On the morning of September 11, 2001 the lives of thousands of individuals were lost in the horrific attacks of The World Trade Centers, The Pentagon, and Flight 93.. After the dust settled and families began mourning their loved ones who perished in the attacks we as a nation awoke from a deep sleep of being resistant to attacks from foreign enemies. However, on that day national security became priority number one. Moreover, border security is not as simple as constructing a wall and or placing surveillance cameras at vulnerable locations to keep terrorists and drug cartels from carrying out their activities. Drug trafficking cartels have the money and man power to defeat current border security measures, which is visible through the amount of drug related crimes that inflate prisons throughout the United Sates.
Being that control of access points into the United States is crucial for the Cartels, many death have result as they fight to gain and control routes across the border. According to Engelhart, since 2006 approximately 26,000 people have died as a direct result of drug violence occurring in border towns from Tijuana to Ciudad Juarez. The large amount of deaths related to drug trafficking from Mexico into the United States demonstrates how vulnerable our border is. The ongoing drug battles between the various groups in Mexico demonstrate that the market for drug is thriving even during hard economic times in both Countries; the drug organizations continue to thrive. Various groups such as the Zetas and Juarez 7 are examples of drug organizations battling for access to routes in order to distribute drugs in the United States according to the Drug Enforcement Agency Video.
Trafficking into the United States has been present for a number of years, but never to this level violence. According to Engelhart, Columbian cartels dominated the drug trafficking through Miami, but also used Mexican smugglers as middle men to transport drugs, paying as much as $2,000 per kilo of cocaine during the 1990s. Furthermore, Oscar Hidalgo of the New York Times reported that violence on the border has become reached extreme levels that American Consulate workers and their families have fallen victim to cartel assassins in the border town of Ciudad Juarez. Assassination of American Consulate workers is clearly a tactic being used to intimidate the United States Government, while also demonstrating the extreme measures that drug trafficker are willing to go in order to ship their product across the border.
The level of violence in Mexico is clear indication of how demanding the drug market is in the United States. Cartels are willing to attack American Consulate workers and innocent people to simply demonstrate how ruthless and how far they are willing to go in order to get access to drug trafficking routes and control of a market that continues to thrive.. Thus, something must be done in order to prevent such massacres as those occurring across the border. One question that should be asked is, are we are taking adequate measures to protecting our border from drug cartels and terrorist alike? Perhaps that may not be an easy question to answer at the moment, but measures must be taken now before we begin seeing massacres such as those that occurred in Mexico. Something must be done to secure our border from drug cartels as well as terrorist who may be seeking routes to enter the United States.
Engelhart, K. (2010). Coming soon to a suburb near you. Maclean's, 123(22), 28-31
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/mexico/drug_trafficking/index.html
