There's No Drug Crime Wave at the Border, Just a Lot of Media Hype

If media reports are to be believed, an Armageddon-like rash of drug-related violence--unlike any seen since "Miami Vice years of the 1980s"--has crossed from Mexico into the United States, "just as government officials had feared." Even if you've never used or sold drugs, you're not safe: kidnappers are breaking into the wrong houses and holding innocent civilians for ransom, putting guns in babies' mouths. Severed heads might end up being rolled into dance clubs, beheadings might end up on YouTube. Television segments narrated like war documentaries broadcast dramatic footage of Border Patrol Humvees kicking up dust in the Southwest, Minutemen with binoculars overlooking the border and piles of confiscated drugs. In the national media, it's become a foregone conclusion that Mexican drug violence has penetrated the United States.

The increase in drug-related violence in Mexico over the past few years is well established, the result of a crackdown on drug cartels by President Felipe Calderón's administration. By most accounts it began in December 2006 when 6,500 federal troops and police were dispatched to the Mexican state of Michoacán. In a series of gradual steps, this war on drugs broadened: over the past two years, 45,000 troops and 20,000 federal police have been dispatched to different regions of the country, primarily in northern Mexican cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. Almost 8,000 cartel-related deaths have been reported in Mexico, with a spike in the summer of 2008. The situation, however, had been viewed from a distance in the United States until the media began raising the nightmarish scenario of a spillover across the border.

In January 2009, outlets like the Associated Press, Fox News, the New York Times and MSNBC reported on contingency plans drafted by the Department of Homeland Security to address such a spillover, but the consensus seemed to be then that these measures were a precaution rather than a response to any real threat. A policy paper from the libertarian Cato Institute on the threat posed to the United States by Mexican drug cartels sounded a similar precautionary note.

The AP reported that El Paso Sheriff Richard Wiles said that he didn't "anticipate the city or county being overwhelmed by border violence." North Carolina Representative David Price said, "It appears so far that such violence is not yet systematically 'spilling over' as some have alleged."

In February, however, something tipped, and the question mark in news headlines--"Border Violence Spilling into the US?"--disappeared. Among the earliest reports that potential violence had become actual violence was an AP story that credited unnamed "authorities" with the news. Tellingly, the story did not contain a single direct quote stating either that violence had increased or that it was linked to the drug trade. Rather, it juxtaposed its broad claims against gruesome descriptions of drug violence in Mexico or wildly speculative quotes about what could happen here.

One of its most fearmongering statements came from Rusty Payne, identified as a "Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in Washington," who said, "'When you are willing to chop heads off, put them in an ice chest and drop them off at a police precinct, or roll a head into a disco, put beheadings on YouTube as a warning,' very little is off limits."

The only relevant statistics included in the piece were the number of "home invasions" in Phoenix for each of the past two years--about 350, "the majority...committed at the behest of the Mexican drug gangs"--and the number of drug-related killings in Mexico over the past year, 5,000. Besides the fact that the steady number of home invasions in Phoenix over the past two years suggests that there had not been a recent increase in violence, the piece also readily concedes that in El Paso, Texas--across the border from Ciudad Juárez, dubbed the epicenter of Mexico's escalating drug war--has remained "one of America's safest cities."