One flaw of current U.S.-Mexico strategy is the false presumption that international trafficking of drugs, guns, and cash can be effectively addressed through interdiction, particularly along the nearly two-thousand-mile U.S.-Mexican border. After a three-decade effort to beef up security, the U.S.-Mexico border is more heavily fortified than at any point since the U.S.-Mexico war of 1846–48. The United States has deployed more than twenty thousand border patrol agents and built hundreds of miles of fencing equipped with high-tech surveillance equipment, all at an annual cost of billions of dollars—with $3 billion per year spent on border control alone. While this massive security build-up at the border has achieved maximum attainable levels of operational control, the damage to Mexico’s drug cartels caused by border interdiction has been inconsequential.
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How can anyone say interdiction doesn’t work when it isn’t being tried? The BATFE is facilitating gun trafficking, not interdicting it.
I’m pretty sure the border was barely fortified at all before the Mexican American War. Outside of a little fort in Brownsville, I think the rest of it was wholly unguarded. So the martial reference doesn’t really serve a purpose in this article.