Last month, a hit squad sent by a Mexican drug cartel brazenly broke into the homes of nine police officers in a ranching town in northern Mexico. They kidnapped the officers, piled them into a convoy of SUVs and sped off into the night. After being summoned by local authorities, troops from Ciudad Juarez, 80 miles to the north, located the convoy and fought a running gun battle with the kidnappers. When the smoke cleared, 21 people were dead, including six policemen who had been tortured and murdered before the soldiers could save them.
Even in Mexico, where a spiraling drug war has claimed more than 7,000 lives in the last 15 months, the scale of the violence was shocking. But in one respect, the shootout represented a breakthrough.
Soon after the bullets stopped flying, a Mexican military officer called a trusted U.S. contact and offered to let American officials inspect the weapons taken from the hit men. The guns were mostly AK-47 knockoffs, and U.S. agents traced them to a dealer in El Paso, just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez. The dealer was already on trial for arming the cartels. He now faces new charges.
Mexico is not the failed state that some pundits have warned about, ...
| ... yes it is ... |
| At least as much as Mexico is respectful of us, which isn't very ... |
Our two countries are already cooperating at an unprecedented level. President Felipe Calderon has approved the extradition of a record 178 drug traffickers to the U.S., and he deserves praise for his courageous stand in going after the drug cartels. But there is more that can be done on both sides.
Too often the kind of cross-border cooperation seen in the recent kidnappings is the result of personal relationships rather than institutional partnerships. Mexico's military and government should allow the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to examine every gun seized to identify and shut down the sellers, who are almost always on our side of the border.
We must stop the flow of handguns, assault rifles and machine guns, which pass from the U.S. to Mexico at a rate of 60,000 a year.
| How exactly do machine guns get through the border? Ordinary US citizens don't own machine guns. Where do they come from? |
| How does banning the import stop the export? Wouldn't vendors just import them directly into Mexico? If Mexico can stop arms from coming in directly from other countries, shouldn't they be able to stop them coming in from the U.S.? Indeed, isn't it their responsibility to patrol their side of our border to stop these arms? |