Michael Totten accurately describes it: The Iraq of Latin America

Mexico is more like Iraq than any other country in the Western Hemisphere with the possible exception of Haiti. A bewilderingly multifaceted armed conflict has been raging since 2007 between more than a dozen militarized drug cartels, the federal government and a smorgasbord of citizen’s militias.

The Mexican mafia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Soviet Proxy during the Cold War that remains on the list of international terrorist organizations, back some of the cartels, and according to the Tucson Police Department, even Hezbollah has gotten involved.

The cartels are bribing and corrupting so many government officials that the state fights them only occasionally and only in certain places, leaving citizens at the mercy of murderous criminal enterprises that don’t flinch at even ISIS levels of brutality.

Totten reviews the documentary Cartel Land

The brutality in Mexico, a neighboring country, is difficult to imagine. Now Breitbart Texas reports that the Zetas are killing each other:

The series of executions and violence that have spiked along this region appear to show that Mexico’s most sadistic criminal group is undergoing internal changes in an effort to remain current and to keep their plazas under control. Their ongoing war with the Gulf Cartel has already spread to five years plunging the state into an insecurity crisis where the loss of lives remains beyond counting and neither side has been a clear winner.

Border security is national security, now more than ever.