Phooey on Trump tweets.
That’s what I usually say, but not the other day when utterly sickening, demonic, drug-smuggling gunmen killed nine Americans in northern Mexico. The victims included twin babies and mothers trying desperately if futilely to save the lives of other children from an assault of the kind that took 36,000 Mexican lives last year. Smugglers also helped in the demise of 68,000 Americans overdosing on drugs.
“The great new President of Mexico has made this a big issue, but the cartels have become so large and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army,” President Donald Trump tweeted. “This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely wait a call from your great new president.”
Trump is right, but Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said no.
Obrador is a lopsided leftist who argued in his election campaign last year that he would defeat the cartels with “hugs, not gunshots.” One means would be to rescue young men from poverty so they would not seek riches from joining drug gangs.
It is certainly true that, long before him, governmental reforms of various sorts did help forge more prosperity and a solid middle class in Mexico, but it is now too late for a kissy-kissy answer. The drug business began taking off in the 1980s and, by 2006, we had something like a gangs-vs.-government civil war eventually leading the outgunned government to back off despite American help.
