Sumantra Maitra asks a question I haven’t heard asked in a long time — what is the U.S. doing about the failed state on its southern border?
A failed state just surrendered a drug lord’s son and a whole city to a drug cartel. In a sensible world, this would ring alarm bells in the Pentagon.
How would one categorize a nation-state whose army gives a drug baron’s son to cartel members after suffering brutal losses in pitched battles? The country whose firebrand leftist president apologized on television and said the army’s surrender to a drug cartel was the correct thing to do, because “we do not want war”?
If the reports are correct, this is precisely what happened in Mexico, around the same time the Democratic presidential primary field was debating whether there should be more trillion-dollar expenditures in the U.S. budget. Instead, a failed state on the southern border of the United States should ring alarm bells in the Pentagon.A map in the BBC showed how Mexico is divided into four cartel zones, similar to warlords in Afghanistan or Libya. A few days back, Mexican National Guards surrounded drug lord El Chapo’s son in a house and after a heavy gunfight forced him to surrender and be arrested.
Then all hell broke loose. Cartel members surrounded the house and forced security to retreat. The army was called in after heavy violence, and even they were fought to a standstill. While there were not many reports of this in American mainstream media, social media was lit with videos of the Mexican military being surrounded by the cartel members.
There were also videos of Sinaloa cartel members in armored cars, with anti-tank grenade launchers, and heavy machine guns patrolling the streets of Mexican cities. In short, the balance of power passed to the hands of drug gangs, militias, and cartel members, who rioted, freed prisoners, and humiliated the national government.
Read more: The Federalist
Image credit: www.thefederalist.com.
