As Mexico sinks deeper in its drug wars, U.S. should worry

As Mexico sinks deeper in its drug wars, U.S. should worry

Most Americans are preoccupied with the state of the economy, and so they can be forgiven if they aren’t paying a lot of attention to what’s happening in Mexico.

But down in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, there is a growing concern about what’s going on across the boarder. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the country can afford to be oblivious.

Mexico is the 12th largest economy in the world, only it and Canada share a border with the United States and all three have signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico is the third largest source of U.S. oil imports and a significant source of natural gas. Those are just the obvious economic reasons why the United States cannot afford to see Mexico degenerate into a narco-state, where drug cartels, not government, controls the nation and where law enforcement is nonexistent. Former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey has described Mexico as “on the edge of the abyss.” Former CIA chief Michael Hayden says Mexican drug cartels have made Mexico as much a national security threat to America as Iran.

Murders as a yardstick

Just the number of drug-related homicides in Mexico are enough to instill fear north and south of the border.

President Felipe Calderon said more than 6,000 people died in drug violence in Mexico last year, double the number just a year earlier. By comparison, the FBI says that in the United States in 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, about 800 of the nation’s 15,000 homicides were narcotics related.

Ciudad Juarez has become one of the battleground cities in Mexico’s drug wars. The city of 1.6 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, had 1,600 of Mexico’s 6,000 drug-related murders. That’s an average of more than 30 a week.

El Paso, a city of about 600,000 had only 16 homicides in the first 11 months of 2008. (Youngstown, a city only about a 10th the population of El Paso, has routinely had 30 homicides a year, many drug related, in recent years, and got into the 60s per year in the 1990s.)

By any yardstick, the level of drug-rleated crime, homicides and corruption in Mexico is intolerable, and if not stopped actually threatens the ability of Mexico to function as a democratic nation within a decade or so.

Even with all it already has on its plate, the Obama administration is going to have to take a greater interest in Mexico, and it has begun to do so.

From a practical standpoint, the United States obviously cannot allow one of its two closest neighbors to sink from being a state under siege to being a narco-state.

From a moral standpoint, the United State is also obliged to act. Not only is the country, regrettably, the major market for the marijuana, cocaine and heroin that is being grown in or funneled through Mexico, the United States is the main source of firearms being used in the drug wars.

Working within present laws, there is much the Justice Department and Homeland Security can do to restrict the movement of drugs coming into the United States and guns going out, which may give Calderon time to disrupt the growing influence of Mexican drug lords. But in the long run, the United States must do more to address its own pathology as an enormous consumer of illicit drugs.