Drug War - Merida Initiative: Connie Mack wants Merida Initiative scrapped for counterinsurgency strategy towards Mexico

Accurate diagnosis, but prescription heads in precisely the wrong direction.

The Pan-American Post: "Outspoken Republican Representative Connie Mack, head of the House’s Western Hemispheric Subcommittee, has called for the U.S. to adopt a “counterinsurgency strategy” in Mexico, declaring that, “while Mexico doesn’t want to admit this; there is an insurgency taking place in Mexico along the U.S. border.”

In a subcommittee hearing on the Merida Initiative, a U.S. aid program focused on Mexican security, Mack said that the program had failed to make an impact on the “well funded criminal insurgency raging along our southern border,” which “some call the greatest national security threat faced by the United States.”

Citing delays in delivering funds, and the dire state of Mexico’s security, Mack vividly described the U.S. response as “showing up to a burning house, late, with a half assembled hose.”

Mack’s argument that the Merida funding has not halted drug violence in Mexico is hard to deny, but it is not clear that his proposed measures would manage to do so."

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