Guns and the Border

President Barack Obama:

“Law should be like death, which spares no one” (Baron de Montesquieu).

On Saturday, January 15, the New York Times published an editorial, which, due to its importance and support for the Mexican cause against crime, I reproduced here some days later. I do this again today partly because the cause has worsened, and in the United States, atrophied minds for which this is of no consequence persist. This text stated:

“In December, the Obama administration signaled a welcome new resolve to block the torrent of illegal guns moving into Mexico and the hands of the drug cartels.

“The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced it was seeking emergency authority to require 8,000 gun dealers near the border to report multiple purchases by any individual of high-firepower semiautomatic rifles that use a detachable magazine.

“The bureau asked the Office of Management and Budget, which must sign off on the plan, to do so by Jan. 5. That date has come and gone without a decision.

“The death toll in Mexico’s drug wars is staggering — more than 30,000 people killed as of last year. The role of American-purchased guns in that carnage is also undeniable. In the past four years, more than 60,000 guns connected to crimes in Mexico have been tracked back to American gun dealers. About three-quarters of those weapons originated from gun shops in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California, the four states covered by the A.T.F. plan.

“The budget office needs to approve the A.T.F. Initiative … Not just at the border, but everywhere.”

This situation with factional powers is an evil that affects your country and Mexico, President Obama. Over there, one of them is called the National Rifle Association, and here its closest relative is the drug traffic. There, the NRA defends the Mexican drug cartels’ right to kill, and here, the latter uses its weaponry to kill the NRA’s supporters along the border. Those forces unified their interests in January, and if they have not annulled your agreement, referred to by the New York Times, they have at least managed to delay it up until last Monday, July 11 — another six months.

In the meantime, Mexico has registered the deaths of another 10,000 victims of drug trafficking and other branches of organized crime. There was the murder of the American customs agent, which raised concern in your country; Operation Fast and Furious was carried out, which caused you shame and anger, and we also found out that drug use in the United States continues to increase, a situation which allows us to applaud happily the laws of the free market and demand its most open and obliged respect because, additionally, the Unites States Constitution supposedly demands it.

The worst part of this problem, President Obama, is that the arrogance of power which your country displays — so attacked by William Fulbright more than three decades ago — continues to be as ominous and dangerous as ever — to such a degree that you mismanage the war against drugs in Latin America, not noticing the differences amongst all of the affected countries, but insisting in applying the same solutions in every case.

We Mexicans are grateful, President Obama, for your persistence in the application of that regulation, which is such a powerful weapon in the Republican electoral strategy. It is incredible, but at the same time impossible, to understand your political adversaries, who risk stating the gravest absurdities against the most basic logic in order to please the National Rifle Association and the large corporations that manufacture the guns whose sale they champion — despite whoever may fall, those on one side of the border or the other, but mostly on our side.

Since your political adversaries defend so adamantly the sale and traffic of American firearms, why don’t you publicly ask them, President Obama, about their incentives in supporting the interests of the drug traffic that is moving in a direction opposite to that of the arsenals purchased by the manufacturers of these drugs, the consumption of which continues to increase in almost all of the territory that you govern.

Because if the Republicans are also in favor of the free trade of drugs in your country, it would be important to clarify the point in these crucial moments before the official launch of the electoral campaign for the White House. Drug addicts are not yet in the majority in the United States, but they are a growing minority with enough economic power to become one more factional power, although one that is fatally doomed. Is that what the Republicans are defending, and for whom?

A topic for your campaign, President Obama.