With the crises playing out across the country, there's been relatively little attention paid to a building catastrophe at our southern border. The Mexican drug war, by recent estimates released by President Calderon's administration, has claimed the lives of 40,000 people. Areas within the country are still banned from travel because of the unsafe conditions, and some of the violence has spilled over onto our soil. The mediasphere has largely reported on the drug war as mexico's problem, separate from the things going on here in the states. However, that's not entirely the case.

     In 2006 a plane was seized on a landing strip in Ciudad Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. The plane was carrying $100 million in cocaine. The plane, a DC-9 jet costing roughly $1 million, was purchased with funds recently funneled through two of the U.S. biggest banks, Wachovia and Bank of America (both of whom received bailouts as well). This is not an isolated incident either. Wachovia admitted in 2010 Wells Fargo, who had purchased Wachovia in 2008, began a new anti-money laundering program to spot illicit funds moving through their system. This after Wachovia executives admitted that they had not done enough to monitor the nearly $388 billion that had moved through latin american monetary channels via their bank. Martin Woods, Wachovia's former director of their anti-money-laundering unit, resigned in 2009 in disgust after executives ignored his documentation. "If you don't see the connection between the money laundering in banks and the [thousands] of people killed in Mexico, you're missing the point," he reportedly told the Star Tribune in May. 

     If megabanks are being used to finance the Mexican drug cartels' activities, government agencies may just be supplying the weapons fueling the violence. In a recent report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), 70% of nearly 30,000 military-grade weapons confiscated from drug runners and cartel members originated in the U.S. This has prompted a number of U.S. lawmakers to call for increasingly tighter restrictions on firearms, including a renewal of the assault weapon ban that the Bush administration allowed to lapse in 2004.

     Speaking of the ATF, let's not forget a cavalier arms sting that went horribly wrong. The ATF ran a sting  through 2010, codenamed "Fast and Furious", in which they attempted to set up the sales of assault weapons, through Pheonix, AZ gun stores and then to trace those weapons to larger cartel buyers. By June 2010, 1,600 assault rifles and automatic pistols had been sold to criminals. Instead the Bureau lost track of the weapons, and more than 2,000 military-grade assault weapons ended up in cartel hands. So far, 700 of these firearms have been recovered at crime scenes, 250 of them on U.S. soil. The government announced an internal investigation into "Fast and Furious" on June 10th, no doubt forced to act after the DEA recovered two "Fast and Furious" weapons at the scene of a shoot-out between smugglers and Border patrol that ended in the death of a U.S. Border agent. In addition, the Mexican government released a statement saying that "Fast and Furious" guns have accounted for the shooting deaths of 150 police personnel in that country.

     The Mexican drug wars are an international crisis, playing out in both the U.S. and Mexico. Between bankslaundering money, government agencies and policies allowing military-grade weapons across the border, large-scale domestic buyers, and the millions of U.S. drug users creating a $39 billion annual demand, our country is very much involved in this issue. What's uncertain, is how we will address the issue that is popularly seen as "Mexico's problem" given our economic issues that are seen as our top priority right now.