Mexican Drug Wars Landing on U.S. Soil

Something needs to be done about the violence in Mexico before we return to the bad old days in America, when the drug gangs terrorized communities in the U.S.

The five dead men lay scattered about a living room. Some showed signs of torture: Burns seared into their earlobes revealed where modified jumper cables had been clamped as an improvised electrocution device. Adhesive from duct tape used to bind the victims still clung to wrists and faces.

As a final touch, throats were slashed, post-mortem.

It didn't take long for Curry and federal agents to piece together clues: A murder scene, clean save for the crimson-turned-brown stains now spotting the carpet. Just a couple of mattresses tossed on the floor. It was a typical stash house.

But the cut throats? Some sort of ghastly warning.

Curry would soon find this was a retaliation hit over drug money with ties to Mexico's notorious Gulf cartel.

Curry also found out firsthand what narcotics agents have long understood. The drug war, with the savagery it brings, knows no bounds. It had landed in his back yard, in the foothills of the Appalachians, around the corner from The Home Depot.

One thousand, twenty-four miles from the Mexico border.

Drug cartels fighting each other
Forget for a moment the phrase itself — "War on Drugs" — much-derided since President Richard Nixon coined it. Wars eventually end, after all. And many Americans wonder today, nearly four decades later, will this one ever be won?

In Mexico, the fight has become a real war. Some 45,000 Mexican army troops now patrol territories long ruled by narcotraffickers. Places like Tijuana in Baja California. Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from Texas. But also resort cities like Acapulco, an hour south of the place where, months ago, the decapitated bodies of 12 soldiers were discovered with a sign that read: "For every one of mine that you kill, I will kill 10."

More than 10,560 people have been killed since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon took office and launched his campaign against the organized crime gangs that move cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and heroin to a vast U.S. market.

Ironically, the guns used to help the drug cartels are purchased in America. So we have the self-destructive practice of supplying Latin-American drug cartels with weapons that are then used to terrorize Americans on U.S. soil. Not to mention the drugs that are brought into this country that are then consumed by us:

Mexico has a point: Americans have contributed mightily to the creation of the violent drug cartels now wreaking havoc on the border. We are major consumers of their illegal products. In addition, we supply many of the weapons they use against rivals, law enforcement officials and innocents caught in the crossfire. Federal agents estimate that 90 percent of the pistols and rifles confiscated from Mexican drug traffickers last year and subjected to traces were traced back to gun dealers in the U.S., according to The New York Times.

Before his meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderon last week, President Barack Obama made a number of moves designed to placate our southern neighbors, who are struggling with an out-and-out drug war. Obama appointed a “border czar” to crack down on the smuggling of guns and drugs, he imposed financial sanctions on three of the most notorious cartels, he threatened to prosecute any American who does business with drug kingpins.

Noticeably absent from Obama’s list of corrective measures was any pledge to reinstate the ban on assault weapons, which expired in 2004. Bullied by the gun lobby, Obama and fellow Democrats are afraid to press a common-sense measure that would take weapons of war off the streets here and out of the hands of drug thugs in Mexico.

Given that cowardice, it’s probably futile to suggest that Obama do something visionary, if radical, about the market for illegal drugs in this country:

Walk away from the failed and costly “war on drugs”; significantly reduce the amount of money spent on enforcement against penny-ante dealers and users, abandon draconian laws that give stiff prison sentences to nonviolent drug offenders, spend the money instead on rehabilitation for addicts.

Some of that money could also be redirected to cracking down on the cartels, as Obama has proposed. They are vicious criminal enterprises that, left unchecked, can infiltrate the law enforcement and judicial establishments of entire countries. As Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) recently noted, “the Mexican drug cartels are capable of a very sophisticated level of quasi-military violence.” The Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI should concentrate resources on those kingpins, not on street-level dealers or addicted users doing more harm to themselves than anyone else.

This is a case in point:

A U.S. judge sentenced a top player in a Texas gun-smuggling ring to eight years in prison on Friday for illegally shipping an "arsenal" of high-powered weapons across the border including some that were later used in gang murders.

John Phillip Hernandez is directly responsible for shipping 103 guns -- many of them military-style assault rifles -- across the U.S.-Mexico border, court documents say.

The U.S. citizen was central to a drug-smuggling ring that funneled more than 300 guns worth some $350,000 to Mexico, U.S. officials said.

Warring drug traffickers killed 6,300 people in Mexico last year, and stemming the flow of U.S. arms to Mexico is a crucial part of U.S. policy to curb border violence.

In Mexico on Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama stood alongside Mexico's Felipe Calderon and promised to help his fight against drug cartels waging bloody turf wars along the joint border.

U.S. District Judge David Hittner sentenced Hernandez to 97 months in prison, more than the 63-month maximum set by federal guidelines.

Hittner said the sentence was warranted by the "arsenal of weapons" Hernandez trafficked in, as well as their use in at least eight murders by drug gangs, though Hernandez was not directly accountable for the deaths.