Baghdad in My Backyard

Any day of the week, you can read, if you want to, about countless heartbreaking things going on across the globe, but usually, they seem distant, it’s possible to keep yourself separated from them. I could go on and on about what’s happening and happened in Iraq, and I have, many times, but on that, I feel like there’s not much left to say, that there’s nothing to be added by throwing in more words to the discourse.

After more than five years, and hundreds of thousands dead (though I’d suspect that most Americans are moved more by the hundreds of billions of dollars that it’s cost), there are precious few minds left to be changed, if you haven’t seen it for the massive crime against humanity that it is by now, you must be totally deranged, with no sense of scale or perspective or morality.

I could talk about how the people that envisioned this war and led my vengeful nation into it, should and deserve to be impeached, indicted, and punished in ways that would only be appropriate for a crime on the scale of destroying a country, tearing millions of lives apart, and snuffing out thousands upon thousands upon thousands. But I know in my heart that they won’t be, they will never be held to account for all that they’ve unleashed. The ones that still hold onto their jobs soon will leave them, though not soon enough. Some may retire; others will go on to be commentators on twenty four hour news channels, columnists, professors, lobbyists, or paid speakers. Those who haven’t done so already will probably get six-figure offers by major publishing houses to have their stories ghostwritten for them, and a few will end up on the bestseller list. There won’t be any justice, there’s not anyone with the power or the will to hand it out.

I can see how this war will end, without actually ever ending. Soldiers will still be fighting and dying in that country for many years to come, but as time progresses, things will began to wind down. Instead of dying every day, they’ll start to get killed only every other day, and that will be seen as a huge success, so some of them will get to come home. After another couple of years, fatalities will only be a weekly occurrence, and that too will be held up as a huge success, so the numbers will wind down a little bit more. Eventually probably twenty thousand Americans will be left on the ground there, but they’ll spend their time on permanent bases, and in the green-zone, there to serve to keep the Iraqi government on our thumb. Somewhere along this timeline, whoever happens to be President will declare the were to be over, probably when the frequency of mass bombings drops to just about every month or so, and at a time when they need a boost in the polls. The story of it’s already been written; all that’s left is for it to be acted out.

And that brings me back to what’s been closer to home than usual. Shootings, executions, bombings, beheadings, roving street to street gun battles, such are key words that are ubiquitous in news stories about Iraq, which is why it’s distressing to me that now they not only describe the situation in a country where the nearest border is seven thousand miles from me, but one with a border only thirty miles distant. It’s almost like a war in my own backyard. Mexico has always been a violent place, any developing country that serves as a smuggling conduit right into the belly of the United States is bound to be, but in the last year it’s jumped up to another level.

Several thousand people have been killed in internecine battles between rival drug cartels and the Mexican government. The cartels are fighting each other over control of territory used to smuggle illegal drugs, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine, into the US, and they’re also fighting the Mexican police and military. One of the worst hit cities is just forty miles from my house, the city of Juarez.

Almost every day, policemen are ambushed, being killed in their cars by machine gun fire, officials have been assassinated in their own homes, and bodies are often found dumped in the desert. Right now I’m reading a news story from today, it says that just in the last day ten people have been found shot dead execution style, three of them were beheaded. Less then a week ago, six severed heads were left in and around Juarez, some in coolers on the side of the road. The violence has gotten so bad that the government sent over 2,500 armed soldiers to patrol the city of 1.3 million.

A couple months ago I remember reading about the police digging in a backyard of a house there; they found thirty six bodies in one backyard, that’s a veritable mass grave, and it struck me how people reacted to it. It made the newspaper, but buried in the back page, with only a few paragraphs of print. If that house was just a mile to the northeast, across that river that marks the border, it would have been a massive story. Mass Grave Found in El Paso Backyard! Massacre in the Borderland! But since it wasn’t in El Paso, but Juarez, people’s lives are valued differently. I’ll never understand that, why the worth of someone’s life depends on which side of which border they happen to be on.

There’s another town that’s been brutally affected by the violence. The town of Palomas is just across the border from Columbus, New Mexico, about an hour’s drive from here. It’s a fairly small town, with about ten thousand people. A month or so ago the police chief for the town, fearing for his life, came to the border demanding asylum in the United States. The entire police force for the town had quit for fear of their lives.

Where I live, even though it is in the United States, is intimately connected with Mexico. A majority of the people are of Mexican heritage, it’s very common to hear Spanish spoken every day, the culture has more in common with Mexico than most places in the United States, but you still have to go out of your way to find out information about what’s going on, literally just down the road. My best friend is Mexican, she lived in Juarez until she moved here a few years ago, her family still owns houses there; all of this makes what’s going on there have that much more of an impact on me.

The tragic thing is all of this comes down to business, albeit an illegal one. People here love using drugs, people everywhere do, and anywhere there’s a demand for something, there will be people right there to provide it for a fee. The violence is a direct result of the product they’re trying to move into the United States being illegal. Anytime something is made illegal, it puts it into the hands of criminals, who often have no recourse to conduct their business through other than violence. The violence is the result of market forces at work in an underground economy.

A guaranteed solution would be to remove the criminal penalties surrounding drugs, that makes sense from a moral view, a security view, and a health view, but sadly not from a political point of view, because people have an irrational fear of drugs, and the people who set the policy know that if they stand against that fear, they won't have their jobs for very long. It’s drug prohibition that keeps these criminal gangs in business, flush with cash, the only way to not only fight them, but eliminate them in one fell swoop, kick their legs out from under the cut-throat bastards is to remove their product from their domain. The historical precedent is clear; today beer, wine, and liquor companies are an all-American part of public life, a far cry from the criminal syndicates that popped up when the eighteenth-amendment and the Volstead Act was made the law of the land. Prohibition doesn’t work, it punishes people for engaging in something that’s not immoral, puts their safety at risk from unregulated products, wastes money and effort, and funnels billions of dollars into a criminal underworld where the only way to get people to follow through is through violence.

And it's made worse by the easy access to guns here in the US. In Mexico, it's illegal to own a gun, but just come across the border and you can buy almost anything you want, even assault rifles, and it's a simple matter for them to smuggle it back over the border.

And on it goes.