Failed state, anyone?

Joe Biden's open borders have brought that state of affairs to the country directly to our south now that Tijuana's mayor has fled for her life to a Mexican army base with her city descending into chaos.

According to Breitbart News:

The mayor of the Mexican border city of Tijuana announced she would be moving onto a Mexican Army base in her city after receiving numerous cartel threats. The announcement comes on the same day that cartel gunmen left seven bodies inside a vehicle in that city.

This week, Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero announced she would be moving to an army base due to cartel threats targeting her and her actions in office.

During a news conference, Caballero claimed that her move comes after enforcement actions from her local police force angered 56 "violence generators," a term used by Mexican government officials to identify violent cartel commanders. Authorities in Mexico did not reveal which drug cartel was behind the threats against the border politician.

Sound like a good time to go visit Tijuana to take in the tacos at Sanborn's, ride the zebra-painted donkey, buy a stripy poncho from the street vendor, and listen to the sequined mariachis?

It's as if that world is gone.  One can only imagine how bleak it is for the Mexicans who live there.  And anything south of them, other than in the elite parts of Mexico City, is much, much poorer.  The mayor has drawn criticism from citizen locals in this city of 2 million just south of San Diego, who say they aren't being protected from cartel violence, either, suggesting that maybe some martial law is called for.  The violence is all over in that border city, the warning signs have been there, and now the mayor can't even live in her own city anymore outside a military fortress.

The story there is horrendous.  TJ, as it's known here (and probably there, too) has clocked in with 2,000 murders this past year.  Next-door San Diego, by contrast, has had...52.  The coroner's office says it's got 1,300 unclaimed dead bodies at the local morgues, which have since found their way into mass graves at city expense.  It's obvious something is gravely wrong, as these aren't ordinary numbers even by Tijuana standards — they look like the kinds of numbers seen in cities such as Caracas, Venezuela in recent years, where they reported an unclaimed morgue pile-up, or Medellín, Colombia during its bad years in the 1990s.

Caracas hasn't fixed its situation much, and Colombia was able to restore control to its second-largest city only after tremendous years-long effort with U.S. assistance, the alternative being a complete takeover by drug cartels.

Most people don't think of cartels as having political aims, but they always do.  Pablo Escobar, after building a gargantuan cocaine fortune in Colombia, eventually sought to rule his country.  The vicious cartels plaguing northern Mexico now, including its economically most important cities such as Tijuana, are throwing out all signs that they are aiming for the same.  It's not just the elected political leader of Tijuana in their crosshairs; it's also the governor of the state, Baja California del Norte, who's gotten threats.  Last month, they showed they were serious by shooting at the mayor's bodyguard.  And political assassinations of elected officials are common in Mexico.  Several years ago, a leading Mexican presidential candidate was gunned down in Tijuana, so the precedent is there. 

The signs have been building that it would come to this.  Here's the other just-a-day-in-Tijuana news from yesterday:

SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — Seven bodies were found inside a pickup on Monday morning in a neighborhood on the east side of Tijuana.

Tijuana police officials say officers chased the vehicle, which had California license plates, to the parking lot of a gas station.

When the white Ford F-150 finally stopped, officers discovered one body wrapped in a blue blanket inside the pickup.

Police reportedly found the other six bodies in the truck bed, along with wooden planks and several tires.

According to police, a steel drum filled with gasoline was also recovered, and they believe the suspects intended to set fire to the bodies and the truck.

All the victims were men.

Less than a year ago, last August, there was this:

TIJUANA, Baja California — The United States Consulate General in Tijuana is instructing employees to shelter in place after unrest in the region began on Friday.

The U.S. consulate is warning government employees near Tijuana, Mexicali, Rosarito, Ensenada, Tecate to shelter in place until further notice due to vehicle fires, roadblocks and heavy police activity.

U.S. citizens are being told to avoid the area, seek secure shelter, and monitor local media for updates.

I wrote about that here.

The border continues to see unprecedented illegal crossings, with billions in profits being generated for the cartels just for the "crossing fees" alone.  Alongside those illegal border crossings brought on by Joe Biden's open border, the crossing themselves tie up the Border Patrol and other law enforcers, which keeps them from apprehending the other profit source from the cartels: its lethal fentanyl trade and other contraband flowing unfettered into the U.S.

Those profits are what's paying for this chaos in Tijuana.

Both of those phenomena have origins in Biden's illegal insistence that every foreigner has a "right" to claim asylum in the U.S., with a free ride into the country until his case can be adjudicated ten years from now (with endless appeals for those eventually rejected) and millions poured on for the illegal crossing industry's enablers.  Just yesterday, Joe Biden earmarked $290 million for the NGOs who've been found to be "coaching" illegal migrants into saying the right things to U.S. officials in order to ensure that they can claim to be persecuted enough to qualify for asylum, even though they are largely economic migrants with full plans in place to fly back and forth to the country they claim to be terrified of living in.  Even the Cubans and Venezuelans, who do have nasty communist governments, can be non-dissidents and have been known to play this game.

Mexico City has a role in this, too.  According to border reporter Todd Bensman, they've repeatedly been caught releasing migrants to the border for entry into the U.S., sometimes actually coordinating with U.S. officials.  With a system in place to receive and finance the migrants, and Mexico operating the conveyor belt, the group that wins, once again, is the cartels, who take the profits.  The people of Tijuana are among the first to pay the price.

They've even found another profit source in the troubled CBPOne app, which permits asylum applications to the U.S. from migrants on the road to the U.S., shaking down migrants for extra cash that way.  Supposedly, the U.S. has stopped that for now.

But the bottom line remains that the profits keep flowing to the cartels from the open border, and now we are seeing signs of a failed state in Mexico's far north.

That's a disaster for the U.S., to have a no-go zone just south of its border, which can only get worse if the problem isn't resolved.

Cut off the money to the cartels, and it will be solved.  It always has.  But Joe Biden just can't make himself do that.  His solution to the border surge has been to provide more gateways for migrants so as to keep the Fox News cameras off the massing migrants at the border, not to stop every foreigner who wants in from getting in, regardless of how much they can contribute to, rather than cost, the U.S. 

The net winners here have been the cartels, who know very well how many people are still getting in, and now they are well on their way to challenging Mexico itself as an expanded criminal empire.

Mexico has a hell of a job here stopping this now as the profiteers from the Biden open border have grown in money and power.  At some point, it will spill over here.

Image: Screen shot from CBS 8 video via YouTube.