Mexico as a spot of bother

Mexico is looking pretty bad.

Now, in case you don't know, Mexico is one of our biggest providers of oil for Barbie's SUV.

Crude Oil Imports (Top 15 Countries) (Thousand Barrels per Day)
Country	Feb-09	Jan-09	YTD 2009	Feb-08	YTD 2008
CANADA	1,913	1,946	1,930	1,920	1,933
MEXICO	1,219	1,299	1,261	1,231	1,214
SAUDI ARABIA	1,099	1,337	1,224	1,614	1,544
VENEZUELA	960	1,172	1,072	945	1,043
ANGOLA	671	527	595	341	458

Mexico's oil production sucks. It is also a sweet deal for the bastards at the oil companies here in the US. They have bribed the shit out of the Mexican authorities to prevent Mexico from developing their own refinery capacity. So there is a sweetheart deal where we get their oil, refine it, and sell it back at a profit. The only thing that they don't do is kiss them on the neck afterward. You will notice the flat numbers for our imports from Mexico. Couple this with the production losses and you start to see the progressive impoverishment of Mexico for our benefit. Please note, this kind of rich-grabs-from-the-poor does not usually sit well with folks.

Anyway, the oil money pays for about a third of Mexico's budget. If the production falls off at the 3-4% a year it has been showing lately, things might get pretty ugly, pretty quick. When shit goes bad in your country, and there is a country next door with good stuff a-plenty, you can't really blame folks for heading that-a-way.

No. I don't think that the best solution is to put up a big fence and shoot the bastards as the come across. The Romans tried that with the Rhaetian Limes as a frontier rather than the Rio Grande. Didn't appear to work very well. No amount of high-tech stuff will stop folks who are desperate.

But to be honest with you, that distasteful solution may very well come down to being the solution that we have to implement. But if we do execute that plan, you had better set your timers, because we will have to set the modern day equivalents of Blackjack Pershing through to Veracruz on a reasonably frequent basis.

When we do that, we will enter our own era of Diocletian.