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A KID OF THE 1950S AND ’60S, I grew up safe in San Diego hearing much and knowing very little about Mexico, our next-door neighbor to the south. By the time I had graduated from college in the 1970s, I’d visited Mexico dozens of times. And I knew even less about it.
American college kids rarely visit Tijuana for cultural or political enlightenment. Most go there to party——the kind of alcohol- and/or drug-driven partying that’s generally harder to find on the home side of the dividing line.
This year, the spring-break plans of far fewer U.S. college kids revolve around a Baja California vacation. The violence and terror fueled by warring Mexican drug cartels——whose industry, ironically, centers on bringing those party drugs to our side of the border——have prompted the U.S. State Department to issue a warning against travel to the Mexican cities of Juarez, Nogales and Tijuana. The party——for the time being, at least——is over.
In recent months, the U.S. media have been issuing sporadic reports on the violence that has gripped Mexico’s border region. Meanwhile, an investigative reporter for San Diego Magazine, S.D. Liddick, has been in Mexico seeking to understand it. This month, in “Blood of Their Brothers,” the first in a three-part series of stories in these pages for San Diego Magazine, he begins to explain it.
Since 2003, Liddick has lived in Rosarito Beach, about 20 miles south of the border. The past five years have given him a unique view of Mexican organized crime——a closeup look at what’s blossomed into a dirty civil war in Mexico. A war that’s underwritten, Liddick says, by U.S. drug demand. “And I’ve wondered,” he says, “along with everyone else in the border region, if that violence is going to spill over into Gringolandia.” The short answer is that it already has.
“But in a wider context,” Liddick says, “I think the strength of the American law-enforcement and judicial sectors——which Mexican mafiosos genuinely fear——will keep the bloodshed south of the border. Still, we need some honest national dialogue. Much of that bloodshed is the result of the fact that our often-duplicitous drug and immigration laws aren’t reflecting the demands and desires of the American citizenry.”
Liddick downplays the personal risks he took to investigate and report on the operations of the Mexico drug cartels. The rest of us may have to deal with the risks if we don’t pay attention.
TOM BLAIR
Editor-in-Chief
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Reader Comments:
I wasn't aware that the State Department issued a warning against travel to Nogales, Juarez and Tijuana. In fact, if you read the alert, you'd find this is not so.