Mexico's Mob Violence Moves North

Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Organized crime in Mexico has nearly taken over the country and is quickly spreading into the States, with guns blazing.

Last month, two thugs impersonating Las Vegas police officers burst into six-year-old Cole Puffinburger’s home, tied up his mother and her boyfriend, ransacked the house looking for money, then kidnapped the child with a gun to his head. Three days later, Cole was found wandering alone down a sidewalk on the city’s east side. Local police believe the attack was in retaliation against his grandfather for stealing money from Mexican drug dealers.

Crimes like these -- byproducts of the Mexican drug trade -- are swarming northward across the border, bringing with them plagues of horrific violence into American cities and suburbs. A recent report by the National Drug Intelligence Center called Mexican drug rings “the most pervasive organizational threat to the United States.” These organizations “are active in every region of the country.” Mexican drug cartels are now present in 195 U.S. cities, according to the NDIC.

The death toll from violent crime in Mexico this year already surpasses the total number of U.S. casualties in Iraq since the beginning of the war.

Phoenix has seen a spike in kidnappings and home invasions; 260 abductions were reported this year alone. And in Texas, execution-style murders and burned bodies have been reported as far north as Dallas, where19-year-old Tinesha Taylor and her boyfriend, Antonio Bradley, were found dead in their living room, each with a single gunshot to the head. Police have identified the main suspects as members of a drug-running operation.

These are mere tastes of the maelstrom of violence engulfing Mexico itself. The day before Barack Obama’s historic election marked the bloodiest 24 hours in recent Mexican history. 58 people were killed that day, many of them civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Six bystanders died at a Red Cross hospital in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, where gunmen burst into an operating room to finish off a man who was already being treated for gunshot wounds. A restaurant owner and one of her employees died as they served breakfast to federal police agents. Beheadings have become a staple of local news. There have been shootings reported even at kindergartens. Organized crime has the country on its knees.

Analysts fear that unless this downward spiral is stopped, our southern neighbor could soon become the fiefdom of the world’s most violent criminals—a national security nightmare for the new administration, and one we’re already seeing signs of.

Three weeks ago, law enforcement authorities trumpeted the dismantling of the Arellano Felix Organization. Based out of Tijuana, the AFO was long considered one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations along the U.S.- Mexico border. Authorities announced the death-knell for the family-run cartel—which served as inspiration for the 2000 movie Traffic—with the arrest of Eduardo Arellano Felix. El Doctor, as he was known among his henchmen, was the last of the seven Arellano brothers to have remained at large.

But this is an illusion of progress. Quashing one cartel—no matter how powerful—amounts to little more than a cosmetic change on the drug-trafficking landscape. Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, likens the drug-smuggling business to a Hydra. “Cutting off one head,” he explains, “merely results in more heads taking its place.” The AFO’s demise might be attributed to the American and Mexican governments making it their primary target for the last decade. But Carpenter points out that this strategy was tried in Colombia, and failed. The crackdown on the Medellín and Cali cartels in the 1990s was heralded as a great victory in the government’s war against drugs. They have now been replaced by about 300 loosely organized groups.

In Mexico, the death toll from violent crime this year already surpasses the total number of U.S. casualties in Iraq since the beginning of the war. Over 4,500 people have been murdered—almost double the total for 2007, and four times as many as 2005. The Federal police commissioner has resigned, and five officials in the attorney general’s organized crime unit have been arrested, accused of leaking classified information to drug cartels. Even the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City was infiltrated by a spy working for the drug lords.