Anthony Gregory and Eric Garris, Antiwar.com, 29 April 2010
Justin Raimondo’s latest column, “South of the Border,” has stirred controversy with its apparent advocacy of stricter U.S. border controls as a response to the drug-related violence terrorizing the American Southwest. While Antiwar.com has traditionally stuck to issues of foreign policy, immigration is a more than tangentially related matter, and the severity of the recent gang warfare and its prominence in the press prompted Raimondo to present his analysis of the problem and his favored response.
But there is another view, one more in line with Antiwar.com’s commitment to non-interventionism and opposition to militarism. While Raimondo is correct about the intolerable barbarity and increasing urgency of the border crisis, he appears to have ignored the root cause of this calamity. This has led him to advance a political solution that neglects the underlying, endemic problem of U.S. meddling in Latin America.
Describing the drug cartels’ actions as “terrorism,” Raimondo fails to mention that as truly horrific as this violence is, it is a logical, inexorable consequence of U.S. government actions. Like 9/11, the border warfare is blowback – in this case, blowback from U.S. drug policy, particularly Washington’s relentless strong-arming of its southern neighbor to serve as a satellite in America’s War on Drugs.