Mexican Standoff

A lot of people are very unhappy about our border with Mexico. A couple of years ago the complaint was about Mexicans sneaking into the U.S. in search of jobs. Now there are no jobs. Feel better?

Now the great fear is about narco-violence spilling across the border. Mexican bandidos are killing each other, police, soldiers and innocent bystanders at the rate of 7-8,000 per year. This is a very insalubrious situation, and it needs to be addressed, but if the U.S. legalized marijuana it would remove one of the smugglers’ stock items, the same way that ending alcohol prohibition eliminated alcohol smuggling from Canada in the 1930’s. Now the descendents of the alcohol smugglers are among our most revered citizens, like the Bronfmans and the Kennedys.

Any time you have borders, you have problems. Europe has for millennia indulged in a round robin of national, sectarian and religious violence, as have Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Central American republics of Honduras and El Salvador once engaged in a savage, bloody war over a soccer match. Fundamentally, people are no better than packs of apes or wild dogs, capable of switching from acts of incredible culture and refinement one minute to behaving like marauding army ants the next. The sooner we confront the beast within ourselves, like a demon or Jack the Ripper, the sooner we can mobilize our formidable resources to eliminate him. We have declared war on malaria, cholera and other scourges while turning a blind eye on what is arguably the greatest threat to public health, human aggression.

The U.S. has been mostly spared the destructive fury of other nations because we have been isolated from the other large landmasses by oceans. We only have two neighbors, which are both weak. But with delivery systems and weapons becoming increasingly sophisticated, our sense of security is starting to break down, and certain citizens are freaking out about North Korea, Iran and Pakistan. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 proved that a determined adversary can wreak havoc right here on American soil, though both were partly due to our own government’s lackadaisical standard of vigilance.

Conflict with Mexico has existed since the European immigrants, invited by that country to populate its Texas territory, aided by American adventurers and chafing at Mexico’s prohibition against slavery, rebelled and established the Texas Republic. Soon after, the administration of President Polk manufactured a bogus pretext for invading Mexico and forcing it to cede 50% of its territory in the biggest land grab in the history of the world, fulfilling the doctrine of Manifest Destiny – that it was our manifest destiny to have a contiguous territory from sea to shining sea.

I’m not complaining. God Bless America. I dig having Route 66 stretching all the way from Chicago to the Santa Monica pier. We certainly made good use of it. No less a humanitarian than the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, derisively referred to the Mexicans as “ 'greasers' who left all those resources undisturbed for centuries, and three years after we expropriated it we discovered gold in California".

An equivalent today would be the Chinese flooding into Siberia and taking half of it, which has obviously occurred to the Russian Kremlin, because they have announced a project to spend $200 billion, which translates into a lot of rubles, to upgrade their military, and it’s doubtful that they feel threatened by the U.S. or Europe.

Mexican-U.S. relations across the modern border have always been problematical, but mostly the threat has come from our side. In the 1880’s the Arizona Territory was infested by what were then derisively referred to as “cowboys”. These cowboys were not simple cowpunchers sitting around the campfire playing “Red River Valley” on their harmonicas. “Cowboy” was the term applied to itinerant gangsters, killers and livestock rustlers. When the great American chronicler of the old west, Louis L’Amour, wrote that the country “was not built by good men alone”, he was referring to these bastards, who constituted such a threat to life and property that even to this day Arizona society retains a vestigial hardened revulsion toward criminality and threats to public order.

One specialty of these cowboys was to mount raids across the border into Mexico, where they would slaughter ranchers and drive their herds of livestock back into the States, where they sold them in industrial quantities to American wholesalers. Not that they just preyed on Mexicans. Any victim would do. Cowboy gangs were sufficiently strong and numerous that they terrorized the whole territory and inhibited investment by legitimate enterprises. They created such a state of insurrection that the territorial governor, John C. Fremont, requested the legislature to form a militia to attack and eradicate them. The Arizona Star newspaper adopted an editorial policy that called for the cowboys to be slaughtered without mercy:

“The organization of a volunteer company of one hundred men to hunt them down or drive them out of the territory must evidently end with failures, from the fact that the cowboys are too strong for such a small force, and in a pitched fight would undoubtedly come out victorious, which would result in making the matters ten-fold worse than at present. We either must have a strong force for the work or not attempt it at all. It has been suggested that two companies of United States Cavalry be sent out to the section where the outlaws camp and stay after them… until they be forced to leave the territory or fight for their ground”.

Unfortunately, Fremont could not convince the legislature to fund the enterprise and his initiative collapsed. They didn’t want to spend the money, reasoning that the U.S. Army was available to do the job at no cost to them. This failure to act by the legislature motivated the ranchers, who were being terrorized worse than the Mexicans were, to form a vigilante committee, which hung several rustlers. In the meantime, the rustlers assassinated several lawmen.

U.S. President Chester A. Arthur ordered the U.S. military to intervene:

“It has been made to appear satisfactorily to me that it has become impracticable to enforce, by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, the laws of the United States within that Territory, and that the laws therein have been forcibly opposed, and the execution thereof forcibly resisted, and whereas the laws of the United States require whenever necessary in the judgment of the President, to use military force”.

The Mexican government also made a determined effort to secure their side of the border, building an army fort and conducting patrols.

In the meantime, the cowboys continued to terrorize the territory by means of robbery, mayhem and murder. The only policeman to stand up to them was Tombstone Deputy Sheriff Wyatt Earp who, with his brothers and Doc Holliday, shot down the cowboy gang run by the Clanton brothers at the OK Corral.

So this cross-border terrorism has deep roots in history on both sides. It might subside for a few years, but the ordinary distortions and contradictions of international intercourse will eventually manifest themselves in forms of conflict. The ancient civilization of Mexico can no more collapse because of the behavior of a relative handful of gangsters than the U.S. could be brought down by the bedlam initiated by an insignificant group of renegade cowboys.

We are at least fortunate that in Secretary of State Clinton we have in authority a personage who will not abandon her composure should she happen to come under small arms fire.

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Posted on 3/26/2009 ( Permanent Link )
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