Clinton in Mexico on drugs crisis

WASHINGTON, March 25 (UPI) -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Mexico for a two-day visit Wednesday on the drug war and escalating border-security crisis.

She flew out just after President Barack Obama promised to bolster border security. During his news conference Tuesday, Obama said the United States needs to step up efforts to stem the southward flow of illegal weapons and cash.

To that end, the White House is sending extra agents from the Department of Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to the southern border. The FBI is developing a special team to consolidate investigations involving Mexico, and the Treasury Department has Operation Firewall to fight money-laundering and smuggling of cash.

During his news conference, Obama had strong words of support for Mexican President Felipe Calderon's efforts in trying to stop the drug wars. More than 1,000 people have been killed in Mexican drug-related violence in the first two months of this year alone. Last year almost 6,300 people died. And the violence is already spilling across the border into the United States.

Brazen assaults on houses, the general level of violence and an epidemic of brutal kidnappings have struck the U.S. Southwest, especially Arizona, the home state of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder have already scheduled talks in Mexico City next month to boost U.S. aid to, and cooperation with, Calderon's embattled government in the struggle against the ultra-wealthy drug cartels that now effectively control some Mexican states along the country's border with the United States as their private fiefdoms.

Obama came to office preoccupied with changing policy in the far-flung wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as seeking dialogue with Russia and Iran. But the inexorably developing crisis on America's own southern border is remorselessly rising on his priority list. The U.S. president has already scheduled an early meeting with President Calderon and a first visit as head of state to Mexico next month to discuss immigration, world economics and border security.

The mounting border-security crisis presents a politically divisive dilemma to Obama and his ruling Democrats. They swept the Hispanic vote in the presidential and congressional elections on Nov. 4, in large part because they were far more liberal on open immigration, immigration amnesty and keeping open borders with Mexico than the incumbent Democrats under President George W. Bush.

Bush himself had moved extremely slowly and reluctantly to start strengthening border defenses, despite a very strong grassroots conservative movement urging him to do so. But open-border ideologists in the Washington think tanks and wealthy GOP business supporters who welcomed unlimited free -- and illegal -- immigration as an unending source of cheap labor opposed too-strong action in this area.

However, Bush was eventually forced to move on the issue, and now Obama is facing the same pressures.

Calderon is trying to tackle the power of the drug cartels head-on in a way no previous Mexican president has ever dared. State and local police forces in northern Mexican states, especially Chihuahua and Sonora, have notoriously been heavily infiltrated, bribed and terrorized by the cartels on a scale that would have made Al Capone in his Chicago heyday green with envy. So in 2007, Calderon deployed the Mexican army in large numbers into northern states to take on the drug trade.

Obama wants to boost the scale of U.S.-Mexican federal cooperation against the drug cartels. Some 500 extra federal agents have been deployed to a new U.S. government interagency force in the struggle. The previous 110th Congress approved $700 million under President Bush's 2007 Merida Initiative with Calderon to help fund the Mexican government's efforts.

However, Obama and Calderon are both fighting enormous forces that threaten to overwhelm all their efforts unless the scale of security commitment is vastly increased. Millions of illegal immigrants still try to cross north to the United States every year. Mexico's population explosion continues unabated. The country now has 109 million people, a more than six-fold increase on 60 years ago.

The soaring power of the drug lords has created what UPI Military Matters columnist William S. Lind has called a classic example of fourth-generation war, the hollowing out and erosion of national state power at the hands of extralegal, non-stevedores who command wealth and resources in their local fiefdoms far superior to that of the national government structure they are destroying from within.

U.S. policymakers and armchair strategists in the Washington media and think tanks have been blind and complacent for years about the growing enormous dangers on the southern border of the United States. They would much rather pontificate about spreading democracy in the Middle East or preaching environmentalism to China than recognize the metastasizing threat to life and security for millions of Americans in the Southwest. There is, after all, nothing "bold" or "visionary" about creating massive, passive border defenses or deploying tens of thousands of police, troops or federal agents to man them.

But the issues at stake are not trivial ones: They are maintaining the safety and security of major regions of the United States against a tidal wave of illegal immigration and the depredations of some of the most powerful, barbaric and merciless criminal cartels on the planet.