A Volatile Brew
A Volatile Brew
by Colonel Robert Killebrew, Small Wars Journal Op-Ed
A Volatile Brew (Full PDF Article)
Last June a group of men in police SWAT team uniforms stormed a building in Phoenix, Arizona, and killed a suspected drug dealer. But the gunmen wearing police uniforms and firing police weapons weren’t cops — they were members of a Mexican drug gang evening scores with a troublesome dealer in the United States. When the real police arrived, the gang dug in for a shootout. That’s increasingly common south of the border, but fortunately it didn’t end well for the criminals this time.
The Phoenix incident is just one symptom of the growing unrest across the United States’ southern border, where the Mexican government is waging a deadly war against murderous drug cartels. Even further south, a volatile brew consisting of thousands of demobilized former soldiers and guerrillas, state-sponsored terrorists and criminal-terrorist hybrids such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) and the Salvadoran MS-13 gang is threatening the rule of law in Latin America. More ominously, it’s moving north. In fact, some of these thugs are already here.
