Opinion: The US Should Own Up to Its Share of the Bloodshed in the Drug War

By Leon Krauze from The Washington Post

The vehicle of a mayoral candidate in Morelia, Michoacán, after being attacked by armed men on May 22. (Marco Ugarte/AP)

Christopher Landau, President Trump’s former ambassador to Mexico, published an opinion piece on Mexico’s “losing strategy” in the war on drugs. It is an expansive indictment. Landau explains how successive Mexican governments have failed to stop the flow of narcotics to the United States. While he acknowledges the importance of capturing the leaders of Mexico’s various criminal organizations, he worries the country’s “law enforcement and judicial institutions” are ill-suited to the task. He is also not sure the strategy is all that sensible. “Most of these organizations have lieutenants willing to take the leader’s place,” he writes.

Landau then ventures a few ideas to address the crisis: U.S. schools should develop new drug awareness programs, while law enforcement should focus on drug dealing inside the United States. In the last few lines of his piece, Landau briefly comes to the issue of guns. Given his experience as both a lawyer and (albeit fleetingly) a diplomat, one would expect him to push for sensible gun legislation. Unfortunately, he does not. Rather than step on fellow conservative toes, Landau advises the Justice Department to “redouble enforcement of its export-control laws to stanch the torrent of firearms and ammunition flowing across the border to the Mexican cartels.”

This is disingenuous. Landau knows the solution to gun trafficking lies elsewhere. The one variable that explains the tyrannical influence of Mexican criminal organizations is their constant access to weapons of war bought legally in the United States for sale as illicit contraband south of the border. Without the flow of guns like the terrifying Barrett .50 sniper rifle, cartels wouldn’t be capable of laying siege to Mexican cities in broad daylight, like the Sinaloa cartel did in 2019 to force the liberation of Ovidio Guzmán, son of the infamous “El Chapo," who had been captured by Mexican security forces. Landau knows this well. By choosing to ignore the elephant in the room, he does a disservice to both his argument and the crisis he seems determined to solve.

Sadly, Landau is not alone.

During her recent visit to Guatemala and Mexico, Vice President Harris had plenty of stern admonitions for future immigrants and demands for both governments. She spoke forcefully against corruption and reached agreements to combat human trafficking and foster regional development. She asked the Mexican government to increase its efforts against opioids, especially deadly fentanyl, a lucrative trade for local cartels that has led to a severe health crisis in the United States.

But there was a glaring omission in Harris’s remarks: what journalist Ioan Grillo calls “the iron river” of guns feeding Mexican criminal organizations. Gun control remained an afterthought.

Landau’s omission of the severity of the gun-trafficking problem and Harris’s apparent unwillingness to discuss it with the seriousness it deserves are not exceptions, but part of a pattern of U.S. indifference on the issue. Over the past few years, authorities in the United States have often shared their alarm over Mexico’s cycle of violence and the consequences of the country’s drug trade, but the calamity is far from one-sided.

While Mexico suffers through another record year of violence driven by U.S. weapons of war, Republicans in Congress have failed to close even the most basic loophole in the country’s gun legislation. Meanwhile, local governments have made a mockery of gun control by enacting laws that will allow those same weapons to be bought, kept and carried freely in the United States. Experience shows that many of those guns will make their way to Mexico, where they will arm the country’s brutal criminal organizations.

The United States has a habit of demanding plenty and offering meagerly. When it comes to the guns that cross its southern border, this dynamic amounts to an outrageous moral failing. Landau is right: The drug war has failed, but U.S. guns are a key part of that failure. If only the United States owned up to its share of the bloodshed.

Note to readers: León Krauze is an award-winning Mexican journalist, author and news anchor. He is currently the lead anchor at KMEX, Univision's station in Los Angeles.

Source: WP