Earlier this week, Josh Marshall at TPM posted up some thoughts on Mexico:
Clearly, there’s a lot of violence in Mexico tied to the Mexican government’s attempted crackdown on its drug cartels. And the Mexicans are quite legitimately pressuring us to limit the number of guns being smuggled from the US into Mexico, which are fueling the fire. And if Mexico degenerates to the level of Colombia where for many years the key cartels have operated as rivals to the government — clearly beyond the legitimate government’s ability to bring them to heel — then that’s a big problem for us, given our proximity and long border, etc. But I keep hearing these stories about violence spilling over into the US, questions from whether we may need to deploy the US army to our own border, vague stories about death squads in the US. I’m not saying there’s nothing to it. But a lot of this has the feel to me of one of those stories ginned up by politicians and restless news outlets where there ends up being much much less there than meets the eye. Part of me wonders whether it’s a recrudescence of the illegal immigration hysteria of last two years.
There are three separate points being addressed here: (1) The issue of guns being smuggled into Mexico from the U.S. (2) The issue of Mexico’s inability to defeat the drug traffickers and (3) The issue of violence spilling over into the U.S.
Josh looks at these three issues and concludes that the third issue is being “ginned up by politicians and restless news outlets.” He’s right about that, and he later posts a link to a good piece in the Texas Observer about how the media is over-hyping the level of violence on the American side of the border. But the reality is that it’s both the first and third points that are being “ginned up by politicians and restless news outlets.”
Recently, a number of politicians and news outlets have been claiming that 90 percent of the guns that get used by Mexican drug traffickers come from the U.S. In actuality, that figure is wildly inaccurate. And Obama repeated the mythical percentage this week when meeting with Mexican President Calderon.
A certain amount of guns do cross the border from the U.S. into Mexico, and it’s possible that the amount of high-powered weapons bought on the illegal black market from the U.S. is higher than we can accurately measure, but to say that the flow of guns is “fueling the fire” in Mexico’s drug war is buying into a large amount of spin. What’s fueling the fire in Mexico is not the weaponry itself, but the money that the drug traffickers are making that allows them to spend so much money on weapons.
Radley Balko, in a column this week in The Daily Beast, gets to the heart of what’s going wrong in Mexico:
When Barack Obama visits Mexico today, the drug war, and the violence it has spawned south of the border, is expected to dominate the agenda. Since 2006, more than 10,000 people have been murdered in Mexico as a direct consequence of the drug trade. This bloody outbreak began when, with the blessing of and funding from the U.S. government, Mexican President Felipe Calderon ordered the Mexican military to aggressively crack down on the drug cartels. Such crackdowns often ratchet up the level of violence, as the elimination of one major drug distributor provokes those who remain to war over his territory. That’s a pattern as old and predictable as Prohibition itself, yet politicians never seem to learn.
Last month, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Mexico, she expressed gave concern over the escalating violence… and then heaped praise on Calderon’s crackdown, promising to support it with more funding and more military hardware. Obama appears poised to say much the same thing. According to a recent preview of his trip in The Washington Post, the president is expected to promise swifter delivery of drug-war aid and increased efforts by the U.S. to stop the flow of American weapons to Mexico. But the best solution to what’s plaguing Mexico right now is the one topic that will almost assuredly be off the table: legalizing marijuana. Marijuana makes up 60 to 70 percent of the Mexican drug trade. Lifting prohibitions on it in the United States would eradicate a major source of funds for the cartels.
I’m not saying that the first and third issues mentioned above – guns traveling across south of the border and increased violence north of the border – aren’t happening at all. What’s happening is that politicians and media outlets are using both of these issues as distractions in order to avoid dealing with the central issue that Balko is discussing right there. This is a problem of organized crime, and the fuel for that fire is the billions of dollars (I’ve seen various estimates of between $10 billion to $100 billion per year) that Americans spend on drugs. It’s not going to be solved by stricter gun control measures. And sending law enforcement to secure the border would only escalate the amount of violence in our border communities. The only way to solve this problem is to cut off the drug trafficker’s income. But that’s something that Obama and a large part of the news media still can’t bring themselves to regard as a serious issue.
Hey Lee, you used a lot of words to basically say, “It’s the drug money, stupid!”
And you were right on the money. Money is the driving function that is causing the violence curve to resonate. And yes, the spin is generating poles in the right hand plane, and you know how unstable that can be.
And this has been a dog whistle to EE’s.
It would seem the patriotic thing for us to do is to grow pot. Consider it a 21st Century “victory garden”.
It seems to me that people will stop at about nothing to avoid having an open honest conversation about why American’s need to suck up an overwhelming majority of the worlds drug supply.
Wow, Lee – that’s a good piece. And I agree with your assessment.
I read somewhere that the “90% of the guns coming from the US” number is actually 90% of the guns that the U.S traces are from the U.S. The U.S. only bothers to trace guns that they believe could have come from the U.S. Apparently most of the guns are actually coming from other places….just hide them in a shipment of cocaine. That would explain the loads of fully automatic weapons thay are getting.
Last week I heard that they are checking at the border on the U.S. side outbound for smuggled guns and cash. That is a perfect illustration that Mexico has no control of their borders. We are having to do their work on our side of the border.
President Obama’s statements notwithstanding, the United States has, like all other Contracting Parties to the UN Convention Against Torture, committed itself to investigate instances of torture and to prosecute all cases in which credible evidence of torture is found.
Maybe Iran is arming the drug traffickers. Soon we’ll hear this from the right.
Guns cming from the U.S.? Here’ how:
1. Congress appropriates millions of dollars in military aid to Guatemala so their military dictatorship and political thugs can obtain weapons to wipe out peasant opposition.
2. Black market elements broker the sale of some of these weapons from their corrupt military to the drug cartels.
3. Look! Guns come from the U.S.!!!
4. Internal civil war erupts in Mexico.
Sweet. We have managed to fund both sides of this war, otherwise known as playing both ends against the middle.
@5
I read somewhere that the “90% of the guns coming from the US” number is actually 90% of the guns that the U.S traces are from the U.S. The U.S. only bothers to trace guns that they believe could have come from the U.S. Apparently most of the guns are actually coming from other places
If you click through to the Reason link at the middle of the page, you’ll find more information about this. The reporters there put the number at about 17%. Even with just that, though, there’s been a large increase in the numbers of gun shops opening along our side of the border. It should give you a good idea of the scale of the violence within Mexico right now.
Last week I heard that they are checking at the border on the U.S. side outbound for smuggled guns and cash. That is a perfect illustration that Mexico has no control of their borders. We are having to do their work on our side of the border.
Neither of us have control of that border. And the more either of us try to prove otherwise, the more violence we’ll create.
There are approximately 250 million firearms in the US, and firearms purchase here is ridiculously easy. How many firearms are manufactured in Mexico? So what are the odds that US guns go down there in fairly large numbers? We do NOT keep track of arms here in the US in any sort of thorough manner.
I read the Reason link and have a news flash for you:
You cannot trust either
(a) Fox News
or
(b) Anyone named “Lott”
for anything having to do with firearms.
Hint: they both lie.
I find it hard to believe that Russians shipping what are probably old and out-of-condition arms halfway across the world can provide a better deal than SuperGunMartUSA right acoss Mexico’s border. The upshot of the article is that good numbers DO NOT EXIST.
We must also accept that the corruption is located on both sides of the border. When my friend and i left the Tohono O’odahm rez last week, after some documentary filming, we stopped at a motel off of I-8 near Yuma. A pretty much empty place run by folks from India, they gave us a nice back room that opened up towards the north and desert. We didn’t think much of it, until we took a trip into Yuma for dinner.
We were driving what could best be described as a highly suspicious large van (painted a gun metal gray, with graffiti and cardboard boxes for window coverings, all camouflaging a several hundred-thousand dollars traveling HD digital video recording studio). We noticed that there was steady stream of traffic in and out of an occupied room across the hall from ours. Given our years of “experience,” we easily discerned that the occupants were members of one of the cartels dispensing narcotics to a vast group of folks, mostly moneyed and/or ASU and UA student types.
When we drove back we were followed by a police car from town to the motel. The car stayed in the street, then made several loops around the block (always the same car with the same two officers), until it drove off. Apparently the cartel was interested in finding out who we were and what if any threat we posed. I suggest this because both of us have had too many years of experience with these activities from all the perspectives. The cartel operated carte blanche, and used their connections to find out that the van was owned and operated by one of the foremost news video-journalists and documentary film makers in the world. We were “cool.” The cartel boys were “cool;” the India management was “cool,” and the cops were “cool” (and on the take).
My only slight surprise was how completely open and obvious the operation was running.
Maxim Lott is the son of serial liar and gun industry shill John Lott. The apple does not fall far from the
liartree.The’re so much big money in the drug trade now, that if marajuana were legalized (and widely cultivated) in the US, the Mexican cartels would no doubt respond in the same way the Mafia did after the repeal of prohibition, or like the RIAA is today to the collapse of the market for music CD’s. Namely, they’d put their accumulated fortune and muscle to work going into other markets. We’d likely see them pushing more coke, meth and heroin here and elsewhere, as well as maneuvering to meet other demands at the fringes of society like prostitution and loan sharking–hell, the latter’s likely to flourish in our current hard times, and since the bankers have become crooks anyway, what’s the difference? It may turn out to be fortunate that the proliferation of Indian-owned casinos has diluted the market for gambling.
8:
Very good points. What’s not being mentioned is that there’s a lot of non-Mexicans involved in the smuggling across the border in both directions, and they’re Guatemalans and Hondurans…..
@11
Hint: they both lie.
And so are all the Democrats who are claiming that the percentage is at 90%, which it clearly is not.
These groups are being armed a number of different ways, partly from corruption within the Mexican military, partly from international black markets outside of the U.S. Even if the U.S. tried to ban all gun sales, it would do nothing to fix the mess down there.
@12
Very interesting comment. Thanks!
10 Lee
I think that the Democrats got their numbers from the source that was listed. The limitations of those statistics they may and probably did not know, and they are not the best-educated to evaluate them.
None of the conditions in that second sentence hold for the Lotts, so I give them no “lee”way.
@18
You’re also assuming that Lott is lying, which is nothing more than an ad hominem belief. Just because Lott’s father tried to produce some bullshit statistics about the relationship between gun ownership and crime once doesn’t mean that his son is automatically lying whenever he opens his mouth. That’s silly.
The actual results of the gun tracing from ATF are being misrepresented by a number of Democratic politicians. Lott and La Jeunesse pointed this out, and I don’t see anything wrong with their logic in doing so. If you think they’re lying, you need to actually prove that they’re lying, not just say “hey, that guy’s father lied once!”
Factcheck is weighing in on it now.
http://www.factcheck.org/polit....._guns.html