Terror war we ignore is next door

Some of the world’s most vicious terrorists live a short drive from San Diego, and lately they make al Qaeda look like the Simpsons. With well-founded fearlessness, the bosses of Mexico’s drug cartels routinely slaughter police officers, politicians, journalists and innocent bystanders, sometimes within sight of the U.S. border. There is no American military presence, covert or otherwise, to deter the narco-terrorists. Our government is expensively preoccupied chasing jihadists on the other side of the world. Perhaps that explains why the mayhem in Mexico has received relatively modest attention, and appears not to be a burning priority of either the Obama administration or the new Congress. Yet, if body counts are a measure of true public menace, the Mexican drug barons are a force to be feared. About 30,200 people have died since President Felipe Calderón initiated a campaign against the cartels in 2006. More than 2,000 of those murder victims were local, state and federal law-enforcement officers. During a recent 24-hour span in Acapulco, 27 persons were killed, including 14 men whose decapitated bodies were deposited at a shopping center. Two police officers were also slain. Border towns where drug gangs compete are strangled by fear, and those who stand up (and some who don’t) are brutally silenced. Some bodies are delivered home in vats of acid, as a lesson...more