The Mexican Zeta drug cartel plotted to blow up Falcon Dam on the Texas border, which would have sent billions of gallons of water into low-lying areas on both sides of the border inhabited by 4 million people.

U.S. authorities confirmed the plans for the attack last Wednesday, revealing that federal officials, American police and disaster specialists secretly scrambled last month to prevent the planned carnage.

The plot was uncovered when law enforcement officials found a copy of a handbill the Zeta cartel was distributing to people on the Mexican side, warning them to vacate the area before the destruction. When authorities found “small amounts of dynamite near the dam,” they beefed up security on both sides of the border.

Mexico’s Zeta cartel desired to destroy the dam, not to harm the civilians in the potential flood zone, but to disrupt the drug smuggling routes of its primary competition, the Gulf cartel. But officials say the billions of gallons unleashed from such an attack would have caused mass destruction and deaths.

Whether or not the Zeta cartel, among whose ranks are Mexican military defectors trained in demolition, had the capacity to blow up the 5-mile-long Falcon Dam may never be known since the attack didn’t come to pass. But authorities are taking this threat and the snowballing power of the drug traffickers seriously.

Fear of being perceived as racists dissuades American politicians from taking the resolute action necessary to stop the organized crime that is devouring the U.S.’s southern border. Rather that tackling these violent cartels with decisive force, elected leaders fiddle while the border burns. The U.S. is too divided to take action, and racial strife is at the heart of the fissure.

The plot to destroy the Falcon Dam is only the latest exhibit in a long list of evidence proving that the U.S. has lost its grip on the Western Hemisphere, and the will to reverse its decline. Drug cartels and the devastation they breed are only symptoms of America’s disease: moral decline. “There is a cause for every effect,” the late Herbert W. Armstrong often said. America’s lust for drugs creates the demand that keeps these cartels afloat. For more on why the world’s greatest superpower is also the world’s biggest drug addict, read “The Drugging of America.”