Come on, everybody, admit that El Chapo is on your mind.

Maybe you’re even on his payroll! Just kiddin,’ just kiddin.’

Let us examine the great escape story of our era. First and foremost, not only are poor, rural Mexicans celebrating El Chapo’s tunnel escape, a multitude of celebrants live in New York, Chicago, L.A., etc. These would be the financers of El Chapo’s years of operation. Tell me you don’t know that it’s good ol’ U.S. dollars that drive these men and women of the drug trade and I’ll show you a bridge in Brooklyn that’s for sale.

Whenever the 11 o’clock news shows confiscated arms of the drug wars in Mexico, 99.9 percent of the guns and rifles are American made. Sold to the (fill-in-the-blank) Cartel by U.S. salespersons. So is the ammunition. And the SUVs.

And . . . oh well, you get the picture. Let’s review: most of the money, guns, ammo, vehicles and clientele are made in the U.S.A. To quote Ol’ Pogo, “we have met the enemy and it is us.”

Yes and double yes, we are the Numero Uno customer of Mexico’s (and other lands south of the Rio Grande) drug impresarios. El Chapo, you might say, is the Donald Trump of this illicit business!

Whoa Nellie, are we laying blame on ourselves for this unholy mess of crime, death and mucho dirty dinero?

Check the frightful facts, don’t just take my word for it. I’ve worked for several dailies dotting the U.S.-Mexican border, but I don’t profess to know “everything about the trade,” but I know enough to realize that our involvement does not stop at the border. Nor are minions and mules the only ones involved, for we have some very, very big names attached to this wretched kind of money-making. Let’s just call them The Untouchables.2 for lack of a better term.

Meanwhile the American people may not understand what’s going on beyond the sound bites our corporate media feeds us nightly. There are estimates that more than $26 billion dollars a year in terms of revenue that flow from this country to the south that benefit drug business, most of it going to the jefes like El Chapo.

Okay, by the time our country lets go of $26 billion, you know darn well somebody stands to make lots more from the resale of such stuff. Who are these people? Hmmm.

There have been lame efforts to safeguard the 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the US. We have constructed taller walls and expensive metal fences to no avail. Drug lords like El Chapo and Co., simply moved to the tunnels. Oh yes, we are finding and closing tunnels, but the cartels construct more, most of them more elaborate. The unskilled ones simply hurl the stuff over the walls in very creative ways. Even submarines are developed and deployed to drop the drugs on U.S. beaches.

Most U.S. politicians remain clueless to the fact that the border spans six Mexican states and four US states, has over twenty commercial railroad crossings and forty-five Mexico-US crossings with 330 ports of entry. According to the Migration Information Source, for example more than 750,000 passengers and 15,338 trucks cross the border every day.

That’s a lot of ground, roads and bad people to cover or guard against. No matter what all of the Republican presidential candidates promise about “securing” the border. If you’ve never lived there as a fronterizo you don’t know beans about it.

By the way, some studies show that corruption in Chicago during prohibition for example, was not so different with what is occurring among the drug cartels in Mexico. The experts on addiction also claim that among the reasons drug users are out there, is that in general some of them are very disenfranchised so they use some form of drug to feel high and avoid certain issues, from a souring romance to bad grades. The feel that our social fabric is becoming more un-wound than ever. The even warn us that we will experience a greater use of drugs until we really take a somber look at the core problems then earnestly address our problems. Good luck with that. Seriously.

Meanwhile, down Mexico way, U.S. figures show that in just six years, 70,000 people have been killed (but some Mexican activists estimate the number is more like a staggering 120,000) and more than 20,000 people have disappeared and a quarter of a million have been displaced. That’s a lot of people, many of them innocent bystanders, to kill for a certain kind of high we seek to cope with our daily life.

In case some have forgotten, investigative journalists have been slain in almost every city of the country. A large number of the country’s newspapers have even adopted a policy of not printing anything about narco related activities. In some cases, however, narcos themselves will burst into an editor’s office and instruct him/her as to what and when to publish a particular story, usually a forth coming social event.

Like America’s infamous War on Drugs, the Mexican version is also failing miserably, if not worse.

After El Chapo’s escape caper, both U.S. and Mexico drug experts are afraid that with this bad boy on the loose, drug enforcement and other similar antidrug efforts are really going to go south.