Mexico needs a bigger tissue (toss en la basura when done)

The U.S. and Mexico often experience each other’s pain, if not their respective nationalistic pleasures. The proximity, the interdependence on trade, resources (human and natural), history and, increasingly, cultural aspects mean that, as the Houston Chronicle editorializes, when the U.S. sneezes, Mexico gets sick. More and more media outlets are hammering on this, and with good reason. Sources within the Mexican government acknowledge their country has its issues, though they would argue with some of the more strident exclamations, such as the Washington Times announcing that Mexico is imploding:

The sovereignty of the Mexican government is slipping into the hands of drug lords and corrupted officials. The highly financed cartels, with a market share estimated at $40 billion annually, will continue to use their creativity to smuggle drugs into the United States and battle the legitimate Mexican government.

But the Washington Times does get this right:

The United States must consider spending more of its largess on our neighbors instead of a collection of far-flung countries where there may be no traction.

The Council on Foreign Relations recently published a task force report that emphasizes that the U.S. needs to not toss money (even though the $1.4 billion or so attached to the Merida Initiative is piddily) at the drug problem, but assist in economic stability abroad while aiming to curb drug demand at home. But the number one issue for Mexico remains public security.

The U.S. needs to offer its handkerchief to Mexico, but not wave it. Just hold it out, so they can both grab hold as they make like Redford and Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Just kidding.

While the Merida Initiative is a good start, partnership is the name of the game. But it still won’t be a happy marriage, not with the U.S.’s (rightful) distrust of Mexico’s law enforcement.

As a friendly reminder, the CFR report states that the era of U.S. hegemony over Latin America, if there ever was one, is over. Bye-bye Monroe Doctrine. Hola Lula.

Spillover

Different law enforcement agencies have different names for cross-border violence, and with it different definitions, I’m told.

According to one definition, there hasn’t been any “spillover” violence from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso (yet — it’s gone to the West and East, but not openly E.P.). There is concern for the growing threat, particularly as gunshot victims — police officers and others — have been taken to El Paso for medical treatment, as discussed in this LA Times article by Miguel Bustillo.

The only hospital within a 280-mile radius to offer state-of-the-art trauma care, Thomason has become an unwilling treatment center of choice for law enforcement officials and others in the vicinity wounded in Mexico’s drug turf battles. The violence has killed more than 2,000 people this year, and more than double that number in the 20 months since President Felipe Calderon began deploying 40,000 troops across the country to crack down on narcotics trafficking.

Thomason has treated 28 people wounded on the other side of the border this year, spending an estimated $1 million, hospital administrators said. Nineteen were U.S. citizens or had dual citizenship, and the rest had legal permission to enter the country.

Mexican police officers in a number of border towns have come to U.S. ports of entry, seeking asylum out of fear of drug traffickers. In one incident, the police chief of Puerto Palomas, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, just south of Columbus, New Mexico, and nearly 80 miles west of El Paso, came to the port after several officers quit the force in March.

From Manuel Roig-Franzia of the Washington Post:

Javier Emilio Pérez Ortega, a workaholic Mexican police chief, showed up at the sleepy, two-lane border crossing here last month and asked U.S. authorities for political asylum.

Behind him, law and order was vanishing fast. In the four months he had served as Puerto Palomas police chief, drug traffickers had threatened to kill him and his officers if they tried to block the flow of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States, his former colleagues said on condition of anonymity.

After a particularly menacing telephone call, his 10-man force resigned en masse. His bodyguards quit, too. Abandoned by his men and unable to trust the notoriously corrupt Mexican authorities, Pérez Ortega turned to the only place he believed he could find refuge — the United States, the former colleagues said.

While the violence may not have hit El Paso (at least not reported), it’s certainly happened elsewhere, particularly with kidnapping in Arizona and California.