Time to Declare War on Mexican Drug Cartels
10th March 2023
It is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S.-Mexico border, at this point, is one of the most chaotic, overtrafficked, and outright dangerous borders in the world. Vicious cartels, such as Sinaloa and Jalisco, engage in gang shootouts in outlaw fashion, with nary a Mexican law enforcement agent in sight—and even those in sight are more likely than not to be bribed and in the cartels’ pockets.
Human trafficking rings, often working hand in hand with the cartels and opportunistic “coyotes” who promise to smuggle vulnerable migrants into the U.S., parade hordes of Central American and Caribbean migrants through the Mexican interior and right up to the border. The humanitarian conditions on these migrant “caravans” are typically abysmal: Drugs are rampant, children are exploited, and far too many women are raped.
Drugs flow across the border like never before. The U.S. drug-overdose crisis, which is primarily a fentanyl crisis, is nearly exclusively a phenomenon of the cartels. Drug-overdose deaths in America last year reached an unconscionable 106,000-plus, or more than 290 daily. That is the functional equivalent of a midsize commercial airliner falling out of the sky each day, and here, as is the case with fentanyl, those proverbial airliners falling out of the sky would be predominantly packed with those under the age of 35.
This tragedy is America’s single greatest humanitarian failing at the present time.