Mexico's former public security head convicted by U.S. of taking cartel bribes | Hacker News Reader

Mexico's former public security head convicted by U.S. of taking cartel bribes

npr.org

156 pointsxrd118 comments

> A former smuggler said García Luna shared a document containing U.S. law enforcement information about a 2007 seized cocaine shipment, the AP reported.

NPR really burying the lede here.

[1]

> But the story that most got me was when El Grande, or Sergio Villarreal Barragán, described how the traffickers got their seized cocaine back. He was talking about Mexico’s biggest ever cocaine haul, when the marines took down 23 tons off a ship from Colombia in the port of Manzanillo in 2007. I covered it at the time and it was a big deal, proof that President Felipe Calderón, the boss of García Luna, was taking on the cartels. The New York Times sent a correspondent to watch it burn, and he described the “pomp and ceremony” as the white cocaine morphed into a black cloud.

> But it was all a lie, according to El Grande. “We exchange fake drugs for the good drugs,” he told the court. “At a ranch where we trained our hit men, we created a small factory so that we could develop the bricks…We made a mixture of sugar and flour so that we could compress them. They were actually mixed with acetone and ether. And we had them dry out. Once they were dried, we would cover them with varnish so that they would look shiny. And we would package them as any other cocaine brick. And that's how we did it…We transferred them to the Manzanillo port, and I delivered them.”

> You caught speculations that cartels were pulling such stunts. But to hear it told in a U.S. federal court really drives it home. The destruction of drugs was a simulation. You could not trust what you saw with your own eyes. The Mexican government, or elements of it, had created a whole simulation it was fighting a war on cartels when really it was working with them.

[1] https://ioangrillo.substack.com/p/so-is-mexico-a-narco-state

(h/t https://twitter.com/ElParece/status/1628414077461573634)

Thanks for sharing, I found that article pretty moving

> that does not mean the entire Mexican state is illegitimate. School teachers get up every morning to teach millions of children from the roughest barrios to the southern jungles. Doctors and nurses save lives every day despite many hospitals being in dire need of repair. And rubbish collectors keep coming to my corner every morning to take away the endless garbage this metropolis of Mexico City churns out.

I hope to god they find a way out of this, it's a great country that can really do better than this...

The CIA did the exact same thing with KMT soldiers in Burma smuggling heroin in the 1970s. It's in The Politics of Heroin by Alfred McCoy. A great book if you want to understand the interplay between intelligence agencies and drug dealers.

Then they exchanged heroin for fake heroin and burned the fake heroin for US journalists. There is nothing new under in the sun in our stupid war on drugs.

Peter Dale Scott recently published an old manuscript of his on the topic, as well as a couple podcasts with McCoy. It's fascinating stuff.

https://americanexception.com/private-war-enterprise-in-asia...

>We made a mixture of sugar and flour so that we could compress them. They were actually mixed with acetone and ether. And we had them dry out. Once they were dried, we would cover them with varnish so that they would look shiny.

that sounds like one terrible fire to be anywhere near.

> that sounds like one terrible fire to be anywhere near.

You think you're free basing smoke from a mountain of burning cocaine bricks and you end up inhaling something dangerous instead. Sounds like a big problem.

Flower (and I guess sugar) can be explosive like a rudimentary fuel bomb. It has to be aerated first. If it’s tightly packed it’ll just smolder. If it’s aerated enough a shockwave will go through and oxidize it all at once. It’ll be one hell of an explosion. With cocaine you could probably be safe by standing up wind of the burn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Georgia_sugar_refinery_ex...

If you work at a grain mill they'll probably show you the video.

Is there some reason cocaine can't cause a dust explosion?

Mainly because I’ve never heard of one despite many large quantities of cocaine being burnt off after seizures (though maybe it was never cocaine). Cocaine melts (which I think is endothermic - chemistry class was a long time ago) and it doesn’t have as many oxygen atoms available in the molecule increasing the aeration requirement. Under ideal circumstances I’m sure just about anything that oxidizes could be made into a fuel air bomb but for it to happen accidentally it must be able to readily happen in much less than ideal circumstances. For things like flour particles can get drawn up into the smoke clouds mix with air in enough quantity to produce a shockwave and that explosion can cause more particles to get thrown into the air for secondary explosions.

It’s astonishing that a conviction was reached on witness testimony alone. There was no physical evidence or video-- just testimony from other drug smugglers who obviously wanted good deals themselves.

I don't doubt the stories of the witnesses. It is just surprising to see a conviction on this alone.

The US justice system routinely hands out life sentences especially in drug cases with zero physical evidence all thanks to "conspiracy laws".

Leading up to the verdict this was surprising to me too

Far fetched testimony from those that have nothing to lose - that even contradicted their previous testimony

Ever read Anabel Hernandez? You would be surprised about the evidence

>It is just surprising to see a conviction on this alone.

Maybe someone got a promotion out of it? Maybe? Haha. I'm sure someone was promoted.

How can we expect anyone in power in these cartel countries to be free of corruption. They all have a choice of payment, in silver or lead -- https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=plata%20o%20...

The only sane answer is to legalize, regulate, and tax all drugs. This needs to be followed by treating drug abuse/addiction as a health issue (not criminal).

It's interesting, that's what happened in Portland, right?

It is really curious to think about the cartels as large startups. If you take that leap, it would be logical that they would be violently opposed to decriminalization. Like competing gangs would be killing people, and the cartels would be doing anything they can to convince the local government to redact that decision.

I'm not saying I've got any evidence that cartels are committing crimes in places where drugs are legalized to change laws, but it is interesting that Portland crime has increased a lot. Many people will say that's because of liberal politicians. But there is other information that says that more policing almost never reduces crime directly. And the corollary is that reducing police, either by defunding or attrition, wouldn't cause increases in crime, right?

If anyone has perspectives on what Portland did wrong, I'm interested in hearing it. It is really bizarre to me as a native Portlander that crime seems so excessive. I never felt unsafe in the prior forty years and things seem very different now. The only two big differences were the endless protests against police brutality and the legalization of drugs. Why did this crime surge increase so much in Portland?

One other thing to note is that the drugs have changed. In general as the years have went on, drugs have increased in potency and side effects.

An interesting piece from the Atlantic about how meth has changed: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

whoa this reads almost exactly like the script for Breaking Bad... 2006 p2p vs sudafed, all the details even the Czech Republic...

They mention in the article it was a subplot on the show! That show was so good because it felt so close to reality, and turns out, it was.

That's an incredible and scary article. Thank you.

The supply side of the drugs is still done by illegal organizations. Portland decriminalized demand which increased the total amount of drug trade without formalizing the drug trade. More violence is a natural consequence.

But why? I'm open to this idea, but it seems antithetical to what I believe about human nature. Simply using drugs isn't IMHO a pathway to violence. That comes, again IMHO, from desperation and other factors. If you decriminalize drugs, the theory is that you would remove the desperation and could fund recovery through taxation. I'm sure it is more complicated than that, but the drug war isn't working either and at far greater cost. But maybe the vested interests prefer it that way?

For harder drugs, the desperation is still there, because ultimately it's harder to keep a job down with harder drugs than it is with, say, weed, which plenty of people are using without impacting job performance.

The key point here is cost. A drunk can beg for enough money to drink their way to an early grave every day. A heroin or meth addict cannot possibly beg enough to support such a habit at street prices. Reduce cost watch crime plummet.

According to the Atlantic article posted above, the prices for some drugs are plummeting already (10x drop in the last decade):

> With labs popping up everywhere, the price of a pound of meth fell to nearly $1,000 for the first time on U.S. streets by the late 2010s—a 90 percent drop from a decade earlier in many areas.

Fentanyl is much, much cheaper. Crime is doing the exact opposite of plummeting.

Perhaps, but that isn't a complete solution. I watched smuggled cigarettes being transferred from one semi to another when I was hitching around Spain back in the 90s (the Spanish guy driving the car told me this is what I was seeing). There was profit in crime still because there was profit in dodging the tax.

Probably not profit in the $100 millions though. This is when you start seeing brutal defense of those profits.. turf war, beheadings..

The cartels at this point have diversified into avocado farming, iron mining, and forestry. Not to mention human trafficking, which makes them some $13 billion a year.

The war on drugs has been a disaster and should be ended, but saying that legalising all drugs will solve the cartel problem is too simplistic. And while legalising heroin and prostitution and instituting open borders could overall be better policy, these are a bridge too far for most Americans.

As you point out, the cartel problem won’t be solved by any single isolated action, however big it is.

Legalizing drugs is the obvious first step, but yes, there’s thousands of other steps and a whole whack-a-mole game starting from there to weaken the bigger players.

Also, it’s a very dangerous game of whack—a-mole.

One previous strategy was to try and cut off the heads of the cartels, but it didn’t stop the drug smuggling, and increased violence due to the power vacuum. The cartels that would win out were often worse.

How much worse can we get? There’s open warfare on Mexican streets. Mexican gangs are active across the U.S. human trafficking is a well established part of their business. Slavery and forced labor is not unheard of among cartel.

Do the worse gangs have their eyes on nuclear weapons, chemical warfare?

You are describing the worst. This policy already happened, and the cartels already transformed.

> Since Calderón launched his military strategy against organized crime, there was an alarming increase in violent deaths related to organized crime: more than 15,000 people died in suspected drug cartel attacks since it was launched at the end of 2006.[62] More than 5,000 people were murdered in Mexico in 2008,[63] followed by 9,600 murders in 2009; 2010 saw more than 15,000 homicides across the country.[64]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war

> the Mexican theater of the global war on drugs, as led by the U.S. federal government

Fuck no...the same useless war framing exported to neighbor countries, getting the military involved and bearing thousand of deaths from there.

I'm mildly pissed at banks trying to track every single of my transactions and making it so difficult to move money between countries, or even open accounts without dozens of papers proving squeaky cleanness, but at least it looks like an effort in the right direction that could have an effect on the cost of illegal transactions. This war thing iin comparison is such a mess.

This really isn't a HN story.

However, the American consumer funding both sides on the war on drugs for half a century seems a bit insane.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs

And not only that, the American pressure for other states to do the same makes the problem bigger instead of smaller. It should be evident that it doesn't work, because the same system creates opportunities: when they take a drug dealer, another one pops out in their place, when they make it harder to traffic heroin, opiates or other drugs take its place.

I certainly don't want hard drugs to run unchecked in Mexico, where I live, but fostering a black market is not the solution either.

So what do you believe is the solution that prevents hard drugs from running “unchecked” while not fostering a black market? “Education” about how bad drugs are for you?

Remove the profit motive by letting junkies get their fix at pharmacies just like the rest of us.

Start with not forcing producer countries into disastrous trade agreements that upend their labor markets (especially in agriculture) and food sovereignty.

How are they forced? Would they be better off if they didn’t sell to the US?

The US meddles directly in the politics of other countries to ensure that pro-US business leaders take power. That’s not a secret. Other countries can sell to the US while maintaining strong industrial policy, just look at Switzerland.

Do you think the decisions developing countries make are screened through their citizens? They're typically corrupt authoritarian regimes, only the hands of the political and rich elites are greased, the general public has little power.

Are you better off if I punch you in the face or kick you in the groin? It's a false choice, and it's pretty psychopathic.

They'd be better off with free flow of both labor AND capital; in my humble opinion. Allowing flow of goods/capital but not (in general) labor seems pretty cruel IMO, as all the capital can get sucked out to where it can see highest profits (US) while labor is left to languish and compete to the bottom due to losing the efficiencies their capital provided. NAFTA and its successors are a nasty deal to the common Mexican.

I don't think they were fucked over by the US so much as their own politicians, though. Their government could have said "we're not gonna sign NAFTA unless there is generous visa-free flow of non-criminals across the border" or whatever and honestly I think they could have strong armed America into agreeing to it, we're "greedy" enough we would have went with it.

"their own politicians" gained power with the help of the US, and paid them back with policies that benefitted the US:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-20-mn-4009-s...

It's absurd to suggest Mexico could have strong-armed the US.

I mean realistically the US has little to lose by letting Mexicans (actual Mexicans with Mexican citizenship) into the US the sort of way an (USA)American can go the other way. Frankly it's a pretty weak concession. I think we would have done it in exchange for free flow of capital if pressed.

I think that’s completely off the table in the US politically. Look at how hard it is to even get existing quotas raised or legal immigration processes streamlined. Most of the country would be extremely opposed to such a policy, and many for less “noble” reasons than economics. What matters is real life, and when a huge part of the population suddenly has to contend with labor competition willing to work for 1/4 the price, you’re talking about a civil war.

You may be right but i think the 1/4 the price notion is misplaced. It's when they are in Mexico that they're 1/4 the price, and that's already legal due to free flow of goods with NAFTA. I can pay $2, $3 an hour and have the Mexican produce the widget and import it. If the Mexican is allowed to come to USA, now I have to either pay more to the remaining Mexicans (supply vs demand) or pay them minimum wage in the USA, which actually makes them MORE EXPENSIVE competition and thus the (USA)American working stiff relatively more attractive to employ.

When Mexicans can come work in the US they generally have to be paid more (at the very least due to minimum wage). So we'd be angry because now we're competing against.... more expensive labor? It's not the voting masses of people at the bottom that benefit from current policy, it's those at the top. NAFTA is the worst of both worlds for labor on both sides, which makes it democratically unattractive.

This is an Econ 101 hypothetical scenario. In the real world, there would be several years (or more) of massive economic dislocation. The bottom line is you would immediately be increasing the labor pool vastly in a certain number of trades/industries. You're also only focused on the US-- Mexico would suffer even more by having more of its most mobile, ambitious laborers flee the country.

why do you think their goal is to do what their propaganda says it is??

clearly if their real objectives weren't getting accomplished they would have changed their strategy already, therefore the war on drugs has not failed it's just that the real objectives are not what we were told

The minute there is an ethical supplier/government available, I will switch. Until then, c'est la vie

Wait until you see all our other wars. America is a war faring country. The economy is dependent on them being at war. It's political fodder. Economic necessity. If there is always a war on drugs at the border, we'll always fund the departments to go fight it.

Makes me wonder if any factions of the US government is working in cahoots with cartels.

They definitely are. Drugs are not teleported to American consumers when they reach the border, there has to be an equally corrupt distribution structure in the American side, and that only works involving corrupt officers. A lot of money attracts a lot of scum, as we say in Mexico, "con dinero baila el perro".

There have been instances of law enforcement trafficking arms to the cartels, because "we're going to track the arms and arrest them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal

> There have been instances of law enforcement trafficking arms to the cartels

They didn't traffic arms.

They "purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them".

Strategy that is a corner stone of law enforcement so it's surprising the outrage at it being applied in this situation.

Were they planning on grabbing the guns back before or after they were used to execute Brian Terry?

Seems like the criticism of this operation may be justified.

If anything, Terry's death was probably helpful to their goal of expanding gun control.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/documents-atf-used-fast-and-fur...

It's a dumb strategy considering they won't be able to track those arms when they cross to Mexico, those weapons won't make their way back to USA, Mexico smuggles drugs, USA smuggles military weapons.

Those grenades, machine guns, 50 cal rifles, etc. are going to stay in Mexico, and will be used to kill Mexicans for years.

Allowed? No. Forced.

That was the stated objective, but ATF emails showed another motive, which was to use cases created by gunwalking in order to justify new gun control regulation.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/documents-atf-used-fast-and-fur...

So they encouraged the sale of 2000 dangerous weapons (https://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/atf_investigation_01_1112...), which were then used in hundreds of crime scenes, didn’t make any major arrests, then turned around and said “Look how terrible these weapons are. Someone needs to restrict their use”. That’s pretty damning…

I guess the cartels are really just good Samaritans trying to encourage USA to legislate better drug laws. It's not a crime if your intentions are good!

Just logically, if you think of the scale that the Cartels are working in, there is a missing link in the narrative here. Mexican cartels are completely intertwined with the Mexican government. This is well known in Mexico, as is well known that the US is the greatest consumer of these substances.

Organizations at this scale have infrastructure that rivals a multi-national corporations. But in our collective imaginary, we never talk about who receives it in the US. The story goes cartels -> ??? -> small to medium street dealers. At the scale of this problem, we are simply dealing with a level of sophistication that requires connections in VERY high places of the US government.

That’s not really a mystery. The Latin kings, MS 13, and other large, Hispanic gangs are the key to bringing drugs into the US.

All the mexican cartels have known leadership with names and faces - who are the leaders of the gangs you mention ?

The US has cameras everywhere - what do they look like ? Where do they live ?

The US doesn't have cameras everywhere. I think you're thinking of the UK.

The US has private cameras all over the place, and spy sats looking at most things

Have you been in any of the major American supermarkets recently? The number of cameras is ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a similar number of cameras/person in the US. A town near me put up cameras on several intersections about 10 years ago, I was told they were for monitoring construction and traffic during the project but they are still all in place.

In federal prison, those are prison gangs.

Can you link to a source?

insight crimecrime is a good source.

https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/mexico-cartel-us-gang...

> The story goes cartels -> ??? -> small to medium street dealers

The "???" is not a mystery. It's well known that they work with the many large gang groups in the USA.

Previous Mexican Presidents have been outed as CIA assets.

I was curious which Presidents were CIA assets, and it's three (that we know of):

- Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964)

- Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970)

- Luis Echeverría (1970-1976)

> The declassified U.S. documents reveal CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverría. The documents detail the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named "LITEMPO." Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide "an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges."

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB204/

I wonder how many westerners who celebrate the anniversary of Tiananmen Square every year have never even heard of Tlatelolco.

It's a hienous part of Mexico's history. Although more recently also a bus of 43 students that went missing.

They were "Secretarios de Gobernación" which at the time were the heads of the Mexican intelligence apparatus and therefore responsable to manage the sharing of intelligence between Mexico and other countries.

> Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide "an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges."

Keep in mind that from the Mexican side the relationship with the US is very difficult to manage and has to be done carefully and sharing of intelligence is a way to keep the US at a healthy distance.

It’s certainly more of a situation where they play both sides. Do things for the cartels and the CIA, less of a playing your enemies against each other and more of doing the minimum to survive.

Nobody seemed to be playing the blame game, that just devolves into emotional appeals.

Most important to highlight the systemic structure of these problems.

I'd say it's a firm "probably": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffi....

https://narco.news/articles/the-shadow-war

https://narco.news/articles/funny-games

I heard on a Joe Rogan Podcast with a CIA 'influencer' that the Federal Reserve is now laundering cartel money through Colorado's legal pot dispensaries

Not in the way you’re thinking of. Growing, processing, and smuggling drugs on a thousand-mile route requires huge resources and sophisticated multi-decade operations that are openly visible to the government. Sneaking it over the border in San Diego in the trunk of a car does not. Distributing it inside the US also does not. Any idiot with a life expectancy of 5 minutes can complete those last two tasks while maintaining secrecy.

There have been persistent rumors about the DEA working with the same cartel (Sinaloa) as Luna. They were the big winners of the opioid crisis. There's no solid evidence though, and maybe some of the suspicious stuff was actually Luna passing intelligence back.

you wonder if anyone working in the US government is human?

I've worked for the US government and I can tell you we all are humans.

Look no further at all the drug-lord's bank accounts and how they are not frozen.

I don't think those accounts are in anyone's name.

The banks launder money for them.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...

Say it louder for the people in the back.

When was the last time the Border Patrol / DEA / Coast Guard got into a shoot out with drug gangs ?

Just another reminder of the disaster that previous presidents left for AMLO. Mexico’s security situation has steadily deteriorated since Vicente Fox tried to impress his buddy GWB by pursuing the idiotic “kingpin strategy” of the gringos.

Do you really believe AMLO is different?

In many respects, absolutely. And that is why the PRI and PAN have conspired with their cartel buddies and gringos to try to undermine him. I think he has made plenty of mistakes, but he’s at least more concerned with his country than getting rich and becoming a visiting lecturer at HKS.

could it be that those “cartel buddies” were kicked out by the current cartel in power?

That's certainly a possibility. I haven't seen any evidence that the AMLO administration is actively collaborating with the cartels, but they have been quite open about not pursuing the failed strategies of the past, like working with the DEA:

https://world.time.com/2014/01/14/dea-boosted-mexican-drug-c...

In Mexico, how do you know if a person is being paid by the cartels? That’s easy. If the cartels are not trying to assassinate the person then the answer is yes.

So long as the financial resources of the cartels is in the same neighborhood as Mexican law enforcement, nothing will solve this problem.

I can’t believe that the US with its resources can have a border neighbor in this bad of shape without somehow being to blame at a national policy level.

I think the resource disparity is exactly the problem. The US/Mexico income disparity ends up distorting the Mexican economy. Mexico's comparative advantage, in an international trade sense, is its long, difficult-to-monitor border with the US, through which drugs & humans can be trafficked.

I suppose there is an argument that the US should try to expand legal, upstanding immigration from Mexico to try to push Mexico more in the direction of being a remittance economy.

Corruption at the levels seen in Mexico is a very, very hard thing to expel from a culture where it’s well-entrenched.

Like trying to being democracy to other countries, no amount of resources and effort will work if the population fundamentally isn’t ready for it.

However, it was pretty easy for the US to topple democracies abroad regardless of the population’s opinions about it.

Indeed it’s easier to destroy than to build.

I think you misjudge the intentions of the US government.

do you really think this is about stopping drugs?

as far as I can tell what they really want is to sell guns (to cartels) and buy the best of the goods (good drugs for good parties?)

I presume every major national policy is fueled by corruption, pay to play, and enriching our politicians, their donors, or both.

So how can the US prosecute crimes committed in other countries?

If you ever interact with the US banking system, or have any impact on US persons or businesses, the US views itself as having jurisdiction.

You'll shit bricks when you read about the undercover Chinese police stations then...

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/04/world/china-overseas-poli...

There's a huge difference between the US having an international network of law enforcement co-operation (even if we do have boots on the ground doing investigative work) and the Chinese Police Stations going out and strongarming people individually.

Countries are supposed to have a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Lending it out is good international relations. Not that it's never acceptable to violate that - The Takedown of Bin Laden was a law enforcement action taken overseas by the US military in a country that was not informed until after it was on it's way out.

> Lending [a country's monopoly on force] out is good international relations.

No, extradition is good international relations, but there the country retains its territorial monopoly on force.

> Not that it's never acceptable to violate [sovereignty].

What would be different about a scenario where Russia snuck commandos into the US to "law enforcement action" some Ukrainians? Nothing, because it's not acceptable, it's simply "might makes right."

(That said, bin Laden was horrible and Ukraine is awesome.)

I don't see how this crude remark is responsive to my comment.

> US views itself as having jurisdiction.

I don't see how international agreed upon rules, eg. Regarding exchange, extradition and payment is equal to claiming jurisdiction.

Additionally eg. SWIFT is European and not from the US.

I'm giving you an example of a country that actually acts like it has jurisdiction everywhere around the world. Setting up police stations in secret, ...

As a better example of "claiming jurisdiction".

This would have been a much more responsive comment than the one you wrote first!

The concept is called extraterritorial jurisdiction, and it is used to do these types of prosecutions.

If he was an American citizen, and performed those crimes in the US, I wonder how it would go with him being extradited and tried for that in a different country? Earnest question, maybe there are examples of it

So Mexico is a state of US.

If i do a crime in my country, another country cannot charge me with my crimes in my country because it has no jurisdiction.

Does everywhere in the world have a drug problem a la US-Mexico? Why has it gotten so bad here but not elsewhere?

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