On the southern border of the United States lies country we are expected to respect. But Mexico is a monumentally messed up place.
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico -- The job offer was tempting.
It was printed on a 16-foot-wide banner and strung above one of the busiest roads here, calling out to any "soldier or ex-soldier."
"We're offering you a good salary, food and medical care for your families," it said in block letters.
But there was a catch: The employer was Los Zetas, a notorious Gulf cartel hit squad formed by elite Mexican army deserters. The group even included a phone number for job seekers that linked to a voice mailbox.
Our elites resist creating a formidable border barrier to stop illegal entries from this country.
The article reports that Mexico's military has suffered over 100,000 desertions in the last 8 years. Some of those deserters who signed up with the cartels were trained at Fort Benning Georgia.
WASHINGTON — As many as 200 U.S.-trained Mexican security personnel have defected to drug cartels to carry out killings on both sides of the border and as far north as Dallas, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, told Congress on Wednesday.
The renegade members of Mexico's elite counter-narcotics teams trained at Fort Benning, Ga., have switched sides, contributing to a wave of violence that has claimed some 6,000 victims over the past 30 months, including prominent law enforcement leaders, the Houston-area Republican told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Your tax dollars help to raise the level of professionalism in the private drug armies. When those forces cross over into the United States on protection details or other operations they operate more efficiently and competently because the US Army trained them.
MEXICO CITY — With the U.S. Congress debating whether to send hundreds of millions of dollars in aid for Mexico's crackdown on drug cartels, American officials said Wednesday that three Mexican police chiefs have sought asylum north of the border in fear for their lives.
Jayson Ahern, the deputy commissioner for Customs and Border Enforcement, told the Associated Press that the officials had sought asylum "in the past few months."
Citing privacy issues, Ahern did not identify the police. A senior Homeland Security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the asylum requests to the Houston Chronicle but provided no details. "They're basically abandoned by their police officers or police departments in many cases," Ahern said in Washington.
The police chief in Puerto Palomas, a town bordering Columbus, N.M., west of El Paso, requested asylum in March when his entire force quit after receiving death threats from drug traffickers, reports show. Seven men were killed gangland-style in Palomas early Sunday in attacks attributed to local smugglers.
Mexico is so dangerous for police that Mexican police chiefs (at least those not owned by organized crime organizations) can make a very credible claim when they seek asylum to escape death. The BBC notes how unusual it is that government officials seek asylum to get away from non-government actors.
Seeking political asylum is, of course, usually associated with individuals fleeing persecution from governments and their forces of law and order, but in Mexico it seems it is the forces of law and order that are being persecuted.
In recent weeks, at least six senior police chiefs have been murdered.
The most prominent murder was that of Mr Millan, the acting head of Mexico's Federal Police Force (PFP).
You can drive from the United States over a border into a country with massive government corruption, private armies, and where top law enforcement officials are getting assassinated and police chiefs are crossing over to ask for asylum after their staffs abandon their posts. Congress resists protecting us from all of this.
Michael Orme sees Mexico as falling apart.
Mexico as a nation-state is under threat, and with it the US's third largest source of oil. The Federal government does not have the forces to smoke out, let alone counter the drug barons who virtually control such provinces as Sinaloa, Nuevo Leon and Sonora. Nor can they tackle the rebels and privateers who have been disrupting the country's oil infrastructure. There has been a mass exodus from the police and the army in the wake of the assassinations of hundreds of public officials. Indeed, by some definitions, Mexico is no longer a functioning nation state.
I do not know the extent to which drug barons control areas of Mexico. I tend to be skeptical of more severe versions of such claims in large part because drug barons do not need extensive control. They just need enough power to get law enforcement agencies to leave them alone. Does that require a degree of control that causes everything else to malfunction? Or does Mexico malfunction for other reasons such as a low skilled workforce, a lack of a civic culture, and other factors?
However, Orme points to another reason to expect worsening conditions in Mexico that strikes me as more plausible. Mexico's government relies very heavily on the national oil company Pemex for tax revenue.
Moreover, Mexico as a state lacks diverse and predictable sources of tax revenues. It is reckoned that over 70% of Mexican businesses and individuals cheat the system, leaving the government to rely heavily on the State-owned oil company, PEMEX to act as a de facto tax collector. These PEMEX activities account for 40% of government revenues. And therein lies an increasingly serious problem.
Mexico's oil production is going to continue to decline. Though some of the revenue loss is probably being offset by higher oil prices. The tax revenue of Mexico rises with oil prices. That article mentions the Mexican legislature has just granted a tax cut to Pemex, the Mexican national oil company. But Vicente Fox vetoed that bill. Why? Probably because he thinks the national government can't get by without that Pemex tax revenue Yet Pemex needs to retain more money to develop oil fields in order to slow and delay production declines.
So why is the company starved for cash? Its proven reserves are dwindling, and last year fell 7.7 percent. Its main oil field, Cantarell, is about to reach its peak production and will begin to decline next year. Without big investment and new oil discoveries soon, Pemex's total production, now hovering above 3.3 million barrels a day, could begin to decline by the end of the decade, analysts say.
Despite lofty prices for oil, Pemex has seen little of the roughly $9 billion windfall above its expected revenue. It is heavily taxed - the government relies on it to finance about one-third of the national budget.
And events this month have shown an uneven will to give Pemex the means to find and pump new oil. President Vicente Fox, a long-time supporter of legislation to lower the heavy taxes Pemex pays, surprised the country by vetoing a bill that would have allowed Pemex to pay $2.4 billion less next year.
Think about what that portends for the future. Mexico's government is going to continue its dependence on Pemex revenue even while it starves Pemex. Eventually the money going from Pemex is going to start declining. Mexico will enter a severe financial crisis. In theory it can raise the tax revenue elsewhere. But it will need to enact types of taxes that the affluent can't escape via bribery. Can Mexico's political system manage to do this?
Cantarell's long term outlook is a massive decline. Just in 2007 Canterell production will decline 15%.
Production at the field is down 130,000 barrels a day from January, within Pemex's forecast that yields will decline around 15 percent this year.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Latin American Economic Outlook 2008 report draws attention to low Mexican tax revenue and low quality of spending of that revenue.
The OECD urges Brazil and Mexico to improve the efficiency of public spending. Both Brazil, which collects tax revenues equivalent to around 35% of its GDP, and Mexico, where tax revenues amount to only 15% of GDP, score badly in such areas as access to basic services like clean water and electricity.
The corruption that keeps down Mexican tax collections starves funding for Mexican schools. The average of 9th grade education in Mexico probably keeps Mexico's economy below where it could be. Though Mexico can't hope to rise to US living standards given a national average of 87 IQ. As of 1999 Mexico spent only about 3% of GDP on education and compulsory education was raised to 9th grade from 6th grade only in 1993! Mexico's human capital development is severely lagging.
Given the problems in Mexico (corruption, massive organized crime groups, private militias, poverty, population growth) we need to build a non-pathetic border barrier fence along the US border with Mexico. Yes, we really can isolate ourselves from some of the world's problems and should make the effort to do so.
The number of police deaths in Mexico in incidents involving organised crime has jumped 50% this year, according to official statistics.
At least 61 police officers have been killed in Mexico since the year began.
The increase in police deaths follows a crackdown on drug-related violence by the Mexican government.
If the United States built a wall along the entire US-Mexico border one of the effects would be to cut revenue to Mexican drug lords. Mexico would become a more civilized and lower crime society. Governments in Mexican border cities and towns could get a handle on the lawlessness and drive out the drug gangs.
The figures above for police deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. As of Friday March 23 one accounting puts total deaths from the drug wars at 491 so far in 2007 and over 2000 in 2006.
MEXICO CITY - Nearly 500 people have been killed in Mexico's drug wars so far this year, according to media reports here, despite a crackdown on the illicit trade by President Felipe Calderon.
The dead include dozens of police officers, the daughter of a retired Army general and a suspected cartel hit man in the northern city of Monterrey left with a knife sticking out of his chest and a message to local officials affixed to his body.
...
Calderon's government, which took power in December, promised a get-tough approach against the drug trade, which claimed more than 2,000 lives last year.
That's worse than US yearly losses from fighting in Iraq. We are talking about the country on the southern border of the United States. We need to insulate ourselves from this with a border barrier and tougher immigration controls. We should also deport all the illegal alien criminals and other illegal aliens. That'll remove drug gangs and provide other benefits as well.
In the first year of the experiment, monthly apprehensions - a rough measure of illegal crossings - fell 57 percent across the Border Patrol's Del Rio sector and 78 percent in the area around Eagle Pass. Agents here seized more than $15 million worth of narcotics in November, about four times what they seized in the same month the year before - the result, officials say, of more time spent on the line and less processing border crossers.
A barrier layer along the entire border with fence and wall elements would free up Border Patrol agents to go after drug smugglers. So few would attempt to cross that agents could respond to electronic crossing detection sensors and catch just about every illegal crosser. We could eliminate Mexico as a conduit for illegal drugs smuggled into the United States while also eliminating it as a source of illegal aliens.
Thanks to Omer K for the heads up.
A succession of Mexican presidents supported a dirty war against opponents.
MEXICO CITY, Nov. 22 — Just before leaving office, the administration of President Vicente Fox has quietly put out a voluminous report that for the first time states unequivocally that past governments carried out a covert campaign of murder and torture against dissidents and guerrillas from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
The 800-page report is the first acceptance of responsibility by the government for what is known here as the “dirty war,” in which the police and the army are believed to have executed more than 700 people without trial, in many cases after torture. It also represents the fulfillment of Mr. Fox’s vow when elected in 2000 to expose the truth about an ugly chapter in Mexico’s history.
I'm going to guess that the people getting killed were mostly Amerinds and the people directing the killing were mostly Spanish. This was yet another Spanish-Amerind civil war. Such wars are a recurrng theme in Latin America. I wonder if any readers know just how much of a threat was posed to the Mexican government by the groups they fought. Had the government not waged its dirty war would the guerillas have developed into a far larger and more disruptive force?
The top leaders of Mexico knew what their soldiers were doing.
The events occurred during the administrations of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, José López Portillo and Mr. Echeverría. The federal security department kept the presidents informed about many aspects of the covert operations. Genocide charges against Mr. Echeverría, the only one still living, were thrown out in July by a judge who ruled that a statute of limitations had run out.
If we continue to let in people from Mexico the United States too will continue to split more deeply along racial lines.
Police chief Baltazar Gomez and councilman Osvaldo Rodriguez of the suburban city of Santa Catarina, were killed just after midnight by a lone gunman who followed them inside a convenience store where they had gone after attending a funeral. A Santa Catarina city councilwoman accompanying the men was wounded, authorities said.
Gomez, who had been police chief for three weeks, is the sixth law enforcement official killed this year in Nuevo Leon state, across the border from Texas.
Mexico also still has a big problem with inter-ethnic and class conflict.
OAXACA, Mexico -- Masked protesters armed with sticks, rocks and homemade gasoline bombs clashed with police and raided a downtown hotel Monday during a march by leftists seeking the governor's resignation.
The protesters began attacking police as they marched to the city's main central plaza, prompting the officers to fire back with tear gas and pepper spray.
The protesters are battling to remove Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz who is a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which had a monopoly on power in Mexico for most of the 20th century. Ruiz Ortiz is accused of corruption, rigging the election that brought him to power, and organizing a strike of the opposition newspaper Noticias de Oaxaca by a union affiliated with the PRI. This is the Mexico that el Presidente Jorge W. Bush wants to dissolve our borders with.
Fox's conservative government has been helpless to stop the conflict between a heavy-handed state governor and leftists, striking teachers and indigenous groups who are seeking to force him from office.
Bush is intent on recreating the highly racially stratified society of Mexico in the United States. I think the US has enough problems with race already without importing still more problems.