Mark Follman

Guest blogger Mark Follman writes frequently about current affairs and culture at markfollman.com.

The raging drug war in Mexico is about to command even greater attention inside the United States. It's not just the gruesome tales of drug cartel violence to the south; the US is far more caught up in the maelstrom than many north of the border may care to realize.

Today at the White House, Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano laid out an Obama administration plan to throw additional money and manpower at the problem, amid mounting fears about "spillover" of violence and corruption into the United States. On Wednesday, Napolitano will go to Capitol Hill specifically to address the crisis, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to arrive in Mexico.

The administration is deploying big guns like Napolitano and Clinton with good reason. As the Wall Street Journal reported recently, "The government is girding for a possible Katrina-style disaster along the 2,000-mile-long Mexican border that would involve thousands of refugees flooding into the US to escape surging violence in northern Mexico, or gun battles beginning to routinely spill across the border." A recent story from international reporting start-up GlobalPost shows how joint US-Mexican operations have been implicated in the spreading violence, on both sides of the border.

Some relatively obscure testimony by senior officials from the ATF and DEA to a Senate subcommittee last week contains stark details about our country's role in the predicament. Simply put, the US is serving as a vast weapons depot for the drug gangs.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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