Help Wanted

As Marina Rodriguez discussed in her commentary, Help in Mexico, help is needed indeed. The United States and Mexico have had their issues over the past centuries. As noted in our textbook, nobody knows that more than the state of Texas originally named Tejas y Coahuila.

Here in the past few decades there have been a number of issues between Texas and Mexico, most notably immigration.  How does this tie into the Mexican cartels?  That is quite simple and can be summed up by two words: supply and demand. Mexico picked up on the vacation resort idea and ran with it. Cozumel, Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, Acapulco, Mexico City have all realized the amounts of money that can be made from American tourists and will sell anything that isn’t nailed down. You want an all inclusive package, done. You want a cruise, sure no problem. In fact, we’ll create a cruise that stops in several tourist towns so that you can spend your dollars here. The crime rates aren’t skyrocketing in those towns. As Antonio Garza, the former US ambassador to Mexico notes, the violence is typically trafficker-on-trafficker. It’s the areas that don’t have tourism to rely on and lack economic growth that are in peril, like Ciudad Juarez near El Paso.  (Mexican Drug Trafficking) As mentioned in this article int the NY Times, the bloodshed is mostly between the Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas. 

Another perspective to bring light to the issues is that the US requires an extensive process to legally immigrate into this country. A great percent of those that immigrate illegally do so because they simply cannot afford to embark on the extensively time consuming and financially draining if not completely unaffordable process. The time, energy and money required are just not realistic. Lack of jobs in their area cause them to move into areas like Texas, Arizona, Nevada and California where they can find jobs until they are booted and sent back to Mexico. In the meantime, those drug cartels have found a very lucrative way to sustain their living. As long as the demand for drugs is high in the United States, the supply will continue its steady stream. The violence and killings, reported as high as 47,515 drug related deaths since 2006, are a direct result of the cartels ridding themselves of completion and livelihood. In the end, it all boils down to the need for jobs and economic growth. The problem involves both countries and US and Mexican government need to both be part of the solution.