Thread: South Padre Island / Precinct One Corruption & Border Wa

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
The killing of a Mexican Marine’s family should remind us that the problem of drug violence is based on demand within the United States. U.S. policy is creating death and hardship. We need to either stop using illegal drugs in the United States or legalize them. Otherwise, we are going to be responsible for militarizing another Latin American country and the Southern border of the United States.

See NY Times article on the killings:Â*http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/wo.../23mexico.html


Article from Texas Coop Magazine, December 2009. Miguel is quoted.
Saturday, December 19th, 2009


By Eileen Mattei

Controversy swirls around the South Texas border fence like a dust devil. The intermittent concrete and metal barrier erected parallel to the Rio Grande in the name of national security and protection against terrorists has sparked battles over property rights, transparency, rule of law and wildlife survival.

Called the Southwest Border Fence by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the border wall in Texas stretches around El Paso for 165 miles, then appears briefly at the cities of Del Rio and Eagle Pass, which opposed the wall with no success.

In the lower Rio Grande Valley, the brawl over the wall is in the final rounds. The last 36 intermittent miles of fence in Cameron County have been going up—through the city of Brownsville, through private property, family farms and wildlife preserves. The structure here is a combination of fence and reinforced levies along the Rio Grande’s flood plain. Despite protests, injunctions and negotiations, the wall was nearly complete by mid-June. But several lawsuits were pending.

Of the planned 55 miles of fence for the Rio Grande Valley, about 33 have been completed.

A 2008 Rasmussen Reports poll showed 52 percent of Texans favored the fence. But along the border, it seems that many residents rarely have a good word to say about it.

“The wall is unnecessary. It doesn’t accomplish anything,â€

A border wall will not protect Americans from the corrupt politicians and dirty cops who have openned the floodgates to illegal immigrants and organized international criminals.

WELCOME TO TEXAS JUSTICE: YOU MIGHT BEAT THE RAP, BUT YOU WON'T BEAT THE RIDE.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2008
FBI: Border corruption increasing on US side
Coming on the heels of allegations that Los Zetas corrupted a deputy constable in Collin County, I was interested to see that Reuters has a feature on drug-enforcement related police corruption at the southern end of the state ("Drug smugglers bribing US agents on Mexican border," July 15):
U.S. Border Patrol agent Reynaldo Zuniga was arrested last month lugging a bag of cocaine up from the Rio Grande, one of a growing number of law enforcement officers accused of taking bribes from drug gangs.

Former colleagues say Zuniga used to wait until agents in the south Texas town of Harlingen were distracted with paperwork, then slip down to the river and help smuggle in drugs from Mexico.

The increasing use of bribes by Mexican drug cartels to corrupt U.S. agents comes as Washington is sending $400 million to help Mexico's army-led war on the trafficking gangs, whose brutal murders have surged to unprecedented levels.

"Zuniga was a good agent and a hard worker. I can't understand why he would do this. We're supposed to be protecting our borders," said Border Patrol agent Daniel Doty, a former colleague.

Data on agents convicted of graft are not made public, but the U.S. government is probing hundreds of border corruption cases where a decade ago it saw a few dozen a year. The FBI-led Border Corruption Task Force says it is busier than ever.

"We've seen a sharp increase in investigations along the border over the past three years," said Andy Black, who oversees the San Diego task force, near the busy border crossing of San Ysidro.

"We are talking about a minority of agents but they are a very significant threat, a weak link in efforts to secure the border."

Some put the rise in bribery down to a recent tightening of border controls and a jump in hiring new agents. Smugglers can offer hundreds of thousands of dollars to get past the heavily policed border with drugs and immigrants -- much more than a border agent or sheriff makes in a year.

Gangs also often use attractive women as bait, setting a "honey trap" to entice officials.

"I was offered sex to let a woman across the Rio Grande, but I have a family, I turned her down," one agent told Reuters as his sniffer dog searched a freight train for immigrants and drugs in the Texan borderlands, steamy with tropical rain.
Billions thrown at border enforcement can be stymied in any given moment by the actions of one corrupt cop or Border Patrol officer. But then, there's hardly been just one.

http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2 ... on-us.html

News

Drug smugglers bribing U.S. agents on Mexico border
Tue, Jul 15 13:02 PM EDT

By Robin Emmott

HARLINGEN, Texas, July 15 (Reuters) - U.S. Border Patrol agent Reynaldo Zuniga was arrested last month lugging a bag of cocaine up from the Rio Grande, one of a growing number of law enforcement officers accused of taking bribes from drug gangs.

Former colleagues say Zuniga used to wait until agents in the south Texas town of Harlingen were distracted with paperwork, then slip down to the river and help smuggle in drugs from Mexico.

The increasing use of bribes by Mexican drug cartels to corrupt U.S. agents comes as Washington is sending $400 million to help Mexico's army-led war on the trafficking gangs, whose brutal murders have surged to unprecedented levels.

"Zuniga was a good agent and a hard worker. I can't understand why he would do this. We're supposed to be protecting our borders," said Border Patrol agent Daniel Doty, a former colleague.

Data on agents convicted of graft are not made public, but the U.S. government is probing hundreds of border corruption cases where a decade ago it saw a few dozen a year. The FBI-led Border Corruption Task Force says it is busier than ever.

"We've seen a sharp increase in investigations along the border over the past three years," said Andy Black, who oversees the San Diego task force, near the busy border crossing of San Ysidro.

"We are talking about a minority of agents but they are a very significant threat, a weak link in efforts to secure the border."

Some put the rise in bribery down to a recent tightening of border controls and a jump in hiring new agents. Smugglers can offer hundreds of thousands of dollars to get past the heavily policed border with drugs and immigrants -- much more than a border agent or sheriff makes in a year.

Gangs also often use attractive women as bait, setting a "honey trap" to entice officials.

"I was offered sex to let a woman across the Rio Grande, but I have a family, I turned her down," one agent told Reuters as his sniffer dog searched a freight train for immigrants and drugs in the Texan borderlands, steamy with tropical rain.

"BAD AGENTS"

Corruption south of the border is a major hurdle to Mexican President Felipe Calderon's quest to crush drug gangs, with up to half the country's police thought to be crooked. Spiraling drug violence has killed 1,700 people in Mexico this year.

U.S. anti-drug officials have pointed to higher street cocaine prices as proof of tighter border controls.

But the campaign is weakened by cases like that of a border agent and his brother in Texas who netted $1.5 million by letting tonnes of marijuana through checkpoint inspection lanes from 2003 to 2005.

Trafficking drugs and people generates billions of dollars a year. Powerful gangs use crooked officials well beyond the border to open smuggling lanes into the United States.

In one case showing the breadth of the problem, two California-based employees of Wackenhut, a contractor that transports detained illegal immigrants, were charged last month with freeing them for $2,500 each.

Also in June, police arrested a Los Angeles attorney for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for allegedly accepting huge bribes to issue green cards and other papers.

"This was an amazing compromise of our system and its integrity," said Paul Layman, a special agent who oversees ICE's corruption investigations in the western United States.

"Smugglers are willing to do anything to get people into the country, they will move anything for a dollar."

U.S. Customs inspector Richard Elizalda, arrested in 2006, was paid $70,000 to let through hundreds of immigrants after a persuasive female smuggler he met at the San Ysidro crossing became his lover.

A sudden influx of Border Patrol agents may have worsened the problem. The number of agents along the border has jumped to more than 14,700 now from less than 9,000 four years ago.

Agents receive intense training and ethics courses, but some officials worry about the screening process.

"Just given the increases, the odds are you'll get more bad agents," said Paul Charlton, a former U.S. Attorney for Arizona. (Additional reporting by Tim Gaynor in Phoenix; Editing by Kieran Murray)

Data on agents convicted of graft are not made public, but the U.S. government is probing hundreds of border corruption cases where a decade ago it saw a few dozen a year. The FBI-led Border Corruption Task Force says it is busier than ever.

If we do something and it fails over and over and over again, maybe we should try something different:

1. Double law enforcement wages

2. Double corruption penalties

3. Legalize cannabis: support American farmers, instead of Mexican cartel

4. Close the border for all immigration

WELCOME TO TEXAS JUSTICE: YOU MIGHT BEAT THE RAP, BUT YOU WON'T BEAT THE RIDE.
Showing newest posts with label Border Wars. Show older posts
TUESDAY, MARCH 23, 2010
Concerns about 'spillover' from Mexican drug fighting belated, naive
It's becoming hard to know what to think about news out of Mexico about crime and the drug war. What few reports we get from northern Mexico sound goddawful, and we know we're not getting the whole story, by a longshot. But friends who've traveled recently in Mexico reported few concerns for safety, and thousands of spring breakers just returned without incident. Meanwhile murder rates in southern Mexico are lower than they've been in years after long-stewing land disputes were essentially resolved by force in favor of large landowners.

That said, recent news has been filled with reports of drug violence in the north and in Acapulco, events which have Governor Perry and others talking about "spillover." But that's a misnomer, one which Jerry Brewer at Mexidata.info corrects:
The simple fact is that DTOs [Drug Trafficking Organizations] have been on U.S. soil for quite some time. They have established highly sophisticated smuggling infrastructures within the country. And for distribution they utilize, among others, U.S. street gangs, prison gangs, and outlaw motorcycle gangs. Much of this assimilation by Latin American gangs has been from within U.S. prison walls.
Bingo. People don't get it. The Mexican Ambassador was dead right when he told the Houston Chronicle that Texas officials' statements about spillover are “disingenuous or naive.â€

Probation officer screened job applicants for drug cartel
Yet another bribery case has cropped up involving a criminal justice worker on the Texas border with the arrest of federal probation officer Armando Mora last week in McAllen. Reports the American Chronicle ("Federal probation officer charged with drug trafficking and bribery," July 20):
According to allegations in the criminal complaint, Mora received bribe payments from members of a drug trafficking organization to provide sensitive and confidential information from government records. It is alleged before the drug trafficking organization considered hiring drivers for their tractor-trailers to transport its drug loads, it would provide personal information - full name, commercial driver's license number and date of birth - to Mora, who in turn would obtained confidential and sensitive information from government sources about whether the prospective driver was on probation or supervised release or had any outstanding arrest warrants. If Mora reported no such warrants or supervision, the drivers would be hired. On the other hand, the complaint alleges that on at least two occasions in May and June 2009, Mora allegedly advised the drug organization not to hire three drivers telling a member of the drug trafficking organization that two of the drivers were undercover agents and the third was one of his own supervisees and and an FBI informant. In June 2009, Mora is alleged to have received $5,000 from a member of the drug trafficking organization for providing the confidential information regarding the third driver.
Obviously ratting out undercover officers puts federal agents at risk. I also have a big problem with using probationers as drug informants, for reasons identified earlier this year by Bobby Frederick at the South Carolina Criminal Defense Blog:
If a person is trying to get clean or stay clean, they cannot repeatedly go into houses and make drug deals - sooner or later they will use and their recovery will be blown to bits. Many narcotics officers do not care if you stay clean or not - you are a tool that they use to do their job for them. Many narcotics officers do not care that you are placing yourself in danger - again, you are a tool that they require to make drug arrests. Rachel Hoffman's death in Florida, although tragic, was representative of the ethics problems that narcotics officers often ignore in their work and thankfully brought national attention to the problem.
There is a fundamental contradiction between policy goals when a probationer is used as a drug informant. Putting someone on probation instead of sending them to prison implies both that the court viewed them as not dangerous enough to require incarceration and also that they're capable of possible rehabilitation. But if that person is sent back over and over into drug environments by the state, it's nigh on impossible to make the kind of clean break from reoffending and drug use that rehabilitation requires.

In this particular case, what kind of message does it send to learn that the FBI and federal probation officers knowingly encouraged an offender under federal supervision to apply for a job as a driver making drug shipments?

In the bigger public-policy picture, this example shows why anti-corruption efforts deserve greater priority in the enforcement battle against multinational drug cartels: One corrupt official can easily thwart the work of many, many others in the system, and too often that's exactly what happens. Americans tend to think of public corruption as more typically a Mexican problem, but we've seen far too many examples of corruption on the US-side of the border to take much comfort in such stereotypes.
POSTED BY GRITSFORBREAKFAST AT 7:15 AM 11 COMMENTS
LABELS: BORDER WARS, BRIBERY, DRUG POLICY, PROBATION, SNITCHING, USDOJ
SATURDAY, JUNE 06, 2009
Obama appointees offer more of the same on drug interdiction
I was critical during the campaign of Barack Obama's drug policy stances, so even though I'm disappointed at the contents of his administration's new "National Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy," released yesterday at a press conference by Obama's drug czar, Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, I'm not surprised to see them proposing more of the same.

This is a tactical document with few if any new strategic elements. They're fiddling around the edges of policies perpetuated by the last four presidents, but nobody appears to be rethinking the fundamental approach.

In a black market, focusing solely on supply-side enforcement ironically enriches the cartels by driving up prices. Because of the volume of cross-border traffic involving legitimate trade and travel, it's literally impossible to interdict most drug shipments, so the the cartels just charge more for the shipments that make it through. To that extent, an enforcement only approach plays right into the hands of the smuggling gangs the policy hopes to undermine.

As the Drug Policy Alliance lamented in a Washington Post story, there's nothing in the plan at all about demand reduction. The problem, to read this document, stems solely from the activities of smugglers, not the predilection of American consumers for their products. To be effective, though, a drug-control strategy must also reduce demand for illegal drugs by reducing consumption through treatment and education. Bottom line: As long as Americans are willing to pay premium prices for illicit narcotics, they're going to come into the United States one way or another. A demand reduction approach might actually reduce drug cartel profits, whereas focusing solely on supply-side interdiction simply maximizes them.

Just as frustrating to me, the policy document mostly ignores official corruption on the US side, barely mentioning the topic from its discussion of investigations and prosecutions. Without prioritizing such investigations, though, the approach is doomed to fail. Cross-border smuggling is incredibly reliant on corrupt, bribable law enforcement and immigration officials; interdiction cannot succeed without reducing that trend. Such investigations are easier than pursuing ghost-like cartel leaders and deliver more bang for the buck in terms of affecting interdiction. But reducing corruption isn't a major focus of the Obama Administration's anti-drug strategy.

Clearly on other issues - healthcare, the environment, Middle East policy - Barack Obama's administration represents a major change from his predecessor. On the drug war, though, as Pete Townsend wrote, it's "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

RELATED: Obama's Mexico policy so far depressingly familiar