America’s Drug War is Indeed Responsible for the Unaccompanied Minor Crisis

I
wrote last week that the unaccompanied minors from Honduras,
Guatemala and El Salvado showing up at our doorstep are refugees of
America’s drug war whom it would be immoral and inhumane to turn
away. Many
commenters in the
conservative press and social media denounced this claim as the
usual liberal claptrap which wants to blame America for
everything.

Today, Mary O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal — that
bastion of left-wing, America-hating nutbaggery — elaborates
the connection, citing the work of Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly,
perhaps the most authoritative source on the region. She notes:

Central America is significantly more dangerous than it was
before it became a magnet for rich and powerful drug capos. Back in
the early 1990s, drugs from South America flowed through the
Caribbean to the
U.S.

But when a U.S. interdiction strategy in the Caribbean raised
costs, trafficking shifted to land routes up the Central American
isthmus and through Mexico. With Mexican President Felipe
Calderón’s war on the cartels, launched in 2007, the underworld
gradually slithered toward the poorer, weaker neighboring
countries. Venezuela, under Hugo
Chávez, began facilitating the movement of cocaine from
producing countries in the Andes to the U.S., also via Central
America.

In a July 8 essay in the Military Times headlined “Central
America Drug War a Dire Threat to U.S. National Security,” Gen.
Kelly explains that he has spent 19 months “observing the
transnational organized crime networks” in the region. His
conclusion: “Drug cartels and associated street gang activity in
Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, which respectively have the
world’s number one, four and five highest homicide rates, have left
near-broken societies in their wake.” He notes that while he works
on this problem throughout the region, these three countries, also
known as the Northern Triangle, are “far and away the worst
off.”

With a homicide rate of 90 per 100,000 in Honduras, and 40 per
100,000 in Guatemala, life in the region is decidedly rougher than
“declared combat zones” like Afghanistan and the Democratic
Republic of Congo, where the general says the rate is 28 per
100,000.

How did the region become a killing field? His diagnosis is that
big profits from the illicit drug trade have been used to corrupt
public institutions in these fragile democracies, thereby
destroying the rule of law. In a “culture of impunity” the state
loses its legitimacy and sovereignty is undermined. Criminals have
the financial power to overwhelm the law “due to the insatiable
U.S. demand for drugs, particularly cocaine, heroin and now
methamphetamines, all produced in Latin America and smuggled into
the U.S.”