Thread: El Paso is major hub for drugs sent to U.S.

El Paso is major hub for drugs sent to U.S.
Daniel Borunda / El Paso Times
Article Launched: 12/20/2008 11:34:21 PM MST



EL PASO -- The extensive drug-related violence that has turned Juárez and other Chihuahua state communities into war zones has largely stopped at the border, but the effects of the drug trade stretch far beyond the banks of the Rio Grande.

El Paso, though spared the brazen killings taking place in Mexico, has felt the power of the multibillion-dollar illicit drug trade and has become a major hub for the distribution of drugs headed to markets throughout the United States, officials said.

Stash houses, corruption, money-laundering, bulk-cash smuggling, gun-running and gang activity in El Paso are all linked to some degree to the drug war in Mexico.

The recently released National Drug Threat Assessment 2009 by the U.S. Department of Justice stated that Mexican drug-trafficking organizations "represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States."

The organizations are fighting over lucrative smuggler territories, referred to as plazas, leading to the markets in the United States.

Mexican narcos now supply the vast majority of cocaine to U.S. consumers and are believed to have gained control of drug distribution in most U.S. cities. They also are gaining strength in markets they do not yet control, according to the assessment.
The El Paso-Juárez area, like other spots on the border, is a vital point in the transnational illegal drug industry.

Last fiscal year, more than 84 tons of marijuana and 774 pounds of cocaine were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, who also dealt with more than 17 million legal international crossings in El Paso, CBP officials said.

Once contraband crosses the border, drug loads are hidden in hundreds of "stash houses" throughout El Paso before being shipped to cities such as Denver, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta, law enforcement officials said.

"We need to step it up. I don't just mean law enforcement," said Robert Almonte, executive director of the Texas Narcotics Officers Association. While heading the narcotics section of the El Paso Police Department, Almonte helped create the stash house unit.

The National Drug Threat Assessment reported that Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers make between $18 billion and $39 billion in wholesale drug proceeds annually.

And as drugs flow north, cash flows south through El Paso.

Last fiscal year, Customs and Border Protection officers in El Paso seized $2.8 million in undeclared cash -- most in a single seizure of $1.9 million hidden in door panels of an SUV traveling from Kansas City, Mo.

To distribute drugs in the United States, Mexican cartels have increased working relationships with American street gangs, the drug threat report stated. Cartels also have formed links to outlaw biker gangs and are increasingly working with the Mafia in the New York region, the report stated.

In El Paso, the gang-cartel link is highlighted by the ties between La Linea, or the Juárez drug cartel, and the Barrio Azteca gang.

Testimony during the recent Barrio Azteca federal trial revealed that killings, kidnappings and drug smuggling were some of the assignments gang members carried out for the cartel.

The Barrio Azteca in El Paso and its Juárez counterparts, the Aztecas, are "an unknown factor" in the current Juárez upheaval, said FBI spokeswoman Special Agent Andrea Simmons.

The Barrio Azteca has an estimated 3,000 members in the Southwest after being formed in the 1980s by El Pasoans in prison. On the streets of El Paso, gangsters collect "taxes" from local drug dealers.

Despite the rampant violence in Juárez, El Paso crime did not increased this year, police said. El Paso is ranked the third-safest large city in the U.S. and as has had only 16 homicides this year. But law enforcement remains on alert.

In Juárez, 1,500 people have been slain, part of the 5,000 homicides in all of Mexico this year.

"Everybody is more on guard, of course," said Robert "Bobby" Holguin, president of the El Paso Municipal Police Officers' Association.

Law enforcement officials say the biggest potential for the violence in Mexico to spill into the U.S. comes from assassins chasing targets who flee across the border.

If the past bloodshed in the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo area is any indication, the violence will strike U.S. citizens.

In 2005, congressional testimony by an FBI assistant director revealed that 35 abductions of U.S. citizens were reported in the Nuevo Laredo region between May 2004 and May 2005.

Many more kidnappings probably went unreported because of fear of reprisals and because relatives of victims involved in drug trafficking may be reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement, the FBI official told Congress.

This year, the FBI has had no reported cases of people kidnapped in El Paso and taken to Mexico.

In the fluid cross-border community, it is hard to know how many people fled Juárez and other parts of the state of Chihuahua this year.

"It seems to me that even small hamlets and villages can't escape the violence of these drug cartels," said Luna County Sheriff Raymond Cobos, whose county sits on the border west of El Paso in Southern New Mexico.

The small town of Palomas, Mexico, across the border from Columbus, N.M., has had roughly 40 homicides in the past 14 months, but street shootings have slowed in recent months, Cobos said.

"Now they switched tactics," Cobos said. "Kidnappings in the middle of the night. These people just simply disappear.

"On our side of the border is the disturbing trend -- the people leaving the Palomas area and relocated in Luna County," Cobos said.

"We believe those people that have been targeted (moved). We are kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop," he said.

Cobos said it is difficult to know how many families -- estimates say up to 200 -- have fled Palomas.

"For us, on a personal level, it really hurts because many of us in law enforcement have families on both sides of the border," Cobos said.

"To watch families uproot and leave because they can't live in Palomas, to me, it's not a far leap to what happens in places like Darfur, where you have refugees that put everything they own in a sack and leave, fearing for their lives."



Drugs in the U.S.

100,000: Inmates in federal prisons convicted and sentenced for drug offenses, accounting for 52 percent of all federal inmates, as of September 2008.

1.8 million: Number of drug-related arrests in the U.S. by federal, state and local law enforcement in 2007.

35 million: Number of people in the U.S. who used illegal drugs or abused prescription drugs in 2007.

$14 billion: Amount allocated by U.S. government for drug treatment, prevention, counter-drug enforcement and interdiction for 2009.

$18 billion to $39 billion: Amount of annual wholesale drug profits by Mexican and Colombian drug organizations.
Source: National Drug Threat Assessment 2009 by the National Drug Intelligence Center of the U.S. Department of Justice.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_11281423

seems to me ramos and compean actually stopped a shipment of drugs from getting to one of these stash houses.
and where are they now???

Added to Home Page
http://www.alipac.us/article3842.html

And yet when BP Agents like Ramos and Compean try to do their job, they get put in prison.