Testimony. Listen up.

Mission District walls speak.

I think they can turn it down a notch, not be so forceful. 

Then they dig into our pockets and put everything on the ground. Then if they find drugs or anything they take us to jail. We'll get out in a couple of days.

But you know, I think there's better ways to do it. A lot of us don't want to keep getting high. We are looking for help or housing.

I'm home in the City by the Bay where no amount of newcomer gentrification erases the underlying struggles.

They still would not be welcome ...

Landing at Veracruz, Mexico in 1847

If you don't live in the rightwing media infosphere, you may not know there are a lot of GOPers advocating that the United States attack Mexico. Sure -- invading a proud and instinctively anti-imperial neighbor would be great way to solve our fentanyl problem. That's dangerous baloney!

Former George W. Bush speechwriter and political pundit David Frum summarizes this madness succinctly:

War with Mexico? It’s on the 2024 ballot, at least if you believe the campaign rhetoric of more and more Republican candidates. ...

Fareed Zakaria describes what's going on here:

... the latest policy idea that has been endorsed in some form or another by almost all the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination: effectively declaring war on Mexico’s drug cartels. Donald Trump plans to “wage war” and impose a “full naval embargo” on them. Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) says he wants to use “the world’s greatest military” to solve the problem. A recent poll found strong support for military action among GOP primary voters, so expect to see more such wild statements.

... it would be an act of war against Mexico. That country’s government has been clear that it is utterly opposed to any use of the U.S. military to deal with its drug problem. ... “the world’s greatest military” was unable to stop the drug trade in Afghanistan, a country that it occupied for 20 years? The problems in Mexico would be even greater: large areas of no-man’s land where the cartels operate, massively funded and armed militias, and many ways to shift production across borders.

These Republicans are nuts -- and monsters whose hubris would guarantee decades of additional pain on our southern boarder.

Yes, fentanyl is killing a frightening number of victims. In 2022, 109,680 people died of drug overdoses, mostly fentanyl. Precursor chemicals flow from China, go to drug cartels in Mexico where the deadly substance is manufactured, and and from there is smuggled into the US. We don't like to think about it, but this trade only exists because the market is here. Our addicts will risk death to get the drugs.

And we can provide something the drug cartels want very much: according to the Mexican government, 200,000 illegal guns are trafficked south over the US border into Mexico annually. Frum continues:

Mexico has about one-third the population of the United States, but four times the homicide rate. ... Does Mexico do too little to halt the flow of opioids northward? The United States does nothing to halt the flow of guns southward.

Our drug habit is killing Mexicans in cartel fights over the market and meanwhile Republican politicians bluster for "gunboat diplomacy."

Mexican fentanyl also is killing peaceful US tourists in a less obvious way. According to the LA Times:

... independent Mexican pharmacies catering to tourists are selling pills that are labeled as oxycodone, hydrocodone and Adderall but are fake and contain fentanyl or methamphetamine.

The Biden administration is seeking international "collective action" against the drug trade. Neither China nor Mexico is onboard, so that's not likely to stop the trafficking. As long as Americans will pay for the stuff, none of this is likely to make much difference.

But please, let's stop posturing about invading Mexco.

Let's not take up the next war ...

While the many of us were looking elsewhere, Republicans have normalized the idea of the U.S. bombing Mexico. No, really. Trump claims he'll do it if elected in 2024.

Mexico City: independencia and global commerce

It is true that the fentanyl deaths all around us in the United States are the consequence of a kind of quadrilateral trade whose end product is murder. The precursor chemicals to the drug enter Mexico from China. Inside our southern neighbor, the drug cartels manufacture the addictive poison and from there ship it to our abundant population of American users. With the proceeds, the cartels arm themselves with military quality guns which travel in the reverse direction. In Mexico, the cartels subvert and battle the government for unfettered power; 30,000 Mexicans are killed in Mexico annually by the drug cartel conflict.

Adam Tooze lays out the frightening contours in a long Substack post, "So far from god" ... friend-shoring and the debate in Washington over whether to bomb Mexico". This begins with a concise survey of Mexico's fraught history with its imperial neighbor (that's us), looks at Mexico's current relationships with Latin America and China -- and then takes up the crisis looming over the drug trade. His conclusions are terrifying and should be demanding of those of us who don't want to compound the drug war with an international atrocity.

The problem for those favoring restraint is that the situation is truly disastrous, they have no good alternatives to offer and America’s planetary conception of its own security provides no official with any wiggle-room. It is their duty to protect Americans everywhere from every threat and to use the tools at their disposal to do so.

So in March 2021, Head of U.S. Northern Command General Glen VanHerck stated that 30%-35% of Mexico constitutes an “ungoverned space”, which as he warns opens the door to cartels and their foreign friends. That then raises the question of how any American President could stand by and allow a lethal threat to America to develop on its border without acting. As the explosive memo to a putative President Trump highlighted by Rolling Stone, remarks: “It is vital that Mexico not be led to believe that they have veto power to prevent the US from taking the actions necessary to secure its borders and people.”

... At one level this is an outrageous carte blanche for an infringement of Mexican sovereignty and a forever war on drugs. At another level it is merely the assertion of the basic principle of self-defense in the face of an unregulated transnational threat on America’s borders. America’s sovereignty and the paramountcy of its own interests means that Mexico can have no veto. To concede anything less is tantamount to treason. ...

Tooze is not arguing for a new (renewed?) Mexican War. But he has made the threat implicit in the current situation real. Those of us who find military action against Mexico unthinkable and absurd should take notice. This is not just habitual Republican posturing, bellicosity, and racism. 

As in so many arenas, the Biden administration is struggling to manage the complicated, ugly, multilayered challenges which confront a country learning to live as one fish (a big one) among many. If we care about peace and justice, Tooze has convinced me that this is a vital direction in which to be paying attention.

Forced migration: our shame amid the world's pain

This isn't about the million plus people fleeing hunger and violence currently trying to make their way to Europe, at least it is not solely about those unfortunate people.

As this map shows, when people are displaced by war, they usually, and first, move to places nearby. The Syrian war has pushed huge numbers of people into neighboring countries. Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey have all been remarkably welcoming. A lot has been asked of countries without huge resources and plenty of their own problems.

And this migrant flood, melding with other refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other African parts, now pushes into Europe, providing a canvas on which the proto-fascist regime in Hungary reverts to barbed wire and a German chancellor strives to demonstrate that her country has learned it racial lesson. (Maybe it has; time and politics will tell.)

Meanwhile, the U.S., which bears deep and continuing responsibility for the deadly chaos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and elsewhere, is doing diddly-squat to to help these people. As of October 21, 1,854 people from Syria have been admitted here in the last four years. It takes two years for a refugee to navigate the bureaucratic hoops of a process more sensitive to excessive fears than too human need. And these are usually the relatively affluent and educated among the migrants.

George Packer, in a forthcoming New Yorker comment, shares some of the history of United States behavior when our wars have unsettled populations.

[After our Indo-China war,] In the end, the U.S. admitted more than a million Southeast Asian refugees. ... It’s easy to forget that every act of American generosity toward refugees has had to overcome stiff resistance based in ignorance. Historically, Presidential action has made the difference. After the Second World War, Congress passed legislation that made resettlement in the U.S. harder for Jewish victims of Nazism than for Germans uprooted by the war Hitler started.

... The Obama Administration is allowing the Atlantic Ocean to shield us from the human consequences, as if geography and moral responsibility were the same thing. Long ago, the President decided that American military intervention couldn’t resolve the Syrian war. That’s not a reason to exercise humanitarian restraint as well.

Packer's right of course. The U.S. can take a lot more of this current flow of displaced people with barely a blip of inconvenience. We're that big, that rich and that accustomed to incorporating diverse peoples.

But amidst our failure to take responsibility for that human migration across the oceans, we need to keep in mind that we are also still the destination for another flow of desperate people from much closer to home. And these people too are on the move from violence we've unleashed. These are the young escapees from Central American gangs who were so much in the news a year ago. Those gangs exist to service our country's drug addiction; they take root under the kleptocratic regimes we prefer for their countries.

Joseph Sorrentino charges at In These Times that there's a reason why we've been hearing less about this migrant flow lately.

... the Migration Policy Institute reported in September that Mexico is on target to deport 70 percent more Central Americans this year than last, while U.S. deportations are expected to be halved. Not only is Mexico doing our dirty work by deporting Central Americans, we’re paying for it: According to an October 10 New York Times article, we gave Mexico tens of millions of dollars in fiscal year 2015 to prevent these refugees from reaching our border.

It’s stunning that U.S. [Customs and Border Protection] is ignoring the fact that, by its own admission, the Central Americans it wants to deport are fleeing violence that has not ceased—which would make them legitimate refugees. CBP recently announced that “conditions related to the economy and violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have not improved.” Yet in the same announcement, the agency calls people “illegally crossing the border” from these countries “a top priority for removal.”

I know, as much as I know anything, that people who are so desperate that they’ll literally risk their lives to reach the United States won’t be stopped by Mexican immigration agents dragging them off trains and using Tasers on them; by Mexican police forcibly removing them from buses; or by the threat of local gangs robbing, kidnapping, maiming or killing them. And they certainly won’t be stopped at the U.S. border by more walls, fences and agents. As long as conditions in Central America don’t improve, refugees will keep fleeing north. And by law, we should be taking them in. Why are we ignoring the crisis that is happening right on our doorstep?

My emphasis. Good question.

Graphic via Albuquerque Journal.

UPDATE: As of November 5, the New York Times reports:

But not a single child has entered the United States through the Central American Minors program since its establishment in December [2014], in large part because of a slow-moving American bureaucracy that has infuriated advocates for the young children and their families.

Caravana 43: Mexican families of disappeared tour U.S.

Sign on the former police station building in San Francisco's Mission

They behead people by the hundreds. They heap headless, handless bodies along roadsides as warnings to those who would resist their power. They have penetrated the local, state, and national governments and control entire sections of the country. They provide employment and services to an impoverished public, which distrusts their actual government with its bitter record of corruption, repression, and torture. They seduce young people from several countries, including the United States, into their murderous activities.

Is this a description of the heinous practices of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria? It could be, but as a matter of fact it’s not. These particular thugs exist a lot closer to home. They are part of the multi-billion-dollar industry known as the drug cartels of Mexico. Like the Islamic State, the cartels' power has increased as the result of disastrous policies born in the U.S.A. ...

Rebecca Gordon, Huffington Post

So begins Erudite Partner's background article published on Monday about the mayhem that the U.S.-sponsored "War on Drugs" has brought to our southern neighbors. It's a good introduction to interconnected horrors in our two countries.

Families of the 43 students disappeared (and murdered) through connivance between politicians, police and drug dealers last September in the town of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero state are currently touring the U.S.

From now until April 28, 2015, parents of the 43 disappeared students are traveling in three caravans throughout the US, covering over 40 cities from the US/Mexico border along the Pacific, central and Atlantic region states. The Caravana43 is calling for justice and accountability, and will shed light on the connection between US foreign policy, and the violence in Mexico.

Families will be in San Francisco over Easter, April 5. More details as they develop.

Family members of disappeared people in Mexico met with the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States in Washington DC on Friday. Mexican government officials also attended the meeting. The families are demanding action that leads to searches for their loved ones: