One of the most-debated issues about the orgy of drug-related violence in Mexico is whether the turmoil is confined to that country or is having a significant impact on the United States. The conventional wisdom is that although tensions have risen along the U.S.-Mexico border over the past five or six years, the actual impact of our southern neighbor’s carnage on communities in the United States has been minimal. Ioan Grillo, who has reported on developments in Mexico for more than a decade, concedes that Mexican cartels operate throughout the United States, but he insists “there has been no major spillover of violence from Mexico to its northern neighbor. As of 2011, after five years of cartel devastation south of the Rio Grande, the war simply hasn’t crossed the border.”
Those who contend that the specter of Mexican drug cartels terrorizing the American southwest is merely a hysterical myth have some credible evidence on their side. Violent-crime rates in such cities as Tucson, Laredo, San Diego and El Paso have not spiked, despite the pervasive killings on the other side of the border. FBI statistics have consistently shown low homicide rates in El Paso, Tucson and most other southwestern cities.
New York Times writer Andrew Rice, who spent weeks in 2011 studying the effect of the horrific drug violence in Juárez on El Paso (just across the border), concludes that “spillover was notable for its scarcity.” He notes further that while Juárez suffered more than three thousand homicides in 2010, El Paso—a city of some six hundred thousand people—had an astonishingly low total of five. Matters have deteriorated just slightly over the past year.
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