Early this morning (2-25-11), Mexican gunmen armed with short rifles and driving trucks equipped with strobe lights, and in one case, missing license plates, once more attempted to box in a US government-owned vehicle (OGV) driven by US anti-drug agents a short distance from the US border on the Mexican side.
One of the Mexican gunmen in the lead vehicle was also, according to reports, wearing a badge around his neck. . .
Cartel-on-cartel violence may offer Felipe Calderon and Barack Obama the political solution they need in Mexico, and give international stakeholders in the Mexican drug industry the break they need to get back to ‘business as usual’–generating billions in drug dollars, cash that, as it ‘gets cleaner,’ is transformed into capital by ‘legitimate’ investors who create billions more.
Senator Lugar is right–as he said in his speech, the United States should undertake a broad review of further steps the U.S. military and the intelligence community could take to help combat the Mexican cartels in association with the Mexican government.
And one of the first steps should be to review the Brownsville Agreement, and the NAFTA-induced, “hands-off” treaty that currently prevents the US, not just from initiating investigations into the debacle inside Mexico, but from investigating the murders of our own citizens on US soil.