It's very real, and you can't say otherwise.

I can't even count how many times I've been told by someone I know, who's never even set foot in a border state, far less a border town, that the problems we have in our twin cities are not so bad, that "at least it's not a real war". It may not be a declared war, nor involve any country's military, but believe me, it's real. Las Muertas de Juarez are real. The bullets that cross the Rio Grande into the city of El Paso on a regular basis are real. The Ft. Hancock violence of a few months ago, was real. The car bombs are real. The drugs are real. The guns are real. The deaths are real.

Tonight, we found out that one of Thak's classmates was killed in Juarez, I think today. He was 20 years old, and left behind two daughters. He was murdered by the cartel because they thought he was someone else. This guy had nothing to do with the drug trade, nothing at all. There are many who have been killed in the same manner. The cartel shoots first and asks questions never. They also own the police force and have their hands in the government, so justice will never be served in this, or any similar, killing. Someone got away with murder, and will go on to do it again, no doubt. If this is not a war, and these people who go this way are not casualties, then I have never known one.

It's really easy for outsiders to say, "It's too easy. Just don't go to Juarez!" OK, that's a great solution for people like me and Thak who aren't from around here. I can't imagine either of us will ever set foot in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico as long as we live. We have no reason to. We can live in our safe little neighborhood where people can afford to be so petty that they call the cops about 7-year-olds riding bikes, and never actually see Juarez any closer than maybe 20 yards away when we go downtown near the crossings, or drive through the mountain pass which overlooks the slums. That's a gringo's solution, though. We don't have family there. A lot of these other people do. In fact, most people in El Paso have family on both sides of the fence. That's just the way it is. People would never ask someone who lives in Dallas never to go to Ft. Worth and think that was reasonable, nor would they do the same of Minneapolis and St. Paul, yet that's the gringo's solution for El Paso-Juarez. I'll tell you right now, it doesn't work. Americans are dying for going to see their families and their friends on the other side of our metro area. Really, the only difference between El Paso-Juarez and Minneapolis-St. Paul or Dallas-Ft. Worth is that there's a fence that runs through our metro area, and border guards who get to tell you if you're allowed to cross it or not. Otherwise, we are just another pair of twin cities. It's not realistic to expect people to just shut themselves in on one side and never go to the other. We are not East and West Berlin, nor will we ever be. Nobody would ever stand for that.

Something has to be done. Mexico needs to get their shit together, and stop with the corruption, and just wanting the US to give them money that they'll just feed right back into the cartels via their corrupt government which the cartel has its hands in hardcore. The US needs to offer military support for an operation to clean out the border towns. Our Special Forces are used to fighting drug wars. We have an entire Special Forces Group consisting of Spanish-speaking Green Berets, who have years, sometimes decades, of experience working in Colombia on anti-cartel missions. If we send them in, plus a few battalions of grunts to support them, this will be over in a matter of months. Then maybe we can stop hearing about all this dying. Every time we turn around, someone else has died. Yes, it was their choice to go to Juarez, but it is not reasonable to ask them not to under the circumstances. The Mexican government has dropped the ball, and failed its people, whether they live on that side of the border or this one (and I'm even referring to those who are naturalized US citizens. If they have family on the Mexico side but they live here, they are of Mexico AND the US.) It's time to do something about this. How many thousands of people have to die before someone will think this is worth their time to fix?