Why Drug Legalization And Hugs For Terrorists Won’t Solve The Border Crisis

[corbe]

Why Drug Legalization And Hugs For Terrorists Won’t Solve The Border Crisis
 
At best, Mexico is a failed state. At worst, it is a rogue state, hostile to regional peace. The silence from politicians who would have otherwise cried intervention speaks volumes.

By Sumantra Maitra
November 8, 2019
 
As Thucydides hinted, often when people are either afraid or malicious, they have historically tried to garb their fear or malice in the language of rationalization. After the ghastly massacre of Americans miles from the southern U.S. border, the firebrand Mexican leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declined the help of Mexico’s northern neighbors in eradicating drug cartels.

“We have to act independently and according to our constitution, and in line with our tradition of independence and sovereignty,” he replied after President Trump’s tweet offering to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.” Obrador added, “War is irrational. We are for peace. It is a characteristic of this new government.”

This comes after his military was told to stand down and surrendered after losing an urban battle to El Chapo’s cartel last month. The rationalization then was similar: that war is brutal and there’s no point in risking life and blood to catch criminals. The criminals in this instance are those same gangs, which are now a law unto themselves.

This is nonsensical. Obrador’s policy since his election of “hugs not bullets” is similar to a lot of American progressives who believe in reformative justice. The reality is, of course, far more humbling. Mexico is now, at best, a failed state wherein large swaths of territory are controlled by different armed groups, similar to Afghan or Libyan warlords. There is no writ of the Mexican state or the Mexican army or police, and no law and order in these regions.

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https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/08/why-drug-legalization-and-hugs-for-terrorists-wont-solve-the-border-crisis/

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No, Bret Stephens, Let’s Not Do In Mexico What We Did In Iraq
 
Mexico’s troubles aren’t Trump’s fault, and a counterinsurgency campaign won’t solve them.

By John Daniel Davidson
November 7, 2019
 
It’s amazing to see the elite consensus about Mexico congeal in real-time around failed ideas and political biases. In the wake of the massacre of nine Americans, including six children, earlier this week by cartel gunmen just fifty miles from the U.S. border, Bret Stephens of the New York Times already knows who to blame and what to do about it.

All it took was a quick flight to Mexico City and dinner with an elder statesman—and voila! Mexico’s problems, he says, are all the fault of Donald Trump and his Mexican counterpart, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the answer is to do in Mexico what we did in Iraq.

Let’s take these assertions one at a time, beginning with Stephens’ facile notion that the crisis in Mexico can be blamed on Trump and López Obrador, whose “managerial incompetence and ideological inanity” have apparently put the country on a fast track to becoming a failed state—all in a just a few short years.

How could this be? Stephens cites Trump’s demand that Mexico crack down on illegal immigration from Central America, claiming it has “drained its army of the manpower it needs to fight the drug cartels.” Never mind that the “army” López Obrador has dispatched to Mexico’s northern and southern border is largely a show force comprised of the newly-minted Mexican National Guard, distinct from the army and navy. And never mind that López Obrador has explicitly rejected using the military to fight drug cartels. Whether the National Guard were deployed to Mexico’s borders or not, it wouldn’t have any effect on the Mexican army’s manpower or the Mexican president’s unwillingness to use it against cartels.

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https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/07/no-bret-stephens-lets-not-do-in-mexico-what-we-did-in-iraq/