Mexican drug war hits home

Mexico’s brutal drug lords crossed a new line last week, when a pregnant U.S. consulate worker and her husband were gunned down in Ciudad Juárez as their baby daughter cried in the back seat of the car. Lesley Enriquez, 35, and her husband had just left a party when gunmen sprayed their car with bullets. Their baby daughter, strapped in a car seat, escaped unharmed. Initial reports suggested the couple had been targeted because of their ties to the U.S. consulate, but the FBI said this week that a drug gang may have targeted the wrong car.

In the resort town of Acapulco, once relatively untouched by the drug violence, 17 Mexicans were found dead last weekend, four of them beheaded. Nationwide, about 50 people died in drug violence the same weekend, bringing the death toll this year to more than 1,750.

Mexico’s drug war is now ours, said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. It’s already been reported that one drug lord has ordered attacks on police on our side of the border, and last year “there was an authentic cartel hit” in Los Angeles. It’s time for the Obama administration “to start acting as if it’s at war—just as the cartels do.”

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“Militarizing” the conflict hasn’t worked, said John Ackerman in the Los Angeles Times. President Felipe Calderón has responded to the crisis by sending thousands of troops to police Juárez, only to see the murder rate skyrocket. Yet President Obama continues to express his “total confidence” in Calderón—and to throw money at the Mexican military.

Obama’s also throwing money at the failed “war on drugs,” said Blake Hounshell in ForeignPolicy.com. The Obama administration’s new drug budget “looks a heckuva lot like Bush’s drug budget,” with its focus on interdicting supplies over reducing drug dependency and thus reducing the demand for drugs. As long as we don’t address “the demand side of the equation,” we’ll just be “doubling down on a failed policy.”