It used to be that Mexico was merely corrupt. Those were the days.
As many as 40,000 Mexicans have been murdered in the last five years. Many by beheadings and via public execution. It’s now a nightmare of epidemic proportions. Our sovereign neighbor to the south is frighteningly morphing into Mexistan.
“We are neighbors, allies and friends,” said Mexican President Felipe Calderon. “But you too are responsible.” As in the United States. As in our insatiable appetite for drugs and guns, the unholiest of alliances.
Two points.
First, Calderon is obviously right, but nobody is more responsible for the civilizational devolution than Mexico and its cartels: the home-grown, moral degenerates no longer satisfied with regional smuggling.
They now terrorize, kidnap, behead and sunder society from its moorings. No one is more culpable — regardless of enablers — than these avatars of evil. Access to high-powered weapons and a drug marketplace, ipso facto, doesn’t explain — or rationalize — a brutalizing contempt for life. And endemic corruption within
Mexico’s judiciary and law-enforcement arms only undermines the effort to eradicate this criminal plague.
Second, we owe Mexico. We owe them more than politically-charged rhetoric about illegal immigrants and rogue landscapers. And we owe them more than the security and intelligence help, which is in our self interest, that we share.
We owe Mexico what we owe America — a society without gun laws so lax that automatic and semi-automatic weapons are too easily available for those on the wrong side of law enforcement. We also owe ourselves a public discourse that no longer prostitutes the Second Amendment for pandering, lock-and-load politics. Such that a president who knows better is reluctant to get gutsy when it comes to reining in high-powered weaponry that easily makes its way into Mexico.
And we owe ourselves — and Mexico — everything in our power to prevent a shared nightmare: the transnational, criminal failed state of Mexistan.