The killing of two Americans has occasioned more news coverage than the thousands of Americans who have died because of cartel drug traffickers. But a kidnapping and murder in broad daylight gets more of a reaction from us than fentanyl deaths. That old saw about a million deaths being a statistic is still with us.
The Biden administration will shrug off the criticism and go on empowering the cartels while trying to get the Mexican government to handle it. This is not even a new approach. And by “not a new approach”, I mean that we have a track record of 150 years of trying to get the Mexican government to stabilize its country to prevent the various bandits and invaders coming out of that country from threatening Americans.
None of it has worked very well, but it occasionally has worked. Giving up works really badly.
There are two elements at play here just as there are in many of the other threats from non-state actors.
1 Our weakness
2 Broken societies from which threats arise
We spend a lot of time trying to fix those societies even though nothing we do, including an armed occupation, will do that, and we spend very little time trying to fix the problem of our weakness. Securing our borders and destroying external threats are not mutually exclusive, they’re both needed and reinforce each other, so long as we don’t get bogged down in nation-building: that is to say believing that we can fix broken societies. We have blueprints for taking on and destroying non-state actors using military force. We’re too afraid to use them.
And so the cartels can boldly kidnap and kill Americans knowing that we won’t do all that much about it except send the FBI, pressure the Mexicans to make some arrests, maybe join them on a raid, capture someone, put them on trial and hope the public doesn’t notice how commonplace this is becoming.
Biden has surrendered our prestige and with it comes an era of greater vulnerability for Americans abroad.
Thanks Daniel. I’ve been telling people for decades not to go to Mexico.
Biden’s not giving up any more than Obama gave up trying to defeat the ISIS. If he had given up that would have shown people what was really going on. But nothing was going to change until Trump arrived.
Hang them all for treason: Bidens, Obama, Clintons, Bush, Fauci, Gore, Soros, I could go on.
I lived in South TX several years and have crossed that bridge into Matamoros several times, but that was 45 years ago and back then you would be met by young boys about 12 or 13 who would offer to show you a safe place to park your car for a couple bucks. I always paid one of these kids and never had any problem. Not to say there wasn’t crime back then. A good friend had his new Thunderbird stolen in Brownsville. He got it back, but only after paying a $2,ooo finder’s fee at an impound yard on the Mexican side.
The Cartels income has increased over 2,800% under TaliBiden
Yeah, Biden has turned the USA into a joke, same as Barak did. Having traveled internationally quite a bit during Obamas terms, I know that other countries were physically laughing at us..
How could this group have been so stupid (God rest their souls) to have gone down there? What are we not being told, if anything. Maybe they were going down there for cheap medical procedures. The so-called news here has at least been somewhat honest about the dangers in Mexico, the State Dept has been honest also about Mexico.
Did the boarder guards not mention the cartel wars to these people? Its a bit of a WTF kinda thang.
Somewhat unrelated: But is their uncle Bidens nominee for head of FAA?
A few years ago that leftists rag Time was going on about allowing for illegal imagration it sure works for the Democrats all the time they want Open Borders