Border security

Forget Syria. What Is The U.S. Doing About The Failed State On Its Southern Border?

How would one categorize a nation-state whose army gives a drug baron’s son to cartel members after suffering brutal losses in pitched battles? The country whose firebrand leftist president apologized on television and said the army’s surrender to a drug cartel was the correct thing to do, because “we do not want war”?

If the reports are correct, this is precisely what happened in Mexico, around the same time the Democratic presidential primary field was debating whether there should be more trillion-dollar expenditures in the U.S. budget. Instead, a failed state on the southern border of the United States should ring alarm bells in the Pentagon.

A map in the BBC showed how Mexico is divided into four cartel zones, similar to warlords in Afghanistan or Libya. A few days back, Mexican National Guards surrounded drug lord El Chapo’s son in a house and after a heavy gunfight forced him to surrender and be arrested.

Then all hell broke loose. Cartel members surrounded the house and forced security to retreat. The army was called in after heavy violence, and even they were fought to a standstill. While there were not many reports of this in American mainstream media, social media was lit with videos of the Mexican military being surrounded by the cartel members.