The war that is lost

Jose Nemesio Lugo Felix was appointed last month as head of a drug intelligence unit in Mexico's attorney general's office.

Less than 30 days later, he was shot and killed in a sophisticated street ambush that is being characterized as a "planned execution" – another assassination presumably by one of the Mexican drug cartels.

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He hadn't even finished unpacking boxes in his new office.

The list of atrocities of this kind in Mexico grows on a daily basis:

• Last weekend, two journalists for the Azteca television network who had previously covered the drug wars in Mexico were reported missing and assumed to have been kidnapped in Monterrey.

• About the same time, an army captain was kidnapped and killed in Chilpancingo.

• A federal police investigator was found shot dead in Tijuana.

• A severed head was left at an army base in Vercruz, a day after the central government said it would send troops to the Gulf Coast to battle the drug trade.

• Four government bodyguards assigned to protect the children of the governor of the state of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto, were killed while taking the kids to the beach.

Mexico City's El Universal newspaper reported more than 1,000 people have been killed by organized crime in the first five months of 2007.

You want to know about a war that is lost?

Mexico has lost the drug war. Our neighbor to the south is officially a narco-economy now. The gangsters and murderers wield more power than the federal government. They operate with impunity. And they are taking this war across the border – expanding their base of operations and extending their killing fields.

Where are the debates in our country about the instability of our Mexican neighbor and what it portends for us?

How can we be on the verge of another amnesty program for 10 percent of Mexico's population while our back door remains wide open to the chaos to the south?

Why do we expect Mexicans to stay in their country when it is wracked with violence and lawlessness?

When will U.S. national security officials realize what a threat we face from this barbarism?

How many towns and cities in America will need to be taken over by the drug cartels before U.S. officials realize what is happening and take action?

These are not idle questions for a slow news day. These are questions fundamental to America's national security.

The Mexican illegal alien invasion has already changed the character of our country. But there is a second wave coming that will pose much graver problems than bilingualism and institutional poverty.

In that second wave, which has already begun, Mexican crime barons will emigrate north to expand their "turf" and profits and bring this kind of mayhem to America.

It is inevitable unless we have a national strategy to head it off.

We do not.

In fact, no one is even talking about it – except me.

Instead of addressing this crisis as a matter of national security, we are busy repaving highways the drug cartel will use to ship their deadly product north. We are busy making it easier for Mexican truckers to enter the country and travel throughout it like native-born Americans.

As a matter of national policy, we're more interested in severely punishing U.S. Border Patrol agents for indiscretions on the front lines than punishing drug smugglers.

This has got to stop. What's at stake is, quite frankly, everything we hold dear – our way of life, freedom, justice, the rule of law, the will of the people.

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