Poor Mexico

Lately, all I've been seeing is drug crime and swine flu. Considering I spent my entire senior year focused on people and money moving across the US - Mexico border, I feel a bit involved and attached to transborder flows of any sort, and I've got to say - it's never good news. No one ever talks about on the news, "Oh how great that we have a huge border with Mexico so that we can get easy access to inexpensive labor, fruit, and vacations." Pshaw.

On the issue of drug crime, I'd like to refer you all to the following article: Reflections from Latin America by Ibsen Martinez. He notes, as I have maintained, that the crackdown on drug imports from Colombia have led Mexico to be the new route into the US. The decreasing purity and increase in street price of cocaine in the US are also a side effect of this success. However, he also points out (which I did not know) about a potentially huge gun smuggling business from the US into Mexico. So perhaps increases in gun control in the US would be one policy to help our neighbor?

See an excerpt from the article below:

Mexico has quickly become the other epicenter of the violence activities carried out by criminal organizations associated with drug trafficking. Mexican drug cartels have come to supplant the Colombian traffickers as the main suppliers of illicit drugs to the U.S. market.

Mexico's attorney general reckons that U.S. consumers buy U.S. $10 billion worth of drugs from his country's cartels each year. All that money allows the two main cartels to arm, equip and pay for a highly motivated army of 100,000 that almost equals Mexico's armed forces in size and often outguns them.

"Americans are understandably focused on the flow of drugs and migrants into the U.S. from Mexico," says Andreas Peter, author ofBorder Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. "But too often glossed over in the border security debate is the flow of weapons across the border into Mexico," he told FoxNews.com in a statement via the Internet.3 Mexican authorities say 90 percent of smuggled weapons come from the United States.