Ambrose: The need to help Mexico

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Maybe it's time for the United States to be something akin to a world cop, at least in Mexico, working as actively as needed with the government of President Felipe Calderon to defeat drug cartels that torture cops to death, assassinate journalists, will slaughter 15 teens partying at someone's house and even enter funeral homes and kill the mourners.

Americans aren't immune. Two of them recently attended a get-together for children at the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez and were making their way home to El Paso across the Rio Grande. Imagine their fright as assailants caught up with them and their one year-old baby riding in the back of the Toyota SUV. The child was spared. Her mother, four months pregnant, was shot in the head and died. The father, it is reported, was shot in the arm and neck. He died, too.

A Mexican citizen who worked in the consulate was also killed and two of his children wounded after the event, and we are reminded by all of this horror that something is going on in Mexico so terrible as to portend the collapse of Mexican society and government and that there is no reasonable calculation by which the United States escapes involvement.

An indication of the peril is that Juarez just may be the murder capital of the world right now. There were 2,657 homicides there last year, and very few were solved, it has been noted. The killers are drug dealers in marijuana, heroin, methamphetamines and cocaine, selling mostly to Americans. One account says the drug dealers can buy a kilo of coke from Columbia for $3,500 and sell it for $25,000 or much more in the United States and that one cartel alone was making something like $18 million a month.

These killers buy as many of the police and politicians as they can and do their best to kill any of the rest that give them trouble. They've been holding their own against Mexican troops sent out to fight this war by Calderon; a think tank analyst reports the arsenals of the criminals include ".50-caliber machine guns, anti-tank rockets, grenade launchers, fragmentation grenades and mortars."

Our interest in all of this begins with 2,000 shared miles of border and includes facts summed up well by one article I encountered: A half million people cross that border every day; we get a third of our oil from Mexico; most of our immigrants, legal and illegal, come from there, and we sell more exports to Mexico than to any country except Canada.

Some people say the only answer is to legalize drugs in the United States, at least marijuana, but this is a hugely complicated issue domestically, won't happen anytime soon, would take a long time to have needed results if it were done right away and would still leave the drug cartels with other markets to develop.

Mexico also needs political, financial and social reform, it's said, and that is no doubt true, but the drug killers make the achievement twice as hard and, again, time is running out. With the exception of some doable new policies here and there, you are looking at a long, extraordinarily difficult process tantamount to reversing history.

Clearly, the United States should continue what it has started: the $1.5 billion Merida Initiative supplying Mexicans with armaments, software and technological know-how and U.S. Army training of their special forces. The Mexican government needs more help with intelligence, and we absolutely have to give it, and we should be involved with Mexico strategically if it will allow us to be, as others have argued. We're at a point where we probably also need far more National Guard troops on the border, as the Texas governor wants.

Should we start talking about the United Nations helping with U.S. and other peacekeeping forces if Mexico requests it? Not yet, maybe never. But the United States should do all it can within reason to prevent there ever being a need for such a decision to be made.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)

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