“This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call” from Mexican president López Obrador, tweeted President Trump yesterday. Describing the cartels as “monsters,” he warns that “the United States stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively…the cartels have become so large and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army!”
Trump was reacting to the recent slaughter of nine Americans not far below the US southern border, as reported in The Guardian: “Mexico: up to nine members of US Mormon family killed in ambush,” adding that “LeBarón family relatives say nine victims, mainly children, dead in attack on dirt road between Chihuahua and Sonora states.”
One of the women was traveling to Phoenix to bring back her husband for their anniversary. He works in North Dakota. She was in one car with her four children, aged 11 and 9 along with two twins under age one. The other car, eight miles ahead, had two other women and two children aged 4 and 6. All now dead.
The Guardian article also referenced its own recent reporting about a “14 October massacre that left 13 state police dead was just one extreme episode of violence in a recent litany of horrors.” The story was titled “Cowed and outgunned: why Mexico’s police ‘don’t stand a chance’ against drug cartels.” As if sent to the slaughter, the Mexican police were “Cowed, outgunned and enmeshed in alliances with criminal groups, Mexico’s state and local police are clearly not up to the job. The scale of the challenge facing officers was captured in recordings of police radio traffic during the Michoacán ambush, in which officers can be heard begging for reinforcements.”
Going after the drug cartels in Mexico is consistent with Trump’s decision to refrain from sending troops to every civil war and tribal dispute around the world. Most are unwinnable, involving endlessly protracted commitments, with America becoming hated in the region instead. Wars fought farthest from home drain the treasury and kill young Americans.
Corrupt and inept Mexican governments have remained a thorn in the flesh. Before Trump, politicians from both parties conspired to encourage illegal immigration—looking the other way when menacing cartels infiltrated Sanctuary Cities. Illegal drugs continue to ravage American society. Thefts and burglaries pay for runaway addiction. The moral decay of American society is everywhere far worse than it’s ever been.
Building the wall on our southern border is just a start. America may have to fight the cartels alone, especially since the Mexican president has shown himself too soft-hearted toward the vicious, stop-at-nothing cartels. He is motivated by a justifiable fear of being assassinated and having his government officials taken out one by one. How else can you explain his wanting to deploy the old 1960s hippie group hug as a weapon against the cartel?
The CIA should be on the ground everywhere in Mexico these days, not colluding with our own traitorous politicians attempting to overthrow the presidency. The American military should send in Special Forces against guerrilla cartel targets, bombing as necessary. Rather than giving unspecified foreign aid to Central American countries, we should build up their economies by putting men and women to work as fighters within their own armies and intelligence agencies. Economic relationships with South American countries should demand similar hemispheric support.
Making America Great Again means making the US and Mexico and Central America as safe and prosperous as possible. Trying to undermine the US from within is another step toward national chaos and anarchy.
