Summary: The cartels’ war against Mexico’s government continues to heat up. America will get sucked in, eventually. Trump has talked of taking a first step to respond. The good and the great have responded with outrage, but I’ll bet we will be doing that – and more – in the future.

CNN reports a battle this weekend in Villa Unión. This was not a shoot-out between police and criminals, like those in the US. It was part of a war between Mexico’s cartels and its government. We do not need Nostradamus to tells us what comes next.

“A gun battle between security forces and suspected cartel members in Mexico’s northeast state of Coahuila over the weekend claimed 22 lives, according to a statement from the government there on Monday. Four police officers, two civilians and ’16 criminals’ are among the dead, according to the statement, which quoted Coahuila Gov. Miguel Angel Riquelme Solis. Authorities have revised the death toll upwards several times since the battle was first reported.

“The lethal, hour-long battle broke out between security forces and suspected members of the Cartel of the Northeast in the town of Villa Union, about 40 miles south of the US border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. Twenty-five vehicles, four with high calibers guns, numerous long range guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition were also confiscated, according to the statement. Images from the state government showed a local municipal building and police vehicle riddled with bullet holes.”

The BBC gave additional details.

“The shoot-out lasted for more than an hour and 10 gunmen and four police officers were killed, according to Coahuila Governor Miguel Ángel Riquelme. {He} said that the gunmen took several locals hostage so that they could guide them along the local dirt tracks to aid their escape. Four of those kidnapped have been freed but one adult and one minor remain missing.

“Security forces have been trying to track the gunmen down and shot seven more alleged cartel members on Saturday morning on a dirt road. Governor Riquelme said the gunmen were members of a criminal gang calling itself Cártel del Noreste (Northeast Cartel), an off-shoot of the feared Los Zetas cartel. …

“Photos posted on social media showed bullet-riddled trucks used by the gunmen with the cartel’s initials, CDN, taped to their doors. Local media reported that the intended target of the attack was the town’s small police force, which only numbers 10 officers, according to Villa Unión’s mayor, Narcedalia Padrón. …

“There have also been a number of high profile attacks in the past months, including the killing in an ambush of nine women and children from a Mormon community and a shootout in the city of Culiacán which led to police releasing the son of drug lord El Chapo Guzmán rather than risk further bloodshed.”

Operations on this scale have objectives. Only in films do bad guys shoot up things for fun. The AP gives an answer.

“Some of the suspected gunmen were later arrested and described the incursion as a hit-and-run operation aimed at staking a claim to the territory for use as a drug-trafficking route to the U.S. border. …Some of the 10 suspects detained in the weekend attack – several of whom are adolescents – said they had been forced into participating, and said they feared the Coahuila state police.”

Villa Unión is 40 miles from Allende, location of a 2011 battle with the Zetas cartel in which 70 people died. This battle resulted from an operation of the US DEA. It was awful.

“We have testimony from people who say they participated in the crime. They described some 50 trucks arriving in Allende, carrying people connected to the cartel. They broke into houses, they looted them and burned them. Afterward, they kidnapped the people who lived in those houses and took them to a ranch just outside of Allende. First they killed them. They put them inside a storage shed filled with hay. They doused them with fuel and lit them on fire, feeding the flames for hours and hours.

— José Juan Morales, Investigative Director for the Disappeared in the Coahuila State Prosecutor’s Office.

Trump’s boldly states his plan

Like his predecessors, Trump believes we can fix other nations’ problems. Decades of failure does not dent his enthusiasm. Nor does our inability to fix America’s inner cities. Bill O’Reilly Interviewed Donald Trump on his “No Spin News Show” on 26 November 2019 (transcript here).

O’Reilly – “You have said to me …that if another country murdered 100,000 Americans with guns, we would go to war with that country. …but the Mexican drug cartels kill more than 100,000 Americans every year by the importation of dangerous narcotics. …Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them with drones and things like that?”

Trump – “I don’t want to say what I’m going to do, but they will be designated. …I like the President very much. I actually get along with this President much, much better than the previous President, and in theory, this President has socialistic tendencies, but I think, he’s a very good man. I’ve actually offered him to let us go in and clean it out. So far has rejected the offer. But at some point, something has to be done. Look, we’re losing 100,000 people a year to what’s coming through from Mexico. {The cartels} have unlimited money. …I will be designating their cartel, absolutely. Absolutely.”

Stratfor states the obvious.

“The situation in Mexico is quite different from that in Colombia during the early 1990s when Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel were designated as narcoterrorists. Both the Colombian government and population supported the designation and the U.S. assistance. However, the long and complex relationship between the United States and Mexico has left the Mexicans far more sensitive to what they perceive as U.S. infringement on their sovereignty. …

“The harsh reality is that economics dictate that the flow of contraband across the U.S.-Mexico border – drugs going north and cash and guns flowing south – will never end as long as there is a huge market in the United States for illegal drugs.”

Looking to the future

All the conditions are there for the cartels to expand more into the USA. The Mexican government grows weaker, with the decline especially worrisome in the north (Mexico’s government has always been weaker in the south). Massive immigration into the US gives the cartels a growing base here, much as immigration from Italy laid a foundation for growth of the Mafia (almost 5 million, half between 1900 and 1910).

Now for the bad news. The legitimacy of the police in the US appears to be declining, especially among minority communities. This will greatly weaken their effectiveness.

Now for the very bad news: Americans ignore this danger. Keeping the border with Mexico open is a high priority for the Democrats. Protecting it is a low priority for the Republicans. Both are more concerned with issues bringing power and wealth to their core special interest groups. If there were more active citizens in America, we could force the major political parties to prioritize serious threats to America over gifts to our grifter elites. But their numbers appear to be shrinking.

But events will eventually force stronger measures by the US to deal with the cartels. We’ll just wait until they are much stronger to begin.

For More Information

Ideas! For some shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon. Also, see Chapter One of a story about our future: “Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.”

Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Also see other posts about Mexico, about 4th generation war, (esp these about 4GW theory), and especially see these posts …

Two books about Mexico’s cartels

I recommend these books by Ioan Grillo, a journalist based in Mexico City. He has covered Latin America since 2001 for major news media. He was fascinated by these figures who made $30 billion a year, were idolized in popular songs, and eluded the Mexican army and DEA. He has visited endless murder scenes on bullet-ridden streets, mountains where drugs are born as pretty flowers, and scarred criminals in prison cells and luxury condos. See his website. See his columns in the New York Times.

El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (2011).

Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America (2016).