The high cost of illegal American appetites

A very depressing piece reports some very uncomfortable news. The Mexican drug cartels (whose murder victims south of the border run into the tens of thousands) are now here in the United States, and they are winning.

We do already have these [cartels] in the United States, but you just don’t hear about them very often. And when we do, it’s not the ‘undocumented workers’ as people are often led to believe, it’s the result of our drug policies.”

Suggesting Phoenix has the second most number of kidnappings out of any city in the world is not new: for instance, that very claim was immediately disputed after Sen. John McCain said it in 2010. However, a review of kidnapping statistics by a team of judges and criminologists earlier this year nearly doubled the official 2008 numbers, lending at least some credibility to the statement.

No matter what statistic it is that’s examined, be it the kidnapping ranking of Phoenix, shootings in El Paso, marijuana arrests in Brownsville or the number of new gang members in San Diego, the reality of today’s America is that drug violence has become a pervasive and pressing threat to most citizens.

“We have got to fix this problem, or else it’s going to get a lot worse for us here at home,” explained Terry Nelson, whose three-decades in law enforcement saw him serving the U.S. Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Customs Service. “We talk a lot about the 40,000 people who’ve died in the last five years in Mexico’s drug war, but we don’t talk a lot about Central and South America. The drug deaths down there per 100,000 are just as great as Mexico. Guatemala, El Salvador … These countries are just wiped out by drug cartels, and it’s not even in the news.”

Just last week, people on both sides of the border were shocked when authorities discovered a chilling scene where two bodies were hanging from a bridge, mutilated beyond recognition, next to a handwritten poster warning to avoid publishing about the cartels on social media or blogs. The situation has become so extreme that today more Mexican youths die from murder than vehicle accidents.

But what does this mean for American citizens? In short: the drug cartels have won, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Both Nelson and Franklin are members of the non-profit advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which aims to win the hearts and minds of law enforcement and conservative lawmakers, who’ve largely stood in the way of any significant changes to the nation’s drug policies.

Cartel methods also include burning people alive:

“The worst thing I saw quite often in South America is people being stuffed into barrels and soaked with diesel fuel, then set on fire,” Nelson said. “That’s got to be the worst kind of death, even worse than all the beheading we’ve seen in Mexico lately.”

The victims may be in foreign countries, but no one deserves to be subjected to such treatment. Especially if the cause is ultimately driven by the economics of the drug laws of the United States.

As to the details of what is happening to Mexican civilians who dare to criticize the cartels in social media, they are chilling by any standard:

A woman was hogtied and disemboweled. Attackers left her topless, dangling by her feet and hands from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo earlier this week. A bloodied man next to her was hanging by his hands, his right shoulder severed so deeply the bone was visible.

Signs left near the bodies declared the pair, both apparently in their 20s, were killed for posting denouncements of drug cartel activities on a social network.

“This is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the Internet,” one sign said. “You better (expletive) pay attention.”

The Nuevo Laredo case “shows that online messages are worrying a lot of people,” said Raul Trejo Delarbre, who studies social media at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “It shows that uncomfortable topics are being addressed there.”

Online posts have become some of the loudest voices reporting violence in Mexico. In some parts of the country, threats from cartels have silenced traditional media. Sometimes even local authorities fear speaking out.

Who can blame them? No one wants to be disemboweled for online criticism. If these savage butchers were Islamist nut jobs, I think more Americans would care.

I worry that most Americans aren’t going to care until such things start happening here.

These cartels get their money and their power because of the huge artificial price differential between the value of their product on a free market and its value in a criminalized market. And of course, some of them are getting their guns and direct drug smuggling assistance from American law enforcement agencies. I can remember a time when American law enforcement was on the side of the good guys.

Fortunately, some still are.

Check out Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.