Thread: Texas - Is it on High Security Alert or Not?

Originally Posted by HippieChick

Originally Posted by Dixie

Originally Posted by HippieChick

this is terrifying to me. i am utterly frightened.
i have such a sick feeling in my stomach right now.......

HippieChick.

Take a deep breath...

Dixie

awwwww!

what wonderful words! thank you so much!
i really, truly, appreciate it. thank you.

You're welcome.

Dixie

Look The Other Way, To Our Peril
Bob Schieffer Says We've Been Ignoring A Growing Threat Facing Border Towns: Mexican Drug Cartels
Comments 11
Feb. 22, 2009

(CBS) Weekly commentary by CBS Evening News chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer.

Video

A friend of mine drove through El Paso, Texas not so long ago, and was stunned to learn that the weekend he was there, 28 people were killed - gunned down, actually - in Juarez, Mexico, just across the border.

More stunning was that most of the people took the news calmly - just another incident in a border town where such things now happen with increasing frequency.

With the United States so focused on the economic crisis, it has gone virtually unreported here, but Mexico is dealing with a crisis of its own - a war among drug cartels that has left nearly 7,000 people dead just last year.

The drug business in Mexico has become so big, it is turning a $25 billion annual profit.

The cartels have become so powerful that in some areas, they have all but replaced the Mexican government. Just last week, the State Department warned U.S. citizens to exercise caution when traveling in the border areas, and noted that the cartels sometimes engage each other and government forces in firefights that resemble military combat operations.

As the new administration plans strategies to deal with threats to America's national security, we hear the usual far-away names and places - Iran, North Korea, al Qaeda, the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Well, now add a new worry - the drug cartels in Mexico. They've been getting worse for a while now. We've just been looking the other way.


© MMIX, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/ ... 8653.shtml

Last week the local media reported texas gun sales are sky rocketing. Texans have rushed out to buy guns, ammo and have applied for carry permits in record numbers.

I did write Dan Patrick and ask lots of question about this concern, but it usually takes a couple of weeks for him to get back with me. He has always taken the time to answer each letter that I have sent him personally since he is my representative. I will definitely post what I learn.

"Bloodbath inches closer to the U.S."
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-147185-.html

Updated 3 hrs. 17 m ago

Mexican drug gangs wage war
By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY

VILLA AHUMADA, Mexico — It was 3 a.m. when Griselda Munoz says she got the first terrifying phone call: "Mom, there are people all over, and they're shooting!"

A convoy of gunmen had invaded the ranch where her son, Jorge Marrufo, 32, was working. As shots crackled in the background, he told her he was running into the desert to hide in the sagebrush.

Before dawn, another call: "If anything happens to me, tell my kids I love them."

Later that day, Munoz found her son at a morgue with his skull caved in and four bullet holes in his chest. He was among 21 people killed Feb. 10 in this town near the U.S. border after drug gangs abducted several men, then fought a massive running gunbattle with the Mexican army — one of the bloodiest episodes yet in Mexico's war on drugs.

Prosecutors are trying to determine whether Munoz's son was an innocent bystander or involved with the gangs. Either way, Munoz attributes his death to the unprecedented combination of drug-related violence and economic misery that is ravaging northern Mexico — and showing signs of spreading into the USA.

"He never caused any trouble for anybody. But in this town, you never know who's going to decide you're a problem," Munoz said. "This is a town without laws."

That's literally true — the entire police force of Villa Ahumada, a community of 10,000 people 80 miles south of El Paso, deserted its posts last May after drug gangs executed the police chief and two officers. The crime wave, plus the crippling recession that has rippled here from the USA, has caused the town's export factories — possibly the only source of reputable, steady employment — to slash production.

"It's just one thing after another," says Villa Ahumada's mayor, Fidel Chavez. "First the economy, and now this."

The story is similar across much of Mexico's 2,000-mile-long northern border: a wave of beheadings, grenade attacks and shootouts as drug cartels battle each other for supremacy and lash out against Mexican President Felipe Calderon's drive to destroy their smuggling operations. The death toll from drug-related violence in Mexico last year surpassed 6,000, more than double the previous year, raising questions about whether Calderon's government can prevail against a brutal and often better-armed enemy without additional help from the U.S. government.

"People are scared, and they have reason to be," says Michael Shifter, a Latin America specialist at Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. "The economic crisis is just going to aggravate the situation. It's very hard to imagine how things will get better in the short term."

That's bad news in broad swaths of the USA, where Mexican drug gangs have extended their operations to at least 230 cities from Texas to Alaska, according to a recent Justice Department report. Police in Atlanta and Phoenix, both major drug transit points, have blamed a wave of kidnappings on the spreading turf war among the cartels. Drug-related violence has become ever more brazen and frequent, including a rise in attacks on Border Patrol agents.

In both Mexico and the USA, most of the victims have been linked to the cartels. Nevertheless, several travel agencies, colleges (including the nearby University of Texas-El Paso) and even the U.S. military have discouraged travel to Mexico's border areas as spring break approaches — resulting in a loss of crucial tourism dollars that could make the Mexican economic crisis even worse.

More than 329,000 jobs have been lost in Mexico since June, the government says; that translates to as many as 30% of Mexican adults who are unable to find full-time work.

Rene Jimenez Ornelas, an expert on crime at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is among those who say unemployment could push more Mexicans into the ranks of the narcos. The gangster lifestyle has been glamorized by television shows and songs called narcocorridos, and it is a powerful temptation for many youths.

"What organized crime mostly has on the front lines are people who need to eat," Jimenez Ornelas said. So the cartels "have an 'army' available — not all of them, of course, but enough to have a good-sized force at their service."

Prime smuggling territory

The violence is devastating towns and families. Three days after the gunbattle that claimed Jorge Marrufo, his mother sobbed as pallbearers lowered his casket into the ground.

The family set up a huge cluster of palm fronds and flowers, and erected a simple wooden cross. There was a rattle as the first shovelfuls of sand and pebbles hit the casket — after that, nothing but the sound of weeping and shifting sand.

Three days later, tragedy struck again — Jorge's cousin, Alfonso Marrufo, was found dead, his body pumped full of AK-47 and 9mm bullets, outside a house in town.

At first glance, it's not clear what's worth fighting for in Villa Ahumada. There's not much here besides a few water towers, a railroad track and several roadside burrito stands. A street sweeper machine roams the few paved streets, fighting a losing battle against the sand that collects in drifts along the curb. The only landmark is a small clock tower, which is stuck at 8:39.

Look at a map, though, and the town's importance becomes more apparent. Villa Ahumada sits astride Highway 45, a spur of the Pan American Highway and a straight shot to Guatemala, Panama and other points south.

To the west, dirt roads snake through the desert, providing a way around the military checkpoints on the highway. To the east, another web of trails leads to the desolate, and lightly patrolled, scrubland of West Texas.

This is prime smuggling territory.

Enrique Torres, a spokesman for the Mexican army, says two of Mexico's most powerful gangs — the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels — battle for control of Villa Ahumada. "It's considered a key location," he says.

In a microcosm of the struggle being played out across Mexico, the fight for Villa Ahumada has intensified after the Juarez cartel's No. 3 leader, Pedro Sanchez Arras, was arrested last May. The Sinaloa gang, based on Mexico's Pacific coast, has been vying for its rival's turf ever since, leading to incidents such as those that killed the Marrufos, Torres says.

In an effort to stop the violence, Calderon has deployed 46,000 troops and federal police throughout Mexico — an unprecedented law enforcement commitment that surpasses the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Despite its numbers, the army has no investigative powers to probe drug gangs' activities and root out kingpins. Federal agents are spread thin, and there have been numerous incidents in which local Mexican police have been co-opted by the cartels.

On a recent morning, a USA TODAY reporter came across the aftermath of a gunbattle in the desert north of Villa Ahumada. Three bodies lay in the sand. Army Humvees and helicopters combed the desert for anyone who may have gotten away.

Hours earlier, an army patrol had come across a Toyota SUV picking its way through the wilderness, Maj. Gerardo Arce said. Suddenly, the doors popped open and gunmen opened fire with AK-47s. The troops returned fire, killing all three.

Inside the SUV was an arsenal worthy of any commando unit: hand grenades, a .50-caliber sniper rifle, helmets, bulletproof vests, combat fatigues and radios.

Such firepower illustrates why townspeople see only one real authority. "The gangs know everything. They're always watching," says Sandra Munoz, Jorge Marrufo's niece. "They'll even mark your house, as a warning."

'The town with no law'

Shifter says the recurring pattern of Mexico's drug war — one cartel is weakened, only to be replaced by another — shows the need for President Obama to seek solutions beyond the $400 million in mostly military aid the United States gave Mexico last year.

Options include more drug prevention and treatment programs to try to curb demand for illegal drugs in the USA, and cracking down on the flow of arms from the USA into Mexico. "It's hard to call the drug policy a successful policy," Shifter said.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the anti-drug czar in the Clinton administration, warned last month that Calderon's government was in danger of losing control of some areas and that millions of Mexicans could seek refuge from the violence in the USA. Recently departed CIA director Michael Hayden has said Mexico ranked alongside Iran as a top security risk to the United States.

Calderon has rejected such talk, saying his government is firmly in charge and casting Mexico's drug war as a "historic challenge of truly becoming a country of law and order."

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has credited his actions with a steep reduction of cocaine supply in many U.S. cities. Calderon says the vast majority of those killed have been drug gang members, and his approval rating remains high at about 60% — a broad enough mandate to keep pursuing the cartels for now, Shifter says.

The unknown factor is how bad the economy will get — and how that could change Calderon's plans.

The border region has been particularly hard hit by plummeting manufacturing demand from the United States, which receives 90% of Mexico's exports. At a plant run by Quality Coils S.A., which makes components for Delphi auto parts and Motorola cellphones, the payroll has dropped from 240 a year ago to 180 workers — and they work only three days a week, says personnel manager Florentino Flores.

The situation is similar across town at the Lear plant, where workers sew seats for Ford Fusion cars. In November, the plant began cutting workers, then workdays.

"There's just no work for us, I guess," says employee Juan de la Torre, whose hours were cut.

Nationwide, Mexico's exports to the United States fell 15% in December compared with the year before. Money sent home by migrants living in the USA, a crucial income source for poorer families, also fell 3.6% last year — the first annual decline in a decade. Overall, the Mexican economy could shrink by 1.5% this year, according to Morgan Stanley bank, breaking a string of years of moderate growth.

"Markets are just now beginning to think through the costs associated with this rise in organized crime," says Gray Newman, Morgan Stanley's chief economist for Latin America.

The mix of violence and recession means bad business for everybody. On Highway 45 just outside town, Javier Ramirez sits under the corrugated metal roof of his taco stand, waiting — in vain — for customers.

"Everyone is afraid to stop here now," Ramirez says. "Villa Ahumada, the town with no law. We've become famous."

'You can't trust anybody'

Even the dead here aren't allowed to rest in peace.

Days after Jorge Marrufo was buried, the lock on the cemetery gate was smashed. Someone drove back and forth over Marrufo's grave, splitting the wooden cross in two and scattering the flowers.

Then they tossed an empty beer can on the wreckage.

Later that morning, Griselda Munoz, his mother, came to the cemetery with other relatives to mend the cross and collect as many undamaged flowers as they could. They shoveled the sand back into a mound, moistened it with water and put the flowers back.

Munoz says the army killed her son after mistaking him for one of the traffickers. She says that just before he was killed, Marrufo called her and said soldiers were coming down the highway. "I'm all right," she says he told her. That was the last time she heard from him.

The federal attorney general's office originally listed Marrufo as one of the gunmen. But on Wednesday a spokesman for the federal attorney general's office, Angel Torres, said investigators were not sure of his role that night and had not determined how he died. Forensic experts were examining weapons to determine who killed Marrufo, Torres said.

Chavez, the mayor, says he believes Marrufo was killed by drug gang members dressed in fatigues. The soldiers wear masks to protect their identities, and traffickers often wear fatigues, so they are hard to tell apart, he said.

"There's no one to go for help around here," Munoz said. "You can't trust anybody to protect you."

Whoever killed Marrufo, many here fear their business in Villa Ahumada isn't finished. As Marrufo's family prepared to leave the gravesite, an unfamiliar SUV rolled slowly into the cemetery and parked behind some tombs.

Munoz shot a worried glance at the SUV and hurried to her car. The family drove out together, for safety, and left the broken flowers in a heap next to Marrufo's grave.

Hawley is Latin America correspondent for USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009 ... rder_N.htm

No illegal immigration.

No one is going to stop drugs. It never stopped alcohol.

Just clogging up prisons, courts. Can't lock up everyone who doesn't believe in the same things.

Lot of good and bad die everyday in this farce, but you can get whatever you want whenever you want in any state any time day or night.

There is no war on drugs, just a smoke screen.

Cartels making money, government making money, that's what it is about.

Take away the value, make it legal. We don't have to believe the propaganda the government spews. Do your own research.

I can't imagine what would be worse gangs in control or the government.

Unrest in Mexico Triggers Texas' Border Security Plan

By Matthew Harwood

02/23/2009 - Coordinated protests and a violent, drug-related shootout just over the border in Mexico spurred Texas officials to activate the state's border security plan last week, reports South Texas' The Monitor.

Last Tuesday demonstrations against the Mexican government's militarizaiton of its war on drugs broke out in the border towns of Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, and Ciudad Juarez. In Reynosa, a military raid on an alleged drug lord's home left at least six people dead. Already this year, approximately 260 people have died in the country's campaign against warring drug cartels. Although estimates vary, the dealths of nearly 6,000 people have been attributed to narcotics-related activities.

Severe and escalating violence in Mexico has stoked fear in border states that the unrest could spill over into U.S. border areas. To prepare, Texas developed the Border Star Contingency Plan. The confidential plan, according to The Monitor, concentrates on five threat areas across the state's border areas and identifies escalating scenarios that help determine whether local, state, or federal law enforcement assets will be responsible for restoring order. In the most critical situation, state officials may call in the Texas Army National Guard.

The Monitor reports:

The violence remained confined to the Mexican side of the border, but the incident provided a good test run for the lowest levels of the Border Star contingency plan, said Katherine Cesinger, a spokeswoman for the governor.

"We're doing what we can to fill in the gaps from a state level," she said.

Throughout the day, a central operations center in Austin sent constant intelligence updates to state, local and federal law enforcement agencies up and down the border. They kept in constant contact over a designated radio band as the situation developed.

That state of heightened alert makes up the lowest level of response outlined in the security plan.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has developed a federal border surge plan for the prospect of cross-border unrest, partly in response to a Pentagon report theorizing that Mexico's government could collapse under the weight of its drug war. The federal plan, like Texas's, has not been released publicly.

SECURITY MANAGEMENT . COM

Rumors have been generated on internet forums and among some bloggers that Texas State Senator Dan Patrick had been interviewed by Fox News today and that Patrick said that the Texas National Guard was on High Alert.

Internet mailings such as the one below indicated that the Texas National Guard had already been put on High Alert. This apparently is not the case as of this afternoon.

..................

The situation is definitely getting bad on the Texas-Mexico border. A violent street battle between suspected gangsters and Mexican soldiers killed at least five people last Tuesday morning in the border town of Reynosa.

On the same day last week police in the Rio Grande Valley had to close the Pharr international bridge to Mexico due to border violence.


This afternoon I spoke with Court Koenning of Texas Senator Dan Patrick’s office. According to Koennig, Patrick was interviewed by a local Nashville radio station today but did not say that the Texas National Guard was on High Alert. Last week Patrick stated during an interview that for the first time since Katrina the State Emergency Service, located in Austin, was activated at the suggestion of Homeland Security for about a day in response to border violence organized by the Mexican drug cartels.

Koennig stated that Patrick never said that the Texas National Guard was on high alert.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/267869

Here is the Fox News interview with Senator Patrick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7_GIbvTE3A