In one moment, a column of soldiers and military pickups creeps along a dirt road in western Mexico. In the next, a massive explosion sends debris and a body flying.
The ground where a soldier stood seconds earlier is a gaping hole, the aftermath of an improvised land mine planted by one of the region’s warring drug cartels.
That soldier was killed and four others were injured in the January explosion, which was captured in a grainy video that circulated on social media. Then last month, four more soldiers died and nine others were wounded when another explosive device detonated in the same region.
This week, three laborers were killed and two others injured by yet another mine, leaving a truck split in half and human remains scattered across a dusty road.
The series of blasts in the Tierra Caliente — an area along the border of Jalisco and Michoacán states that has long been a hot zone for cartel warfare — mark an alarming escalation of violence in Mexico as criminal groups arm themselves with ever-more sophisticated and deadly weaponry. The drug war in Mexico has come to resemble actual warfare.
Of all the stuff the US military hasn’t involved itself in, I’m kind of surprised they haven’t been supporting Mexico’s military more in their efforts to take out large cartels.
Blowing up brown people in a desert on the other side of the planet means it’s a lot harder for combatants to reach the United States.
Blowing up people who have made a career out of subverting border security, and who are only a few hours travel from the border, involves a lot of risk to the mainland.
Congress would never risk exposing the charade of their trillion dollar security blanket by green lighting an operation like that.
It also gets tricky when you consider how deeply the cartels must be involved with parts of Mexican government. The line between policing action and outright coup could get blurry really fast, which just leads to more issues.
Probably best if we don’t stick our noses into another decades long conflict with no quick resolution in sight.
I mean, only best to not get involved because the US has a track record of doing the bullheaded dumbass response to something. We SHOULD be helping Mexico. We should have been for a long time. This should’ve been a partnership, not a neighbor squabble about whos dog gets to shit on the lawn…
They do. Many of the original members of the Zetas were in the Mexican special forces and were trained in the United States. So, that backfired.
The US doesn’t actually want to destroy the cartels completely. Legalization and harm reduction would choke off all the cartels within a month.
And stop the drugs and cheap labor from coming into the US?