A recent story in Front Page magazine [We Are at War with Mexico, by Jason D. Hill, March 22, 2023] suggested that the U.S. should invade and annex Mexico because it’s a failed narcostate controlled by the drug cartels. After a career in the Border Patrol, I like the idea and I don’t like the idea. As with many things in life, it’s complicated.

Some background:

President Trump flirted with declaring the drug cartels terrorist organizations, but President Manuel Andrés Manuel López Obrador dissuaded him [Trump halts plan to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists, BBC News, December 7, 2019]. Trump also considered using missiles to destroy Mexican drug labs [Trump Wanted to Launch Missiles Into Mexico to Destroy ‘Drug Labs,’ Former Defense Secretary Says, by Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone, May 5, 2022].

But those actions are measured next to what college philosophy professor Jason D. Hill [Email him] advocated in Front Page. The highlights:

We are at war with the forces that rule, govern and puppeteer the hands of the Mexican government: the drug cartels that are actually cartel terrorists. They have already launched a massive invasion into the United States. …

Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is a politically impotent and inefficacious puppet, declared from the beginning of his tenure that he would suspend hostilities against transnational criminal organizations, adopting “embraces and not bullets” (abrazos y no balazos). …

Talk of comprehensive immigration reform fails to capture that it is the cartels that are bringing hordes of immigrants to the border armed with drugs including fentanyl and the deadlier Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer that causes flesh wounds to incurably rot at injection sites. …

It is time for the United States to step in and clean up Mexico by whatever means necessary.

Mexico, ruled in all but name by the cartel terrorists, is a hostile foreign power attacking the United States. …

What can the United States do? It can place Mexico in economic and political receivership. Receivership is an act of self-defense and an act of political and economic retraining of a politically immature nation in need of guidance of how to manage its internal affairs and governance.

Hill goes on, but you get the idea: The United States must invade Mexico,

destroy the cartels, and take over.

But here is what we must consider before we can invade or take measured action against the cartels on Mexican territory:

• First, attacking even just the cartels likely means war against the Mexican military.

When I was on the southern border, I was told that any time I saw an M&M—Mexican military, green on the outside, brown on the inside—encampment on the banks of the Rio Bravo (which is what Mexicans call the Rio Grande) to take note. That’s where drugs crossed.

Once, a member of our Special Response Team was hiding in a tree to monitor a possible drug shipment through a state park. He was trying to get a good view of what was happening on the Mexican side of the border. After a long wait, he heard someone walking below his perch. He looked down to see a Mexican soldier in full battle gear.

Later on, a border agent who had worked in Arizona told me about the time he caught a Mexican soldier on a road at least a mile inside the United States. Higher-ups killed the report and the M&M was sent back to Mexico with no penalty.

In the book El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, the anonymous author claimed that his first assignment on joining a cartel was attending a police academy as a regular new recruit. If that isn’t a sign of how corrupt Mexico is, I don’t know what is.

So, forgetting about an invasion of U.S. troops, even declaring against the cartels a terrorist threat means, as a practical matter, going to war with the military, not just a gang of criminals.

• Second, just as immigration patriots want to close the border, the Treason Lobby is determined to keep it open. And a US invasion/incursion could help them.

Currently, most Mexicans at the border do not apply for political asylum, but a growing number of them do. “Migrants” from failed states, as we know, are not deported back to them. One way “migrants” claim asylum is by showing that their government is unable or unwilling or to protect them from organized criminal gangs. Right now, the entirety of Mexico’s population can claim Mexico is a failed state where corrupt police will not and cannot protect its citizens. Our immigration court system is already a disaster, so imagine what it will be if all Mexicans could claim political asylum after the cartels have been designated terrorist organizations.

That would be another success for the Treason Lobby. Just as they used Jeff Sessions’ Zero Tolerance policy against him with the slogan “Kids in Cages,” the Treason Lobby will scream that because Mexico is a failed state, completely Open Borders is the solution to protect its people.

That, too, would happen if we invaded. By invading Mexico to crush the cartels, we would be acknowledging our inability to contain them on our side of the border. (Any president who wanted to, by the way, could crush the cartels that now control some remote areas in the United States.)

Those facts segue into this one: Lara Logan, a former CBS reporter who has moved right,  has claimed that the United Nations is attempting to flood the United States with 100 million illegals from Latin America [Lara Logan: We Are Living Under A Globalist Policy of Open Borders, RealAmericasVoice, Rumble.com, September 21, 2022].

Our border not only is NOT secure but there seems to be an invasion going on. WHY?

🚨LARA LOGAN: “It is an invasion but an invasion that is part of a long term plan & political ideology to obliterate the sovereignty of this nation & change the way the world looks forever”🔥👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/ghvLFd5IUt

— LionHearted (@LionHearted76) September 22, 2022

With the cartels operating on both sides of the border and making life miserable, an invasion would inspire the globalists to say that the only solution to the failed state is to make a hemispheric government between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. U.S. sovereignty would be a thing of the past.

For those who think that Lara Logan’s source is preposterous and that she’s peddling a “baseless conspiracy theory,” a question: Would Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas behave any differently if that were not his agenda?

• Third, a colleague who was a U.S. Marine Corps reservist in San Diego told me he was amazed at how many Marines under his charge lived in Mexico.

“If we go to war with Mexico,” he wondered to himself, “whose side are they going to be on?”

If the Roman Empire is anything to go by, they won’t be enthusiastic warriors for America. White Americans might be colorblind for the most part, but other races aren’t. As the United States military becomes increasingly non-white, the loyalty of its soldiers must be questioned.

I am told dual loyalty accusations are always and everywhere spurious and racist pic.twitter.com/E2P9Dc3DDN

— Arthur Bloom (@j_arthur_bloom) March 10, 2019

To believe a soldier or Marine of Mexican descent who lives in Mexico will fight other Mexicans on behalf of a mostly white Army or Marine command is begging to find out why Rome collapsed.

That said, I don’t say that the cartels should not be designated terrorist organizations. But if that’s done, a few summary provisos:

• It must be done so that the average Mexican illegal cannot use it as an excuse to claim political asylum.
• We must prevent “mutual” military operations with a thoroughly corrupt Mexican government. It will try to subvert anything we do.
• We must bar soldiers and Marines of Hispanic descent from any role in such an effort.
• Finally, we must acknowledge that fighting the cartels means fighting the Mexican military.

The reality is that the Mexican military is deeply involved in smuggling narcotics. That’s just one sign Mexico is indeed a failed state.

The author [Email him] is retired from the Border Patrol.