Joaquin "El-Chapo" Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. Reuters.
The leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin "El-Chapo" Guzman has escaped from a Mexican prison. Reuters. The notorious drug lord was able to escape the Altiplano prison after a mile long tunnel was dug right to his cell. His is escape is a tremendous embarrassment for Mexico's president, Pena Neito, who took office with a mandate to end the Mexican Drug War. The Sinaloa Cartel, with Guzman at the helm, is responsible for massive amounts of drugs crossing the border as well as much of the violence in the Mexican Drug War. This is not the first time Guzman has been able to escape from prison. In 2001 he bribed his way out and remained free until he was re-arrested in 2014.
My Comment:
One of my friends told me I should do a post on this case. He's right. The Mexican Drug War is one of the most criminally unreported conflicts in the world and one of the architects of all the violence and deaths has escaped from prison. This war, and it is a war, has killed at least 150,000 people and is still raging, with very little signs of letting up. To put things in perspective, the Ukraine war killed about 4700 people last year and another 1700 so far this year. In Mexico, the Drug War killed 7500 last year and 1800 so far this year. But which one have you seen in the news more?
The actual escape is just incredible. The cartels have a lot of experience building tunnels. They often use them as way to bypass the border for their smuggling operation. Obviously, they used a bunch of people to dig the tunnel from a mile outside the prison and were precise enough to break right into his cell. My guess is that they used the experts who dig tunnels at the border for this project. This of course begs the question on how on earth the prison guards didn't hear something. After all, tunneling isn't all that quite, and even if they were unable to hear the tunneling they definitely should have heard something when they were breaking into the floor. It's possible that they really were that incompetent, but that really seems unlikely.
My guess is that someone got either bribed or threatened to look the other way. Both would be in character for the Sinaloa Cartel, or any of the cartels for that matter. The standard options for people that have something the cartels want is either bribery or threats. And those threats have a tendency to be carried out if people don't cooperate. If you tell the cartels no, you are signing your own death warrants. If you say yes, you get to be moderately rich, and most importantly, get to keep your head.
Given those options, is it any surprise that so many people are able to be bribed? Sure there is a risk of prison for any or all of the guards that helped Guzman escape, but it is nothing compared to making the cartel angry. It's important to note that ISIS isn't the only group out there that uses flashy media and executions to terrorize their enemies. The Cartels have been doing that for years, and some of their crimes would be familiar to anyone who has been closely following the wars in Syria and Iraq. Unlike ISIS, they don't even have the excuse of religious beliefs to justify their actions. For the cartels, it is all about one thing. Greed.
Though the Drug War has subsided a bit, it is still a hugely dangerous conflict. The three factions have settled into a stalemate. The Sinaloa Cartel spends much of its time fighting Los Zetas and their allies while the government makes half-hearted attempts to fight both. Though the sides have stabilized, the actual level of violence has not gone down all that much.
And it is amazing to me how little coverage it gets in the United States. The Mexican Drug War touches so many hot button issues that it is ridiculous, but even in an election year, you won't hear much about it. Drug policy, gun rights, immigration. national security, and crime, all of them are effected and shaped by the war in Mexico, but it is never framed that way.
As much as I hate to defend Donald Trump, (and this will be damning by faint praise), he at least brought up the point, in a roundabout and offensive way, that there are a lot of scary people in Mexico right now, and some of them are coming here and doing terrible things. He took it further then it needed to go, and I still don't take him seriously as a candidate, but at least people are talking about the situation.
Unfortunately, the discussion about the Mexican Drug War will always get overshadowed by peripheral issues. Right now, the question has become "Is Donald Trump, and by extension, the GOP racist against Mexicans?" and not "is there a national security threat posed by the war in Mexico"? And this always seems to happen with this subject. If you talk about the war in conservative circles it gets overshadowed by anti-immigrant sentiments. Do it in libertarian circles and the conversation will be drowned out by people calling for legalization of drugs. Talk to liberals about it and they will complain about how allegedly loose American gun laws are fueling the conflict. The conversation will never be about stopping the war, only about how certain groups can use it to score political points. Hell, even this story about Guzman is more about how and why he was able to escape and not the horrible crimes he has committed!
And that is just insane to me. The presence of not one but two major criminal organizations across the border, that are just as brutal as ISIS and have more money then many countries, is an existential threat to the Untied States. The product that they sell kills hundred of civilians and does untold damage to our country. The drug trade is responsible for a decent portion of the violence in our inner cities. And since the cartels have so much money, they could be a real threat to our democracy itself it they manage to bribe the right people.
I remember reading one of my old college textbooks, back when I was in school before the Mexican Drug War really took off. It used the example of the War on Drugs for someone taking things to literally. In the book, "stupid example man" said that we should fight the war on drugs like an actual war. Back then that sounded ridiculous, and for many people today, they would agree. Not me. The Mexican Drug war and the cartels fighting it are just as big of a security threat as ISIS is. We need to start recognizing that fact...
At this point, I don't see the war ending without a major escalation. Legalizing some drugs, like marijuana, won't do much because the Cartels will just switch to different drugs. They are already focusing more on heroin, cocaine and meth, to counteract the legal pot industries in the states where it has been legalized. And even if we legalized everything, which is politically impossible, the cartels have enough other income streams, such as human smuggling, gun running, corruption, extortion and even legitimate business, to survive. I don't see the war ending without at least one of the major cartels being utterly destroyed. And right now both the Sinaloa and Los Zetas cartels are too strong to be defeated without brutal and merciless military action. And nobody, not here or in Mexico, is willing to go that far...
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