"Iron River of Guns"

American-bought guns are fueling the war between drug cartels and the government in Mexico. From the L.A. Times:

More than 6,700 licensed gun dealers have set up shop within a short drive of the 2,000-mile border, from the Gulf Coast of Texas to San Diego -- which amounts to more than three dealers for every mile of border territory. Law enforcement has come to call the region an "iron river of guns...."

"Just guarantee me that arms won't enter Mexico," Mexico's public-safety chief, Genaro Garcia Luna, told a radio interviewer recently. Stop the flow of guns from the United States, he said, "and the gasoline for the crimes that we have will run out."

This GQ piece blames the war on... NAFTA? It actually kind of makes sense:

Every day in Juárez, at least 200,000 people get out of bed to pull a shift in the maquiladoras. The exact number varies: Right now roughly 20,000 jobs have vanished as a chill sweeps through world markets; just after the millennium, about 100,000 jobs left the city for mainland China, because as Forbes magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four times the wages of the Chinese. (Those greedy Mexicans were taking home $60, maybe $70 a week in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the United States.) The barrios where these maquiladora workers live are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Turnover in the grinding maquiladoras runs from 100 to 200 percent a year. The factory managers say this is because of the abundant economic opportunities of the city. And in a sense, they are right: A drug peddler, for example, makes a maquiladora worker’s monthly wage each week. And there’s even more money to be made in other trades: A few years ago, the going rate for professional murders in Juárez was $250 apiece.

But in America, we know nothing of such matters. Officially, Juárez has healthy wages and almost no unemployment. It is a beacon of the global economy that was poised to become a modern city in a Mexico that was to become a modern nation. But when Mexico instead lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was ignored by successive American administrations, since a quiet neighbor was and is the best kind of neighbor for a global economic empire. When Mexico persisted in being a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, it was the fault of American habit and addiction. Finally, when these habits could not be contained, the North American Free Trade Agreement was ballyhooed as the answer that would bring prosperity and end the violence.

What America got from NAFTA was cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration from the barrios of places like Juárez into the United States. What Juárez got was more drugs and more violence.

The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason poor people in Juárez sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason they go north is to survive.