At the southeastern corner of Arizona, there is across the international border a small town called Naco, Sonora. As late as the first half of the 1970s, when I attended the university in Tucson, nasty scarring still marked adobe bricks in the south wall of an old hotel there. Some were likely bullet holes, some were divots the size of softballs, indications of shrapnel from pretty good-sized howitzer shells.

That's probable, since furious warfare around this tiny, long-forgotten pueblo once held breathless our national media, as forces of Gen. Francisco "Pancho" Villa trapped most of a Mexican Army division in Naco and a slightly larger town due east, Agua Prieta. That battle 94 years ago ended when President Wilson allowed the Mexican force to surrender to mostly African-American troops on this side of the border, and be ferried via railroad to Texas, where it recrossed "the line" to fight another day. Furious, Villa raided Columbus, NM, a few months later, sparking a long, Gaza-style "police action" in Mexico by Gen. "Black Jack" Pershing and what was the boots-and-saddles U.S. Army at the time. That fruitless bullying didn't end until our anachronistic units packed off to Europe, and the rotted, septic Great War.

It's hard to picture such international combustion today, on the quiet edge of the Chihuahuan Desert plateau, where deep red, ore-rich earth and dark green mesquite scrub dress the rugged countryside almost perennially in festive color. But the bullet holes and deteriorated trench lines falling back into the earth at the outskirts of town echo fairly sophisticated conflict that itself encapsulated the clash of old and new so much a part of that blood-drowned decade: cavalry charges and machine guns, sabre duels and long-range artillery barrage. The spectacular, set-piece battles drew huge crowds of Americans to hillsides on their side of the fence, to watch the carnage, and, to their credit, aid many of the refugees.

And we think border violence is bad today.

Well... maybe it comes close.

Gunmen have carried out another attack on a drugs rehabilitation centre in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, killing 10 people and injuring two others. The shooting follows the deaths of 18 people in an attack on a separate rehab centre in the same city this month. Such shootings have been blamed on drug traffickers who accuse the clinics of protecting dealers from rival gangs. 

The long, torturous, capitalist venture to supply drugs to affluent gringos north of the border has all but rendered Mexico a failed state. In many areas of the country, the military has been forced to take civil control, simply because local law enforcement is too corrupt or too intimidated to take action against the cartels. Sometimes, it's hard to figure what keeps Mexico going. Sometimes, it's easy to imagine that the drug combines - los narcostrafficantes - are themselves the de facto state, supplying whatever order there is, however brutal.

Next month is the centennial of the 1910 Mexican Revolution that produced names and places which still resonate, at least in this part of the world - Villa, Huerta, Pershing, Vera Cruz, Emiliano Zapata. And from this side of history, it's hard to see where the upheaval ended. Mexico is still saddled with a government at best negligent and at worst corrosive, it still must endure a greedy, derisive - and decidedly unneighborly - neighbor to the north. It must tolerate the voluntary evacuation of its best and brightest, its strongest and most industrious, to "el Norte", where dwindling, meltdown opportunity still beats that at home.

But by how much? It's getting hard to tell. How far are we, here, from becoming a failed state?

On the web, I came across a student essay that boils down in simple terms the causes of the 1910 revolution that toppled the regime of the old Juarista Porfirio Diaz:

This government created severe poverty with their corrupt system that caused a severe separation between the classes and created tension between the classes, finally the Mexican economy (which was already suffering) was completely dependent on (loans from) foreign nations... This foreign dependency caused the Mexican economy to have no stability or control of either its growth or decay. Prior to the revolution these nations began to demand that Mexico pay back its debt to them. This was absolutely devastating to the already crippled Mexican economy.

Huge debt held by foreign creditors and a ruling elite utterly detached from its citizenry. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

In the processes of our economic meltdown, and especially in "revovery" efforts by our government, it isn't hard to feel common Americans - the famous "little people" that are so much the national bulk supporting from far below that airy tip of our political and economic pyramid - have been left out of the equation. Left behind. Efforts to re-establish investment markets, and even install a new health-care system, are power lunches by insiders, by a detached minority firmly in control of what should be, in a democracy, our commonly designed social and political mechanisms. Everything is pitched to those who stand to gain the most from any public intervention, any avenue of official control or aid; the rest of us... dwindle. We pay for it. That's all.

Paul Craig Thomas is a Libertarian columnist who's sometimes a little dotty, but capable of real insight and vivid reasoning. In a piece this week he proposes, The U.S. Is a Failed State:

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war's financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400...

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks...

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington's wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar's value reduces the purchasing power of Americans' already declining incomes...

Maybe 14 months ago it would have been easy to write off Roberts' alarms as ravings of a dime-store Cassandra, as grudge-fueled nonsense. Now? We have reports the TARP recovery money probably won't be repaid fully by our banking system, too big to fail, and that after all that taxpayer revenue was handed out, and helped lace bankers' pockets in the form of bonuses, the U.S. financial system is "shakier than ever." Those tidbits come on top of an August report that estimated U.S. banks will collect a record $38.5 billion in overdraft fees this year. ...Just overdrafts.

How narrow a margin are we on... right now? If we're shoved to the wall long enough, hard enough, will we push back? Will our own Villas ride? Will we find our own "La Cucaracha" to march to? And if that nightmare comes, how long before we set right our failure?

Ever?