Pubdate: Wed, 4 Mar 2009
Source: Record Searchlight (Redding, CA)
Copyright: 2009 Record Searchlight
Contact:  http://www.redding.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/360
Author: Tim Rutten
Note: Tim Rutten writes for the Los Angeles Times.

US CANNOT WALL OFF MEXICO'S DRUG WAR

Early in the last century, near the end of his 34 bloody years in 
power, the aging Mexican strongman Porfirio Diaz mused that his 
country's great misfortune was to be located "so far from God and so 
near the United States."

The shrewd old thief's observation came to mind last week when U.S. 
officials announced that they'd joined with Mexican authorities in 
arresting more than 730 people allegedly linked to the Sinaloa drug 
cartel. That gang is the most powerful of the numerous criminal 
organizations smuggling drugs into the United States. Their 
intramural quarrels and resistance to a government crackdown have 
plunged Mexico into a round of violence unseen since the Cristero 
Wars in the 1920s. Over the past year, about 6,000 Mexicans have been killed.

Many fear that Mexico could be sliding into civil instability because 
of the cartels' increasing willingness to use violence and bribery to 
protect their business. It's an old story in other parts of Latin 
America, and for that reason, three of the region's former heads of 
state - including onetime Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo - 
recently issued a report urging the United States to consider 
legalizing at least marijuana. Fat chance.

Similarly, at a news conference last week, Attorney General Eric H. 
Holder Jr. set off a firestorm when he mentioned in passing that the 
United States should consider restoring its ban on the sale of 
military-style assault weapons. That prohibition, adopted in 1994, 
contained a clause requiring Congress to renew the ban after 10 
years. To nobody's surprise, Congress didn't, and now assault 
weapons, semiautomatic pistols and .50-caliber rifles that are 
illegal in Mexico flow into the hands of the drug traffickers there 
from an estimated 6,000 American gun dealers in Texas, New Mexico, 
Arizona and California.

Thus, America's political decisions to treat drug addiction as a 
crime rather than a public health problem, and to legalize AK-47s but 
not pot, fuel an incipient civil war in Mexico.

Mexico is a complex country with a resourceful and creative people. 
It also is - like other Latin American nations ravaged by the drug 
trade - burdened with a stunted civil society, chronic 
maldistribution of wealth, ingrained corruption and endemic political 
violence. These pathologies have made it painfully susceptible to the 
social and economic distortions created by America's seemingly 
insatiable desire for drugs.

For a country as proud of its cultural autonomy as Mexico 
traditionally has been, one of the bitter ironies must be the way in 
which the pseudo-romantic culture of drug trafficking has 
commandeered so much of the nation's popular imagination. In the 
cities of Mexico's northern and western states, traffickers and 
wannabe narcos mimic the dress and tattoos of Los Angeles' street gangs.

One of Mexico's most ubiquitous popular music genres is the 
narcocorrido, ballads built on traditional norteno dance music but 
with lyrics that romanticize the drug trade. It's a brand of music 
born in the cantinas, dance clubs and swap meets of Los Angeles and 
California's Coachella Valley, in large part because of a gifted 
young composer named Rosalino "Chalino" Sanchez.

He was born on a ranch in Sinaloa, an epicenter of Mexico's drug 
trade, and had to flee as an illegal immigrant to California after 
killing a local drug trafficker who had raped his sister. Initially 
he worked the Coachella fields, but soon he found a place in Southern 
California's thriving underground Mexican music scene.

Sometimes, Sanchez simply set down the stories he heard from the 
dealers and smugglers in the bars and at the swap meets; sometimes, 
he worked on commissions from the narcos themselves, minor criminals 
who saw a chance for cassette-based immortality. In 1992, Sanchez 
returned to Sinaloa for a concert and was murdered execution-style. 
His killers never were found, but his narcocorridos spawned an army 
of imitators.

Sanchez's strange and tragic story is a metaphor for the destructive 
symbiosis in which the United States and Mexico find themselves. As 
Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Quinones, who profiled Sanchez for his 
book "True Tales From Another Mexico," puts it, "Los Angeles is 
Mexico's culture factory."

Mexico's drug war could escalate into widespread civil strife with 
incalculable consequences for the United States - and particularly 
the Southwest. And we're kidding ourselves if we insist that this is 
a problem that can be wholly solved south of the border, or 
quarantined there if events spiral out of control. It's impossible to 
know how close either the United States or Mexico is to God, but 
geographically, culturally and economically, they've never been 
closer to each other.

If Americans really are concerned about the horrific toll inflicted 
by Mexico's narco-gangsters, we need to ask some tough questions 
about our own cultural and political delusions. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake