September 03, 2010
The first thing many people think when they see the carnage going on in Mexico is, “What have we done?” Then they exhale and add, “If Mexicans are killing each other to supply us with pot, meth, coke, and heroin, our need for each must be through the roof.” Finally, they butt out the roach and say aloud, “and if there’s any kind of firepower behind it, those docile Mexicanos must be using our guns.” I imagine some kind, old mariachi in a sombrero forced to trade in his guitar for an AK-47 just to feed his family. Then I laugh my ass off.
Americans think like this because the majority of us only know Mexico as a quaint tourist spot. In fact, at a rate of barely one in three Americans owning a passport, we see most of the world as either a nice place to never visit or a fascinating new food to try. When the New York Times discovered 90% of the registered guns confiscated by the Mexican authorities were traced back to America they gave us their usual “Told ya so” and basked in the guilt. There’s something about working at the Grey Lady that makes journalists stop dead once they find an American culprit. Like a junkie searching for a vein, they find that one, thin blue line that links the junk to the heart and that’s all they need.
OF COURSE AMERICA IS THE ONLY ONE WHO APPEARS IN THE PAPERWORK YOU BOURGEOIS BOOB! We”re the only ones who keep paperwork! Mexican gangs get their guns from South Korea, China, Spain, Israel, Russia, South America, Guatemala and yes, The Mexican Army. Good luck tracing anything back to any of those groups. When all the untraceable guns are factored into the total, America’s input goes down to a whopping 17%. If Hillary Clinton gets her way and all automatic weapons are banned, the Cartels will shrug and fill the gap with their other eight suppliers. It’s called supply and demand, bitch. They need us to supply guns about as much as they need us to supply legal DVDs.
Once again, America is being punished for following the rules while Mexican criminals are rewarded for breaking the law. Ironically, you see the exact same mistake being made with immigration. If you go by the rules, you”re looking at about $10,000 in immigration lawyers and a decade of visas before you are eligible for a Green Card. One false move along the way and it’s all over (I”m actually one of these immigrants and have been using “we” for the sake of expedience). Cut to: 15 million illegals marching in for free with the only punishment being a great big amnesty carrot at the end of a stick.
What’s really happening in Mexico today is what happened to us almost 100 years ago. They are going through their corruption stage and I can”t even look at them without getting nostalgic. Remember the power vacuum prohibition made here? It was filled with incredibly cool-looking mobsters in three-piece suits and Tommy Guns. Eventually, the booze ban was repealed and the mobsters were stuck with nothing to fight over. If they had been left to their own devices, they would have ironed out the kinks and eventually given us a well-organized crime syndicate with well-organized booze.
I”ve seen it happen here in New York with cocaine. When Antonio Fernandez (AKA King Tone) took over New York’s Latin Kings he noticed turf wars were an incredible drain on resources. He pushed for peace among rival gangs and insisted they all focus on what was important, pushing drugs. This was sold to the press as a new pro-community / “End the Violence” Latin Kings and the New York Times gobbled it up. Tone’s plan worked incredibly well and cocaine was as high quality as it was easy to get throughout the late 90s and early 2000s.
The American DEA must have felt great when they pegged off Escobar on that barrio roof but all it meant was there now had to be a new Escobar. America’s demand for recreational drugs will never subside because it’s what defines America in the first place. Though Johnny Appleseed is portrayed by Disney as a guy who sold delicious apples to the pioneers, the real reason he was so popular is he had the main ingredient for alcoholic cider. Apples weren”t even sweet back then. When alcohol became just one of many ways to catch a buzz, America said, “Bring it on” and every other drug flooded in to join it. This need to get high isn”t unique to America or even the West. I can”t think of a country I”ve been to where cocaine wasn”t readily available (though islands like Japan and Britain definitely have lower quality). Drugs are as ubiquitous as guns. Fighting either of them is as futile as waging a war on terror.
Besides, the Cartels are not filled with George Lopez and Cheech Marin down on their luck. They”re filled with scumbags. Los Zetas, the strongest force in the mix, is made up of the few psychos who joined the military to kill people and got bored by the lack of action. The Beltrán Leyva Brothers: Marcos, Arturo, Mario, Alberto, Carlos, Alfredo, and Héctor are sadistic gangsters with a long history of human trafficking, assassination and torture (Marcos was shot last year surrounded by no less than 20 naked prostitutes). Go back into the history of the Gulf Cartel, the Oaxaca Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Tijuana Cartel and today’s butchery is just more of the same. I pity the New York Times fool who is assigned the task of blaming any of their horrific pasts on us.
Once we bid adieu to the “our guns” and the “our drugs” arguments, we”re left with two solutions to this inevitable war. We can legalize drugs the same way we repealed prohibition and deny the mobsters the big money that comes with high risk or we can just let them fight it out.
Perfect Coke… from Decon on Vimeo.
Legalizing drugs is a whole other article but can I briefly point out we”re already doing it? Mexico is our number one supplier of meth, for example, and it’s seen as the scourge of the Midwest but the legal form helps thousands a day be productive citizens. It’s called Adderall and it says methamphetamines right on the bottle. Marijuana in California is also going rather smoothly outside of the Feds wasting everybody’s time by knocking down doors. Before you roll your eyes at the prospect of pulling the rug out from every drug dealer in North America, at least take a glance at the mini-experiments we”ve already tried.
Unfortunately, we all know we”re going to end up with the “fight it out” solution simply by default. It’s a lot longer and costlier than legalization but—eventually—it works. Mexico today is Colombia back then and the vacuum created from Escobar’s inevitable fall has been filled by Mexican amateurs flying by the seat of their pants. Eventually this mess will settle into an Escobar-eque controlled chaos.
The Cartels are already ironing out kinks by refusing to pledge allegiance to any one American gang and treating all thugs as potential salesmen. Mexican suppliers are only interested in wholesale and are leaving customer relations to the retailers. When you”re dealing with over $50 billion a year in product, that’s good business. With this kind of Big Picture thinking, it’s only a matter of time before body counts are replaced with counting machines.
If you really care about the Mexican Drug War, you should be talking about legalization. If you”re like me and you could give a shit what happens down there, roll a joint, sit back, and relax because all good things come to those who wait.
