Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the Atlantic and Pacific. It is brought closer to the rest of the world not only by technology,
but by the pressures of Mexican and Central American demography.
But this vision requires a successful Mexico, not a failed state. If President Calderón and
his successors can succeed in the mission to break the back of the drug cartels once and
for all (a very difficult prospect, to say the least) then the United States will have achieved
a strategic victory greater than any possible in the Middle East. A stable and prosperous
Mexico, working in organic concert with the United States, would be an unbeatable com-
bination in geopolitics. A post-cartel Mexico, combined with a stabilized and pro-Americ-
an Colombia (now almost a fact), would fuse together the Western Hemisphere's largest,
third largest, and fourth largest countries in terms of population, easing America's contin-
ued sway over Latin America and the Greater Caribbean. In a word, Bacevich is correct in
his inference: fixing Mexico is more important than fixing Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, as Bacevich claims, Mexico is a possible disaster that our concentration
on the Greater Middle East has diverted us from; and if it stays that way, it will lead to
more immigration, legal and especially illegal, that will create the scenario that Hunting-
ton fears. Calderón's offensive against the drug lords has claimed 47,000 lives since 2006,
with close to 4,000 victims in the first half of 2010 alone. Moreover, the cartels have gradu-
ated to military-style assaults, with complex traps set and escape routes closed off. “These
are war-fighting tactics they're using,” concludes Javier Cruz Angulo, a Mexican security
expert. “It's gone way beyond the normal strategies of organized crime.” Ted Galen Car-
penter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Wash-
ington, writes: “If that trend persists, it is an extremely worrisome development for the
health, perhaps even the viability, of the Mexican state.” The weaponry used by the cartels
is generally superior to that of the Mexican police and comparable to that of the Mexican
military. Coupled with military-style tactics, the cartels can move, in Carpenter's words,
“from being mere criminal organizations to being a serious insurgency.” United Nations
peacekeepers have deployed in places with less violence than Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana.
Already, police officers and local politicians are resigning their posts for fear of assassina-
tion, and Mexican business and political elites are sending their families out of the country,
even as there is sustained middle- and upper-middle-class flight to the United States.
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Mexico is now at a crossroads: it is either in the early phase of finally taking on the car-
tels, or it is sinking into further disorder; or both. Because its future hangs in the balance,
what the United States does could be pivotal. But while this is happening, the U.S. security
establishment has been engaged in other notoriously corrupt and unstable societies half a
world away, Iraq until 2011 and Afghanistan at least until 2014.
Unlike those places, the record of U.S. military involvement in the Mexican border area
is one of reasonable success. Even as proximity to Mexico threatens the United States
demographically, it helps in a logistical sense when trying to control the border. As Danelo
