Several presidential candidates have suggested that the US military should attack Mexican drug gangs. Here’s Reuters:
Sending troops or firing missiles into Mexico to battle cartels, as proposed by Republican 2024 presidential candidates including former President Donald Trump, could lead to casualties and bloody reprisals on American soil without stemming the flow of illegal drugs, current and former U.S. military and government officials told Reuters.
This would not be the first time the US has attacked Mexico. The justification seems to be that illegal drugs imported from Mexico kill lots of Americans. But it’s also true that illegal guns imported from the US kill lots of Latin Americans. Here’s The Economist, discussing the rise in violent crime in the Caribbean:
Officials attribute the escalating violence to the increased availability of firearms. The share of murders and other crimes that involve a gun has surged. . . .
Almost all the weapons are illegally trafficked. The Caribbean countries do not manufacture guns, and their governments strictly regulate them . . .
The majority of guns appear to come from the United States, and Florida in particular (see chart 2). Anthony Salisbury, head of US Homeland Security Investigations in Miami, says in the past year his agency has witnessed a “massive uptick” in weapons being smuggled from the United States to the region, especially to Haiti. Seizures are of increasingly lethal weapons, including belt-fed machine-guns and armour-piercing rifles.
Another article in The Economist suggests that Mexico is also a victim of US gun smugglers:
Few Countries are as affected by arms-trafficking as Mexico. Its 3,200km (2,000-mile) border with the United States makes it easy to smuggle firearms into the country. Criminal groups wield these weapons to devastating effect. Over 30,000 Mexicans have been murdered each year since 2017, resulting in a homicide rate of around 25 per 100,000 people. In a novel approach, the Mexican government has taken legal action against the gun industry in the United States.
In 2021 and 2022 Mexico’s government launched two cases north of the border: the first in Boston against a handful of gun manufacturers, the second in Arizona targeting gun-dealers in Tucson. The government alleges that people in the gun industry negligently, recklessly and sometimes unlawfully sell guns in full awareness that they are likely to end up in the hands of criminal organisations.
It might seem odd to blame law-abiding US firms for the misuse of their products in some sort of downstream activity. But doesn’t the US government blame Chinese chemical makers when their products are used in Mexican labs to make fentanyl?
Illegally smuggled drugs kill thousands of Americans. Illegally smuggled guns kill thousands of Latin Americans. You can argue that both guns and drugs should be legal (my view.) You can argue that both guns and drugs should be illegal. What I find hard to understand is how someone could view a US invasion of Mexico as a good idea while at the same time opposing a Mexican invasion of the US.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas L Hutcheson
Dec 1 2023 at 10:14am
“It might seem odd to blame law-abiding US firms for the misuse of their products in some sort of downstream activity.”
No. The blame is appropriate. They vigorously oppose tracking system that would allow law enforcement to interdict the flow of guns to criminals foreign and domestic. I don’t know if Chinese drug manufacturers oppose CPP’s refusal to restrict Fentanyl precursor export.
TGGP
Dec 1 2023 at 2:56pm
The most obvious question to ask before launching a war is whether you’re likely to win or lose. And that has completely different answers for the US vs Mexico.
Jon Murphy
Dec 1 2023 at 3:25pm
I’m not sure it does. Invading Mexico to stop drug cartels would likely be another boondoggle.
Scott Sumner
Dec 1 2023 at 6:27pm
I agree with Jon. We can’t even stop drug gangs in America—what chance would we have in Mexico? (Putting aside the fact that it’s also immoral to invade neighboring countries.)
steve
Dec 1 2023 at 7:37pm
Mexico would get slaughtered if they attacked us. If we invaded them I am sure it would work just as well as Afghanistan. /s
However, what I think these people imagine is that we would target them with missiles based upon perfect information and with he perfect accuracy we would kill only the members of the drug cartel. In real life that’s not how it works and we likely dont kill that many cartel members, do kill a number of innocents and accomplish little at great cost. Funny how people who claim to have no trust in government put absolute trust in government when it comes to killing people. Reminds me how Sowell, who is generally anti-government strongly supported torture.
Steve
Scott Sumner
Dec 2 2023 at 1:20pm
Yes, it seems to me that some of the same people that wanted us out of Afghanistan want us into Mexico. At least with Afghanistan we were acting in self defense; they attacked us on 9/11. Mexico didn’t even attack us.
Ahmed Fares
Dec 3 2023 at 4:11pm
9/11 was blowback.
The US invaded Afghanistan first using Wahhabi fighters, as explained here by Hillary Clinton. (The audio kicks in after a couple of seconds, and the partial transcript below the link is from the YouTube page.)
Hillary Clinton : We created Al Qaeda
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY-BWScpdZw
The same thing happened when the US asked the Saudis to send Wahhabi fighters into Syria to overthrow the Assad regime to break the link between Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The latter was post 9/11. Which is odd when you consider that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals, and all 19 followed the Wahhabi version of Islam.
TGGP
Dec 5 2023 at 1:10pm
Hillary was wrong. The late Ayman Al-Zawahiri wrote “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner” about the early history of al-Qaeda. The CIA funding all went through Pakistan’s ISI, and as he notes AQ didn’t take funding from them (not that they were interested in funding Arab expats rather than local assets who would pursue Pakistani interests in the long term). OBL himself was already rich and got money from other Saudis.
TGGP
Dec 5 2023 at 1:30pm
The US already won a war with Mexico. And we easily won our war against Afghanistan in a short period of time. We eventually got tired of hanging around and propping up the government we had created there, but trying to nation-build Afghanistan was never that sensible or important to US interests. Propping up a government in Mexico would probably be less difficult, but it’s not actually necessary. The US could cut off all trade with Mexico without any military conflict, but if we wanted to selectively alter behavior within Mexico to maintain some trade & travel, then coercion could be an ingredient. The US has ventured into Mexico before to punish non-state actors, although Pershing’s expedition against Pancho Villa didn’t amount to much.
Richard Fulmer
Dec 3 2023 at 12:49am
Perhaps we should put it to a vote. Because, you know, democracy.
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