"It's like something al-Qaeda would do"

Perhaps you've seen bits and pieces of this story breaking over the last 48 hours or so: dvd footage of the interrogation of four kidnapped members of "the Nuevo Laredo-based Zetas, allies of the Gulf cartel," including the murder of one, was sent to and partially released by the Dallas Morning News. But that's almost all that's clear at this point. It appears that the men responsible for the kidnapping were Mexican federal agents. Maybe they were working for the rival Sinaloa cartel. Maybe they weren't federal agents. Maybe they were just former or current members of the Mexican military. Mexican Deputy Attorney General José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos (who now admits that Mexican authorities have had a copy of the video "for months") suggests that

. . . one motive for the video could have been an attempt at misinformation. By forcing the Zetas to confess to a series of crimes, including the assassination of a radio reporter and the Nuevo Laredo police chief, the Sinaloa cartel is trying to bring more government heat to their rivals, he said.

In that sense, the video is staged and serves as a kind of publicity stunt to shift public opinion, he said.

For example, the interrogations imply corruption on the part of former Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha or his deputies, but are actually a form of payback for Mr. Macedo's honestly and his unprecedented attack on the drug cartels, Mr. Vasconcelos said.

"We do not have a lot of confidence in this video because of the way it was made," said Mr. Vasconcelos.

This is, in short, a tremendously confusing--and disheartening--mess. Does it sound familiar? Tom Sanchez, of the Webb County Sheriff's Department here in Laredo, where the fighting occasionally spills across the border, declined to comment, except to say that "It's like something al-Qaeda would do."

I see where Sanchez is coming from, but that's a typically irresponsible comparison. If we can just ignore the complexities of the off-the-books organizational character of drug cartels; if we set aside any reasonble understanding of the Mexican economy (and the U.S. impact upon it); if we continue to deny that our insatiable demand for drugs north of the Rio Grande has anything to do with drug violence (on either side of the border); if we don't want to think about it at all, then, come to think of it, this is just like al-Qaeda. Yes: if we're going to make that stretch, let's make it all the way: these guys, like al-Qaeda, just appeared from nowhere, they oozed mysteriously up out of some well, in the world, of "evil." They probably even devote a lot of energy to "hating freedom," as well, these drug-cartel types.

But let's not seize this impulse to wash our hands of the mess in Nuevo Laredo and elsewhere in Mexico: we can help. Let's begin by treating addiction in the United States, and treating it sensitively and well. The use of many illegal drugs in the United States has, we should all admit, after all, an ethical dimension, given its human implications in Mexico and elsewhere. However: the "tough-on-crime" approach misses this point broadly. Sadly, this is precisely the approach we expect our neighbors in the hemisphere to adopt.