Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

I’m not big on linking to The New York Times, and this is the sort of story that Dwight over at Whipped Cream Difficulties covers more than I, but this article reveals some pretty shocking details about the drug war going on in Juarez. Like the fact that Juarez had 250 homicides. Last month.

By contrast, in 2008 (the most recent year I was able to find annual figures for), El Paso proper had 17 murders (plus another two for “other reporting areas,” which I take to mean unincorporated parts of the county). While it’s possible that the drug war across the border has increased that some, it’s fairly shocking to find out that more people are killed in Jaurez in a week than are killed in El Paso in a year. (Indeed going through each of the individual zip codes here, it appears that there have been no homicides so far in El Paso this year.)

Why the vast difference? A few thoughts:

• Say what you will about U.S. government officials, but they’re at least a couple of orders of magnitude less corrupt than their Mexican counterparts. If drug cartels started killing government officials on a regular basis, Uncle Tex and Uncle Sam would come down hard. The rule of law matters.
• Honest police officers seem to be a luxury good; rich nations can afford them, poor nations can’t. There are, of course, exceptions, but I can’t help believing that the average American cop is much more likely to be honest and responsive
• Guns don’t cause crime. Texas has some of the loosest gun laws in the U.S. Buy contrast, Mexico’s gun controls are fairly strict.
• Would legalizing drugs in America help? Probably. But I doubt it would solve all the problems, which are large, systematic, and endemic.

(Note that Reason (for which I’ve penned the occasional piece) covered this same paradox early last year, though I wasn’t aware of their article when I started working on this blog post. I do not agree with their conjecture that illegal immigration actually reduces crime, but pointing out problems with their reasoning would take a longer (and only tangentially related) blog post than I’m interested in penning to reply to a year-old piece.)

Further reading: Articles from The El Paso Times on the situation in Juarez.

Tags: Crime, drugs, El Paso, Juarez, Mexico, murder, narcoterrorism

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 7:04 PM and is filed under Crime, Foreign Policy, Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.