Mexico – Page 2 – Ed Warner

Border Crisis 1

Texas Governor Greg Abbott calls the town of Roma the “hottest spot” on the border. With reason. The increasingly aggressive drug cartels are now shooting across the river in the direction of the Border Patrol who are not allowed to fire back. So far no one has been hit, but if he is?

The cartels who basically control the Mexican side of the border like to taunt the Border Patrol and see how far they can go. We’re told they harbor political ambitions beyond drug profits. Time to avenge the Mexican War of the 1840’s when half of their country was lost to the U.S.? The cartels are sufficiently ruthless, organized and wealthy beyond dreams of avarice to act on their ambition.

Their presence is felt in Roma and across the Rio Grande – the border – in the Mexican town Miguel Aleman. Having paid $10 thousand or more to the cartels or forced to carry their drugs to reach Roma, desperate migrants can be spotted daily. The river is shallow and easily crossed, and there are not enough border guards to be constantly on the watch.

“They come night and day,” says an employee at Jack in Box close to the river. Nothing special, she says. It’s just routine. “It’s easy to hide here,” says a saleswoman at the Dollar Store nearby. Migrants will duck behind the many tables of merchandise. The Border Patrol comes searching for them in a continual game of hide and seek

Some of the newcomers don’t even have to wade into the water. They try to cross the bridge from Aleman. They can be very inventive, says a U.S Customs agent on the bridge. “We get everything.”

The governor has sent the National Guard to the border, but they are unarmed and cannot detain the immigrants. They can only call the Border Patrol who may arrive too late to make an arrest. To keep bad news away, Border Patrol agents are told not to talk to outsiders like reporters. Please go to my superior, one will say, and the superior says the same all the way up to where? The White House? Out on the road, maybe a very dusty road, the BP tends to open up. They have a job to do and are doing it as best they can.

Miguel Aleman is a brisk sunny walk across the bridge from Roma. It’s quite similar to other Mexican border towns – colorful facades of shops that line the streets, lively people at work and play, and an abiding sense of poverty with the continuing background hum of drug cartel control. The town has been the center of a violent dispute between the Zetas and Gulf cartels with dead bodies appearing from time to time.

A group of undocumented immigrants wade across the Rio Grande at the U.S.-Mexico border in Roma, Texas. (credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

But Americans still arrive for good dentistry at a third of the cost back home. All kinds of other goods, respectable or not, are on sale at bargain prices. Is it safe to come and buy? Yes, provided you stick to your purchases and don’t go out of your way to antagonize anyone, especially a cartel member

A resident says that these days you don’t have to worry just about the cartels but also their imitators. Cartel violence is contagious and others have picked up the habit without the cartels’ more astute strategy. The cartels don’t like this, but they have only themselves to blame.

There are a few rather dowdy hotels in town which fill up with illegals on their way across the river. I’m told the cartels have also removed the town planting along the Rio in order to make a speedy getaway for migrants headed for Roma.

As Roma goes, it seems, so goes the border

A Drug Cartel Bonanza

Apparently, the Mexican drug cartels, masters of the border, were taken unawares by the Haitian surge to the U.S. But have no fear. The cartels quickly adjusted, and it looked as if they had planned the whole event themselves.The congestion of some 15 thousand Haitians at the border town of Del Rio drew under manned U.S. Border Patrol from other ports of entry that were then open to an invasion of cartel drugs – a clear bonanza. They could only agree with American progressives: the more immigration the better.

Soldiers unload bundles of seized marijuana before incinerating the drugs at a military base in Tijuana, Mexico. Photo by wired.com

How other Americans may react to the increased fentanyl coming across the border is another matter. A record 92,183 Americans died from an overdose of drugs in 2020, largely attributable to fentanyl, deadly even in tiny bits which make them easier to smuggle. They are insidious. NBC News reports a young woman at Arizona State University who swallowed an oxycodone pill for pain that turned out to be laced with a lethal amount of fentanyl.

The Border Patrol cannot cope because there are not enough of them. Some 600 agents were moved from Laredo, Texas, upriver to Del Rio. Abandoning Laredo, the largest point of entry to Mexico, meant loss of control of the border. The cartels caught on and began furnishing buses to bring still more migrants to Del Rio.

There are long stretches of the 2000 mile border which are unprotected. One can spend a good part of the day going back and forth between the two countries without being detected. Clear sailing for the cartels who operate mainly at night. Even the projected wall, if completed, would be only a partial deterrence. There would still be significant gaps to be exploited by the cartels.

The solution is more manpower, e.g., U.S. troops protecting this country along with all its patrons abroad. They need to have the power to enforce the law, and if cartels make trouble on the U.S. side of the border, they should be able to pursue them if necessary into Mexico.

The U.S. media is understandably sympathetic to the plight of migrants but tends to overlook a main reason for their flight – the violence around them, mostly due to the cartels. Despite the inroads made by billionaire George Soros in financing prosecutors who don’t prosecute, the U.S. remains much safer than nations to the south. The best way to make life better for their people and to stop their coming to in great waves to the U.S. is to curb the power of the cartels. Fewer drugs means less violence. This entails greater care for the addicted here whose depression is not helped by media hysteria over one thing or another. A suitable calm is prescribed which is better for everyone.

What If the U.S. and Mexico Were One?

Visiting the town of McAllen in southern Texas, you may think you’re in Mexico. Everyone speaks Spanish in a town considered to be 90 per cent Hispanic, and that may underestimate. There’s no sign of fear of any kind as people contentedly go about their business in a bustling community.

That’s the north side of the U.S.-Mexican border. To the south it’s a different matter. Even by Mexican standards, the city of of Reynosa is violent, reflecting near total drug cartel control. No racial divide – a crime divide. Migrants are now piling up in the city, waiting their turn to cross the border under the supervision of the cartels who charge heavily for the privilege of entering the U.S. Cartel approval is the passport.

The cartel chiefs are as careful about people coming as going. Look-outs are posted on top of buildings to monitor everyone who enters. Any possible trouble makers are going to have trouble. A manager of the Fairfield Inn in McAllen has a grandmother in Reynosa who pays a lawyer with cartel contacts to remain safe, a cartel tax. The manger would like to visit her but doesn’t dare. She says she would be trapped in a cartel financial web from which there’s no escape.

Genuine solutions for this impasse are in short supply – two utterly contrasting nations with governments that couldn’t be farther apart. That said, a startling cure was once proposed during the U.S. war against Mexico in the 1840’s. Ambitious imperialists urged taking all of Mexico instead of just half, as it turned out. This would be best for both countries, they said, a greater U.S., a better governed Mexico.

Other Americans were aghast, abolitionists and slaveholders alike. Popular U.S. Senator Henry Clay asked: “Does any considerate man believe it possible that two such immense countries with populations so incongruous, so different in race, in languages, in religion and in laws could be blended together in one harmonious mass and happily governed by one common authority?”

But with U.S. troops in Mexico City, some prominent Mexicans asked them to stay and offered $1.2 million to victorious general Winfield Scott to assume the presidency of Mexico along with its annexation to the U.S. Observers at the time said many Mexicans agreed. But war weary Americans weren’t buying it. They wanted to go home and forget an unpopular war.

What if the improbable had occurred and Mexico joined the U.S.? There would be no border today and no cartels since U.S. law enforcement would extend to Mexico. A more genuine Mexico could emerge from cartel rule. It’s true the U.S. would have become more culturally diverse with attendant problems, but including more gradations between black and white might have softened extremes and, as in other countries, led to the abolition of slavery without the vastly destructive Civil War which still reverberates today.

Artist of Murder

Understandably, most Mexicans do their best to avoid the violent drug cartels that have turned their country into the most murderous on earth. Not artist Teresa Margolles who is steeped in their misdoings. Her inspiration is not the artist studio or the scenic countryside but the morgue. There she finds the ingredients of her art in the victims of violent crime of which there is never a shortage in Mexico. She says they are a mirror of the living with their disdain for lfe. While still born foetuses are routinely discarded in Mexico, she has embodied one in stone.

The dead almost seem to be her companions. Trained in forensic medicine, she is as attentive to the dead as to the living. Little escapes her scrutiny. “Every murder leaves a mark,” she says. “Even after months, years, the first drop – the moment the family is told – will always be there.” Femicide in particular overwhelms her, the murder of a dozen women in Mexico each day. “Women are seen as disposable,” she says “I research loss and pain so that people can understand it. My intention is to be a filter so audiences can feel the pain.”

Margolles, Teresa. Pista de baile de la discoteca “Tlaquepaque” (Dance Floor of the Club “Tlaquepaque”), 2016.

Yet all this anguish is embodied in work that is mostly abstract and minimal. Death is there – parts of corpses and the fluid used in cleaning them – but the viewer has to fill in the blanks. A plain looking concrete bench seems to invite people to rest. Once seated, the visitor reads an inscription that notes the ingredients of the morgue that have gone into its construction. Is it a bench or a tombstone?

How do the cartels respond to this artistic assault on their work? If it were in writing, the answer would be simple and direct – death. More journalists are killed in Mexico than in any other country. Since art is silent, it can be ignored. And what about the American drug consumers who finance the cartels while poisoning themselves? Since little is reported about Mexican violence in the American media, could art somehow fill the void and awaken people to this disaster next door? That would be Teresa Margolles’ triumph.

Trotsky in Mexico

What’s another murder amid the carnage of today’s Mexican drug cartels? But the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City still stands out. It occurred at the apex of Communist influence around the world following Stalin’s great victory over the Nazis and the consequent expansion of Soviet power. Indeed power talks and converts, and that was true of Mexico as elsewhere. Mexico City was crawling with Stalinists who were awaiting his every command.

In this environment Trotsky sought refuge. The arts were embroiled. Famed artist Diego Rivera welcomed the exile, while equally famed David Siquieros staged an unsuccessful raid on him. Trotskyites, as they were called, visited him and offered homage. As it was becoming apparent, even to loyal intellectuals, that Stalin was a boundless tyrant, Trotsky would replace him in communist affections. This was partly illusory in that Trotsky was a fierce dogmatist who believed in “permanent revolution” of a violent sort largely conducted by superior minds like his own.

And that was his failing. He thought that Stalin had a “third rate provincial mind,” when in fact the canny strongman outmaneuvered him throughout. Trotsky dropped from being the star of the Bolshevik revolution, esteemed for his oratory and organization of the Red army, to a hapless outcast with his life in danger wherever he went. He defended himself with reams of writings denouncing Stalinism, but as Stalin noted: “Paper will put up with anything on it.”

Still, compared to Stalin Trotsky was almost humanitarian, and there was always a certain glamour to him as biographer Isaac Deutscher notes in a touching description of his last days in The Prophet Outcast. Knowing full well the end was near, he was kind to those around him and acknowledged his shortcomings while remaining steadfast to his Communist vision. “Life is beautiful,” he writes his wife Natalya. “Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the full.”

Today’s drug cartels would not have botched his assassination, just a quick bullet to the head. Instead a Stalinist spent months courting a woman who gave him access to Trotsky and then smashed his skull with an ice axe. The blow was fatal but not instantaneous. Trotsky lingered in pain for close to a day. So Stalin got his revenge and then some. When the assassin was released from prison twenty years later, he returned to a hero’s welcome in Russia.

Trotsky’s legacy in today’s Mexico? Not permanent revolution but what about permanent drug warfare? Communist brutality is no longer with us, but it set a precedent for unceasing violence. If the communists can do this, the drug lords might say, why not us? It’s in the best intellectual tradition. The Stalin-Trotsky duel remains fixed in history.

The Media Discovers the Drug Cartels, Sort Of

In the absence of any genuine reporting or analysis of the Mexican drug cartels, Fox News has now filled the void in part. Reporter Lara Logan went to the area in Mexico where nine Mormons were slaughtered by the cartels and interviewed survivors of the attack in a gripping presentation but had little to say about the cartels or how they operate – a media tendency.

If there is any significant area of the world which the Americana media fails to cover, it is right next door, Mexico. Yet it is one of the most dangerous places on earth, where the cartels murder with impunity as they send their poisonous drugs to the U.S with earnings approaching 100 billion dollars a year.

Maria Ronita Miller and four of her children, including 7-month-old twins, killed in cartel attack.

Even so, the media slumbers with far more coverage of lesser violence in such far away places as Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan. Fox news has now broken the pattern with an hour long feature on the killing in November 2019 of nine Mormons – three mothers, six children, including baby twins – that is truly heart-wrenching. Yet as the program fails to make clear, this is an every day affair in Mexico with one of the highest murder rates in the world and still climbing.

Don’t Mexican lives matter? Racism might be a conventional response, but it’s rather a vast, inexplicable indifference to the suffering south of us. Ignored by the media and the government, it doesn’t exist for Americans. Out of sight, out of mind. The Mormons interviewed by Logan tell compelling stories, but it has to be said that they are American citizens living in Mexico. They get attention because of that while Mexicans keep getting murdered in the shadows.

At a break in the Fox program, someone is caught saying the Mexican situation is a U.S. national security issue. Indeed. Along with enormous quantities of drugs, cartel bosses are crossing the U.S. border and even took over an Arizona border town until an aroused citizenry threw them out. Enthusiasts like to compare today’s expansive U.S. with the long lived Roman empire. But it’s as if Rome treated neighboring Gaul – about the same size as Mexico – with similar indifference. Do as you like, we don’t care. Julius Caesar would be dumbfounded and the Roman empire would not have lasted.

The U. S. deserves a better fate. The Fox program is a step in the right direction. Much more is needed.

Traveling Safely in Mexico

The Wall Street Journal devotes a full page to the delights of Tulum, a Mexican resort town on the Caribbean. The accompanying pictures help tell the story: bicycling on the road, relaxing on the beach. We’re informed there’s cultural and culinary abundance.

There is, to be sure, the danger of Covid which afflicts Mexico along with the rest of the world. Having too much fun may hide the danger, the article notes. Visitors should make sure masks are worn throughout. Even so, while fewer Americans are visiting Mexico these days, they are staying longer. Paul Safarti, an international tour operator, says a small hotel he owns in Tulum is nearly full. “They’re partying like there’s no Covid.”

But something far worse than Covid is overlooked by these enthusiasts – a rising, high violent crime rate in Tulum as in the rest of Mexico. Ana Pereira, a local resident and author of The Tulum Safety Guide, writes that she is getting increasing reports of serious crimes against tourists.

Last December visitors from Sweden, Martin Graham and his wife, were walking along a main street at nine in the evening when they were accosted by a small kid with a gun who demanded money. Graham refused and the boy pulled the trigger. Fortunately, the gun didn’t fire, and the pair managed to escape to their hotel where they called the police. Three hours later the cops arrived but wouldn’t take a report because it would be bad for business. For the Grahams it was back to Sweden in a hurry.

This incident illustrates a recruitment ritual of the cartels. An aspiring member of the criminal organization must prove his worth by randomly killing someone, a Mexican usually, but a foreign tourist will do. “Cartel violence is now part of Tulum,” says Lilly who lives there. Executions occur in broad daylight, she says, and armed muggings are common. She concedes that tourists are not likely to be hit by stray bullets, but they can easily witness some gruesome act during their stay.

While urging visitors to come to Tulum, author Pereira nevertheless offers a long list of warnings. Among them: Don’t wander too far in the daytime and don’t walk anywhere at night. Keep emergency money hidden, and when you pay for something, keep larger bills out of sight. Don’t keep your phone out all the time. If someone tries to take your stuff, let him. Safety first. These could be usefully included in the Journal’s next story on bountiful Tulum.

Coincidentally, the same day – January 16 – of the Journal story the Associated Press reported on women who are organizing against the Jalisco cartel in the crime ridden state of Michoacan. They had little choice since the cartel had killed or kidnapped most of the men in the community – husbands, sons, fathers, brothers. Carrying assault rifles and posting road blocks, the women are taking the fight to the enemy much to the applause of long suffering Mexicans. This story rings true.