Oh Holy Ef (tip to Instapundit):
The forces [of El Chapo's drug gang] that emerged were in the literal sense awesome and awful. Heavy weaponry that would be familiar on any Iraqi, Syrian, or Yemeni battlefield was brought to bear. More and worse: custom-built armored vehicles, designed and built to make a Sahel-warfare technical look like an amateur’s weekend kit job, were rolled out for their combat debut. Most critically, all this hardware was manned by men with qualities the Mexican Army largely lacks: training, tactical proficiency, and motivation.
Then the coup de grace: as the Chapo sons’ forces engaged in direct combat with their own national military, kill squads went into action across Culiacán, slaughtering the families of soldiers engaged in the streets.
Cowed and overmatched—most crucially in the moral arena—the hapless band of soldiers still holding the second son finally received word from Mexico City, direct from President AMLO himself: surrender. Surrender and release the prisoner.
Ten years ago I was worried that Mexico might be one of the first foreign crises that the new President Obama would face.
I was wrong. But only in timing.
Mexico's authority doesn't seem to extend much north of the capital region, does it?
Will the government bite the bullet and embark on a full counterinsurgency response (podcast at the link)?
If the escalating drug gang violence keeps up and Mexican federal control keeps eroding, a wall on America's southern border will need to be replaced with minefields, cleared fields of fire, and bunkers.
And plenty of armed troops and paramilitary police manning the defenses. I'll note again that my grandfather in the New York National Guard was sent to the border before World War I when Mexico was in chaos.
We'll see if the only border Democrats want to defend is the Syrian Kurdish border with Turkey.
