Alas! The old cliches about Mexico are coming home again. Veteran New York Times newsman Scottie Reston once said that "Americans will do anything for Latin America -- except read about it." When four people connected with the U.S. consulate in Juarez were gunned down in March, three of them American citizens, it didn't dominate the headlines here. The murders came on the heels of 79 Americans killed in Mexico in 2009.
How to account for this refusal to appreciate a primary security problem escalating along our 1,500-mile southern border? In the mid-1980s, when I was returning from decades in Asia, it didn't take any special perspicacity to recognize the classic problems of "underdevelopment" were present right here, not in distant parts of Africa and Asia. Mexico and the U.S., then as now, shared the only land border between a modern industrialized economy and the Third World. The book I wrote then -- the title hyped but certainly appropriate now, "Mexico: Chaos on Our Doorstep" -- only needs statistical updating to apply to the situation today.
That other classic Mexico cliche also bears repeating just now. Porfirio Diaz, the late 19th-century dictator, observed, "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States." There is no denying that we provide the world's largest market for "recreational drugs" -- conservative estimates put Mexico's total drug smuggling in 2009 at between $25 billion and $40 billion, more than the country's No. 1 export, oil. There is evidence that smugglers also supply the illicit weaponry from the U.S. that fuels a hideous war among crime "cartels" battling for control of the traffic inside Mexico (and increasingly on this side of the border) and against the government. |