Reaper Drones Over Houston
A War in Mexico Would Mean War in America
Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
South Carolina 2029:
A few dozen recently graduated Marine Corps recruits are enjoying drinks and celebrating at the Cactus Lounge, Mexican Bar and Grill as the air fills with toasts, nervous chatter of their coming deployment, and sexual tension between the coed 18 and 19-year-olds. News from the war hasn’t been great and the similarity between the recent action in Guadalajara and their fathers’ and sergeants’ stories of Baghdad and Fallujah is fresh in everyone’s mind.
Then suddenly the restaurant goes silent, a new marine has gotten on his knees and proposed to a fellow graduate… As she says “Yes” the crowd erupts in cheers… and automatic fire pierces the air.
…
The Cactus Lounge Massacre marked one of the darkest turning points in the war. A mere dozen miles from Marine Corp Recruit Depot Parris Island a group of a dozen gunmen opened fire killing 8 and wounding 12 more almost instantly, several patrons and staff fled the restaurant as the gunmen opened fire killing or wounding 6 more, but 16 escaped into the surrounding woods and waterways. The gunmen then worked fast, barking orders in unaccented American English, detaining the survivors and executing those too wounded to move, they would be the lucky ones.
Kidnappings had become relatively common as the Cartels needed prisoners to exchange or ransoms to fund themselves… Security footage would later show some marines admonishing each other not to resist for fear of danger to the female recruits amongst them (this footage would remain Classified through 2042 and would stir controversy even in the 2040s… though as many commentators pointed out, in light of the “Gun-Free Zones” recently implemented 25 miles around military bases, there was little they could do). In total 14 civilians, Marines, and Naval staff were loaded into unmarked windowless vans, and driven away. None would survive.
5 days later 13 bodies were found Strung up from bridges in West Virginia, Florida, and Tennessee. Each showed signs of torture, the women showing signs of the worst sexual abuse before being shot, and the men covered in hammer blows having finally died of brain trauma and fractured skulls.
The 14th missing marine, Tyler Alvarez, was not amongst them. Leading to speculation that Alvarez was a Cartel collaborator and a significant manhunt ensued… His body was finally found a month later in a New Orleans homeless shelter. He had died of a fentanyl overdose which could have been easily prevented had the shelter’s Naloxone been replaced after an overdose 8 hours earlier. His identity was only determined at the coroner’s , where poorly healed hammerblows and fractured bones, as well as a series of drafted then crossed out suicide notes, told the story…
He’d “won” the gladiatorial games that the gunmen made the men fight.
This would spark outrage in America and start what future historians would dub the “No Prisoners” chapter of the war, as Congress authorized new drone and airstrike campaigns as well as new Rules of Engagement allowing “Signature Strikes” previously used in Afghanistan and Pakistan: drone-strikes on unknown people merely based off behaviour observed from 20,000 feet… These strike would be heavily criticized after birthday parties, weddings, and teenagers playing soccer were targeted and killed. After the exspansion of these strikes to Texas and other border states, they would be directly cited in the Mexican, Texan, and New American Republic’s Declarations of Independence, acting as a major recruiting motivation for nationalist insurgencies and militias across the region.
Before all of this though the Massacre would immediately demoralize American forces. As the subsequent (and much crticized) general “Confine to Base”, expanded after follow on murders of Military personel on leave visiting family, signifigantly reduced already waning military prestige and recruitment, necessitating the reimplementation of Stop-Loss meassures formerly employed during the Iraq war and finally the reimplementation of conscription.
“El Coyote” Head of the New Jaurez Joint Cartel, was the man who ordered the attack on the Cactus Lounge and similar massacres on US soil, he would be killed in a US airstrike in 2032. But his Luetenant and successor, Cartel Boss, Mexican Nationalist Front commander, and Future Mexican President, Jaun Herrera would reveal in his 2054 memoirs Smuggling to Freedom: From Narco to Patriot that the US exspansion of the war had been Coyote’s intent, and that the NJJC had been losing members and revenue for months before the wider war and resultant chaos in the US changed their fortunes making recruitment and smuggling operations vastly easier, even as the first American “Free Men” Militias began to fight their own war against the ATF Paramilitaries and FEMA Press-Gangs brought about by the 2030 Gun Confiscation and 2031 Conscription Acts.
Herrera’s memoirs would momentarily reheat tensions between Mexico and the Undivided States of America (comprising 28 of 50 former states) with both sides accusing other’s of warcrimes and forcing 18 year olds to fight to the death at gunpoint against friends and brothers… before the start of the third Russo-Ukraine War took the controversy out of the news cycle.
None of the above is entirely fictional
Events such as these have all already occurred either within the Mexican and South American drug wars between Cartels and South American governments or in America’s wars and “interventions” over the past 70 years or in “Decolonization” wars as European empires collapsed in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
The thing that would be unique about a US military intervention in Mexico against the Cartels is how continuous with America Mexico is geographically, culturally, and demographically.
The insanity of the old jingoist war cry “We must fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here.” Will nowhere be argued harder, nor be as completely backward as in the case of Mexico.
Republican figures from Trump to Dan Crenshaw to Vivek Ramaswamy to Tom Cotton, have all hinted or openly suggested US military force be used against the Mexican drug Cartels with or without the permission and cooperation of the Mexican government… Indeed, the possibility of a Military Intervention in Mexico is quickly becoming a, if not THE, major point of agreement between the Republican Neocon and America First factions… Potentially serving as the basis of an Intra-party peace whereby the populists get a pull-back from the empire, an increased focus on the Southern Border, and preference for legal Americans… In exchange for massive amounts of money and a new forever war for Raytheon and the Military Industrial Complex.
On paper, this seems tolerable to your average right-wing populist… That’s what the military should be used for… Keeping the border secure! Not subsidizing foreigners’ Money laundering, Girl schools, and Pride Festival grifts….
Except for the fact an intervention into Mexico would be Imperial Suicide.
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The South and Central American drug war(s) is one of the most violent wars in modern history, depending on who’s counting Over a million people have died in the conflict since 1970, and that’s not counting the over 50,000 Americans who die every year from opioid-related deaths, or the 20+ thousand American homicides every year, the majority of them in some way related to gangs that fund themselves off drug sales, or the direct poor judgment of a drug user.
On paper, you can see why one might think if any international goings-on warranted US intervention it’d be this one, except the sheer scale and proximity to America makes such an intervention nigh suicidal.
The Global Drug Trade is valued 200-300 billion per year the vast majority of which passes through the Central American Cartels… If they capture merely 1/3-1/2 of that that’s more than the value of all foreign Aid to Ukraine since the start of the war… And they do that every year.
This is in addition to all the money the Cartels receive from protection rackets they run, the cartelization of other industries they’ve affected (every avocado you buy is significantly overpriced thanks to their schemes), and the massive amount of money they and their associates bring in by effectively taking over and governing large swathes of Mexico, mostly under a Mexican Government coat of paint. US Northern Command estimates 30-35% of Mexico is effectively ungoverned, ie. Cartel Governed… that’s an area the size of Texas and a population comparable to Iraq.
A US intervention against the Mexican Cartels would be taking on organized forces that have been under arms longer than the Taliban, are better funded than Ukraine, Have a population and territory bigger than Saddam had in Iraq, and some of whom, as in the case of the Los Zetas Cartel, are themselves former Special Forces trained by American Green Berets.
America struggled with all its previous wars and this would be vastly worse… Border hawks are fond of saying that we need to stop thinking of the Cartels like Mafias and start thinking of them like ISIS, and that’s why there needs to be an increasingly military response… expressing an exasperation that so many don’t understand what’s happening South of the Border, and I want to grab them and shake them “Do YOU understand!?”
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America has had a massive advantage in every war it’s fought in the past 100 years: America has always been fighting elsewhere.
America’s population, industry, backend logistics, population, recruiting infrastructure, training facilities, taxing bureaucracy, politicians… They’ve all been safely 10,000 miles away across oceans from the enemy and pretty much untouchable, the one exception of 9/11 setting off a chain of bad decisions, overreach, and national panic so bad that it shaved decades off the national finances and may have started the unwinding of the empire.
For 100 years Americans have been able to target their enemy’s vulnerable infrastructure, kill their recruits as they trained in camp, firebomb their offices and industry, and assassinate their core leadership… and all their enemy had to swat at was the the armed and trained sharp end of the spear, the soldiers deployed specifically to fight them… not even at their major logistical bases, but at their in-country Green zones and forward operating bases.
Aside from 9/11, the closest any enemy has gotten in the past 100 years is for 1 day when the Japanese managed to strike a US military base on Pearl Harbor, and Germany managing to get its U-Boats to America’s shorelines… That’s it.
For 70 years, America has been using a 20ft pike to fight monkeys in cages … And somehow these outranged, out-teched, out-logistics’ed enemies won half the time.
A military intervention against the Cartels would instantly end that and show just how vulnerable American society and infrastructure is.
The murder rate in Ciudad Juarez is 103 per 100,000. One of the murder capitals of the world.
The murder rate in El Paso, Texas is 4.4 per 100,000. About the US average.
These are the same city geographically.
The entire place is less than 20 miles across from desert to desert.
Why the disparity?
Is border security that strong? Are American police just so upstanding and incorruptible that they don’t let any crime slide?
El Paso, and the US in general, are peaceful because the cartels are happy to maintain an unspoken agreement:
The US Keeps its military and policing assets out of Mexico, the Cartels keep their violence in Mexico.
Sure both of them slip over: DEA agents and US Intelligence “assist” Mexican authorities, and the Cartel and it’s partners have people killed in the US for ratting out or stiffing them on deals… but at least for the cartels, there’s a very clear understanding to keep things quiet and non-provocative.
In Mexico, the cartels might kidnap dozens of people involved in some protest or political activity that goes against the interests of one of their stooges and make them fight to the death with hammers (That was a real example)… but they try to keep things quiet or let American based gangs (who understand how to keep heat low) handle the violence north of the border because they don’t want to have to deal with drone strikes and SEAL Teams.
If America starts a hot drug war intervention in Mexico that incentive is gone… Indeed at that point the cartels become heavily incentivized to strike back WITHIN America, if only for deterence… Hell if the US brings the full war on terror playbook to bear, the Cartels might suddenly start talent-scouting American Extremist groups they can train and fund… or use political assassination and terrorist savagery to try to destabilize the US and turn America’s internal divisions hot.
If America were to start drone-striking Cartel bosses, It’s easily conceivable they might hire assassins to just start killing US officials for no other motive than to try and cause an internal security and gun-control crisis which might start a hot internal-US conflict.
There’s absolutely no reason for Mexican drug war violence to stay south of the border if US military assets don’t stay North of the Border… which of course means a good chunk of the fighting would be North of the Border… And intensive fighting at that. There’s no reason the Cartel’s playbook of kidnapping the families of government officials, blackmail, and armed militias wouldn’t let them start setting up hidden bases and operations within the US… Hidden bases that would have to be retaken, operations that would have to be subjected to random unconstitutional checkpoint stops and searches to disrupt. Further diluting American civil liberties and risking an American armed backlash…
And of course like every single US intervention from Korea, to Vietnam, to Afghanistan, to Iraq… The political considerations and divided political opinion will inevitably result in an under-commitment of manpower and money until some outrage requires escalation, at which point the enemy will have learned how to counter the tactics, making the escalation in turn an under-commitment.
I can guarantee you the first US drone strike in Mexico will occur after months if not years of aerial surveillance, at which point the Cartels will have already learned how to avoid drones, so inevitably the majority of deaths will be warcrimes against innocent civilians… likewise when that drone campaign gets expanded to contested US territory, and then again when that campaign gets expanded to fight American militia groups that rose up in response to the civilian deaths caused by the initial drone campaign.
Stop trying to give the same people that fucked up Afghanistan and Iraq and all their surrounding countries, and now are currently fucking up Ukraine and all of its surrounding countries, a future chance to fuck up Mexico and all of it’s surrounding countries…. America is one of those countries.
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Instead, the focus should be on building the wall, and seeing what can be done to choke off funding to the cartels…
Honestly probably what’d be best is to legalize/decriminalize Cocaine, pick out some of the more promising gangsters and cartel members to take over that trade, and then use the revenue they’d get from a “legal” Cocaine trade to incentivize them and the swamp of Mexican officials to wipe out the opioid trade (and kill or set to flight all their rivals practicing that trade, with their protection rackets and price fixing schemes as the prize to be won)
It’d lock America into its 1980s drug problem, but that’s vastly better than Fentanyl and the opioid crisis.
The established cartel bosses have won, they are the major players in Mexican society and government… you’re only going to be able to affect it on the margin without a major war.
It’d be absolutely insane to kick this hornet’s nest right on the US border…
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So of course it’s exactly what they’re going to do, This is how Raytheon and Lockheed-martin will get the last drop of blood out of the American empire, and this will be the initial wound that sets off the second civil war just like the Russo-Japanese War stated a decade of imperial and social collapse in Russia…
Expect future historians to talk about this moment as when the Monarchical-Corporatized-Cartel first started to outcompete Democracy, and the Cyberpunk era superseded the end of history.
Learn Spanish.
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P.S. Had someone ask on another forum to the effect of: Well Obviously America could do this with enough ruthless commitment, China would just ruthlessly crush these people, likewise look at El Salvador where they just arrested all the gang members. This is clearly a problem with the US just being unwilling to go all out.
Which: No. You misunderstand the scale of the problem.
The US probably could cripple 50% of the domestic US drug trade by 5x-ing the US prison population, which in and of itself might start a hot ethnic conflict on a par with the 1970s (not all Americans use drugs equally, and of those that do they're certainly not equal in their likelihood to get caught)...
The challenge is Hostily imposing this on another country of 126 million, where something like 30-50% of the local government is just pretending to be an ally whilst taking bribes and actively integrating with the cartels.
China has a problem like this, it's called corruption, and Chinese Corruption is absolutely impossible to root out not least because there isn't really a non-corrupt faction and every arrest for corruption is really just backdoor purging by the various factions.
So lets say America goes balls to the wall in Mexico, Full invasion of Iraq. HALF A MILLION US military personnel and then 200-400 thousand continuously once established, This is basically all the US can spare, with 1.4 million active-duty military personnel total, this is everyone but the people actually maintaining the bases and operating the Ships back in the US and around the empire...
The thing is that wasn't enough in Iraq. There was the entire war during the occupation which was only reduced down to a dull roar with the surge.
And this was Iraq with a population one third the Size of Mexico, a Shia Majority, and Kurdish minority that were being empowered by the US intervention against their hated Sunni minority rival who was the one actually fighting the US... And even then it didn't work, and Sunni ISIS arose within a decade, and the country is still divided between militias and local warlords.
You do that in a country with 3x the population, 2x the GDP, several massive cities, and insurgent networks that are basically already adapted to resist US surveillance (these guys have been paranoid about cellphones since the 80s, many cartel bosses simply do not allow cellphones within 200 meters of them, since they assume the NSA is already going full tilt spying on them, and that will be all of them instantly if the ones that don't start getting picked off)...
And also 10 cities with populations over a million where drone strikes basically can't be done, one of which is a ten-million-person mega-city that will just devour an army that tries to occupy it...
Oh ya and it's a permanently profitable trade. So you have to maintain this, for decades... because there's no way you're getting rid of all the corrupt Mexican officials, many of whom are popular and elected, and many of whom are the military... and it will instantly replace itself the second you leave.
RAND had a paper to the effect that The golden ratio for hostile occupations of conquered people is 1 soldier per 50 civilians... that's what was used in Germany after WW2 and Kosovo, America's 2 successful occupations.
America would need 2-3 million to do that in Mexico, or twice the number of people in the entire military... so you'd need a draft, which would be resisted, the resistance of which would be funded by the cartels... which would require further military force and straining of America's already stretched thin police to put down...
You see how this quickly becomes the American state itself being stretched thin, across AMERICA, even if the government magically bites the bullet and goes full force from the start, instead of making the easy call like they did in Vietnam and Iraq and massively under-committing thus letting their enemy organize and create networks, and adapt to the hardest hitting tactics, whilst the politicians are still calling their forces in country "Advisors" and telling the American people they're not at "war", whilst various military planners are actually kind-of secretly hoping something will happen and dozens of Americans will be killed so they can have popular support to actually do something that might be kind of effective...
It'll inevitably be something America sleepwalks backward into with some minor commitment, turning into casualties, turning into bigger commitments, turning into more casualties, turning into outrage, turning into a war, turning into a Quagmire... turning into Vietnam...
Except America would never be able to pull out of this Vietnam because it's RIGHT THERE, and the conflict would immediately be inside America's border.
El Salvador succeeded in its campaign because it's a country that was both unnecessary to the drug trade (so once the margins got high enough the trade could go elsewhere), it had the security force fully committed, it had local political will... and it did vastly less than you're thinking because they took out only 3 specific gangs not the trade itself (strongly suspect the El Salvadorian regime is backdoor participating in the international trade for personal profit just like Noriega, and their policy is just making a deal with the population to not let it affect El Salvador directly... so there was a massive profit motive in El Salvadorian security forces crushing MS-13, they were probably their rivals)
You paint a terrifying scenario, similar to what I've heard/read from people who definitely know what they're talking about, so this is all the more terrifying because of how plausible it is. Maybe this will be the Black Swan event that initiates hyperinflation of the dollar, and because the GAE's leaders run the country like a hedge fund, where nearly everything the government owns has been mortgaged or sold off and everything the government needs it basically rents, the GAE will quickly find itself unable to pay for anything, including the war effort. I'm sure those cunning Chinese Communist Party bosses are already working on manipulating Mexican and American leaders into this conflict (10% for the big guy!), and they'll be happy to supply the cartels and the Mexican government with everything they need to cause as much damage to the GAE as they can. Definitely this is a sobering addendum to John Carter's post about why America cannot win WWIII (https://barsoom.substack.com/p/why-america-cant-win-world-war-iii).