It’s 10;30 AM, Saturday, December 13 and we’re at the port of entry just south of Columbus, New Mexico and headed into Palomas, Mexico.
To our surprise, a US Customs and Border Protection agent stands in the southbound lane. Since there is little traffic behind us, I ask him if they ever do checks for weapons being smuggled into Mexico.
“Yes,” he answers, then adds, “Ninety percent of the weapons that the drug cartels have come from the US.”
“How often do you do checks?” I ask.
“When there are two of us here. But we’re short staffed so that isn’t very often.”
“When was the last check?”
“I don’t remember,” he answers.
What happened to all the money in the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” Can’t we hire more agents so these checks for weapons will actually happen?
This was one of two requests Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum suggested to President Trump shortly after his inauguration. It was a question Ben Ray Lujan, US Senator from New Mexico asked Cabinet members Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem as well as Attorney General Pam Bondi many months ago. He never received an answer.
Isn’t this an important part of the war on drugs and drug cartels? These cartels are often more heavily armed than the law enforcement agencies that have to combat them.
And now American weapons are flooding Canada as well.
I mention this because it’s a part of an accelerating but confused war on drugs and cartels.
Sheinbaum’s second issue relates to our overwhelming demand for illegal drugs, creating a market that is irresistible to criminals in other countries. Look at Venezuela, Honduras, and Colombia and you will see how inconsistent our polices are.
President Trump is pushing closer to an invasion of Venezuela, aimed at dethroning its President, Nicolás Maduro.
It’s clear that Maduro lost the July 28, 2024 presidential election and remains in power illegally; he and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez have destroyed the economy of this oil-rich country. Twenty five percent of the country’s population or about 7 million people. have fled, including many thousands to the United States. It seems inconceivable that given that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, there is widespread poverty.
But, for starters, those Venezuelans who fled to the United States legally should be treated with respect, not deported en masse. After all, they are on our side. Yes, weed out those small numbers of gang members but give tjose who could add to our country a fair chance.
As for Maduro, how do you depose him without fomenting further chaos? Most experts contend that the boat strikes are illegal, that killing defenseless survivors are war crimes and that detaining oil tankers is close to an act of war.. But, setting that aside, are we prepared to do our share if Maduro is deposed?
Look at several other Latin American countries, however, and see the inconsistencies in our policies.
Start with Honduras. Imagine how difficult it was to investigate the former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, get an indictment, have him extradited to the US where he was convicted and given a 45 year sentence. This is a tiny country of about 11 million but a violent one with a murder rate five times that of the United States and an extraordinarily complicated one on the overland drug route from countries like Colombia to the US. In 2008, I was part of a delegation that welcomed a previous Honduran president, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya ( 2006-2009)to Colorado only to find out shortly thereafter that he was about to violate Honduran law by running for a second term as President. Members of his own party in their Congress opposed this and eventually the Supreme Court ordered the military to remove him from the country.
The military took him to Costa Rica but he is now back in Honduras and, believe it or not, his wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya is the current president.
When I was in Honduras right after Zelaya’s ouster, I interviewed dozens of Hondurans and they all said he was a drug dealer and they were glad to be rid of him.
The key point, however, is how can we have a consistent anti-drug effort and then turn someone like Hernández loose? In fact, the President has pardoned or given clemency to about 100 drug-related defendants in his two terms.
What does this do the morale of the men and women who out these criminal cases together, often at substantial personal risk?
Look at Colombia where the president is having a war of words with its outspoken President, Gustavo Petro. On a trip to Colombia in 2007 with an organization named the Defense Orientation Conference Association, we met with then-president Alvaro Uribe, his cabinet members and DEA officers and saw how close the US- Colombia anti-drug and anti- terrorism working relationship was. The now-largely destroyed US Agency for International Development ( US AID) was a major part of this effort. The country director told us that Uribe would call her after his troops had liberated an area from the FARC ( Revolutionary Forces of Colombia )and say he needed money for social programs like building schools. This would help keep the liberated area from drifting back to FARC control.
Now that relationship has been destroyed and Colombia is once again a major drug exporter.
Last, look at Mexico. Is this Venezuelan sword rattling a message to its president, Claudia Sheinbaum that she is next?
No one disagrees with the need to get illegal drug use under control so why isn’t there a coherent plan that also involves responsibility on our side? Why are we headed in two directions at once and what will that cost us.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by Morgan Smith, a New Mexico-based writer who frequently visits the U.S.-Mexico border. The column appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author. Smith can be reached at Morgan-smith@comcast.net.
