The war next door

To most Americans, the “War on Drugs” meant Nancy Reagan encouraging us to say “No,” Chris Rock playing crackhead Pooky and drive-by shootings taking the lives of innocent elementary students in the inner city who happened to be walking to sch

To most Americans, the “War on Drugs” meant Nancy Reagan encouraging us to say "No," Chris Rock playing crackhead Pooky and drive-by shootings taking the lives of innocent elementary students in the inner city who happened to be walking to school on the wrong day. But there’s a new war on Drugs going on right now in Mexico that’s spilling into our streets, and it’s going to take a lot more than Nancy Reagan and teens smashing fried eggs to stop this war from getting out of control.

Recent news coverage of the battles between the major drug cartels and the Mexican government have only scratched the surface of just how deep-seated the crime and corruption is across our border and the danger it poses to our very way of life in the United States. Until Felipe Calderon was elected president in 2006, the Mexican government had a tacit agreement with the drug cartels. As long as they kept the violence to a minimum, and only sold to the ‘gringos’ up north, law enforcement would look the other way. But Calderon has a whole new attitude. He’s deployed over 50,000 troops and police to stop six drug cartels that he sees as a threat to the very sovereignty of Mexico.

Over 7,000 people have died in direct conflict between the Mexican army and the drug cartels since 2006. That’s a higher death toll than the U.S. army’s losses in the Iraq War in half as much time. In Ciudad Juaraz, a Mexican border town only a few miles from El Paso, Texas, the drug cartels are so powerful that they threatened to kill a police officer every 48 hours until the chief of police quit–he did. The Mexican Federal police chief was killed in his own home last year. Public school teachers in border towns are being extorted out of their bonuses by cartels, and literally hundreds of police, politicians and bureaucrats are on drug payrolls. In 2008, the cartels were so bold that they began extorting money from General Motors plants operating in Mexico. Most recently, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, head of the Sinola drug cartel, one of the most brutal in Mexico, was named to the Forbes list of the richest people on the planet bringing in more than 18 billion dollars a year in drug profits.

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