Edinburg Votes to Join Texas, Accelerating Mexico Crisis

I wrote this post yesterday (March 6) while our site was down. Vlad was kind enough to let me post it last night at his place. Readers may enjoy looking at the comments on it there.

The latest on the Mexican crisis, from Reuters:

EDINBURG, Mexico (Reuters) March 6, 2022 — Edinburg’s legislature voted to join Texas on Thursday and its Washington-backed government set a referendum within 10 days on the decision in a dramatic escalation of the crisis over Tamaulipas state in Mexico.

The Edinburg region of Texas — which was ceded to Mexico in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama to satisfy domestic political pressures — consists on the former counties of Webb, Zapata, Jim Hogg, Starr, Hidalgo, Willacy, and Cameron. The region is now part of Tamaulipas state.

The sudden acceleration of moves to bring Edinburg, which has an Anglo majority and has effectively been seized by Texan forces, formally under Austin’s rule came as UN leaders gathered for an emergency summit to find ways to pressure Texas to back down.

Russian President Vladimir Putin took steps to punish those involved in threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Mexico, ordering the freezing of their Russian assets and a ban on travel into Russia.

The Russian Navy announced a guided-missile destroyer, the Archangel, was heading to the Gulf of Mexico in what it said was a long-planned training exercise and not a show of force.

The Edinburger legislature voted unanimously “to enter into the Republic of Texas with the rights of a citizen of the Republic of Texas”.

The vice-governor of Edinburg, home to Texas’ Gulf of Mexico military base in Port Isabel, said a referendum on the status would take place on March 16. He said all state property would be “nationalized”, the U.S. dollar could be adopted and Mexican troops would be treated as occupiers and be forced to surrender or leave.

The announcement, which diplomats said could not have been made without U.S. President Rand Paul’s approval, raised the stakes in the most serious east-west confrontation since the beginning of the Great Collapse.

U.S. stocks fell and the dollar weakened further after the news. Moody’s ratings agency said the stand-off was negative for Texas’ creditworthiness.

Texas said it would make it easier to give passports to native English speakers who have lived in Texas or the United States. Paul has cited the threat to American citizens to justify military action in the Caribbean in 2019 and now in Mexico.

Far from seeking a diplomatic way out of the crisis, Paul appears to have chosen to create facts on the ground before the East can agree on more than token action against him.

UN leaders had been set to warn but not sanction the U.S. over its military intervention after Washington rebuffed Eastern diplomatic efforts to persuade it to pull forces in Edinburg, with a population of about 2 million, back to their bases. It was not immediately clear what impact the Edinburger moves would have.

French President Dominique Strauss-Kahn told reporters on arrival at the summit: “There will be the strongest possible pressure on Texas to begin lowering the tension and in the pressure there is, of course, eventual recourse to sanctions.”

A Edinburger legislature official said voters will be asked two questions: should Edinburg be part of the Republic of Texas, and should Edinburg return to an earlier constitution (2017) that gave the region more autonomy?

“If there weren’t constant threats from the current illegal Mexican authorities, maybe we would have taken a different path,” deputy legislature speaker Donald McTeague told reporters outside the legislature building in Edinburg’s main city, also named Edinburg.

“I think there was an annexation of Edinburg by Mexico, if we are going to call things by their name. Because of this mood and feeling we took the decision to join Texas. I think we will feel much more comfortable there.”

To provide some perspective on the Ukraine crisis, the imaginary article above was created by modifying this Reuters story (which has already been altered by Reuters via several updates since I downloaded it).

The Crimea was a part of the Russian state from 1783 — when Catherine the Great wrested it from the Ottomans — until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev assigned it to the Ukrainian S.S.R. for internal Soviet political reasons.

12 thoughts on “Edinburg Votes to Join Texas, Accelerating Mexico Crisis

  1. So, the Crimea only belongs to Ukraine because communists thought it was a good idea.

  2. The real question isn’t what happens with Crimea. Of course it will revert to Russian control. Russia holds all the cards: military, economic, demographic, and mystic-chords-of-history.

    There are two real questions. First, does Putin want more? Second, how much more?

    The portion of Ukraine that includes the major cities of Kharkov and Donetsk is largely peopled by Russian speakers. Moscow might not win a free plebiscite, but if Putin wants to paper over a conquest of that region, he can make up whatever votes he needs and then argue that it only makes sense that Russians would vote to live in Russia.

    The part of Ukraine that lies further to the west, and in particular the capital city, Kiev, can perhaps also be conquered, but nobody would believe a pro-Putin vote and there would be quite a bit of fighting before Russian troops got the upper hand. And what about partisans? Putin has no easy path to outright and complete conquest.

    Henry Kissinger suggests a reasonable and workable end state to this difficult situation. Crimea perhaps remains formally in Ukraine, but with Russian base leases confirmed and with so much local autonomy for Crimea that in practice it’s part of Russia. Or perhaps it formally joins Russia. Potato, potahto.

    The rest of Ukraine remains fully independent, in the sense that Russian troops don’t go there. But it models itself on Finland. Ukraine does a lot of business both with the West and with Russia. The Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine are treated with all due respect and nobody picks on them or excludes them from business or politics. But they don’t rule—they find some modus vivendi with the Ukrainian speakers, as the French and English speakers of Canada have found.

    Ukraine ends up playing somewhat the same commercial role as Taiwan and Hong Kong have played in the development of China: a conduit for investment and a bridge between cultures. And a buffer.

  3. When GOV goes down, I aways check first at Vlad’s. There is a war going on for your mind, as they say.

    I find these alternate/reversed scenarios, and you’ve done a number of them, to be enjoyable. Your colophon includes a little history which seems to favor the Russian view of the Crimea. We should always consider that what goes around comes around, sooner or later.

  4. The Crimea is ‘game over’ already, what’s going to be very tricky indeed is
    Eastern Ukraine, heavily populated with Russians (as some of it was part of Russia before 1954). It seems like deja vu, when we look back to 1937 and the
    Danzig Corridor where Ethnic Germans were targetted by Bolcheviks and
    Polish irregulars. This lasted for something like 18 months while Hitler
    gnashed his teeth as about 58,000 of the German diaspora were casually wiped out in Stalin’s attempt to goad AH to attack Russia. The Eastern Ukraine is where Putin absolutely HAS to get it right, if he doesn’t, Uncle Sam
    is either going to have missile shields along the Ukraine / Russia border or
    WW3 is going to start in 2014.

  5. All quite predictable for many years. Why now? Orchestration perhaps? The answer to the conundrum is, as ever, what is the UN doing.

    (I exhausted my supply of question marks).

  6. I still want to know what Obama’s meddling was intended to achieve. Compared to the present, how bad would ten more years of the status quo auntie have been?

    Buster Keaton and Bela Lugosi would have handled this better.

    • Laurel and Hardy comes to mind every time I think of
      the Big O and his sidekick.

  7. Pingback: The Devils You Know | Gates of Vienna

  8. Welcome back to Texas, to the people of Edinburgh. And you Yankees, just stay the hell out of our country.

  9. A thin analogy, but useful. Mostly at issue is , like others have said, what next? Also, what cannot be ignored easily, the US got in there back in the day and made agreements. Then in 06 or so, Senator Obama jumped over there with Lugar and made a big deal about , and paid US money to implement, massive arms and ammo destruction… in the greater Ukraine… leaving them vulnerable.

    So if not for that last bit, I am comfortable with leaving them alone.. but we kinda disarmed them and made it a much easier calculation for Vlad to invade, and that part I find unsettling and another reason I can’t stand our dear leader. He was a fail, even in the Senate.

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