Confirmed: We're still losing the drug war
The drug war will end, because it must. By 2017, only nine years from now, federal entitlement spending alone will necessitate a tax increase equal to 25% or more of payroll. Faced with confiscatory tax rates, we will have to slash public spending and find new sources of revenue. An end to the drug war offers both savings and revenue. But for now, we will do again what we have done before, and get the same results while expecting different ones:
More than 20,000 Mexican troops and federal police are engaged in a multi-front war with the private armies of rival drug lords, a conflict that is being waged most fiercely along the 2,000-mile length of the U.S.-Mexico border. The proximity of the violence has drawn in the Bush administration, which has proposed a $500 million annual aid package to help President Felipe Calderon combat what a Government Accountability Office report estimates is Mexico’s $23 billion a year drug trade.
A total of more than 4,800 Mexicans were slain in 2006 and 2007, making the murder rate in each of those years twice that of 2005. Law enforcement officials and journalists, politicians and peasants have been gunned down in the wave of violence, which includes mass executions, such as the killings of five people whose bodies were found on a ranch outside Tijuana this month.
Like the increasing number of Mexicans heading over the border in fear, the violence itself is spilling into the United States, where a Border Patrol agent was recently killed while trying to stop suspected traffickers.
Reportedly, the Mexican government is not in control of large sections of its territory. In other areas, it maintains control only by having troops garrisoned there:
Soldiers crowd the slender canal bridges that crisscross Reynosa, stopping drivers at random and staring across the cityscape with their fingers on the triggers of heavy weapons. The tense atmosphere has led to mistakes.
On Feb. 16, soldiers fatally shot Sergio Meza Varela, a 28-year-old with no apparent ties to the drug trade, when the car he was riding in didn’t stop at a checkpoint. “You’re scared to leave your house,” Alejandra Salinas, Meza’s cousin, said in an interview outside the family tire shop. “We’re just in the way.”
Questions presented: Our government can hold out for the next nine years. Can the same be said of Mexico’s? And if not, what are the implications for the United States?