The Mexican Drug War: Is It Their War or Ours?
A common news headline in any newspaper or on any news channel these days mentions the “Mexican drug war”. It has become common along the U. S./Mexico border to hear people talking about it at schools, work places and in their own neighborhoods - coworkers, classmates and neighbors whom are involved in some way or know someone that is. Violence is seen and heard of on the U.S. side of the border quite frequently which raises the questions, is it their war or ours? How did this all begin? What does the U.S. have to do with it? “For years, Mexico’s domestic supply of psychoactive raw materials (cannabis, peyote, opium poppies, hallucinogenic mushrooms, etc.) concerned authorities on both …show more content…
“Throughout the 1960s, many others—hippies, students, and sympathizers of the antiestablishment culture—followed suit” (Teague). The 1970s brought about change however. Then, President Richard Nixon, worried about the increasing drug appeal amongst Americans, declared the “ubiquitous war on drugs”. “Public enemy number one in the U.S. is drug abuse,” Nixon said to Congress in 1971 (Teague). The 1980s saw a rise in cocaine use with Americans also. Cocaine had been brought in to the U.S through south Florida from Columbia. During his administration, President Ronald Reagan “established a special force to cut the cocaine pipelines” (Debusmann) in an effort to prevent the flow of cocaine into the United States also. With the “South Florida Task Force” now in place, the only alternative to getting drugs and cocaine into the country was through Mexico (Debusmann). In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement, …show more content…
One must wonder if the U.S. is a help or hindrance to the war. During the Bush administration, the U.S. spent billions of dollars, in just one calendar year, to reinforce the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to secure the border by “building up physical barriers and going on a hiring spree to develop the nation’s largest law enforcement agency to patrol the area” (Archibold). Since 2008, Congress has sent more than 2 billion dollars to Mexico to train their law enforcement and buy “new aircraft, scanner, x-ray machines and nearly 400 canines that can detect drug, weapons and explosives” (Gomez). The sole purpose of all of those efforts was to help combat and deter the flow of drugs from Mexico to the U.S. But, while the intentions of the U.S. have been to offer aid to Mexico, they also counter their efforts by not dealing with the drug addiction problem within its own borders – which seems to be the root of the problem. While Mexico may be the drug “supplier” to the United States, the U.S. is also a “supplier”, of sorts, to Mexico. “Ninety percent of the cocaine that enters the U.S. transits through Mexico. Mexico is also a main supplier of marijuana and methamphetamines in the U.S.” (CNN). On the contrary, “Mexican drug cartels take in between $19 and $29 billion annually from U.S. drug sales” (CNN). The United States would seem to be a “cash cow” to the cartels. With billions of
A common news headline in any newspaper or on any news channel these days mentions the “Mexican drug war”. It has become common along the U. S./Mexico border to hear people talking about it at schools, work places and in their own neighborhoods - coworkers, classmates and neighbors whom are involved in some way or know someone that is. Violence is seen and heard of on the U.S. side of the border quite frequently which raises the questions, is it their war or ours? How did this all begin? What does the U.S. have to do with it? “For years, Mexico’s domestic supply of psychoactive raw materials (cannabis, peyote, opium poppies, hallucinogenic mushrooms, etc.) concerned authorities on both …show more content…
“Throughout the 1960s, many others—hippies, students, and sympathizers of the antiestablishment culture—followed suit” (Teague). The 1970s brought about change however. Then, President Richard Nixon, worried about the increasing drug appeal amongst Americans, declared the “ubiquitous war on drugs”. “Public enemy number one in the U.S. is drug abuse,” Nixon said to Congress in 1971 (Teague). The 1980s saw a rise in cocaine use with Americans also. Cocaine had been brought in to the U.S through south Florida from Columbia. During his administration, President Ronald Reagan “established a special force to cut the cocaine pipelines” (Debusmann) in an effort to prevent the flow of cocaine into the United States also. With the “South Florida Task Force” now in place, the only alternative to getting drugs and cocaine into the country was through Mexico (Debusmann). In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement, …show more content…
One must wonder if the U.S. is a help or hindrance to the war. During the Bush administration, the U.S. spent billions of dollars, in just one calendar year, to reinforce the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to secure the border by “building up physical barriers and going on a hiring spree to develop the nation’s largest law enforcement agency to patrol the area” (Archibold). Since 2008, Congress has sent more than 2 billion dollars to Mexico to train their law enforcement and buy “new aircraft, scanner, x-ray machines and nearly 400 canines that can detect drug, weapons and explosives” (Gomez). The sole purpose of all of those efforts was to help combat and deter the flow of drugs from Mexico to the U.S. But, while the intentions of the U.S. have been to offer aid to Mexico, they also counter their efforts by not dealing with the drug addiction problem within its own borders – which seems to be the root of the problem. While Mexico may be the drug “supplier” to the United States, the U.S. is also a “supplier”, of sorts, to Mexico. “Ninety percent of the cocaine that enters the U.S. transits through Mexico. Mexico is also a main supplier of marijuana and methamphetamines in the U.S.” (CNN). On the contrary, “Mexican drug cartels take in between $19 and $29 billion annually from U.S. drug sales” (CNN). The United States would seem to be a “cash cow” to the cartels. With billions of