Jack of Harts

The Americans swept through Mexico with two missions. The first was to kill every drug cartel and leader they could find, and burn everything they owned in a scorched earth strategy that would destroy the Drug Lords’ power. The second was to find locals who wanted to form new local governments that would hopefully be strong enough to rebuild. Then they left the locals in charge and returned home with a promise to come back if anybody worked with the surviving drug cartels to rebuild. It took two demonstration strikes by Texas Marines to prove the “we mean it” in that promise. But the last thing they wanted to do was stick around trying to rebuild Mexico, so they pulled their military back north of the old Mexican-American border. The Chinese and other enemies of America were on the move, after all. Including those politicians still in Washington who styled themselves the rulers of America. The remaining Mexican Drug Lords paled next to those enemies, and all of them needed to be dealt with permanently.

Texas did not wish to march into Mexico City, install a new government, declare victory against the drug cartels, and then go home. They did wish to go home, but many of the Drug Lords had fled south before the approaching American troops. They could not be given a chance to rebuild. So after a week of celebrations, parties, and governmental negotiations, often intermingled in such a way as to make differentiating them difficult, the American military moved on. Army tanks, Marine raiders, and Texas Rangers pursued the Drug Lords into southern Mexico, as Air Force and Navy fighters, bombers, and warships secured the air and sea along the way. A month-long sustained campaign of utter destruction followed that march, aimed at anything or anybody linked with the drug cartels all the way down to the border wall that separated Old Mexico from its southern neighbors. The Americans, and the new Mexican federal government, wanted them as effectively destroyed as possible, and the Americans were happy to shoot them until that result was as complete as possible.

There was no surviving central Mexican government to deal with when Texas led the first of the incursions to deal with the Mexican drug cartels. Oh, there was a Mexican government. It was staffed with politicians picked by the Drug Lords, and it made the North Korean government of the time look functional. Texas had long since stopped recognizing it as a legitimate government, and when they moved in they did not seek verbal deals with that government. The Texans preferred their deals inked in lead, and they liked to filibuster. The locals that had been ruled for decades were honestly happy with anybody who freed them from Drug Lord rule. Even if they had to be arrogant Americans.