AMERICANS' APPETITE FOR DRUGS FUELS THE VIOLENCE IN MEXICO

Mexico Is Dripping With Blood.

You may have seen news coverage of the bold murders committed south
of the border in the past couple of months. Your reaction might have
been similar to that of other Americans: What's wrong with those
people? But what you may not know is that we comfortable gringos
north of the border are pretty intimately involved in the mayhem
unfolding down there.

In one of the more recent outrages, a 45-year-old man was found shot
dead in a vacant lot in Juarez, a town that shares the border with El
Paso, Texas. The man's hands had been severed and laid atop his
private parts. The taking of this man's life was not newsworthy -
dozens are murdered every week in Juarez. What put his name in the
papers was the dismemberment, no doubt a message of some sort.
Mutilation is a mode of communication currently in vogue among
Mexico's drug lords.

In Juarez, more than 1,600 people died in drug-related killings last
year. For all of Mexico, the tally was more than 5,000 dead - more
than double the drug murders of 2007.

Most of the victims are found riddled with gunshots, rounds and rounds
of ammunition that make the gang-related drive-by shootings of U.S.
cities appear tame. Gory, Mafia-style "examples" are routine. People
left with messages scrawled on their bodies, warnings from one drug
cartel to another. And then there are the heads. Mexican drug lords
are big on decapitating people and then rolling the heads into public
places - a popular disco, the town square.

Americans' love of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin is
what keeps the drug trade bustling in Mexico. But now there's a new
way Mexican crime is bleeding across the border: small-town farmers,
some of them elderly and frail, being kidnapped and held for ransom.
The goal is to have the ransoms paid by their U.S.-based relatives,
migrants working here. The kidnappings are a sinister new criminal
enterprise, but they also serve as a calling card from one drug gang
to another to indicate who controls a particular area. And the
ultimate goal in this struggle for territory is land routes to the
U.S. drug market.

If all of this is making you say, "Tsk, tsk, why can't that country
protect its own people?" consider the facts: While the drugs are
flowing north of the border, guns are flowing south. Estimates are
that more than 2,000 guns are smuggled from the U.S. into Mexico daily.

Here is the list of what U.S. immigration agents found at two El Paso
homes raided in December: 11 AK-47 assault rifles, two military-style
bayonets, ballistic body armor, 2,560 rounds of Russian ammunition,
seven M-16 ammunition magazines and 20 rounds of armor-piercing
.223-caliber ammunition.

Unlike any previous administration, Mexican President Felipe Calderon
has declared war on the drug cartels. They are fighting back (and
among themselves for dominance). High-level Mexican police and
military, some of them with their own hands in the drug trade, are
among the assassinated.

And, yes, the U.S. is working closely with the Mexican government in
an attempt to break drug and gun trafficking rings. But the successes
are dwarfed by the scale of the violence, which is exploding.

A U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats in January
listed Mexico and Pakistan as the two counties that "bear
consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse." For Mexico, it wasn't
just the peso's decline but the bloodshed that earned the dire
warning. And Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recently
ordered 22 federal agencies to formulate plans to react if violence
crosses the border.

Many observers deem this crisis a sterling argument in favor of drug
decriminalization. Here's news for them: As much as you may wish for
that kind of "enlightenment," it ain't gonna happen. Our society, our
government will never allow it.

So Mexicans will go on dying until Mexico's army and police figure out
how to get a handle on the drug cartels. And our contribution will be
a billion here or a billion there to help battle drug and gunrunners.
And we'll keep on snorting the coke, smoking the meth, rolling the
weed and selling the guns.