Killing scores of innocents and brutalizing small towns is one thing: seizing regional capital cities and crushing the national armed forces in open fighting in broad daylight is something else.Wow, that is a heck of a scenario on our southern border. Green (and Berlinski) apparently think it likely enough to share. I’m not sure what to think, it sounds possible. The Federalist has two articles about this battle and its implications here and here.
“Drug War” is a misnomer for reasons the Culiacán battle lays bare. This is not a mafia-type problem, nor one comprehensible within the framework of law enforcement and crime. This is something very much like an insurgency now—think of the eruption of armed resistance in Culiacán in 2019 as something like that in Sadr City in 2004—and also something completely like state collapse
What happens now, barring an exceedingly unlikely discovery of spine and competence by the government in Mexico City, is more and worse. The country is on a trajectory toward warlordism reminiscent of, say, 1930s China or its own 1910s.
Some of those warlords will be the cartels. Some of them will be virtuous local forces genuinely on the side of order and justice—for example the autodefensa citizen militias of Michoacán. Some of them will be the official state, grasping for what it can. Some of them, given sufficient time, will be autonomous or even secessionist movements: look to Chiapas, Morelia, et al., for that.
The lines between all these groups will be hazy and easily crossed. None will be mutually exclusive from the others.
The “China disintegrating into warlord fiefdoms” is historically valid, if not necessarily applicable. Mexico is a culture genuinely ambivalent about the ‘romance’ of armed men taking charge, dominating a situation.
The one thing we know for certain is that Mexicans don’t want us to interfere. We won’t unless they become a giant pain in our backside.
