This is the third in an excellent series of guest posts by Paul Rexton Kan. The first and second articles explored drugs in warfare and peak insurgency. Kan also recently contributed to a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgency.
The ongoing drug cartel violence in Mexico took an ominous turn last month. While the killings of two Americans who were consular employees in Ciudad Juarez was a serious escalation, even more troubling was an event that took place several miles away and several days later. Thirty people of the small Mexican town of El Porvenir walked the 860 yards to the US border, crossed it and went to a small Texas town of Ft. Hancock to seek political asylum from an explicit cartel threat. The threat was simple as it was cruel—leave before the outbreak of a gang war or your children will be targets…unless you provide 5000 pesos per child for protection. The gang was able to purge the town of human obstacles and earn money for weapons from those who could afford to pay the extortion money.
Political asylum cases are not new, but those who qualify are targeted for their political beliefs or ethnicity in countries that are typically repressive or coming apart. Mexico is neither and the reason people are being targeted in Mexico by cartels and gangs is not for what they believe or for who they are, but for what they do—police who investigate crimes; mayors who govern towns; journalists who write about the violence. And now people are being targeted merely because they are in the way, because of where they live.
If such acts of criminal cleansing are repeated and sustained, US communities will feel an even greater burden on their systems of public safety and public health from “narco-refugees”.
Given the ever increasing cruelty of the cartels, the question is whether and how the US should begin to prepare for what could be a new wave of people like those whose hometown of El Porvenir is Spanish for “the future”.
Paul Rexton Kan is currently an Associate Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. While finishing his Ph.D., he was the Deputy Director of the Center for China-United States Cooperation where he coordinated professional exchanges with Chinese officials from the policy institutions linked to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of State Security, and the People’s Liberation Army.
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