Here’s a little thought experiment: Imagine that Mexican Constitution made explosives legal, that Mexico had thousands of shops in border towns selling hand grenades, and that shit was blowing up everywhere here. Then imagine that Obama addressed the Mexican Congress and said the following:
And with all due respect, if you do not regulate the sale of these weapons in the right way, nothing guarantees that criminals here in the Mexico, with access to the same powerful weapons, will not decide to challenge Mexican authority and civilians.
My guess is that Cornyn and Kyl would be yelling treason, while McCain would be commandeering the Arizona National Guard as part of his invasion plan.
Those mild words (with references to the US, not Mexico) are what Felipe Calderon said yesterday in Congress. He’s concerned because the current violence in Mexico is armed in part from the 7,000 stores selling assault weapons on the US/Mexico border. Fewer than half of the Republicans in Congress bothered to show up, and here’s Cornyn:
“I have great respect for President Calderon, but he really shouldn’t turn this into an opportunity to tell us we should change our laws,” Cornyn said. He said that the Second Amendment, which gives Americans the right to bear arms, wasn’t a subject for diplomatic discussions.
I wonder what would happen if half of the Republicans missed one of Bibi Netanyahu’s joint addresses to Congress, and if the ones who did attend told him to STFU.
atlliberal
Nothing because IOKIYAR.
Now if a Democrat did it, well….
Karmakin
Wut.
7k stores selling assault weapons among the US/Mexico border. I find that VERY hard to believe. Not saying that anybody is wrong here. It’s just…insane.
Keith G
I am one of those godless liberals who actually loves this country (wink), and it really pains me how we can once again be such a horrid world citizen.
In and of itself, the polity of Mexico is no wonderful thing. Yet, it seems we are well on our way to making sure a troubled state comes damn close to being a failed state.
We can be such a stupid and insular people.
kommrade reproductive vigor
The nerve! And it’s not like the GOP has made a habit of blaming every country on south of Texas’ border for pumping drugs into the U.S.
atlliberal
@Karmakin: It’s not that hard to believe if you consider that the border includes California, Arizona and Texas. They don’t have to be right on the border to be accessible. Dealers don’t have to be shops either. They could just set up booths at gun shows or sell privately.
debbie
How about a discussion on domestic terrorism? I for one look forward to Cornyn and Kyl’s reaction to yesterday’s murder of two Arkansas police officers by what appear to be Aryan Nation members with AK-47s.
VOR
Like it or not, but Mexico is our neighbor with whom we are at peace. We have strong international trade. Doesn’t the leader of such a country deserve the simple respect of showing up to listen? I’m not asking them to agree with him, but at least show up.
Remember November
http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs38/38661/swb.htm
Interesting. For a country so keen on 2nd Amendment rights we make it too easy for the drug traffickers to get Made in USA Colts and S & W’s.
So the DTO’s are killing people with our own guns.
capitalism! NRA, Team America, Fuck Yeah!
Shygetz
Maybe Mexico will close the border and start deporting all pasty white people.
Hypnos
Mexico should reply by legalizing drugs and setting up 7k cocaine shops on the border.
Their government would probably go down faster than you can say “9/11 1973”.
CynDee
@mistermix: Thank you so much; that really needed to be said. Subject for today’s e-mails to government office-holders.
Ash Can
Wait, what? Fewer than half of the Republicans showed up to a joint address by a foreign head of state? I know it’s been a while since I was in DC, but that strikes me as an enormous breach of decorum. Seriously, today’s Republicans have no fucking class whatsoever.
As for the 7,000 gun dealers selling assault weapons along the US-Mexican border, wouldn’t it be a crying shame if the feds banned gun sales within, say, 200 miles of the border? Then gun enthusiasts living within that no-sell zone would have to drive all that distance to purchase arms. It’d be unconstitutional! It’d be un-American! It’d be just like women in many states who want to get an abortion!
The Moar You Know
I agree with everything you said, mistermix.
But Calderon has just dealt gun control at least a decade-long setback in this country, and handed the Republicans a BIG fucking stick at a time when I’d certainly prefer that they didn’t have one.
“The Democrats and Mexicans are coming to take your guns in 2010, unless you get out and vote!”
I guarantee you that sentence, or one so similarly worded as to be indistinguishable from it, will be in in my next NRA mailer. I guarantee it.
Katherine Hunter
is there a typo in the imaginary quote ? the Mexico ? refers to the state of New Mexico ?
Linda Featheringill
I looked up “callate, pendejo” and found that the meaning can range from “Quieter, Dummy” to “Shut up, Motherfucker”.
Mistermix is such a nice young man that I am sure he had in mind the first, more polite interpretation.
:-)
[Your mission today, should you choose to accept it, is to go out and tick somebody off. Thankyouverymuch.]
Hypnos
@Katherine Hunter: probably literal translation from Spanish, “en el Mexico”.
Ash Can
@Hypnos: Or mistermix left in the “the” from “the United States.”
Zifnab
@debbie:
If we’d just armed the Arkansas police with mini-guns and RPGs, this wouldn’t have happened.
Ash Can
@Linda Featheringill: Considering the fact that so many of them saw fit to blow off Calderon’s joint address, I’d say the latter translation was probably more apt.
Patriot 3
Why should Republicans listen to anyone about anything on overthrows of government especially from a Mexican or the Kenyan? They already know what they’ve got to do: get somebody else to do their dirty work for them. It’s the Republican Way…
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/09/full_text_of_newsmax_column_suggesting_military_co.php
David Hunt
Any response would be drowned out by the literally earth-shattering sound of the Trump of Gabriel signaling the End of Days. Or to put it less pretentiously, it’s unthinkable.
However, I disagree with atlliberal@1. Not even Republicans are immune from the forces that require U.S. lawmakers to suck Netanyahu’s you-know-what every time he does something despicable in the Occupied Territory.
Face
Thus, clearly illegal Dem immigrants.
/Limbaugh
El Cid
Calderon, a thorough-going right winger who used the narco-gang crisis to send the ultra-corrupt federal and military forces to attempt to solve the problem through occupation, also correctly pointed out that from Mexico’s and Mexican citizens’ point of view, this is a problem of US consumption rather than Mexicans being made victims of the suppliers.
Believe it or not, Mexicans are tired of their society being ripped to shreds because the U.S. subsidizes the narco-trafficking industry by providing a massive illegal market of consumers.
The problem is our consumption of a criminalized market of narcotics, not the countries in the way of the suppliers.
mistermix
@Linda Featheringill: I take to mean “Shut up, Dummy”, but others may have a harsher interpretation.
nenabeans
@El Cid: well said, gracias
El Cid
@nenabeans: It’s stunning how commonly accepted it is throughout Latin America and the Caribbean that the generations-long narco-crisis is the fault of the U.S. for creating and sustaining the market for illegal narcotics, and yet they are made to pay for it via repressive U.S. programs such as spraying poisons on peasant growing areas or turning Colombia into a game of a government-corrupting military / paramilitary counterinsurgency & mass massacre war versus the narco-guerrillas, all of whom are sustained by a failure of a ‘drug war’, in which occasional tiny reductions in coca or whatever production are heralded by U.S. authorities as proof of ‘success’ and years in which production increases are ignored.
[And yet this view is almost entirely absent from establishmentarian U.S. debate on ‘drugs’ and ‘the drugs problem’. Which is why I thought the AP story on the massive failure of the ‘drug war’ was so significant.]
toujoursdan
@El Cid:
And the other elephant in the room was also the passage of NAFTA, which decimated Mexico’s family-run agricultural sector which was undercut by American mechanized agrabusiness, subsidized by $10 billion in U.S. government subsidies.
That drove rural unemployment up and caused the exodus to the U.S. for unskilled work.
El Cid
@toujoursdan: Agreed — up to 10 million rural Mexicans (campesinos and ejido farmers) might have had their families’ agricultural, small trade income made simply irrelevant by the massive importation of U.S. subsidized crops like corn, while prices for Mexican consumers have increased, including the absolute staple of the Mexican diet, the tortilla.
But I wanted to stay focused on the most direct discussion of the narcotics subject.
Nobody’s even discussing how Mexico’s new narco-gangs have been ‘upgraded’ by contacts with the Colombian narco-paramilitary, which have long (whether in classic form or the more recent, supposedly ‘demobilized’ paramilitary forces) been the allies of the Colombian government’s war against the narco-guerrillas.
The Colombian narco-traffickers are sending undetectable home-made submarines to the coast of Southwestern Mexico, which is why you’ve seen port towns like Acapulco turn into utter and open shooting wars and assassinations of public officials.
All of which, of course, mean that American public intellectuals and politicians spend a lot of time blaming Venezuela and Bolivia (but not Brazil) for bordering Colombia and for having narco-traffickers use their territories as drug transit zones.
By the way, current and soon to be ex-President Uribe of Colombia was the head of Colombia’s civil aviation administration during the days of Pablo Escobar, when the drugs trade out of Colombia mostly depended upon the operation of small airstrips. Uribe in his position of state governor of Antioquia also helped form the first openly government-suppoted paramilitaries, and whose claim that his father was killed by guerrillas now looks more likely to be the result of narco-traffickers operating on his property.
All of which means the U.S. had great faith in backing successive Colombian regimes with massive military and other technical aid, for all their ‘successes’ in driving back the narco-guerrillas.
rickstersherpa
Politicians like getting elected and reelected and tend to do things (and not do things) that improve their prospects. They may fool themselves on these matters, or based their preferences on faulty assumptions and information, but that is what they do. For Republicans right now, snubbing Mexico and Mexican-Americans appear to them a winning proposition they think. Because of their fundraising and a link with a strong strategic voting group, both American parties in Congress tend to fall over themselves in supporting AIPAC’s agenda. And AIPAC, like the NRA, has collected certain number of high-profile political scalps over the years which has taught most congress people that it is not politically safe to cross either group. Hispanics-Americans should learn the lesson and start trying to massacre nativist politicians in both primaries and general elections in districts where they are a block and they should start serious fund raising for political action groups representing Hispanic interests.
artem1s
I don’t think that the NRA’s only beef with Clinton was gun legislation. They also hated him for shutting down the endless flow of arms to the IRA and Ulster Union. The peace accord severely cut into gun sellers profit clientele.
MBunge
“And the other elephant in the room was also the passage of NAFTA, which decimated Mexico’s family-run agricultural sector which was undercut by American mechanized agrabusiness, subsidized by $10 billion in U.S. government subsidies.”
Wait, wait, wait. Are you telling me that free trade policies, the very policies folks like Paul Krugman and Matthew Yglesias are constantly telling us are “win-win” for everyone involved, might possibly produce awful results when employed between two nations at vastly different stages of economic development? The hell you say?
Mike
Florida Cynic
There’s another reason that Mexican narco traffickers have an abundance of US manufactured Colts and S&Ws: the US government delivers them to Mexico. Why import AKs when you can bribe a supply clerk?
Just Some Fuckhead
Gaaah-argh. Now our guns? Is there anything brown people can’t fuck up for decent god-fearing white people?
liberty60
@The Moar You Know:
As if they needed that! As President, Obama has never uttered a word about gun restriction, yet they still chant “Obama is coming for your guns” every chance they get.
Thinking you can piss off the Right by saying progressive thoughts boldly has, as its corrolary, the thought that you can appease them by being timid and moderate; they refuse to be placated, and only a full throated defense of liberal secular democracy will counter the stupidity.
Linda Featheringill
@mistermix:
See? You are a nice young man. :-)
geg6
@liberty60:
This.
I am in complete and full agreement with your views and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Comrade Dread
I wonder how many Republicans freak out when the United States president goes around moralizing in other countries?
mistermix
@Linda Featheringill: I think I’m the oldest contributor to this blog. I’m older than John, DougJ and TimF. I don’t know about dengre and Anne Laurie.
Ella in NM
First of all, EFFF the Republicans. They have no answers, and helped create and reinforce this mess. But it’s really easy for people who don’t actually encounter these problems to assume it’s all America’s fault.
As a person who has lived 50 miles from the US-Mexico line going on 30 years now, I promise you that we have an incredibly complex set of problems when we talk about border issues. While the US contributes to them, it is simply naive–no, outright ignorant–to pretend that Mexico (the Government, not the people) is just a pathetic, weak, blameless victim here. You need only compare our relationship with the country on our southern border to the one we have with our northern border. Canada is a responsible and responsive government, it’s people have a real democracy in which to participate, and it has an economy that at least attempts to bring all its citizens out of poverty. They seem to have NO problem dealing with the impact of the US’s nasty little habits.
The government of Mexico, on the other hand, has been a completely corrupt regime for–well, forever. They have neglected their citizens–especially those within striking distance of our border– BECAUSE THEY KNOW THE US WILL PICK UP THE TAB FOR THEIR GOVERNING FAILURES. Mexico would lose something like 40% of its banking revenue if all of the financial resources that pour into the country from Mexican citizens working here (legally or illegally) suddenly stopped. Their children can walk across the border everyday to attend school in our country–for free, relieving the Mexican government’s educational budget burden. Pregnant women know that if they can just get themselves across our border to a hospital at the time the baby is due, and have that kid here, they have an automatic US citizen that is now eligible for all US aid and support. Mexican citizens literally drag themselves across the border every day to sit in our community hospital Emergency Rooms until they get expensive and high-end care, and once it’s provided, they will simply go home without paying (Just yesterday, I discharged a patient who was “visiting” from Mexico when he had “chest pain”. He was admitted, received a four-vessel coronary artery bypass surgery, remained in our ICU for 10 days, then left. In his history was the fact that he had already been told by a doctor in Mexico that he had heart disease which would require this very surgery. All costs were billed to our county indigent funds program which was intended to help uninsured, working residents.) The Mexican government, through its deeply corrupt and neglectful ways, fails to provide even the most basic services to its own citizens, instead literally dumping them on our economy. I don’t blame the people who do whatever it takes to find a better place to live, seek to educate their children, or come here for life-saving health care–I blame their government.
When Calderon and others in the Mexican government come up here and whine and complain that we like drugs and guns too much for them to change, just remember that he’s full of shit. He’s only talking to the puppeteers back home that allow him to pretend he’s “the President”. Meanwhile, his people suffer, both there and now in the US, as pawns who have few choices, no good options.
Mexico, the government, is despicable. NEVER make excuses for them.
Paul L.
allowed no civil rights for migrants illegal or otherwise.
Progressives would still give them absolute moral authority to dictate US law.
BTW the progressive gun grabber lie of 90 percent of firearms recovered at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to gun sellers right here in the United States has been debunked.
El Cid
@Ella in NM:
Calderon is corrupt and full of shit, but he’s absolutely right about the drugs point.
I don’t know why people are so utterly stupid and ignorant of reality that they think a mere police and military crackdown can stop a multi-billion dollar U.S. drugs consumption market from going through Mexico, but a nearly infinitely funded and militarized attack on narco-trafficking in Colombia with a super-close U.S. ally
Whether Mexico had yet another member of a corrupt ruling elite or anyone’s fantasy of a Mexican Thomas Jefferson or FDR in charge, the U.S. consumer market is responsible for narco-trafficking via Mexico, and no moral rectitude of the leadership will ever prevent narco-traffickers from buying off nearly any sets of officials they want on either side of the border.
It isn’t a defense of the Mexican government to point out these clear and basic facts, nor is it a defense of the Mexican government to point out that the U.S. government strongly supported the very same policies robbing Mexicans of the ability to make their own living in Mexico, as mentioned in these same blog comments — including closely supporting the nearly perpetual PRI dictatorship over leftist rivals, destroying Mexican domestic production and wages through the investor-favoring NAFTA, NAFTA’s destruction of Mexico’s smallholder agricultural production, and pressuring for the privatization of public industries.
So a bit of getting off of the high horse might be warranted, and still wouldn’t count as a defense of the Mexican government, any more than pointing out that the reason L.A. was flooded with Central American immigrants during the 1980s who sent their earnings back home was largely caused by Reaganite destruction of 4 Central American nations and their economies was praise for, say, the El Salvadoran death squad government who knew that roughly 1/3 of their national economy in the 1980s came from the monies sent back from refugees in the USA.
I would venture to point out that as U.S. citizens, we have a bit more ability to change harmful U.S. policies than we have in changing harmful Mexican policies.
El Cid
@Paul L.:
Did you take a look at the GAO report which was cited in the linked blog post?
Because the GAO report says this (PDF):
The blog to which you link does not at all debunk that figure — rather, it takes issue with the Brady campaign for not accurately clarifying the time period cited by the GAO and for not mentioning that many of the weapons came from California, which had gun laws approved of by the Brady campaign.
(Though there would be no reason to believe that California-sourced weapons would have to go to Mexico directly across the California-Mexico border as opposed to being transferred to another U.S. state first. Neither is there evidence that they didn’t directly cross that border.)
Paul L.
@El Cid:
How about this debunking?
Counting Mexico’s Guns
President Obama says 90 percent of Mexico’s recovered crime guns come from the U.S. That’s not what the statistics show.
BTW, Here is the new progressive talking point to defend Mexican anti-migrant laws.
They are not as bad as they were a year ago.
Ella in NM
@El Cid:
The US needs to clean up it’s own messes in this regard, for a lot of reasons. But again, just look north and you will see no similar unleashing of anarchy by narco-traffickers. There is ample evidence that the Mexican government is so benefiting from the drug trade that it is even protecting favored drug lords. I’d love to see the US decriminalize most drugs, but I also wonder if we did it tomorrow if we’d merely see the shooting and beheading occurring in the streets of Juarez now jump across the border to our own towns and cities–there simply would be no barrier to keeping them from moving their money making cartels up here.
Of course we need to find ways to legitimize decent human desires to work and find a good life by streamlining the processing of permits to enter, work in and reside in the US by Mexicans. But we also need to protect our own citizens and communities from harm. We can’t do that if we don’t accept the fact that Mexico is just as responsible for it’s people and it’s problems as any other nation on earth, and stop making excuses for them.
El Cid
@Paul L.: Roughly 90% of the guns captured and submitted for tracing are sourced to the United States.
Guns which are neither captured nor traced cannot have their sourcing proven.
What you’re advocating is no more than people be more clear about their characterization, as FactCheck too makes clear.
If you have any evidence that the non-traced or non-captured guns do not come from the U.S., please present it, or show where FactCheck or the ATF has such evidence.
So, yes, 90% of firearms submitted for tracing were sourced to the United States, maybe 95%, but this figure is now unimportant because, um, not all firearms were submitted for tracing, partly because many serial numbers have been removed, partly because of suspicions of bureaucratic inefficiency or hypothesized selection bias among Mexican officials.
It’s certainly possible that there are small boats arriving from Colombia bringing weapons from guerrilla or narcotrafficker or paramilitary sourcing. Or from Venezuela. Or various Caribbean nations. Or from El Salvadoran ex-military and ex-guerrilla members, and so on and so forth. It’s possible, but you haven’t shown and I haven’t seen any sourced evidence suggesting that this has been shown or that this may be responsible for the majority of captured (and, also, non-captured) firearms in Mexico.
Still, the figure stands, as long as it’s stated clearly: 90% or more of all traced firearms captured by Mexican authorities are sourced in the United State.
90%. 90% of all those traced. 90%. Come from the U.S. 90%.
El Cid
@Ella in NM: Oh, given the infrastructure built up by Mexican narco-traffickers, and their ability to buy off military and police and border officials, I think you’re very likely to see more incidents of violence and shootouts in the U.S. that you see in Mexico.
I don’t understand your point — if drugs are decriminalized, much of the massive profit incentive is gone. In addition, evidence from Portugal’s recent decriminalization shows that use declines. Why would Mexican narco-gangs suddenly transfer activities up here given that their profit motive would be drastically reduced? You might have Mexican border-crossing dealers, just as you had massive importations of heroin from Southeast Asia given the U.S.’ backing of right wing drug warlords there during the Indochina wars, but there wouldn’t be as much of a need for heavily armed narco-gang operations, nor the revenues to fund them.
If you look north (Canada), you will see that (a) their anti-drugs policy is mainly focused on use reduction and treatment, (b) they are free of a 2,000 mile border with a major narcotics producer, and (c.) marijuana production in Canada itself and cross-border U.S. trade means that there is not a limited supply incentivizing drastically profitable importation from 3rd world producers, and criminal sanctions are much lighter, also reducing the profit motive.
Finally, I don’t see how any amount of American citizens ‘stopping making excuses for Mexico’ changes one single, solitary thing.
The problems I’ve pointed out have been worsened by U.S. interventions in the Mexican political and economic systems, and have done so in the interests of concentrated U.S. economic interests.
How is this ‘making excuses’ for Mexican governance?
I, for once, have been more accepting than the average border concerned American of how the Mexican government is “responsible” for its citizens, and how does this change things?
Give it a shot. Increasingly blame the Mexican government and demand they reform their system and take responsibility for their own citizens, particularly while our government and businesses does what it can to make life shittier and more precarious for the average Mexican. See how it helps. You want me to echo those sentiments? You got it. I’ll condemn the lack of responsibility and verbally support candidates I think might change something. Maybe that will help somehow.
See if insisting that the Mexican government does ‘something’ about the millions of, say, largely indigenous Mexican peasants displaced from their farming life and streaming into local and more distant cities from the last NAFTA agricultural chapter opened in January of 2009, see if that insistence makes a difference. Good luck.
Try to build a really big fence and send a million troops to the border. Maybe they won’t be bought off by narco-traffickers offering tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to look the other way. Maybe we’ll get much better at detecting tunnels.
But I’m fairly confident that a staggeringly huge profit incentive to supply narcotics consumers in the U.S. will keep cross-border narco-trafficking going, and I also draw from the Colombian example of anti-guerrilla fighting and anti-narcotrafficker crackdowns that production from source countries will remain about the same or get more efficient or will switch between crops as needed, and that since Mexican narco-gangs aren’t geographically limited to particular territories as were Colombian narco-guerrillas and many narco-traffickers, they’ll be even less controlled by a counter-insurgency type approach.
So, you got it — you want me to blame the Mexican government for many of these problems and call on them to take more responsibility? Done. Sure. Why not?
Lysana
Is this the point where the illegal alien problem and the War on Some Drugs comes to a meeting of the mutual issues and in a sane world, both Mexico and the US would legalize marijuana and cocaine, putting millions back to work in Mexico and reducing their need to cross the border?
Or am I just losing it?
Ella in NM
@El Cid:
Because organized crime can exist within legal domains. Exhibit 1: Las Vegas and the Mafia infiltration of LEGALIZED gambling.
Look, my main point is in response to people with absolutely NO personal experience or knowledge regarding the complexity of these problems who glibly responded here in old style knee-jerk liberal fashion that this is all the fault of America and that Mexico is just a pathetic victim of our empire. You’re not exactly one of those, but I do think it’s simplistic to think that if we legalized drugs that we’d overnight see some kind of blissful peace descend upon the world.
Your points about Canada support what I was saying: we are dealing with a decent and sane government up there, and the truth is, no one from our country is causing them the problems Mexico causes us. We obviously are doing a LITTLE better than Mexico, because we don’t dump all our economic problems on Canada, and vice-versa. Mexico has NEVER been the kind of state that either of our countries has, by their own choice and political culture. They have a two tier society because the ones at the top really, really like it that way. We’d be the same if we let the free marketeers and libertarians have their way. But we have managed to demand better from our nation, somehow.
Again, I’m not saying we don’t have work to do. Just that I have seen first hand the cesspool that is Mexico, literally held the hands of its dying victims, and pretty much want to puke every time it’s latest sap for a President wags his finger at the US’s excesses as the root of his country’s problems.
Zuzu's Petals
@VOR:
I guess they REALLY don’t care about the Hispanic vote.
Idiots.