John Robb (Brave New War) notes that as little as a year ago, the prospect that the narco-insurgency raging in Mexico would successfully expand into the southwestern US was remote — but with our recent economic troubles, that’s no longer true:
It appears that increasing militarization of both the US and Mexico’s “war on drugs” is having an impact, although not what the governments had in mind. The myriad of groups that are dependent on the narco/smuggling economy now consider the two governments to be more of a threat to their continued success than each other. As a result, they are inevitably moving towards an agreement on a plausible promise for an open source insurgency.What is a plausible promise that could unite ~100,000 Mexican narco-guerrillas into an open source insurgency? Simply:
To force the Mexican and US governments to cede de facto control over northern Mexico and Arizona/Southern California/New Mexico/Southern Texas.By itself, it’s doubtful that a narco/smuggling open source insurgency could accomplish this goal, although it would make a very good run at it (particularly given the declining budgets of their opponents).