War on Drugs

The Mexican government looked the other way while drug cartels took over parts of the country, but the government is attacking the vigilantes who have risen to fight the cartels.

"Now the "vigilantes" have upped the ante, moving in what appears to be a coordinated strike at the heart of the cartels’ power. The town of Nueva Italia is the latest battlefield, where the self-defense forces have taken over City Hall – under a rain of gunfire from the government-aligned Templarios – and surrounded the neighboring city of Apatzingan, widely known as the Templar’s chief headquarters. "
"The central government has reacted the same way they have in the past: with relentless hostility and demands to disarm. After decades of indifference to what is happening in the southwest part of the country, the lords of Mexico City are sending thousands of federal troops into the region as a complement to their demands that the peoples’ militias disarm."

The vigilantes make the government look bad.

"What is happening in Mexico is the slow-motion collapse of governmental authority under the relentless onslaught of the cartels. It isn’t just the fact that the cartels often have superior firepower: it’s the all-pervasive nature of their corrupting influence, made possible by the huge profits they make from the drug trade. "

The war on drugs is turning Mexico into Afghanistan.

"No one should underestimate the seriousness of what is happening down Mexico way: the country is unraveling much faster than even I predicted last year. As the world economic crisis impacts the already impoverished Mexican masses, and their clueless government continues to dawdle while the country burns, the crisis of authority is bound to culminate in a rather spectacular explosion – one sure to take our own equally clueless (and corrupt) political class completely by surprise.
An all out civil war in Mexico would have to mean millions of refugees crossing the border into the US in a veritable floodtide – one that could not be stopped by our Border Patrol, or, indeed, anything short of a massive military mobilization. The military conflict would inevitably spill over the border: for the first time since the Mexican-American war, the American southwest could conceivably become a battle zone."

This is another reason you can't talk intelligently about illegal immigration without talking about the war on drugs.

"Will Mexico’s civil strife be played out on the streets of American cities? This is a question our political class ought to be asking about now, but they’re too fixated on the wars in far-off Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq to fully appreciate (or even notice) the fire burning right on their doorstep."

This is already happening on a small scale.