Thread: Nuevo Laredo's tragedy -tip of a growing iceberg

Carlos Guerra: Nuevo Laredo's tragedy is only the tip of a growing iceberg
Web Posted: 06/14/2005 12:00 AM CDT

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/column ... b3eee.html

San Antonio Express-News

Wait. Isn't Nuevo Laredo that sleepy border town South Texans visited for bargains on crafts, food, liquor and prescription drugs?

What has happened?

Sunday, Mexican federal agents flew 41 Nuevo Laredo police officers arrested earlier to Mexico City for interrogation while most of the remaining 650 city officers were confined in their headquarters. Monday, investigating began on each officer still in the city for corruption ties as state and federal agents assumed local police duties.

It all began Wednesday when Alejandro DomÃÂ*nguez Coello was assassinated hours after becoming police chief. Local leaders asked President Vicente Fox for federal agents and he sent a 400-man special team into six states, Tamaulipas among them, where narcoviolence has become most prevalent.

But soon after more than two dozen feds left Nuevo Laredo's airport, they were in a confrontation with city cops.

Local newspapers' reports are sketchy and contradictory. There is agreement that the uniformed local cops stopped the plainclothes feds, suspecting that they were criminals, and that a gunfight erupted and a federal agent was shot.

Nuevo Laredo Mayor Daniel Peña Treviño, who had said he didn't believe Dominguez's murder was drug-related, called it all the accidental product of confusion and of local police unnerved by their chief's killing. But an unnamed federal Attorney General's agent charged that city police ambushed the feds, whose weapons were still stowed in their luggage.

What all this is really about, however, is the convergence of politically inspired public policies and their unintended consequences.

Two decades of lowering American and Mexican trade barriers have given Nuevo Laredo â€â€

"Until we retool our strategies of trade and drugs, the pools of the desperate and corruptible will grow like cancers until there is widespread anarchy?"

Until we "RETOOL"....what does this guy think the US is....an auto plant?

We don't need to RETOOL anything.

ALL we have to do is enforce US Immigration Law.

1) Get Troops to the Border

2) Prosecute Lawbreakers

3) Cut off "benefits"

4) Deport Illegals

That's it. Very simple. An elementary 4 step process to protect the United States and the American People from the RAVAGES of illegal border crossings.