our case, nearly 10,000 can’t stop gangsters in our sister city, Juárez.

No amount of soldiers, police, weapons, or money can change the inviolable laws of supply and demand.  The harder you try to pinch the suppliers, the more risk and scarcity you add to the supply, the higher the price and the steeper the profits.  Those profits translate into six-figure monthly bribes for police and government officials who live on three-figure monthly salaries.

The demand in America for marijuana and drugs is great.  In the case of drugs like heroin and cocaine, the sources, opium and coca, do not grow well here, so there will always be some level of drug trafficking that will get heroin from Afghanistan and cocaine from Columbia into the United States.  In the case of drugs like ecstacy and meth, the precursor ingredients and manufacturing are tightly controlled in the US, so there will always be some trafficking from places like China, India, and Germany with lesser controls.

But in the case of marijuana, responsible for 60%-75% of the profits of these murderous cartels, there is a foolproof way of nearly eliminating American demand for Mexican trafficked marijuana – let Americans grow the supply domestically!  As our nation’s economy tumbles and unemployment nudges toward 10% (already over 12% here in Oregon and over in Michigan – 1 in 8 can’t find work!), we will not have the luxury of spending money fighting marijuana, ignoring the tax revenues we could reap from its legal sales, and forbidding new hemp farming, hemp processing, and cannabis production and retailing jobs that would be generated by a legal marijuana industry.

I just hope it doesn’t take months or years of seven murders per day in Mexico, or those murders coming to American city streets, to get our politicians to see the ultimate folly of marijuana prohibition and wisdom in legalization.