Borders are Not Always Bookstores

The most dangerous real estate in North America lies just south of the US/Mexican border, particularly the area from Brownsville to El Paso in adjoining Texas. Ciudad Juárez – the other side of the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas – is the murder capital of Mexico. The folks who are raking it in – addition to arms and drug dealers – are casket-makers. The sucking sound of U.S. narcotics peddlers and drug users, pulling up everything from marijuana to cocaine from all of the illicit ports of entry and manufacturers/growers in Latin America, has created a demand curve that our Border Patrol agents have been almost helpless to stop, notwithstanding attempts (mostly failed) to use state-of-the-art technology to seal the porous border.

Politicians complain of illegal immigrants coming to the U.S. to work – Arizona recently passed some pretty tough laws making undocumented aliens very uncomfortable in that state – but the harsh two-way traffic across our border is the dividing line between life or death for many: guns and other weapons moving south; drugs north. With fewer jobs in the U.S. due to the recession, sealing the border is more about this toxic trafficking than the undocumented taking jobs and consuming social services. The Mexican government is almost helpless in this battle; the billions of dollars flowing to Latin American drug lords has financed private armies of over-armed militia and “wannabees” trying to prove themselves to the drug lords that has proven to be more than a match for the federales. With so much poverty and so much drug money, corruption makes enforcement virtually impossible.

Additionally, dwindling oil revenues (Mexican oil fields are plagued with aging equipment and oil fields that are running dry), fewer dollars being sent south from undocumented workers in the north supporting families in the south and a horrific recession have strapped Mexican resources, even with US aid, to the breaking point. Mexicans caught in de facto free fire zones near the border point north and complain that if the US could reign in its drug addicts and social users, then Mexico wouldn’t have this devastation within its territory; it’s an American problem for which Mexicans are paying with their lives.

How bad is it? Mexicans are crossing into the US in search of not jobs but safety. The April 18^th New York Times looked at one such community, about 57 miles from El Paso: “On the other side, a brutal war between drug gangs has forced dozens of fearful families from the Mexican town of El Porvenir to come to the border seeking political asylum, and scores of other Mexicans have used special visas known as border-crossing cards to flee into the United States. They say drug gangs have laid waste to their town, burning down houses and killing people in the street… Americans are taking in their Mexican relatives, and the local schools have swelled with traumatized children, many of whom have witnessed gangland violence, school officials say… ‘It’s very hard over there,’ said Vicente Burciaga, 23, who fled El Porvenir a month ago with his wife, Mayra, and their infant son after gang members burned down five homes in their neighborhood and killed a neighbor. ‘They are killing people over there who have nothing to do with drug trafficking,’ he said. ‘They kill you just for having seen what they are doing.’…

“People who have fled El Porvenir say gruesome killings are occurring daily, though newspaper reporters have been unable to enter the town to confirm them. Last month, a man and his pregnant wife were murdered outside a primary school in El Porvenir, according to residents; the man was shot but the killers were said to have cut open the woman and taken her baby, leaving her to die. In another account, gunmen were said to have killed a beggar in a wheelchair.”

People are leaving these border towns in droves, running for their lives. “In El Paso alone, the police estimate that at least 30,000 Mexicans have moved across the border in the past two years because of the violence in Juárez and the river towns to the southeast. So many people have left El Porvenir and nearby Guadalupe Bravos that the two resemble ghost towns, former residents say.” The Times. Even the drug lords themselves have settled their families, in posh residences, in US territory. Very few are granted legal asylum in the US; the ability to document the horror is almost impossible to do on an individual level.

The trend is obvious: the drug war that seemed to be sealed off and relegated to Mexico is now moving north. With refugees and the families of drug lords on our side of the border, sooner or later the violence that makes life hell “over there” will spill treacherous “over here.” There are increased numbers of “incidents” in US border towns, but clearly time will accelerate that, as feuding drug lords reach into the United States to retaliate against their rivals, as enforcers travel north to instill their visions of “rough justice” in this horrific struggle to control the drug routes into the United States.

I’m Peter Dekom, and sooner or later, we’re going to have address exactly how we are going to control the drug trade in the U.S.; what we’re doing isn’t working.