America’s southern neighbor is becoming one of the world's biggest security risks.
Interesting piece by Traci Carl in Huffington Post on the growing lawlessness in Mexico and the risk it poses to the United States, particularly the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
Carl sites the latest U.S. Joint Forces Command report published November 25:
"In its latest report anticipating possible global security risks, the U.S. Joint Forces Command lumps Mexico and Pakistan together as being at risk of a ‘rapid and sudden collapse.’"
Carl notes that in Mexico:
"Mob murders doubled from 2007, taking more than 5,300 lives last year. The border cities of Juarez and Tijuana wake up each morning to find streets littered with mutilated, often headless bodies. Some victims are dumped outside schools. Most are just wrapped in a cheap blanket and tossed into an empty lot."
Carl notes that Mexico has deteriorated into barbarism and lawlessness in the past nine years:
"When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, the nation of 110 million had just chosen Vicente Fox as president in its fairest election ever, had ended 71 years of one-party rule and was looking forward to a stable, democratic future.
Fox signaled readiness to take on the drug cartels, but plunged them into a power vacuum by arresting their leaders, and gangs have been battling each other for territory ever since.
Felipe Calderon, who succeeded Fox in 2006, immediately sent troops across the country to try to regain control. But soldiers and police are outgunned and outnumbered, and cartels have responded with unprecedented violence."
As much as America's focus and resources have been consumed in the Middle East, in large part due to the highly effective Washington lobby efforts in of a foreign state, America must not ignore the growing threat to its south.