Collateral Damage
In the past week, the costs of the “war on drugs” in Mexico have become increasingly obvious and onerous. First, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) released a report damning the military’s human rights abuses, specifically abuses of people not directly involved in the drug wars. The Secretary of Defense largely accepted this condemnation. Then it was revealed that violence, or at least the fear of violence, has spread to the state university in Sinaloa, where students were evacuated twice during the last semester; campus protests against the increasing violence were organized over the weekend. On Sunday, it was reported that five shoppers at a mall in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, were taken hostage by thugs, after the gangsters shot a high ranking police officer. Today, four innocent teenagers and three other young adults were shot in Sinaloa, caught in the cross-fire between rival gangs.
These events give the lie to the notion that the “war on drugs” is simply a battle between high level government and cartel officials that by and large does not affect normal people. To the contrary, the violence, and threat of the same, appears to be spreading well beyond the confines of government versus kingpin. The government will undoubtedly make the usual claims about things needing to get worse before they get better, and the violence demonstrating that the drug lords are becoming more desperate because the government is winning.
These claims are not necessarily false. But would the President please explain how we will know when the war is almost over and the violence is finally going to decline? Or how we will know if the government is actually losing the war and it is time for a new strategy? Or whether there is any limit to the number of innocent people who must die before strategies are rethought?
The problem with the claims of the prosecutors of this war is not that they are false, but that they are not falsifiable. Any amount of violence can be justified. Any length of time fighting a losing war can be justified. Any number of dead is reasonable collateral damage. Only faith can guide us in knowing when enough is enough.
God help us all.