Out of Control

If the drug-war violence that erupted this week across the border in Rio Bravo and in Reynosa leaves you apprehensive, your head is probably in the right place.

It is a very scary situation akin to the Capone-era gangland wars in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, which left scores of bad guys and innocent bystanders dead and injured.

Although we would like to think not, there is a distinct possibility — because of the extreme mobility of the cross-border illicit drug trade and its practitioners — that more of this violence could spread to the U.S. side. We say “more” because if you think it isn’t already happening here, you’re deluding yourself. Many of the stories we have covered regarding home invasions, burned bodies found in cars, corpses discovered here and there around the Valley and instances in which U.S. Border Patrol officers have been fired on from across the Rio Grande have been associated with cross-border drug trafficking.

We have so far been spared overt violence like that which broke out this week in the streets of Rio Bravo and Reynosa. But how much longer we will be able to say that remains to be seen unless the Mexican government moves swiftly and decisively to break up the warring cartels. That, however, might be only a temporary fix.

Even if the existing cartels are broken up and their leaders jailed or more permanently dispatched, it will be just a matter of time before new ones take their place so long as there is the sort of money to be made that comes from drug trafficking.

Before truly effective action can be taken to halt the Mexican drug wars and the possibility of them spilling more overtly across the river, two things must happen:

>> Mexico must get a grip on the corruption within the government, its law enforcement agencies and its military that helps enable the traffickers to go about their business and to acquire the weapons necessary to enforce their will.

>> We must get a grip on the U.S. demand for the illicit drugs — primarily marijuana and cocaine —the Mexican cartels are pushing. Without the demand in this country — the world’s leader in illegal drug use — the traffic out of Mexico might not dry up, but it certainly would be far less profitable and, therefore, much less prevalent.

But what can be done to lessen the U.S. demand?

Clearly, the now decades-long “war on drugs” waged by our government — fueled by our stand on drug prohibition — is having little effect. Keep in mind that it was the Volstead Act that outlawed the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages in the United States from the 1920s into the early 1930s that gave rise to the bootleg trade that stoked gangland violence in Chicago and other U.S. cities and led to the ballooning of the organized crime we still contend with.

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies for the Cato Institute, a Washington-based Libertarian think tank, wrote in his 2006 article “Strung Out: Prohibition Stays Put South of the Border” that:

“Most of the corruption and violence (in Mexico) is caused by the enormous black-market premium in the illicit-drug trade. The risk factor involved in defying the law means that drugs sell on the street for 10 to 20 times more than they would in a legal setting. An aggressive trafficking organization can make tens — or even hundreds — of millions of dollars a year. That huge financial lure attracts those people who are most inclined to risk jail or death in a cutthroat trade — in other words, the most ruthless and violence-prone elements.”

Carpenter, who has long studied the relationship between our government’s drug prohibition laws and the growing drug violence in Mexico, has concluded that the time is past due to reconsider relaxing or doing away with those prohibitions.

Considering the potential for that violence to spill into the streets on this side of the Rio Grande, we agree that the time for that reconsideration is at hand.