By John Daniel Davidson
Monday, October 21, 2019
The southwest U.S. border might be quieter now than it
was this spring at the height of the migrant crisis, but south of the Rio
Grande the Mexican state is disintegrating.
Last Thursday in the city of Culiacan, the capital of
Sinaloa state, a battle erupted
between government forces and drug cartel gunmen after the Mexican military
captured two sons of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The elder
son, Ivan, was quickly freed by his men, who overpowered government forces and
secured his release. Ivan then launched an all-out siege of the entire city in
an effort to free his younger brother, Ovidio.
The ensuing scene could have been mistaken for Syria or
Yemen. Footage posted on social media Thursday showed burning vehicles spewing
black smoke, heavily armed gunmen blocking roads, dead bodies strewn in the
streets, and residents fleeing for cover amid high-caliber gunfire.
Armed with military-grade weapons and driving custom-built
armored vehicles, cartel henchmen targeted security forces throughout
Culiacan, launching more than one dozen separate attacks on Mexican security
forces. They captured and held hostage eight soldiers, then kidnapped their
families. Amid the fighting, an unknown number of inmates escaped from a nearby
prison. At least eight people were killed and more than a dozen were injured.
The eight-hour battle ended when government forces,
outgunned and surrounded, without reinforcements or a way to retreat, received
an order directly from Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to release
their prisoner and surrender. Lopez Obrador later defended this decision,
insisting that his security strategy is working and saying, “Many people were
at risk and it was decided to protect people’s lives. I agreed with that,
because we don’t do massacres, that’s over.”
The Mexican State Is
Collapsing
The battle of Culiacan marks a turning point in the
collapse of the Mexican state. There is now no doubt about who is in control of
Sinaloa, let alone the rest of the country. Cartel forces seized a major
regional capital city in broad daylight and defeated the national armed forces
in open battle.
Violence is rampant across Mexico. Earlier in the week,
more than one dozen police officers were massacred in a cartel ambush in
western Mexico. A day later, 14 suspected gang members were killed by the
Mexican Army. Homicides in Mexico this year are on track to surpass last year’s
record total of more than 29,000.
Understand that the fighting in Culiacan is not just
another episode in the “drug war,” nor is it merely an incident of organized
crime. What’s happening Mexico right now is more like an insurgency. Yes,
drug-trafficking is one of the things the cartels do, but it doesn’t nearly
describe what they are or what role they’re playing in the disintegration of
civil society in Mexico. Indeed, over the past decade cartels have diversified
their economic activities to include everything from oil and gas production to
industrial agriculture to offshore commercial fishing.
In other words, it’s fair to say that Mexico is now on a trajectory
to become a vast gangland governed more by warlordism than by the state. The
last time this happened was a century ago, during the decade-long Mexican
Revolution, which eventually triggered the invasion and occupation of northern
Mexico in 1916 by the U.S. Army, including the mobilization of the entire
National Guard and a call for volunteers. Before it was over, U.S. forces
attacked and occupied Nogales, Sonora, in 1918 and Ciudad Juarez in 1919.
Historically, insurgent and secessionist movements have
bedeviled Mexico from its very beginnings. Civil wars and rebellions were
endemic in Mexico throughout much of the 19th century, ceasing only with the
Porfiriato and resuming with its collapse in 1910.
What’s different today is that Mexico, despite its
corrupt and incompetent government, has a rising middle class and a growing
economy. Unlike the Mexican state, the Mexican people have shown themselves to
be more than capable of industrious and liberal self-government, not just in
the success millions of them have achieved in the United States but also in the
success of local governments throughout the country.
Set against the Mexican people is a Mexican state
incapable of governing and a cartel insurgency that now controls vast swaths of
both territory and industry. President Lopez Obrador will not push back on the
cartels. He has never said a bad word about El Chapo or the Sinaloa Cartel, and
even campaigned for cartel amnesty in 2017, but he does have a long history of
associating his political rivals with organized crime.
He has said he wants to tackle the “root causes” of crime
and violence, which he has said are poverty and lack of opportunity, and
campaigned for president on slogans such as “hugs, not gunshots,” and “you
can’t fight fire with fire.” In short, Lopez Obrador is not the man to rescue
Mexico from the unfolding crisis.
The idea that a nation of 120 million people with whom
the United States shares a 2,000-mile border and ever-increasing economic ties
might spiral into collapse has not seriously occurred to the American people.
We’ve had a century of relative peace on our southwest border, and aside from
dealing with an occasional surge of illegal immigration, we have assumed that
it will continue. It will not.
Culiacan should be a wake-up call that the war now
underway in Mexico will not stay there, and that we’d better start thinking
about what that will mean for America.
No comments:
Post a Comment