Mexican Drug Cartels Invade the US

We wrote, a couple of days ago, about the threat posed to post-collapse retreats and communities by organized gangs.  There are over 1.4 million members of organized gangs in the US at present, a number which is growing at an alarming rate.

But our ‘own’ gangs are not the only threat we must anticipate.  Although it is difficult to know where ‘our’ gangs end and ‘foreign’ gangs start, this article reports on the spread of Mexican drug cartels into almost every part of the United States.  Over 1,000 US cities reported Mexican cartel presence in 2010.

The cartels are not only ‘doing business’ in the US, they are also setting up massive marijuana growing operations too – primarily in California, Oregon and Washington.

We spoke about an uneasy truce between gangs and law enforcement in our earlier article.  But the Mexican cartels don’t understand the concept of truces.  Some 50,000 people (that we know of – who knows how many more have never been reported) have been killed in the last six years by gang warfare in Mexico.  If they can’t bribe or bully them, the gangs don’t hesitate to shoot it out with police and other national law enforcement agencies, and if politicians or journalists start to make public complaints, they get assassinated.

Mexicans are dying in Mexico from this unofficial civil war at a greater rate than Americans were dying in Vietnam.  We lost about 55,000 soldiers in the most active ten years of the Vietnam war, compared to more than 50,000 Mexican deaths in six years.

Another comparison – in Iraq, the US lost about 4,400 personnel over about an eight year period.  Mexico has lost more than eleven times as many people, in only six years.

The US has not been without casualties either in this ostensibly Mexican war.  But most of our casualties are in the form of new addicts, their lives destroyed, and the social costs of these addicts – either in treatment programs and/or as the addicts steal to support their habits.  These days two-thirds of the cocaine and 70% of the methamphetamine comes into the US via the Mexican cartels.

These cartels won’t just go away in a Level 2/3 situation.  They’ll merely adapt and adopt to the changed circumstance, and alter the type of misery they trade in and the violence and ruin they leave in their wake.

Meanwhile, our federal government pretends that all illegal traffic between Mexico and the US is good, and is exclusively in the form of honest hardworking Mexicans desperate to build a better life for themselves in the US while conforming to all our country’s rules and social conventions – oh, apart from being illegal immigrants, not learning English, not paying taxes, not having car insurance, and so on.  And if a state should find itself with no choice but to try to enforce some of the immigration laws already on our statute books, the federal government refuses to cooperate and sues them in federal court.

Maybe the federal court rulings are correct when they say that controlling immigration is primarily a federal government responsibility, but has anyone joined the dots the rest of the way in this picture and asked what should be done when the federal government refuses to honor the responsibilities and obligations it has previously enacted and claimed for itself?

Never mind a ‘war’ on illegal immigration.  Our federal government can’t even use its self-proclaimed ‘war on drugs’ as a reason to crack down on the spread of illegal cartels throughout our heartland.

One wonders how much of a problem gangs would be if every illegal immigrant was booted out of the country, and no more allowed in.  It seems to us their membership would collapse from 1.4 million down to a massively lower number.

Opinion surveys show an overwhelming majority of Americans support tighter border and immigration controls.  But the Washington elites continue to do completely the opposite.  Is this the way democracy is supposed to work?

Bottom Line for Preppers

There is a temptation to think of the outcome of a Level 2/3 event as creating a disorderly and disorganized mob or rabble of people, aimlessly fleeing cities, while dysfunctionally and desperately seeking food any way possible.  Superficially, such concepts don’t imply great danger or risk to us.

While this projection may be true, it is not the complete picture.  The collapse of law and order will remove the constraints on organized gangs – large groups of people who are neither disorderly nor disorganized.  They will aggressively act to fill the ‘power’ gap caused by the collapse of normal government, social and policing structures, and will have both the means and motivation to ruthlessly dominate their chosen territories.

You better make sure you have a Spanish/English dictionary in your retreat.  The chances are that when the armed gang that attacks you arrives, they’ll be speaking Spanish.