Weekly Roundup: They Fought The Law And The Law Lost Edition
As of this writing, CNN's front page has the word "Trump" on it sixteen times, but "Guzman" or "Chapo" are nowhere to be found. Which makes sense, of course: Donald Trump is absolutely, positively, totally going to be impeached any day now, plus he's the President until that happens, so you're going to hear quite a bit about it. Who the heck is Guzman?
Why, he's just a private citizen who forced the Mexican National Guard to surrender on the field of battle last week.
Ovidio Guzman Lopez, son of the notorious (and incarcerated) Mexican drug lord "El Chapo", was captured in a pretty daring raid by the recently-formed Mexican National Guard this past Thursday. The Mexican National Guard is not like, say, the Ohio National Guard; think of it as a branch of the Mexican Army which has license to operate inside the country.
When Chapo Junior got nabbed, his brother swung into action, ordering dozens of "sicarios", or gang assassins, to assault the prison in which Chapo was being held. At the same time, other paramilitary units of Guzman's Sinaloa cartel located the families of National Guard members and took them hostage. Eight people were killed in the streets as the prison walls were breached and escaping inmates were handed weapons by the sicarios.
Were this to happen in the United States, you'd presumably have Delta and Seal Team Six dropping in from helicopters within hours --- but the Mexican Army was unable to get into the city to reinforce the National Guard's positions. So the logical thing happened, at least the logical thing for Clown World: the Mexican government surrendered to a drug kingpin's brother and let Guzman go. The significance of this is difficult to overstate. It would be like "Black Hawk Down" taking place in Chicago, or perhaps having a battalion of the 10th Mountain Division surrender to the Four Corner Blocc Crips.
For purposes of shoring up an increasingly fragile narrative, Time Magazine has helpfully informed its readers that "over 150,000 guns have gone to the cartels from American gun shops", which is probably not true. The only thing we can say for sure is that the ATF sent 2,000 guns to the cartel a while ago and some of those guns were used to kill an American border patrol agent. The videos posted by the cartel members also show everything from F-250-mounted heavy machine guns to M249 Squad Assualt Weapons to M72 LAWS anti-tank rockets. Regardless of what you might hear on CNN, you can't get any of that stuff at Wal-Mart or even at that one kind of scary gun store with the "MOLON LABE" stickers. Those are real military weapons, made in America by American companies and delivered to the cartel through the kinds of channels it scarcely bears thinking about lest we all be struck with permanent insomnia.
I've read the same statement all over the Internet from some pretty clued-in people, and it goes something like this: "The Sinaloa cartel couldn't hold a single rural American county for twenty-four hours." I think they'd be hard-pressed to keep control of Powell, Ohio --- this place is crawling with former operators itching to take a few potshots at vibrant and diverse undocumented additions to the American tapestry. Which is not to say that these fellows are a joke. Far from it. They used documented insurgent tactics to beat an undisciplined and poorly led army.
Something tells me we're eventually gonna have a chance to test that rural county theory. Every new group of Americans brings criminal activity with them --- there's even a book about this, called The Godfather --- but the most recent have been particularly active. There are supposedly ten thousand members of MS-13 in the United States, which makes them as big as the better-known, and more telegenic, Crips and Bloods. At some point, things will come to a boil somewhere and some charismatic gang leader is going to decide that his sicarios are more than a match for the SWAT teams of Des Moines or Apple Valley.
The only real solution, other than setting the public-policy clock back to 1964 with a vigor, will be to further militarize the police --- or police-ize the military. Neither of these solutions is what any sane person would consider good news. Still, I'd prefer Soviet levels of armed cops on the streets to a world run by the cartels. At least with the apparatchiks you have a tiny chance of not being beheaded in public. On the downside, you won't get all that better food.
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For Hagerty, I drove the revised 2020 GT350R, reviewed the first round of C8 Corvette coverage, and offered an opinion on Chinese-centric cowardice.
This week I'll be driving the GT500. Have questions? Post them below.