March 2009
Three weeks into the Obama administration, “change we can believe in” is no more than the status quo Al Gore recommended eight years ago when he urged the American public to “have faith in government.” The bankers who are now in operation thanks to an infusion of the taxpayers’ money rewarded their own failure and incompetence by awarding themselves $18.4 billion in bonuses at the end of last year, and politicians with national reputations have recently been revealed as tax delinquents, adept at getting round or ignoring the tax regulations they and their colleagues wrote and passed into law. Meantime, immigration to the United States proceeds unchecked, despite the dire American job losses incurred by the Second Great Depression. The federal government is currently accepting 138,000 legal immigrants into this country per month (about 1.6 million a year), while a provision in the Senate stimulus bill could result in the creation of 300,000 jobs for illegal immigrants. “Change” is beginning to appear like an attempt on the part of the Titanic’s officers to discover another iceberg to hit, before the engines finally shut down.
South of the border too, change is a only a matter of worse, proceeding in the same direction at accelerated speed. Even Washington has been constrained to take notice of the fact. At the beginning of 2009, the Pentagon released a study which concludes that Mexico is in danger of becoming a failed state, owing to endemic corruption within the country and the violent drug wars incited by President Felipe Calderón’s attempts to confront Mexico’s drug growers and smugglers. Mexico, the Pentagon paper warned, may be facing the complete collapse of civil government around the country, as the 45,000 troops and 5,000 Federales (federal police) mobilized by Calderón take on the drug cartels, other less organized narcotraficantes, and the drug farmers of the Sierra Madre Occidental.
Twenty-five years ago, American residents of West Texas and south-central New Mexico, including unaccompanied women, thought nothing of driving across the Rio Grande from El Paso into Ciudad Juárez to shop and eat lunch. Ten years ago, when I was living in Las Cruces, N.M., that pleasant tradition had long since ended. Starting in the early nineties, I used to attend the bullfights, two or three times a year, at the Plaza Monumental in Juárez with an “Anglo” friend of mine from Belen. On one of our last visits to the Plaza de Toros, we missed by several minutes being present at a shootout in front of our favorite restaurant, an incident that resulted in two or three deaths. Since then, the situation has deteriorated drastically, and with drastic speed. Three years ago, I crossed over to Juárez by taxi and took a Chihuahenses bus to Ciudad Chihuahua, 175 miles south. Although we found Juárez a bit edgy, Chihuahua, an historic mining and cattle town dating from the colonial period with an 18th-century cathedral, elegant nineteenth-century residential districts, and first-rate restaurants (also the fascinating Casa Villa and attached museum), seemed completely relaxed. I would not venture there today, nor into Juárez. Within recent months, vicious gun battles have occurred on the streets of Ciudad Chihuahua, while in Juárez violence is so omnipresent and endemic that residents return directly home after work and retire behind locked doors, and El Pasoans of Mexican and Anglo ancestry alike, as well as soldiers from Fort Bliss, have quit shopping and patronizing bars and restaurants--and even visiting friends and relatives--on the south bank of the river. Thousands of people have been murdered in Juárez and in cities along the border from Laredo to Nogales, Sonora to Tijuana. Here is material for a saga by Cormac McCarthy, a contemporary equivalent of his novel Blood Meridian.
Last fall I gave a talk in San Antonio, a summary of Mexican politics from the colonial era down to the present time, which I ended by suggesting that the very real progress accomplished over the past ten or fifteen years since the Partido Acción Nacional broke the Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s 70-year-old single-party grip on the Mexican political system is in danger of being reversed, and worse, by the war between the Calderón government and the drug interests. This was not the message some people in the audience wished to hear, but the events of just the past three months suggest that they are likely to be disappointed in their hopes for a democratic and “progressive” Mexico.
The crisis has provoked accusations from Mexican commentators that, in all of this, the United States is primarily to blame. The “huge demand for drugs” in El Norte, one of these critics has argued, and the easy availability of weapons here, have combined to give the cartels the advantage over the government forces. If Americans were to overcome their addiction, he continued, the production of drugs in Mexico and Colombia would be halted, the international drug trade would dry up, and the violence in Mexico and along the border would cease. The alternative to a significant increase in the $1.4 billion in aid already promised by Washington to Mexico’s military and civilian anti-drug forces is, according to Investor’s Business Daily in the U.S., the collapse of the Mexican state that would send “millions of Mexicans,” many of them criminals, across the border into the United States.
This argument overlooks a couple of highly relevant facts. The first is that drug consumption has become in recent years far more significant in the culture of northwestern Mexico, especially the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango, than it is in American culture as a whole. The second is that the legalization of drugs in the U.S., on the one hand, and (or) a successful war against the drug trade in Mexico, on the other, would mean the destruction of the country’s single most lucrative industry (more so even than petroleum), the loss of which would send many more millions of Mexicans over the border in search of a living. Indeed, that is already happening periodically, as Mexico City sends soldiers to the Sierra Madre to burn out the marijuana and poppy fields, and the dispossessed farmers head north to the Estados Unidos to plant new crops on American soil and resume the smuggling trade from the American side of the Rio Grande.
Rod Dreher has predicted that President Obama “will have to fully militarize the US-Mexico border before he leaves office.” He might, in fact, feel compelled to invade Mexico to “fight the narcotraffickers and prop up the government.” That, of course, would be a response wholly typical of a modern American government, which already has at least two failed states--Pakistan and Afghanistan--on its hands, with post-war Iraq likely to follow in due course. Invade Mexico City, as if it were Baghad…. There is a grandiose solution worthy of the world’s only hegemon! And, for that reason, hardly in keeping with “change.” A simple, uncomplicated solution, like sending the army to seal the border against drugs and immigrants by comparison is infra dignitatem, worthy of a Third World country like Syria--or Mexico, along its own southern boundary with Guatemala.
In truth, it seems unlikely that Obama, the first black gringo president, would ever invade Mexico to resolve the drug wars there. It seems equally unlikely that he would seal the border, either, for the purpose for shutting the violence out of the U.S. at the expense of not letting the Mexicans in, though that would indeed be change in which we could believe. Too much change, for too many people in high places, and scores of ethnic millions in low ones. So the chances are that we will get another amnesty bill in Congress, instead.
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.