http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6286839.html

Mexico drug crimes leave border at odds
Fort Hancock residents don't like the fence, but value security

By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle Mexico City Bureau

Feb. 28, 2009, 10:15PM

Three years ago, the Fort Hancock area made international news when a vehicle being chased by U.S. law enforcement agents got stuck in the Rio Grande. The vehicle was found to have bundles of marijuana.

FORT HANCOCK — Gale Carr and his neighbors farm thousands of acres of cotton and chile peppers on America’s fortified frontier, across a trickling Rio Grande from what’s been called Mexico’s Valley of the Beheaded.

The bedlam and drug violence gripping Mexico has reached down even into the once somnolent villages bordering Fort Hancock, where Carr and thousands of others in the high desert find themselves in the trenches of turmoil.

“You have mass killing over there,â€