Mexican Security Threat

What makes things so frightening about Mexico is that the continuous failure to provide and support a standard in education and human welfare is pushing the population out into the USA and coming with it is the drug supported criminal mafias.  This can be stopped and must be stopped.  Unfortunately, we keep getting hope and failure from the leadership of Mexico as the country slides into even worse conditions.

The drug prohibition fraud must end and be regulated to cut of the money flow to the outlaws in Mexican society.  The oil business in Mexico is also presently collapsing and this will begin to starve the institutionalized graft in the government.

In the meantime, the violence is becoming so extreme it is now spilling over the borders.  As this item makes clear it is becoming too big for the locals to handle and they are plausibly corrupted in any event. 

The real problem is that we can not avoid the problem by ignoring it all.

7 Reasons Mexico is the Biggest Threat to American Security

BY ROB TAYLOR

POSTED ON MARCH 3 2011 6:00 AM

Rob Taylor has a Master of Arts degree from Wesleyan University. He blogs at Greenville Dragnet.

Conservatives and liberals alike look to far flung shores for the biggest threats to our national security with good reason. No enemy we face is more dedicated to our destruction than Islamic Expansionists and resurgent communism worldwide has again begun to wage war against American world dominance. But these threats, as real as they are, need to gain entrance to our country to truly achieve their ends and it is through the collapsing Mexican state that they will find purchase. As they do, other threats emanating from within the hollow state of Mexico are even now exacting a heavy toll in American blood, land and economic health.

Mexico is a problem that has been left to fester on our border for decades and the Left has exploited this war zone to pursue their corrupt anti-American agenda. Right now there is no battlefront more important to the continued existence of America than the southern border. Here are just seven reasons why:

7. Narco-Cults Have Spread from Mexico into Most Major Metropolitan Areas

Most famous and brutal among these is the now infamous cult of the Holy Death or Saint Death, better known as Santa Muerte. I’ve long argued a connection between the Santa Muerte Cult and the Matamoros murderscommitted by the coven of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, but Santa Muerte cultists are thought to be involved in many more murders both in the U.S. and in Mexico. In 1989 when police busted Constanzo’s coven, they hadcommitted 14 confirmed ritual murders.

That same year there were 74 confirmed ritual murders in Mexico city.

Santa Muerte worship has exploded along the border states but has also made inroads into any area where there is a large illegal population or drug activity, traveling as far north as Chicago and New York. Because the cult has no central theology, the worship of Saint Death is transmitted by professional “practitioners” to followers who are largely drug dealers and other criminals. They are, according to Dr. Tony Zavaleta, fanatics who havecommitted murder to appease their goddess. More importantly, the worship of Saint Death has diffused into many traditions without losing the rituals that define it. Thus the cult’s members range from MS-13 members, who have an unusually high concentration of Santa Muerte devotees, to professional Witches, who may or may not work on the periphery of the criminal underground, to thrill seeking suburbanites.

Unlike the mythical satanic cults of the 80s and 90s, the Santa Muerte cults are criminal enterprises that represent an actual threat to Americans. A man was beheaded by cultists in Chandler, Arizona by a group of illegal immigrants who had been seen burning candles and using spirit boards. Police are reluctant to call the murder a ritual crime but will not deny that it is. A woman named Angela Sanford stabbed a lover of hers 13 times in what police think was a ritual sacrifice in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At one time a Wiccan police officer found that Sanford had listed the victim on her phone as “sacrifice” and local Wiccans maintain she gave up Wicca to practice “traditional” witchcraft. Across the border in Mexico, murder victims are routinely decapitated and their heads given as an offering to the goddess of death.

We often say the Left does not understand Islamic imperialism because they don’t understand a religion driven by fanaticism to a cause. But all Americans are guilty of underestimating the growing power of Santa Muerte in our cities and border states, and the murder and mayhem they bring with them.

6. Mexican Corruption is Creeping Across the Border into Our Law Enforcement Agencies

Mexican corruption is so pervasive and endemic in Mexico that it has now infected American law enforcement agencies. Nowhere is this more blatant than the Project Gunwalker scandal involving the BATF and an attempted cover-up by the Department of Justice. While this story was breaking on the blogs months ago, it is just making the news now that the leftist media can no longer protect their ideological brethren in government.

In an effort to “pad” out the numbers of American guns found in Mexico, the BATF was allowing “hundreds” of guns to be walked across the border to Mexico. Because the claim that most illegal Mexican guns are legally purchased American arms smuggled across the border in exchange for drugs and cash is demonstrably false, it is theorized that Obama administration officials enacted this illegal program to justify increasing calls for gun control from the American Left. Not only was the program a failure, but according to ATF whistleblowers, one gun was used in the slaying of Border Patrol officer Brian Terry.

In pursuit of a political agenda that only benefits the corrupt Mexican government our federal agencies armed the cartels with at least 2,500 American weapons that would have never been available to the gangs.

5. The Mexican Military is Untrustworthy and Out of Control

The Mexican military President Calderon relies on to fight his war on the cartels is known to receive upwards of $500,000,000 a year in bribes and payoffs from various criminal organizations. A Wikileaks document shows that the State Department and our military are both “aware” that much of the cartel firepower in Mexico is actually military weapons America sells to the Mexican government–which is then given by the military to the cartels.

In 2008, Local 2544, which represents Border Patrol officers in the Tuscon area, reported that Mexican soldiers crossed a bridge into American territory and held an agent at gunpoint. That same year Judicial Watch used a FOIA request to obtain documents that showed the American government knew of at least 17 confirmed armed incursions by the Mexican military into American territory in a two year period. In 2010, Border Patrol confirmed two incursions by Mexican military, but claimed the actions were part of the drug war.

Just recently, video surfaced of Mexican troops crossing into America to conduct vehicle searches on our side of the border.

The military of Mexico has increasingly disregarded national boundaries and as the situation within Mexico deteriorates they represent a serious military threat to the United States.

4. Hezbollah Has an Operational Foothold in Mexico

It has long been known that Hezbollah operates in many Latin American countries, especially those with Marxist governments sympathetic to the anti-Western views of radical Islamism. A recent Fox News report by Adam Housley shows that our fears of Hezbollah gaining a foothold in Mexico have been realized:

My military and Department of Homeland Security contacts are insistent…it’s not if Hezbollah operatives have been smuggled into the U.S….but how many? They note that drug tunnels are becoming much more sophisticated and striking similar as tunnels being used by terror organizations to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip. My contacts also say they have real concern that bombing techniques used in the Middle East to promote terror are now also being used inside Mexico, as the cartels war with each other and anyone in their way.

This comes as Mexican authorities busted a senior Hezbollah operative who employed Mexicans nationals with family ties to Lebanon to set up the network, designed to target Israel and the West, according to multiple reports. The man’s name is Jameel Nasr and he was arrested after a Mexican surveillance operation revealed that he traveled frequently to Lebanon to receive information and instructions from Hezbollah commanders and he also spent several months in Venezuela working with the terror group and Hugo Chavez’s people. American security contacts say the Mexican operation was impressive and they are seeing some increased pressure on the cartels from Mexican authorities and thus…their friends.

Meantime, over this past weekend President Calderon of Mexico sent a significant number of troops to the border regions and while they are there to help battle the cartels, they have also been sent to deal with the growing connection to Hezbollah. As one contact told me, “Mexico knows the seriousness of a cartel connection with Hezbollah and the threat to their national security.”

We also know from DHS documents that over 180,000 illegal aliens from countries Other than Mexico were apprehended from 2007 through mid-March 2010 and the State Department Country Reports on Terrorism said that “smuggling rings have been detected moving people from East Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia”. I am told these people and drugs are then moved up through Central America and into the Unites States through Mexico.

Our wide open border is allowing an unknown number of Islamists to pour through unchecked. A book celebrating suicide bombers was found in the Mexican desert just recently and Islamist cleric Said Jaziri was discovered being smuggled into the U.S. in the trunk of a car driven by a human smuggler. In 2009, 52,000 OTMs (other than Mexicans) were arrested at by Border Patrol. If Islamism is our greatest threat, how can we leave the southern border open to them?

3. The Cartels are Not Drug Gangs

The Left (and many libertarians) frames the chaos in Mexico as a “drug war” and calls the cartels drug gangs. This is usually an attempt to make the case that ending prohibition (usually on marijuana) will end the violence, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the cartels represent. Even if you had the stomach to legalize all the drugs the cartels produce and distribute (including meth, cocaine, and ecstasy) the cartels make millions in the sex trafficking trade, human smuggling and even piracy.

The cartels control territory, not trade, and though this may sound similar to American street gangs, remember that our gangs don’t have more authority than the local police in an area. The cartels cut out complete swaths of land and retain total control. They control not just the drug trade or criminal activity, but the entire populace, law enforcement, and even legal economic activity. The cartels have fiefdoms in the literal sense so viewing them as simply “drug gangs” creates a dangerous illusion that hampers our ability to deal with them

The cartels control not only territory in Mexico, but in America. Cochise County Sheriff Larry Denver claimed last summer that Border Patrol agents in his county were ordered to withdraw from areas that were “too dangerous” to patrol. Cartels have placed forward observers in American territory.

A pre-dawn oil pipeline explosion in December was blamed on the Zetas stealing oil from the state owned pipeline. Cartels have been increasingly turning to this sort of theft as the Mexican state shows itself to be powerless to stand against them.

These are not the actions of “drug gangs” but of warlords who have little fear of Mexican or American state authority. Their private armies already challenge our law enforcement on the border and will expand their territory into America permanently if we don’t push them back.

2. There’s a Literal War on the Border

When a Pinal County sheriff’s deputy was ambushed by an armed group of illegal aliens, America should have been put on notice about how bad the situation was near the border. But that story didn’t wake people up.

Neither did the new stories of American families being driven from their homes by cartel operations or the Mexican Mafia publicly putting a hit out on Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu. Babeu just recently told a reporterhe expected his department to be in “armed conflict” with the cartels in the next few months. America’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio needs a .50 caliber machine gun and an armored car to patrol parts of his county. So little control does our government have on the border that several different militia groups are active there. At least one is affiliated with the Nationals Socialist Movement, while others are locals fed up with the economic damage of open borders.

Militia groups from outside the area have traveled to the border to run operations against the cartels, and bandits have taken to patrolling the areas looking for cartel drug loads to steal. A rumor has been circulating that claims the Zetas believe several of their soldiers were gunned down by American “vigilantes” and they are planning to retaliate by shooting any armed American they come across and dispatching assassins to hunt for drug bandits.

This all sounds like news from a third world country but it’s happening now inside our border. Mexico has destabilized our border states so much that there are now private armies fighting each other inside our borders. How could this not pose a clear and present danger to American security?

1) Mexico is a Hollow State

John Robb, author of  A Brave New War, defines a hollow state as thus:

The modern nation-state is in a secular decline, made inevitable by the rise of a global market system. Even developed nations, like the US, are not immune to thisprocess. The decline is at first gradual and then accelerates until it reaches a final end-point: a hollow state. The hollow state has the trappings of a modern nation-state (“leaders”, membership in international organizations, regulations, laws, and a bureaucracy) but it lacks any of the legitimacy, services, and control of its historical counter-part. It is merely a shell that has some influence over the spoils of the economy. The real power rests in the hands of corporations and criminal/guerrilla groups that vie with each other for control of sectors of wealth production. For the individual living within this state, life goes on, but it is debased in a myriad of ways.

Except in Mexico there really isn’t much in the way of corporate entities willing to vie for control of anything there. Instead we have criminals and insurgent groups competing with each other and with local and state governments who seek to consolidate power in the vacuum left by the Mexican state whose legitimacy rests more and more on a co-opted military unwilling to take the fight to the cartels.

While the “hollow state” theory is an interesting armchair debate, the consequences of living next to one are no different than the consequences of living next to a failed state like Somalia, as our border governors can assure you. If America bordered Bosnia or Somalia or Tunisia, only the most partisan of hacks would argue that our borders shouldn’t be our top defense priority. But because Mexico gives the illusion of a functioning government, the Left and libertarians pretend that open borders can cause little harm to American interests.

To believe this requires a studied ignorance of what life is like for Americans that live near Mexico. Mexico is a near lawless ruin of a state comprised of neo-feudal kingdoms constantly at war with each other. Increasingly these combatants, including the “authorities” we recognize, have shown themselves willing to annex American land in pursuit of their goals and there is no governmental institution we can go to that would have even the slimmest chance of stopping them.  The hollow state of Mexico is a cancer on our border that is slowly spreading into America.

Who has called for any action on this threat? There have been piecemeal calls for action, but few in power have the spine to fight the war on our border, and thanks to the Left’s campaign to smear those concerned with border security as racist, there will have to be a massacre on the border before anyone takes the actions we need to secure America’s southern frontier. Mexico cannot keep receiving American arms if it cannot guarantee control of them. We cannot keep close ties with their government if they’re successfully corrupting our agencies at the highest levels. We can no longer rely on local law enforcement and private citizens to fight the war that the cartels have declared on us. Mexico is the biggest security concern we have and we must start taking control of our border seriously before it’s too late.