RETHINKING SECURITY

With John P. Sullivan, I’ve written on Mexico for a while, but this recent piece by the always excellent Sylvia Longmire is wonderful:

It’s the phone call every Mexican immigrant in America dreads—the anonymous, vulgar, and threatening voice demanding ransom for a family member’s release. Such an event can throw an entire family into distress, calling distant relatives, friends, friends of friends, and anyone else who might be able to lend money. And even if a ransom can be gathered together, that’s no guarantee a kidnapping victim in Mexico will be released. But why should Americans care? Because this horror, this distress, fear, and chaos could be happening to a Mexican family you know, you live next to, or you come across every day.

The drug war in Mexico is like cancer; everyone there either knows someone who has survived it, or knows someone who has died from it. Most Americans don’t understand the connection that’s maintained between Mexican immigrants in the US and their friends and family in Mexico. Word of mouth is very powerful, and often when a Mexican national gets deported, people in Mexico usually their friend or family member is on the way home. Especially in smaller communities, it’s easy to discover most people’s whereabouts, which is why it’s typical for a kidnapper to be able to contact a kidnap victim’s relatives in the US relatively quickly.

No matter how Americans might want to ignore what is going on in Mexico or deny that it is a war, we cannot metaphorically and literally escape the bloody reality of what is going on south of the border. And even though Mexico’s cartels have diversified far beyond simple drug trafficking, we cannot ignore our role in supplying them with funds due to the massive North American drug market. Yet this occurs day by day.

Moreover, there are potentially grave direct costs to the United States arising from the potential and increasingly real spillover effects of border violence. As much as Latin America may be a foreign policy backwater to most, America cannot walk away from what is going on south of the border.

Whenever we think of a responsibility to protect, we always imagine far-off peoples who our help may not necessarily benefit, and to whose service our action may trigger greater costs to our national interests. But one of the crueler ironies of international affairs is that Mexico remains, at best, a secondary issue——seen mostly through the prism of the illegal immigration debate.

Without saying that America has a responsibility to protect Mexicans, perhaps we might contemplate what responsibilities Americans owe to their southern neighbors and residents of border states before we talk about creating a “no-drive zone” over Syria.