Mexico a candidate for internal collapse, says U.S. military study

The El Paso Times reports:

Mexico is one of two countries that “bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse,” according to a report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats.

The command’s “Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008)” report, which contains projections of global threats and potential next wars, puts Pakistan on the same level as Mexico. “In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. Could Mexico collapse?

“The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”

N., who sent the article, writes:

It was just about 100 years ago the last civil war began in Mexico. The possibility of a failed state right across the Rio Grande, or the barbed wire fence as the case may be, is real.

People I talk to from San Diego to Nogales to El Paso to Del Rio to Brownsville don’t disagree. The murder rate in some of the border cities, such as Matamoros and Ciudad Juarez, has gotten incredibly high, partly due to inter-cartel warfare, and partly due to increase in violent robberies. Plus, kidnapping for ransom has become a business. All of this makes life very difficult for ordinary people, and people in those conditions will choose security over liberty. However, the Mexican Army is not a very strong force, it mainly serves internal security. There is some question whether they could really take on some of the cartels without some problems, maybe serious problems.

The last time Mexico had a civil war (1910-1920), huge refugee camps formed all along the border. I’ve seen photographs of places in the Arizona desert with 10,000 or more little tents. A native of Los Angeles once claimed to me that until the mid 1960’s, virtually all the Mexican Americans in California were either resettled refugees or their progeny. I do not know if that is true, but it is unquestionable that some number of Mexicans fleeing a horrible war were allowed to settle in Arizona, mostly Tucson.

So consider the implications of a failed state problem in terms of refugees streaming north…

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Clark Coleman writes:

The possibility of a collapse of Mexico is chilling. I have been meaning to write about the drug problems in Mexico and Colombia for some time.

If we secured our borders, we would come close to winning the drug war on the basis of this one action alone. We would still need to patrol the seas and the air, of course. But the primary avenue is overland. In fact, drug smugglers have teamed up with coyotes in Mexico, and the illegal aliens reduce their coyote fees by carrying drugs in their backpacks as they cross the border. This has become a significant percentage of estimated drug shipments, along with all the other shipping routes that depend on a porous border, using vehicles, etc.

The open borders advocates, including the businesses lobbying for cheap labor, have blood on their hands. The huge, bloody conflicts in Colombia and Mexico are fueled by American consumers of drugs from those countries. Now that the drug cartels exist, they will not go out of existence quietly, even if we win the drug war. That just implies that we should have secured the border decades ago.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 15, 2009 10:51 AM | Send