RIGHT SPEAK: Empowering Mexican Cartels With Biden’s Open Border Is Even Worse Than You Think: Mexico’s paramilitary armies have an unprecedented amount of military-grade weaponry, paid for by millions of illegal border crossers

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Mexico’s paramilitary armies have an unprecedented amount of military-grade weaponry, paid for by millions of illegal border crossers.

Mexico is a war zone again. But anyone who believes that’s just Mexico’s problem, think again; American national interests are at unprecedented risk.

Cartels’ smuggling syndicates are at each other’s throats along Mexico’s northern border and in Pacific states known as the Tierra Caliente (Hot Zone) as Mexico sends in its military. The warfare has left hundreds dead and whole city blocks scorched, vehicles burning, and citizens taking shelter from hours-long gun-battles. Millions of Mexicans are readying for worse to come.

But so too should Americans. Because, unlike past drug war conflicts in Mexico, the paramilitary armies are swollen like never before with military-grade weaponry bought and paid for by millions of foreign nationals who answered the siren call of President Joe Biden’s open-doors border over the last 20 months, paying cartels huge amounts of money to cross into the United States. The cartels’ growing arsenals and Mount Everest-sized piles of new cash may inalterably compromise Mexico’s central and state governments like never before.

The very real prospect that America would lose even its current imperfect, wanting partnership with Mexico’s government portends serious security, public safety, and even wide-ranging economic impacts on the American people.

I’m not alone in my estimation that Biden’s cartel-enriching mass migration crisis poses serious threats to important U.S. national interests, including many that are rarely discussed out loud, such as Mexican oil and auto-parts exports.

“The criminal organizations in Mexico have made a lot of money off our lax border enforcement, and it stands to reason they’d invest a substantial percentage of that money into the thing that gives them their power,” Christopher Landau, ambassador to Mexico from 2019 to 2021, told me in a recent telephone interview. “Their power is measured in terms of money and weapons. The more money and weapons they have, the larger stick they’ll be carrying and the more influence they carry in Mexico.”

“It stands to reason that anything that increases the power of the cartels in Mexico is adverse to our interests,” he said.

The U.S. needs at least a minimally reliable Mexican government partner for matters of tracking fugitives, controlling illegal immigration when desired, interdicting drug trafficking, and intelligence-sharing for bi-national criminal investigations, and on a wide range of other national security matters.

Empowered Cartels Might Threaten Exports to US

In the past, the cartels avoided actions most likely to provoke U.S. demands that Mexico conduct military crackdowns, raids, arrests, and (worst of all) extraditions of cartel suspects to the United States for prosecution. All of that was bad for business.

But what happens when what is left of Mexican government autonomy is reduced any further, or entirely, too intimidated or bought off to retaliate on behalf of America?

The probability that Mexico’s newly muscular cartels become true puppet masters of Mexico’s central government stands at a high water mark, only rising the longer Biden allows his mass migration over the southern border to continue fabulously enriching them.

Dare anyone finally say this aloud, but: the more militarily powerful the cartels become compared to Mexico’s military, the more likely they will feel free to press a thumb down on the 212 million barrels of Mexican heavy crude oil the U.S. imported in 2021, and nearly a million barrels a day now. Perhaps, for any number of petty reasons of their own — say the U.S. incarcerates a beloved drug-trafficking relative — vengeful paramilitary overlords might want to meddle in Mexico’s huge auto part export business upon which American car makers heavily depend.

Cartel puppet masters less worried about American-ordered retaliations against them inside Mexico might feel emboldened to make thousands of American companies feel less secure operating in the country. Or they might do the same to the hundreds of thousands of American expatriates who make their homes and lives in Mexico. More Americans are concentrated in Mexico than anywhere else outside the U.S., an estimated 1.6 million.

When cartel power and whim to target American communities in Mexico overtakes the power and autonomy of Mexico’s central government to protect and deter on their behalf, what then?

“Your hypothesis does not seem far-fetched to me, in that the more power these groups have in Mexico, the less we can count on Mexico as a partner and the greater the challenge for us on everything dealing with Mexico,” Landeau said. “Even on energy … on auto component supply. It’s conceivable. Our economy is very bound up with Mexico.”