Thread: From Mexico, Drug Violence Spills Into U.S

From Mexico, Drug Violence Spills Into U.S.
Brutality Gives Rise to Formidable New Problems for Both Countries

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 20, 2008; A20



PUERTO PALOMAS, Mexico -- Javier Emilio Pérez Ortega, a workaholic Mexican police chief, showed up at the sleepy, two-lane border crossing here last month and asked U.S. authorities for political asylum.

Behind him, law and order was vanishing fast. In the four months he had served as Puerto Palomas police chief, drug traffickers had threatened to kill him and his officers if they tried to block the flow of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States, his former colleagues said on condition of anonymity.

After a particularly menacing telephone call, his 10-man force resigned en masse. His bodyguards quit, too. Abandoned by his men and unable to trust the notoriously corrupt Mexican authorities, Pérez Ortega turned to the only place he believed he could find refuge -- the United States, the former colleagues said.

As President Bush meets this week with Mexican President Felipe Calderón in New Orleans, the repercussions of Mexico's battle with drug cartels are increasingly gushing into the United States, giving rise to thorny new problems for Mexican and U.S. officials, as well as the millions of people who live along the border.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in January while chasing suspected traffickers fleeing back to Mexico, AK-47 bullets have been found a half-mile inside U.S. territory after shootouts in Mexican border towns, and wounded Mexican police have been taken to the United States for treatment at heavily guarded hospitals.

Here in Puerto Palomas, a wind-swept desert town south of Columbus, N.M., spillover from Mexico's drug war is measured in bullet-pocked bodies. In the past year, at least 10 gunshot victims have been dumped at the border checkpoint -- taken there by friends or colleagues who believed their only hope of survival lay across the border.

In the calculus of U.S.-Mexican border relations, the living were rushed to medical treatment -- sometimes with law enforcement escorts -- but the dead were not allowed across. Either way, the fallout from Mexico's drug war was being dropped at the doorstep of the United States.

"Mexico's problem is Sheriff Cobos's problem," Sheriff Raymond Cobos, whose jurisdiction in Luna County, N.M., stretches to the border with Puerto Palomas, said in an interview. "No doubt about it."

Cobos ordered a major state highway closed after shootouts in Puerto Palomas and recently sent deputies to monitor the funeral in Columbus of a Mexican man killed in Puerto Palomas. His force goes on alert when drug gangs start shooting in Puerto Palomas, deploying with semiautomatic weapons to the lonely roads and cactus-dotted expanses on the U.S. side of the border. Gunfire is often heard by residents of Columbus, as well as by Border Patrol agents, who have significantly increased their vigilance.

More than 130 miles of rough driving from Ciudad Juarez, Puerto Palomas was once known as a placid outpost marred only occasionally by violence. But since the beginning of the year, more than 30 people have been killed in the town, Puerto Palomas Mayor Estanislao GarcÃ*a said in an interview.

Puerto Palomas became strategically important because Ciudad Juarez, the traditional drug-trafficking hub, has been inundated with Mexican army troops sent to contain a war between the rival Juarez and Sinaloa cartels blamed for more than 200 deaths this year.

The cartels probably knew that the Mexican military was coming months before its arrival in late March and saw Puerto Palomas as an acceptable alternative, a high-ranking Mexican federal government official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the campaign against cartels.

"They have their own intelligence operations," the official said of the cartels. "For them, it's like a chess game."

The cartels quickly brought daylight gunfights to the streets and dumped victims around town. In March, Eddie Espinoza, the Columbus mayor, was in a dentist's chair in Puerto Palomas when armed gunmen stormed the office, making off with $2,000.

"They're getting brazen down there," Espinoza, who was unhurt, told reporters.

In the past two years, as cartels spread terror, the population dropped from 12,000 to 7,500, GarcÃ*a said. Row after row of abandoned houses line eerily quiet neighborhoods. Tourists, the town's lifeblood, have stopped coming.

"When people stay here, they don't go down to Mexico anymore," Martha Skinner, a former Columbus mayor who owns a bed-and-breakfast three miles from the Mexican border, said in an interview. "They're afraid."

On March 17, several Puerto Palomas police officers quit after being threatened by drug traffickers. GarcÃ*a said the officers believed that they were targeted because of an inaccurate Mexican newspaper article that implied they would confront drug gangs.

Within several hours, the entire police force had resigned, rendering the town lawless. Even Pérez Ortega, the stern police chief, left to seek asylum. He awaits a decision in a federal detention center and could not be reached for comment.

Palomas recently recruited a new police chief and nine officers, but they have only two revolvers and two assault rifles for the entire force. The drug traffickers tote automatic weapons and grenades. "Trying to fight the drug traffickers would be like a race in which I was on foot and they were in a car," Salomón Baca, Puerto Palomas's new police chief, said in an interview.

Baca, like his officers, has refused to move his family to Puerto Palomas. The officers all sleep on cots crammed into a backroom of the police station.

Baca, who hopes to move to the United States, is hopeful that his old friend Pérez Ortega will get asylum. For many here, especially as border towns have become shooting galleries, flight to the United States is an ever more pressing dream. But moving north sometimes creates as many problems as it solves.

In 2000, Mauricio Rubio, then a Puerto Palomas police officer, sought asylum. He had been arrested by Mexican state police after helping a New Mexico sheriff's official arrest two men outside Puerto Palomas. The men were suspected of killing a woman in Deming, N.M., and presumably were being protected by corrupt Mexican police.

Rubio and the New Mexico sheriff's official, who also was detained, were released after U.S. diplomats intervened. Afraid that corrupt police would kill him, Rubio and his family asked for, and were granted, permission to live in the United States. But within days, his family was falling apart.

"My daughters were crying all the time, yelling at me and saying, 'Why did you have to get involved in things you shouldn't have been getting involved in?' " Rubio, who now lives in New Mexico, said in an interview.

His wife left him six months later. Since then, he has pined for the cozy feel of his Mexican neighborhood, where everyone knew him. But he is afraid to return -- in the months before he fled, 11 friends in the Ciudad Juarez police force were murdered.

Cobos, the Luna County sheriff, said it is likely that more Mexican police will seek asylum in coming months and years, as the war between drug cartels that has cost more than 5,000 lives in the past two years shows no sign of abating. Asylum requests are long shots at best -- of the 2,611 requests from Mexicans in 2006, the most recent year for which figures are available, 48 were granted.

Cobos considers Mexican police officers, especially those who assist U.S. law enforcement in drug cases, perfectly suitable candidates for asylum. But he also worries that increasingly brazen drug cartels will simply slip across the border in pursuit of Mexican police given refuge there and that he is not equipped to combat them.

For that reason, Cobos has a blunt message to any Mexican policeman who wants to live in his county: "I don't want you around."

www.washingtonpost.com

Sunday, April 20, 2008; A20

Old news.

And I'm afraid drug cartel member’s will/are slip/ing across the border in disguise of law enforcement officers seeking asylum.

SHUT DOWN THE BORDER...... BUILD WALLS... PUT THE ARMY MARINES AND AIR FORCE DOWN THERE

WHERE ARE OUR INCOMPETANT POLITICIANS ...OR ARE THEY AS WELL WRAPPED UP IN THE DRUG CARTELS

Originally Posted by MW

Sunday, April 20, 2008; A20

Old news.

Ok, you got me MW! Checked and I had posted it in April but no comments so going back to to delete that one and will let this stand since some have commented here. Found it at another site posted today.

Note.....this is an older story.

Thank you MW for pointing this out.

This so called government has to be involved with the drug cartels. Those incompetent, inept, corrupt waste of taxpayer dollars, space and oxygen called representatives ignore the slaughter occurring along the border that is spreading into and throughout the Mexican occupied U.S. Idiots as Schwarzenegger are negotiating with Mexican occupation officials to further open the so called border bringing in more corruption, violence and lawlessness. Once again this illustrates this government's primary concern which is supporting open borders and the free flow of drugs, terrorists, weapons, cheap labor and illegal alien votes for their corporate, Mexican government, drug cartel and UN masters; not the safety, welfare and well being of the American people who they tell to go to hell.

Mexican drug violence spills over into U.S.

Much of the bloodshed spreading to cities farther away from border

updated 58 minutes ago

Just as government officials had feared, the drug violence raging in Mexico is spilling over into the United States.

U.S. authorities are reporting a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions connected to Mexico's murderous cartels. And to some policymakers' surprise, much of the violence is happening not in towns along the border, where it was assumed the bloodshed would spread, but a considerable distance away, in places such as Phoenix and Atlanta.

Investigators fear the violence could erupt elsewhere around the country because the Mexican cartels are believed to have set up drug-dealing operations all over the U.S., in such far-flung places as Anchorage, Alaska; Boston; and Sioux Falls, S.D.

"The violence follows the drugs," said David Cuthbertson, agent in charge of El Paso's FBI office.
Many forms of violence

The violence takes many forms: Drug customers who owe money are kidnapped until they pay up. Cartel employees who don't deliver the goods or turn over the profits are disciplined through beatings, kidnappings or worse. And drug smugglers kidnap illegal immigrants in clashes with human smugglers over the use of secret routes from Mexico.
So far, the violence is nowhere near as grisly as the mayhem in Mexico, which has witnessed beheadings, assassinations of police officers and soldiers, and mass killings in which the bodies were arranged to send a message. But law enforcement officials worry the violence on this side could escalate.

"They are capable of doing about anything," said Rusty Payne, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in Washington. "When you are willing to chop heads off, put them in an ice chest and drop them off at a police precinct, or roll a head into a disco, put beheadings on YouTube as a warning," very little is off limits.

Murder for hire
In an apartment in Columbiana, Ala., police found five men with their throats slit in August. They had apparently been tortured with electric shocks before being killed in a murder-for-hire orchestrated by a Mexican drug organization over a drug debt of about $400,000.

In Phoenix, 150 miles north of the Mexican border, police have reported a sharp increase in kidnappings and home invasions, with about 350 each year for the last two years, and say the majority were committed at the behest of the Mexican drug gangs.

In June, heavily armed men stormed a Phoenix house and fired randomly, killing one person. Police believe it was the work of Mexican drug organizations.

Authorities in Atlanta are also seeing an increase in drug-related kidnappings tied to Mexican cartels. Estimates of how many such crimes are being committed are hard to come by because many victims are connected to the cartels and unwilling to go to the police, said Rodney G. Benson, DEA agent in charge in Atlanta.

Brutality in the U.S.
Agents said they have rarely seen such brutality in the U.S. since the "Miami Vice" years of the 1980s, when Colombian cartels had the corner on the cocaine market in Florida.

Last summer, Atlanta-area police found a Dominican man who had been beaten, bound, gagged and chained to a wall in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in Lilburn, Ga. The 31-year-old Rhode Island resident owed $300,000 to Mexico's Gulf Cartel, Benson said. The Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros just south of the Texas border, is one of the most ruthless of the Mexican organizations that deal drugs such as cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin.

"He was shackled to a wall and one suspect had an AK-47. The guy was in bad shape," Benson said. "I have no doubt in my mind if that ransom wasn't paid, he was going to be killed."

In July, Atlanta-area police shot and killed a suspected kidnapper while he was trying to pick up a $2 million ransom owed to his cartel bosses, Benson said.

Violence without borders
State and federal governments have sent millions of dollars to local law enforcement along the Mexican border to help fend off spillover drug crime. But investigators believe Arizona and Atlanta are seeing the worst of the violence because they are major drug distribution hubs thanks to their webs of interstate highways.

In fact, drug officials have dubbed Atlanta "the new Southwest border," said Jack Killorin, a former federal drug agent and director of the Atlanta region's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force.

El Paso, population 600,000, is only a quarter-mile away from Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, which has seen open gun battles and 1,700 murders in the last year. But El Paso remains one of America's safest cities, something Cuthbertson said is probably a result of the huge law enforcement presence in town, including thousands of Border Patrol and customs agents.

In the past year, more than 5,000 people have been killed across Mexico in a power struggle among Mexico's drug cartels and ferocious fighting between them and the Mexican government. The cartels have established operations in at least 230 U.S. cities, according to the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center.

Payne said the U.S. and Mexico are working together to pressure the warring cartels. Payne cited the extradition of high-level drug suspects — four members of the Arellano Felix cartel in Tijuana were brought to the U.S. in December — and the capture or killings of several other top cartel leaders across Mexico in the past year.

"We have to make sure that we attack these criminal organizations at every level so that we are safer not only in Mexico and on the Southwest border, but here in the rest of the country," Payne said.
While some Americans may feel victimized by the spillover of violence, others are contributing to it. Americans provide 95 percent of the weapons used by the cartel, according to U.S. authorities. And Americans are the cartels' best customers, sending an estimated $28.5 billion in drug-sale proceeds across the Mexico border each year.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29105630/