War with Mexico

 Critique of Republican Plan to Invade Mexico

This op ed by Jean Guerrerro brings together many of the key threads of a critique of the Republican proposal to use military force against Mexican cartels.  Here are the key elements.  There is a lot of public support for militarizing the war on drugs as a way of responding to the overdose deaths of U.S. citizens on synthetic opioids.  At the heart of this the rage of family members who would personally like to shoot every single drug dealer.  One of the dangers here is that this is an issue with deep visceral support from a large segment of the population that would like to see perpetrators of harm inflicted on their children punished.  Why, asks Guerrero, don’t we bomb the Sackler family.  They’re just as culpable.  Instead, they’re being given pretty lenient treatment by the Department of Justice in the form of legal judgements that strip them of some but not all of their wealth.  This underscores the basic political reality in the United States that the powerful do what they like, with few consequences. The other example of this that comes to mind is Saudi Arabia and its various crimes, including its material support for the 9/11 attackers, which successive presidential administrations have swept under the rug because the Saudis have too much leverage over the United States.  

Turning back to Mexico and bombing narco-traffickers, Guerrero cites the example of one bereaved mother, who conflates narco-traffickers with immigrants, a pernicious category error that was promoted by four years of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.  This might be the fallacy of origins, which suggests that Mexicans - or, more generally, Latinos - are a people which generated both the immigrants and narcos and therefore must be attacked.  On this reckoning, the attacks would wind up being quite indiscriminate in character.   Or it might be a kind of topographic fallacy, which suggests that the border is a place that generates both narcos and immigrants and therefore must be bombed.   Here is Guerrero’s interview with a grieving mother whose son died of a heroin overdose: 

A few months ago, I spoke to a 52-year-old white woman whose son died in 2021 from a fentanyl overdose. I’d first met this woman while reporting on Trump voters ahead of the 2020 election, and she agreed to speak to me about her grief on condition of anonymity.

She had thoroughly internalized the GOP’s scapegoating of Mexicans. “If it stops the drugs from coming across the border, I will bring a gun down there and I will start shooting,” she told me. She broke into sobs. “I’ve never felt that way,” she said, “it’s not because I hate — I don’t hate immigrants. I don’t hate them as people. But I hate what they’re doing to our country. They’re invading our country, stealing our livelihoods, murdering our children.”

If President Biden doesn’t stop the drugs, she said, it’s only a matter of time before private citizens organize an offensive at the border. “Me, my family, my husband, and everybody I know is ready to do it,” she said.

Notable here is a potent combination of grief and racism, with the former triggering and intensifying the latter.  This is the kind of wicked resonance machine that the Republicans are trying to set in motion for the 2024 presidential campaign. It is hard to target people like this as a critique of Republican policy, but quite necessary.   The danger, as Guerrero points out, is turning them into villains - into resentment filled warmongers - will only increase political polarization in the United States and lead to civil war.  The former is a sure bet, but the latter, I don’t know.  It occurs to me, though, that the intense, visceral character of this issue makes it into an issue that can serve as a counterweight to abortion.  Put simply, people who are really pissed about this will be willing to overlook abortion and focus instead on killing the narcos.  This, of course, externalizes the problem and overlooks the U.S.’s agency in creating the issue in the first place.  There are several levels at which the problem of U.S. agency in the war on drugs can be addressed.  The first, of course, is U.S. gun smuggling to Mexico, which is similar to Mexican heroin and fentanyl smuggling to Mexico, in that it results in the deaths of the Mexicans, as Guerrero notes:

Republican legislation also ignores the fact that cartels in Mexico operate almost exclusively with guns smuggled in from the U.S. in defiance of Mexico’s gun laws, some of the most stringent in the world. Imagine if Mexico were planning to invade the U.S. to attack American gun companies, which make products known to kill tens of thousands of Mexicans each year and which refuse to take basic steps to stop gun smuggling. Instead, Mexico is merely suing the gun manufacturers.

This critique could be deflected by the contention that the people killed in Mexico are other narcos and that narcos killing narcos is certainly not the equivalent of narcos killing Americans, via drug overdoses.  It could also be neutralized by the view that Mexican deaths are no counterweight to American deaths because Mexican lives are worth less.  This would be the basic moral conclusion of nationalism.  Our lives matter more than theirs - or anyone else’s. 

Another topic to discuss with regard to Guerrero’s op ed is the reporting of the El Proceso on alliances between U.S. and Mexican narco-traffickers - another facet of the U.S. denial of its own agency in this issue.  The U.S. DEA produces maps that divide the U.S. into different territories of the major drug cartels in Mexico - with some regions controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel, others by the Zetas, others by the CNGJ, and so forth.  The Mexican cartels operate through various U.S. street gangs.  There is a notable asymmetry here:  their cartels and our street gangs, as Marcelo Ebrard, the former secretary of foreign affairs for Mexico (under AMLO) and current candidate for President in 2024 points out.  Americans think there are no cartels in the United States.  This is part of the discourse of the war on drugs that Zavala discusses - and the discourse, with its various categories, serves, once again, to externalize the issue.  Ebrard formulates several other observations regarding the DEA’s framing of the narco-trafficking.  If there are Mexican cartels that are operating in U.S. territory, then why can’t the U.S. control them. “They have to underscore that the problem is external,” continues Ebrard, “if not, then the narrative of the DEA would have to explain why they cannot stop the internal distribution.”  The DEA can never explain why they cannot disarticulate the activities of Mexican cartels in the United States.

A final issue, outside of the context of the Guerrero op ed is the historical relationship between the state and narco-trafficking in Mexico.  According to Alejandro Merch, this is part of the political economy of policing in Mexico, where the police facilitate the repression of social movements and armed insurgencies - key to Mexico’s historical trajectory of dependent development - while constructing protection rackets through which they can direct benefits to themselves.  These protection rackets entail state patronage of various criminal activities - prostitution, car theft rings, and narco-trafficking among them.  These patronage networks have shifted from the state to federal level of the course of the 20th century, as Benjamin Smith discusses in The Dope.  At the point where federal authorities, such as the PJF, conducted a hostile takeover of existing trafficking networks - selecting traffickers and logistically facilitating the international movement of drugs (in this case, cocaine), the Mexican government began to characterize traffickers as cartels - vertically organized, autonomous organizations, rather public/private partnerships in crime.  The key point to emphasize here is the context of these partnerships, which is the Mexican state’s project of pacification, carried out by dirty wars in the 1970s and the imposition of neoliberal austerity in the 1980s and 1990s, complete with the repression of insurgent social movements from below.  So, in short, narco-trafficking is the blowback from resource extraction.     

But the right wing elites that are pushing the proposal of war want to have their cake and eat it too.  They want more border security, more arms spending, more opportunities for resource extraction, and they want the political benefits of waging a righteous conflict against bad Mexicans - a thinly veiled race war - which can re-energize their grievance based political coalitions.