Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
developed and interconnected with the United States—culturally, economically, and hy-
and steppes, which are virtually lawless: witness the border city of Ciudad Juárez, across
from El Paso, Texas, wracked by running gun battles and serial killers. Ciudad Juárez is
the murder capital of Mexico, where 700 people were murdered in the early months of
2010 alone. In 2009, more than 2,600 died violently in a city of 1.2 million; some 200,000
icide rate was 143 per 100,000—one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere. The northern
mountains and steppe have always been the bastion of Mexico's tribes: the drug cartels,
Mennonites, Yaqui Indians, and so forth. This harsh frontier was difficult for the Span-
ish to tame. Later on, in the 1880s, it was a lair for Geronimo and his Apaches. Think
of other remote highlands that provided refuge for insurgents: the Chinese communists in
Shaanxi, the Cuban revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra, and al Qaeda and the Taliban in
The fact that most of the drug-related homicides have occurred in only six of Mexico's
thirty-two states, mostly in the north, is another indicator of how northern Mexico is sep-
arating out from the rest of the country (though the violence in Veracruz and the regions
of Michoacán and Guerrero is also notable). If the military-led offensive to crush the drug
cartels launched in 2006 by conservative president Felipe Calderón completely falters, and
Mexico City goes back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a functional
sense lose control of the north, with grave implications for the United States. Mexico's very
federalism—a direct product of its disjointed and mountainous geography—with 2 federal,
32 state, and over 1,500 municipal police agencies, makes reform that much harder. Robert
C. Bonner, former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, writes that
if the gangs succeed, “the United States will share a 2,000-mile border with a narcostate
controlled by powerful transnational drug cartels that threaten the stability of Central and
South America.”
21
The late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who made a career out of clairvoyance,
Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity
, published in 2004, Huntington
posited that Latin history was demographically moving north into the U.S., and would con-
sequently change the American character.
23
Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of
immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the
former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society. For only by ad-
opting Anglo-Protestant culture do immigrants become American. America is what it is,
Huntington goes on, because it was settled by British Protestants, not by French, Spanish,
or Portuguese Catholics. Because America was born Protestant, it did not have to become
