The Border Crisis Is Bad, But In Mexico A Larger Crisis Looms

[Kamaji]

The Border Crisis Is Bad, But In Mexico A Larger Crisis Looms

By: John Daniel Davidson
January 18, 2022

Most Americans don’t realize it but the Mexican state is in serious trouble, and we won’t be able to ignore it for much longer.

Video footage recently surfaced on Twitter showing C4 explosives being dropped by a drone near a town in Michoacán, Mexico, reportedly by members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, following hours of clashes between armed groups.

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The easy conclusion to draw is that Mexico has serious problems with organized crime, as it has for decades. But armed drones are something new, part of what some security experts have called an “arms races between the various belligerent criminal organizations” in Mexico’s multi-decade drug wars.

In this particular case, narco-drones are being deployed in a turf war in and around the city of Tepalcatepec, which sits on the border of the states of Michoacán and Jalisco, about 350 miles west of Mexico City. Local news reports indicate the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, commonly known by its Mexican acronym, CJNG, has launched multiple drone strikes in the area in recent weeks, escalating months of intermittent gunfights and ambushes.

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Cartel violence of this sort is getting worse in Mexico. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office at the end of 2018, promised an end to the violent drug wars of earlier administrations. His policy toward the cartels, he said, would be, “abrazos, no balazos” — hugs, not bullets.

It has not worked out very well. The homicide rate has been steadily rising in Mexico since 2014, but under López Obrador it has spiked. The last two years have seen a record number of murders, and this year is already off to a bad start. On Jan. 6 in Zacatecas, an SUV with ten beaten, murdered corpses inside was dumped next to a Christmas tree outside the governor’s office. The mostly rural state of Zacatecas has Mexico’s highest murder rate thanks to CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel, which are battling for control of the area and its numerous fentanyl labs.

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Mexico’s Institutions Are Collapsing
Under López Obrador, at the same time the cartels seem to be operating with impunity, the military’s role in civil society has been expanding.

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The Crisis In Mexico Will Not Stay There
The reason all this should matter to Americans is that U.S. policymakers, in both parties, are captive to the increasingly dangerous delusion that Mexico is a competent and trusted partner, and that our two countries can and should work together to solve problems like organized crime, drug trafficking, and illegal immigration. The animating idea, decades old now and woefully out of date, is that Mexico is a peer nation, acting in good faith, and that we all want the same things.

This gauzy conception of Mexico is how the Biden administration was able to come up with a framework for a U.S.-Mexico security relationship that’s utterly divorced from reality. A joint statement released back in October after a meeting between President Joe Biden and López Obrador outlines what’s supposed to be an update to the George W. Bush-era Merida Initiative, which was focused on helping Mexico wage war on powerful drug cartels.

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/18/the-border-crisis-is-bad-but-in-mexico-a-larger-crisis-looms/