Mexican Drug War

After doing a paper for my government class this term regarding this topic, I'm curious as to what other people think. Do you think the US should step in to help the Mexican government control the drug cartels that are currently taking over the country? According to an article that I read during my research, two of the fighting cartels have joined forces and combined now have 30,000 less soldiers than the Mexican army. Now, that information was from 2011, imagine now just how much more it has increased?

So, the question is...do you think the US should step in to help Mexico control the situation? Yes or no? Why or why not?

Since a big part of the money supporting the drug trade in Mexico is American and since the US is selling the drug cartels weapons to fight against Mexican police/military troops (indirectly, via black market), I think America has some responsability in what's going on in Mexico. This sort of "investment" makes it nearly impossible for the Mexican government clean the mess alone, even more because they have to deal with other internal issues e.g. institutionalized corruption within the government and so on. However, I don't think America should wade into this drug war declared by President Calderón because its already lost (started by all the wrong reasons, has no method, no clear goals), but I do think America should help more.

I live in Mexico, in a border city that is right next to Texas. You have absolutely no idea how bad it is.

What you read or watch on the news is nothing like it is right now. This is not just a Mexican issue; this is an international issue. Just now Spain has stricter regulations because the drug cartels from Colombia are threatening to take the cities.

In Juarez, where I live, we cannot trust the police nor our governors.

Top the drug war with corruption and you get electoral fraud that placed a president that DID NOT win the elections. We have documented evidence that his people (people from the cartels) stole and burned the electoral urns with OUR votes in there in order to replace them with votes for the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto.

Off explodes a student movement that tried to reach political awareness like the 1968 student movement tried (which ended in la matanza de Tlatelolco). Like that, the things quiet down and we no longer have our country in our hands, but in the hands of corruption.

As much as I wish the U.S. or any other country to intervene, the truth is that the intervention would be solely for the benefit of the country that "helps" Mexico.

Right now Enrique Peña Nieto is trying to privatize two things: education and national petroleum.

These two things move our economies forward, but this idiot is trying to sell em off to international companies (aka, U.S. companies and across the globe too). Whatever movement the U.S. does I feel will be to their interest and not to our, the people of Mexico, interest.

@ cadaveres literarios

I'm aware that there isn't such thing as humanitarian help, specially in Mexico's case, but do you think other countries could cooperate (for real) without interfering too much? Or do you think Mexico would be better left alone to deal with corruption and violence?

I'm really asking, I can only talk by what I see on the news and here things are like, "look Mexico's in trouble, someone must help!" but we don't do anything because, you know, Europe's broke, so we're all expecting US to save the day and our investments threatened by the drug war, talk about a damsel in distress.

So how do you think this could be solved? Or at least, where should it start from?

@ Filth in the Beauty
I believe we had this discussion on several panels when the electoral fraud of 2012 occurred. Several students and citizens started saying that we should let the U.S. intervene, but may of us think they would only intervene for their own convenience.

I honestly don't know and like millions of Mexicans, we feel hopeless for the future of the country. At this moment we have strikes in several parts of the country because Peña Nieto is trying to privatize education, which should be free, but now he's trying to charge for it on all levels, even with 6 million people over the age of 15 being uneducated only in 2012. If we can't even change situations like this, in which we, the people, should have the say over the decision of la cámara de diputados, then we're at loss as to what to do with something that affects the rest of the world too.

@ Filth in the Beauty
Is America not broke? We're in a recession . . .

@ dru's troubled soul
Not wanting to start a "who's worse off" contest here, but in Europe we have countries who are completely broke e.g. Greece, with Spain following closely behind. Like, let's start from scratch because more than a quarter of our labor force is unemployed and we don't have an economy anymore sort of broke. I may be wrong, but as far as I can see US economy is only slowing down a bit.

Sorry for the off-topic-ness of this post.

@ Filth in the Beauty
No one here is trying to start a "who's worse off contest". I think the only thing Dru was trying to point out is that the U.S is broke as well. We may not be as broke as Europe is, but we don't have as much money as everyone thinks we do. We can't always play hero like people want us to. The simple truth is we don't have that ability. We cannot even take care of our own citizens, we would never be able to take care of another country's citizens. As much as I wish we were a country who had the funds to save other countries, that's not who we are anymore.

The U.S economy isn't just simply slowing down, more than that is happening. Recently, the U.S was hit by a sequester. Our Congress failed to balance our budget so now, our services get to suffer another cut. Budgets across this country have less money going into them and thus, services are getting shut down. Citizens are out of work, jobs are hard to find. Even if someone gets a job, they can't live on it. Minimum wage won't keep us alive in this country. Minimum wage isn't enough to live on anymore. There's a lot more going on in this country than people in other countries are seeing.

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To the general topic at hand.... I don't know how much the U.S could help Mexico. We're trying to fight drugs in our own country and look at how well that's turning out. Not well. If we can't even find an effective way to fight drugs in our own country, how can we fight the cartels in Mexico? There's a chance we'd only do more harm to innocent people than help. I'm torn on whether I think the U.S should jump in or not. The people of Mexico need help, that much is clear, but will we actually be able to help them? Or will we only cause more damage?

There's also the problem of getting our government to do it. Our politicians won't do anything unless it benefits them in the end. So, unless helping fight the drug war in Mexico would truly benefit them in the long run, most of them won't agree to do it. That's just how our government works. There's also the aforementioned problem of economics. We're going broke as a country. We're in a recession that could lead to another Great Depression if we're not careful. We have a fragile and unsteady economy right now. We're also still in an expensive war in the Middle East. Even if we wanted to help Mexico, would we have the funds to do it?

I do think Mexico needs help, but I don't know if I think the U.S is the right country to give them help. What I do know is that we cannot do it alone. Mexico has a very deep problem, it goes deeper than the cartels. It's a government corruption problem. This is more than the U.S can handle alone.

So, Obama came to Mexico last week to discuss security policies with Peña Nieto. After that, border security was doubled (if not tripled, there are people waiting as long as 8 hours in line to cross to the U.S. now). This is because of the new migratory reform implemented by the Department of National Security. Currently they are only checking international students because of what happened with the Boston city bombing.

Why I'm bringing this? Well, this was implemented because Obama and Peña Nieto strenghtenened security policies in order to deal with organized crime; according to what was discussed between the two presidents, this was to be a bilateral agreement on security standards for the entering and leaving through international ports of entry; both countries suffer from violence however only one benefits from the policies; there's nothing bilateral about this since Mexico has not implemented any security change and the U.S. is now with these changes that only target Mexican nationals. If this was the case, there have been studies done that show that most of the people who cross drugs from Mexico to U.S. are actually U.S. citizens, yet they're not held accountable. Despite the good intentions (if there were any) of having both countries work together, things always affect Mexico because policies never favor us; this comes to show that U.S. only intervenes when it benefits them and I fear this would be similar to whatever policy the U.S. could come up with to stop the drug cartels.

I don't know all the ins and outs of the drug war, but apparently part of it is drugs coming from Mexico to America. I think to fix that you need to destroy the black market and legalize drugs.