“What would their capability be? They can’t do law enforcement,” said Walser. “The way to do this is to get more law enforcement assets for the challenge -- to investigate arms shipments and the like. And to continue to work with the Mexican officials who are pursuing this.”
Walser said the Meridia initiative was probably the best route, given its collaborative approach with local Mexican law enforcement, instead of Jump Start’s detached patrols. But Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, said that the type of action did not matter, given the demand for drugs in the U.S.
“The arrests and killings of numerous top drug lords in both Colombia and Mexico over the years have not had a meaningful impact on the quantity of drugs entering the United States. Cutting off one head of the drug-smuggling Hydra merely results in more heads taking its place,” he said in a February policy paper.
The oft-cited figure of 7000 drug-related deaths last year consists almost entirely of Mexican citizens, with no reliable resource to track American deaths as a result of the Mexican violence. Still, American deaths do occur, and many fear they may increase as the conflicts escalate.
Rep. Loretta Sanchez, (D-Calif), chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism, said that she had seen an influx of violence into the United States.
"Well, it certainly has always been a problem at the border, but in the last couple of decades, it's gotten even worse. Now we see some spillover, just a little bit, coming into the United States," she told CNN's "American Morning.