MEXICAN STANDOFF
200motels The Americas
A lot of people are very unhappy about our
border with Mexico. A couple of years ago the
complaint was about Mexicans sneaking into
the U.S. in search of jobs. Now there are no
jobs. Feel better?

Now the great fear is about narco-violence
spilling across the border. Mexican bandidos
are killing each other, police, soldiers and
innocent bystanders at the rate of 7-8,000 per
year. This is a very insalubrious situation, and
it needs to be addressed, but if the U.S.
legalized marijuana it would remove one of the
smugglers’ stock items, the same way that
ending alcohol prohibition eliminated alcohol
smuggling from Canada in the 1930’s. Now the
descendents of the alcohol smugglers are
among our most revered citizens, like the
Bronfmans and the Kennedys.

Any time you have borders, you have
problems. Europe has for millennia indulged in
a round robin of national, sectarian and
religious violence, as have Africa, Asia and
Latin America. The Central American republics
of Honduras and El Salvador once engaged in
a savage, bloody war over a soccer match.
Fundamentally, people are no better than
packs of apes or wild dogs, capable of
switching from acts of incredible culture and
refinement one minute to behaving like
marauding army ants the next. The sooner we
confront the beast within ourselves, like a
demon or Jack the Ripper, the sooner we can
mobilize our formidable resources to eliminate
him. We have declared war on malaria, cholera
and other scourges while turning a blind eye
on what is arguably the greatest threat to
public health, human aggression.

The U.S. has been mostly spared the
destructive fury of other nations because we
have been isolated from the other large
landmasses by oceans. We only have two
neighbors, which are both weak. But with
delivery systems and weapons becoming
increasingly sophisticated, our sense of
security is starting to break down, and certain
citizens are freaking out about North Korea,
Iran and Pakistan. Pearl Harbor and 9/11
proved that a determined adversary can wreak
havoc right here on American soil, though both
were partly due to our own government’s
lackadaisical standard of vigilance.

Conflict with Mexico has existed since the
European immigrants, invited by that country
to populate its Texas territory, aided by
American adventurers and chafing at Mexico’s
prohibition against slavery, rebelled and
established the Texas Republic. Soon after,
the administration of President Polk
manufactured a bogus pretext for invading
Mexico and forcing it to cede 50% of its
territory in the biggest land grab in the history
of the world, fulfilling the doctrine of Manifest
Destiny – that it was our manifest destiny to
have a contiguous territory from sea to shining
sea.

I’m not complaining. God Bless America. I dig
having Route 66 stretching all the way from
Chicago to the Santa Monica pier. We certainly
made good use of it. No less a humanitarian
than the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln,
derisively referred to the Mexicans as “
'greasers' who left all those resources
undisturbed for centuries, and three years
after we expropriated it we discovered gold in
California".

An equivalent today would be the Chinese
flooding into Siberia and taking half of it, which
has obviously occurred to the Russian
Kremlin, because they have announced a
project to spend $200 billion, which translates
into a lot of rubles, to upgrade their military,
and it’s doubtful that they feel threatened by
the U.S. or Europe.

Mexican-U.S. relations across the modern
border have always been problematical, but
mostly the threat has come from our side. In
the 1880’s the Arizona Territory was infested
by what were then derisively referred to as
“cowboys”. These cowboys were not simple
cowpunchers sitting around the campfire
playing “Red River Valley” on their harmonicas.
“Cowboy” was the term applied to itinerant
gangsters, killers and livestock rustlers. When
the great American chronicler of the old west,
Louis L’Amour, wrote that the country “was not
built by good men alone”, he was referring to
these bastards, who constituted such a threat
to life and property that even to this day
Arizona society retains a vestigial hardened
revulsion toward criminality and threats to
public order.

One specialty of these cowboys was to mount
raids across the border into Mexico, where
they would slaughter ranchers and drive their
herds of livestock back into the States, where
they sold them in industrial quantities to
American wholesalers. Not that they just
preyed on Mexicans. Any victim would do.
Cowboy gangs were sufficiently strong and
numerous that they terrorized the whole
territory and inhibited investment by legitimate
enterprises. They created such a state of
insurrection that the territorial governor, John
C. Fremont, requested the legislature to form a
militia to attack and eradicate them. The
Arizona Star newspaper adopted an editorial
policy that called for the cowboys to be
slaughtered without mercy:

“The organization of a volunteer company of
one hundred men to hunt them down or drive
them out of the territory must evidently end
with failures, from the fact that the cowboys are
too strong for such a small force, and in a
pitched fight would undoubtedly come out
victorious, which would result in making the
matters ten-fold worse than at present. We
either must have a strong force for the work or
not attempt it at all. It has been suggested that
two companies of United States Cavalry be
sent out to the section where the outlaws camp
and stay after them… until they be forced to
leave the territory or fight for their ground”.

Unfortunately, Fremont could not convince the
legislature to fund the enterprise and his
initiative collapsed. They didn’t want to spend
the money, reasoning that the U.S. Army was
available to do the job at no cost to them. This
failure to act by the legislature motivated the
ranchers, who were being terrorized worse
than the Mexicans were, to form a vigilante
committee, which hung several rustlers. In the
meantime, the rustlers assassinated several
lawmen.

U.S. President Chester A. Arthur ordered the U.
S. military to intervene:

“It has been made to appear satisfactorily to
me that it has become impracticable to
enforce, by the ordinary course of judicial
proceedings, the laws of the United States
within that Territory, and that the laws therein
have been forcibly opposed, and the execution
thereof forcibly resisted, and whereas the laws
of the United States require whenever
necessary in the judgment of the President, to
use military force”.

The Mexican government also made a
determined effort to secure their side of the
border, building an army fort and conducting
patrols.

In the meantime, the cowboys continued to
terrorize the territory by means of robbery,
mayhem and murder. The only policeman to
stand up to them was Tombstone Deputy
Sheriff Wyatt Earp who, with his brothers and
Doc Holliday, shot down the cowboy gang run
by the Clanton brothers at the OK Corral.

So this cross-border terrorism has deep roots
in history on both sides. It might subside for a
few years, but the ordinary distortions and
contradictions of international intercourse will
eventually manifest themselves in forms of
conflict. The ancient civilization of Mexico can
no more collapse because of the behavior of a
relative handful of gangsters than the U.S.
could be brought down by the bedlam initiated
by an insignificant group of renegade
cowboys.
We are at least fortunate that in Secretary of
State Clinton we have in authority a personage
who will not abandon her composure should
she happen to come under small arms fire.
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