Meanwhile Around the Block

While our attention is focused on impeachment inquiries, Brexit, and the withdrawal of U. S. forces from Syria, portentous events are taking place much closer at hand. Consider this report from Reuters:

CULIACAN, Mexico (Reuters) – Mexico sent in special forces troops on Monday to patrol a northern city in the wake of a cartel assault that freed Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s son in a hail of bullets, and also won a U.S. promise to help stop gun-smuggling at their shared border.

More than 400 soldiers turned up in Culiacan over the weekend after gunmen from the Sinaloa cartel briefly took control of the city and forced security forces to free the drug lord’s son from a botched arrest attempt last week.

“We are going to protect the citizens, that is our mission,” said General Carlos Ramon Carrillo de Villar, who oversaw formations of soldiers marching at a media event. “We are fighting insecurity.”

The convoys of army trucks with mounted machine guns rumbling through Culiacan’s streets were meant to instill confidence. However, a national poll on Monday showed two thirds of respondents believe drug lords and mobsters are more powerful than the government after the gunbattles last week that forced an army retreat.

Sinaloa public safety director Cristobal Castaneda told news anchor Joaquin Lopez Doriga that 13 people were killed during the disturbances that ran late into Thursday night.

That doesn’t really cover the seriousness of the situation. What happened is that cartel forces armed with military weapons and equipment defeated Mexican regulars in a pitched battle and took control of a regional capital, displaying better training, morale, and force cohesion that the regulars did. That the Mexican government needed to send in “elite” forces to retake the city is not a good sign.

That is not merely organized crime. It is a genuine civil war and a destabilized Mexico is terrible news for us. Not only could it bring a resurgence of Mexican migrants fleeing the violence but a weakened Mexico is less able to staunch the flow of migrants from Central America. An uncontrolled border with a part of Mexico that is ungoverned or under the control of criminal cartels does not sound like a benign development to me.

It has always been obvious that our situation, with weak, passive aggressive neighbors on the north and south and fish on the east and west, would not persist indefinitely. I have always thought that our considered strategy of weak neighbors has been an error. What we should have sought was something much more challenging to achieve: strong, friendly neighbors.

But the situation is what it is and developments in Mexico certainly sound dire.