Politics are often a war fought with words and deals- even as the teams and causes are within the same country or inside the same city. In Ciudad Juarez, the art of politics has lost the power to take control of local events. Instead, the city is run by drug and human trafficking gangs, but the money that those acts generate, and rather than deals being made, hitmen who are hired to do the work of the people who are in charge. The politics of guns and power are brutally different than the flashy but domestic debates and arguments in the buildings of the capitals. There are no rules, no motions, no decorum that can be used to bring a familiar order to the decision-making.

Reuters has a revealing article today, profiling a man who worked for years as a hitman in the Ciudad Juarez scene. He says that he would get a phone call, meet at a safehouse and learn who his target was. Maybe buy off that person’s bodyguards, maybe not, but police chiefs who owe money or politicians getting in the way were (and are still) routinely shot, beheaded, maimed or otherwise “punished” for not adhering to the politics of the gangs.

Mexico is an important oil and trading partner for the U.S. They are also an emerging economy that is going through massive cultural and economic growing pains. When President Felipe Calderon came to power in 2006, he launched a military initiative against the drug cartels, and it has turned the country upside down. 25,000 people have been killed. 5,500 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez alone over the past 2 ½ years. Two and a half years is around 913 days. That’s over 5 people each day.

The hitman that Reuters interviewed was a former police officer who now is a born-again Christian, and had spent the time in between his late teens, early twenties and early thirties, doing the work of an itinerant hitman. He is now out, but the cartels are far from losing power. How exactly does a government deal with this kind of ingrained and all-powerful drug presence? Indeed, that is the question that Felipe Calderon is sitting with, and it is the question that the U.S. government doesn’t have a good answer to, though it is knocking on our door along the border through immigration, drug and human trafficking, and the simple fact that what happens in Ciudad Juarez is based on getting things into the U.S. where the money comes from.

In a not so dissimilar way to the BP disaster, what is happening there is because there is a market in the United States, and while the murders themselves (or the leaks/spills) are not our direct fault, there would be far less killings and no oil leaking if it weren’t for the lucrative, consistent and growing demand from the U.S. It’s the way of the world economy, and it is a moment for the U.S. to look out and take a long hard look at what we do with our time.

Photo Credit: World Economic Forum