Mexican Drug Assassins in Laredo
March 13th, 2009 | 1 Comment
The more I ponder this CNN article, the more chilling it is. Two American teenagers were recruited by a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate people in Laredo, Texas on orders from south of the border.
Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say Cardona and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.
Think about that for a minute — a criminal organization in a foreign country recruited American, gave them military training in a foreign location, then paid them to kill other Americans on American soil.
Now, swap “Mexican drug cartel” for “Ahgani Taliban.” Tell me how that’s different. If the Taliban recruited Americans, trained them in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, then sent them back to the U.S. to kill Americans…what would the U.S. response be?
I read a couple months ago that the CIA considers instability in Mexico a bigger threat to the U.S. than instability in Iran. I’m starting to believe it.
March 13th, 2009 at 3:50 pm (#)
It’s different for a few reasons.
1. Mexico doesn’t have oil. And we can’t say that terrorists from Mexico are being harbored and trained in Venezuala…so we’re going to start a war there. On that note, Obama’s dad didn’t start a war in Venezuala in the 90′s…so Obama doesn’t have to finish a war there to make his dad proud of him.
2. There are a lot of Mexican American’s living in the US. So it’s a lot harder to dehumanize them by calling them terrorists. That would start blurring the line between “terrorist” and “human” and people would start to get uncomfortable.
3. It’s too close. Too many people have been to Mexico so we can’t paint Mexico as a land of terror without a face.