Last week’s discovery of 72 bodies on a ranch in the northeast Mexican state of Tamaulipas is shocking and should be an anomaly, but according to a CNN report other mass graves were found in the states of Nuevo Leon, Quintana Roo and Guerrero in the last few months.  Officials believe each of the mass graves is a result of drug cartels.  It’s no secret that gang violence spills over to innocents.  For example, in March of this year a pregnant U.S. consulate employee and her husband were gunned down as they left a party in Ciudad Juarez. Their young son, who was buckled in to his car seat, survived the attack. Their murders are just two of too many in this city across the border from El Paso.  The exact number of drug-violence related deaths is not known, but estimates but the number at more than 28,000 since January 2007.

The dire situation in Ciudad Juarez is mirrored elsewhere in cities such as Monterrey, Nogales and Tijuana.  Last week the State Department issued an updated travel warning after a shooting outside the American Foundation School in Monterrey. This travel warning mandates the removal of diplomats’ children from the region by September 10.  Despite numerous plans of action to quell the violence, nothing has worked so far.  These cartels will not go away until the demand for their drugs dries up.

So where does that leave us?  Hopeless?  Not necessarily. 

There is a concept in the field of international law called the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, that is worth the try. 

R2P is a concept that was developed by an international committee at the behest of the United Nations General Assembly in 2001.  The U.N. has never implemented the concept, but Mexico’s current situation would make for a good test case. 

R2P boils down to this simple fact: it is the responsibility of the international community to intervene when citizens are threatened as the result of an intra-state conflict.  While Mexico is not embroiled in a civil war, the situation still warrants outside involvement.  According to an AP report, Ciudad Juarez had close to 2000 murders from January through October 2009.  That’s an exorbitant number for a city with a population of 1.5 million.  Contrast that with Los Angeles: L.A. has a population of roughly 3.8 million people and there were 315 murders reported in 2009.  These types of numbers merit a closer look from the international community.

R2P is broken down into three pillars: the responsibility to prevent, the responsibility to react and the responsibility to rebuild.  Ideally, the international response will start with prevention – think of this as an extremely tense situation before any violence has occurred.  In the case of the first pillar, the international community would work together to try and prevent violence from breaking out.  Unfortunately, most of the time the international community isn’t aware of a dire situation until after violence begins, which is the case today in Mexico.  Right now Mexico falls into the responsibility to react pillar.  The government has shown that it is either incapable or unwilling to prevent this sort of extreme violence.  The government has indicated that it is willing to end the violence, but officials simply aren’t capable of doing so, mostly because there is too much systemic corruption. 

The argument might be made that an international police force wouldn’t be effective because it isn’t a stakeholder in the peace process, but this argument doesn’t really hold water.  Instability within a country can easily de-stabilize a region.  It’s already begun to happen.  A lot of the drugs are crossing over Mexico’s borders, and violence is following the drugs.  It’s too late for those 72 men and women found dead last week and the thousands killed last year, but we owe it to them to help the ones they left behind.

Reach Reporter Christine Detz here.