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Attack the Cartels: Why Now?
The attack on the families from La Mora community was horrific; no one would argue otherwise. The reasons for the attack are still unclear. These people were US citizens who left the Mormon Church to escape the ban on polygamy passed in 1885; although many who moved to Mexico identify as Mormons, they aren’t affiliated with the Mormon Church. (Not all of them practice polygamy these days.)
You can go here for more background on the families. The church website had the following quotation:
‘We came into Mexico gladly because we had to,’ one early pioneer stated. At that time, United States marshals were zealously executing the Edmunds-Tucker Law against those practicing plural marriage in the United States. Rather than renounce family ties already established or go to prison, many persons fled to Mexico as a haven from persecution.’
President Trump responded to the attack in this way:
US President Donald Trump is offering Mexico’s government unspecified help to ‘wage war’ on drug cartels after a family from a breakaway faction of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints was massacred in northern Mexico.
‘This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!’ Trump says in a series of tweets addressing the tragedy.
Trump adds that the US government stands ready to get involved. He says that Andrés Manuel López Obrador has made fighting drug cartels a top issue.
‘But the cartels have become so large and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army!’
These comments from the President raise all types of questions:
- Is he using the attack on the La Mora community as an excuse to fight the cartel in Mexico?
- Should we enter Mexico without the approval of the Mexican president?
- Do we need to declare the cartels a terrorist organization first?
Finally, should we be acting in response to an attack on a group of US citizens who left the country because they wanted to practice polygamy and didn’t want to be persecuted or prosecuted for their actions? (And this comment is no reflection on the current Mormon Church).
* * * * *
For the record, I’m torn. The cartels are a nightmare and I want to be rid of them. But is it our job to respond militarily? Also, should we be acting in response to this act against US citizens? Should we be dictating our involvement to the Mexican president? Also, my ambivalence arises regarding a community leaving this country to avoid our laws and values. Are they due American intervention with these conditions and their dual citizenship? Does their deserting America have any effect on your own opinion?
Published in Culture
@bobthompson, that would make a great post–discussing dual citizenship. I hope you’ll think about writing one.
I don’t know, perhaps I’m not as focused on why or when they left the United States to live abroad. I would like to think that the US would want organized crime to know that they can’t target innocent American citizens and massacre them without consequences. If our lives don’t matter to the cartels, then they need to know that they matter to the US.
When massacres of innocent Americans are a problem, we can ask the CIA to conduct covert operations to take care of threats. We don’t have to have “boots on the ground.” We could have done more of this during the Obama years to rescue hostages in Syria and the young man in North Korea.
These cartels are enemies of the United States.
If we do it on our side of the border it’s cops ‘n’ due process; on their side of the border it can be army ‘n’ explosions.
Maybe flesh out the position a little more.
Edit: Or not – on reflection I kinda like “I Don’t Like Dual Citizenship: Fite Me!” as a title.
They are the enemies of civilization and humanity.
If I fleshed it out a little I would probably cite why I don’t like people carrying flags representing the country of their origin while protesting here,
or, telling me how wonderful everything is there while complaining about here,
or, well, you know, I just don’t have anything to go on because all my ancestors that I know anything about came here and never looked back.
Dual citizenship means dual loyalty. We already have a problem with a suicidal understanding of birth-right citizenship (see Chinese birth tourism).
The issue of dual or divided loyalty or commitment applies to Christians in America. As I see things Christians must believe in free agency of individuals because the individual must exercise free agency to gain salvation. Progressives do not convince me that they honor individual free agency – that threatens the collective. My conclusion is that Christians should not follow Progressives. Progressives must see the truth of this so they must work to destroy Christianity.
How did a country with a ton of natural resources, access to two oceans and some pretty good colleges get cartels with tanks?
We need to build the wall and police it so it actually works. We also have to police the gulf and the Pacific. We can severely reduce illegals by doing so. It will have no effect on the drugs. Invading Mexico would reduce drugs coming in from Mexico so they’d move elsewhere. We cannot stop the drugs. It’s time we learned that fact. At a 2000 percent profit margin, tiny size, infinitely hide-able, we have to get serious which we’ve shown no signs of for half a century.
Seems like in terms of actual use of the military and long-term public support, as opposed to a short-term backing based on a horrific incident, you’d have to go back to the General Pershing vs. Pancho Villa rules of just over a century ago, when Wilson gave the OK for U.S. forces under Pershing to enter Mexico to get Villa only after he had entered the United States and committed murders in Columbus, N.M.
Since the murders were committed 70 miles south of Nogales, you’d have the situation of American forces intervening over an incident on Mexican soil, even if it did involve U.S. citizens. That’s not going to get you extended support from the American public for any sort of armed conflict between the military and the drug cartels — the only way that happens is if the cartels start taking their massacres across the border into America, and as of now, they know not to poke the tiger. It’s why earlier this decade El Paso could suffer just over a dozen murders in an entire year, while there were more than 2,500 just across the Rio Grande in Juarez. The gangs knew not to conduct their fights on U.S. soil, even as their leaders in some cases lived in El Paso for their own safety.
It would be easier to get extended public support for going after the drug gangs by attacking their financial assets, as the U.S. has with the Iranian mullahs. Sending the military in would be setting up an extended fight likely to see declining public support, especially if the politicians in Mexico are playing both sides of the street and secretly aiding the cartels as the pretend to fully cooperate with the Americans.
I think for most of us the issue is that they left our country so they wouldn’t have to abide by its laws – not which particular laws they wanted to flout.
If you’re still looking for a rhetorical device, this one is more appropriate: Would you feel the same as you do if the victims were Mexicans who’d been murdered in the U.S.?
The particular causes of Mexico’s dysfunction aren’t clear to me either, but I’ve always been pessimistic about Mexico’s chances for good governance based on a few observations.
Mexico is tropical. Modern civilizations don’t seem to arise in the tropics.
Mexico was founded by Spanish colonialists, unlike the U.S. which was settled and established predominantly by northern Europeans. I can sum up this distinction by asking where governments and society function better today – Spain or England?
Mexico’s population is far more divided than ours. The fault line between European descendants and the meso-american natives seems vast and uncrossable – they seem to me to be fundamentally different people. American blacks are far more integrated, in that all members of the nation live similar lives, than the indigenous Mexican population will ever be. While the cultural divide between Europeans and natives is immense, the divide between individuals is just as great – the cognitive gap between the two populations is more than large enough to matter.
Mexico’s has not devolved significantly in the last few years; it’s always been pretty much like it is now. The elites can keep the lid on most of the time, but they can never really put out the fires. I think we can attribute most deviations from the norm (and killing a bunch of women and kids is not a deviation from the Mexican norm) to the fact that Mexico currently has a thug-coddling president. That’s just a random excursion stemming from the current globalist/populist conflict.
Wouldn’t need to ask the above questions if the federal government stayed out of issue related to marriage and family. States could handle this and leave all Americans with choices.
Why is that, do you suppose? Too much low hanging fruit requiring too little effort for survival? The heat is enervating? I’ve always been fascinated by this.
I think it’s a mistake to consider religion, or similarly marriage or family, as relevant at all in this matter. Religion has nothing to do with how these people were murdered or with how we should respond, if at all.
Jared Diamond addressed some of this in his book ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’.
It must be both, together with a dash of tropical disease. I once built a temporary forge to heat scrap steel so I could beat it into a survival knife, just so I’d know how. (Full disclosure: I will not depend on that skill in the event that shtf.) In the winter in Montana, I was working in a t-shirt. I cannot imagine anyone in the tropics working metal.
It helps to have a bordering country that pays good money for illegal activity while simultaneously funding extreme measures to stop that illegal activity.
America has provided the crucible to make some devastatingly virulent and shockingly toxic strains of criminal organisms. Our values (individual freedom, scrupulous court proceedings) as well as our political will (inconsistent policing, non-enforcement of death penalty) are the lattice on which these malignancies grow.
It would be too glib to say we get the underworld we deserve, but a parasite matches itself to its host – or in this case hosts. Mexico has a level of general corruption that is endemic and (relatively) benign, but provides an incredible growth medium for a moneyed and sadistic criminal organization.
“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” said Prospero of Caliban. He wasn’t its father, but he had attempted to rein in its evil to little effect.
I propose no solutions – I’m not sure that there are solutions.
However; drug ‘trafficking’ in my lifetime
wewent from few if any deaths to the most savage mutilations and the purposeful slaughter of bystanders. So we may not be able to solve drug trafficking, but we can clearly make it worse.I agree that people would be acting reasonably if they question the dual citizenship of people who left a generation ago.
However what happened to these former, or present day, Americans is an indication for what might befall any American traveling through Mexico. After all, this massacre occurred 70 miles south of the US border.
Or “for what might befall any Mexican traveling through Mexico.” If having a wild-west failed state on our southern border is a cause for action, then it’s a cause for action.
Nobody’s stated it out loud, but I fear some have a nebulous pseudo-patriotic thought going in their heads that says “Americans get to travel anywhere in the world and the U.S. government should protect them and guarantee that right.” I hope that hearing that stated plainly will convince any fence-sitters that idea is childish. It’s a big mean world, and I for one am against any offer of protection for any citizen outside our borders unless we-the-people sent him there on our business.
This is a reasonable viewpoint. I don’t like the drug cartel power because of the effects it is having on American society.I would like to see something done about that but I don’t know what that something is. I’m pretty sure ignoring it and acting as if whatever they do is just a Mexican government problem may not turn out well for America.
This is where I am. I don’t care whether the women and children murdered by the cartels were Americans or had forfeited their citizenship for whatever reason. I care that a failed state run by cartels is just over the border and just so happens to be murdering women and children.
Use this for a pretext to “wipe the cartels off the face of the earth?” Fine by me.
I’m actually pretty good with the idea that Americans will be avenged sevenfold so think twice about attacking them. It works for our ships as well.
That’s different. Ships are flagged.
I’ve wondered about that, how one would use a modern disciplined infantry company to wipe out a cartel. I mean the real experts at this kind of thing – a big team of American grunts fresh from a tour in the sandbox, maybe after two weeks R&R. What would they do? They’d face two problems – identifying the cartel members, and then deciding what to do to them.
Ok, now anybody who’s an advocate of U.S. troops in Mexico, please pick up that scenario where I left off.
I don’t care if it’s drone strikes, special ops, whatever. Let the experts decide how it’s done. But, this problem isn’t going away or going to get better unless we do something about it.
Maybe we should make Mexico the 51st state as long as they don’t get to vote for a generation or two. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t put our education establishment in charge of assimilation!!
What a mess.
Is this something like identifying the jihadists in the ME?
That is, in a nutshell, very similar to the problem US Forces in the sandbox and ‘Stan have faced for years. How do you pick out the jihadi fighters from the casual bystanders and then what do you do with them once you identify them? I submit, first you shoot the ones that are shooting at you. Do that often enough and eventually the numbers of people shooting at you will diminish and you can figure out what step two needs to be…
And then there’s the matter of what we say is a compound and what they say is a family residence.
Smart bombs or even average IQ bombs work pretty well for this problem.
I realize I’m being pretty cavalier about the women and children but waging a ‘War on Drugs’ for most of my life and the casualties have mostly been on our side.