You Got To TCB
Jul 14, 2009 Political
Here we go again- talking about illegal immigration, but this time it is in the context of law and order, not jobs that could very well be the tipping point here. I am not real concerned yet for my state, as Texas probably has as many guns as any of these punky little “cartels”, but there has been a disturbing trend of people who haven’t the moxie to live near a border where bullets fly move to Texas, thinking that Texas is as settled as New Jersey, or Vermont. I am sure we are not. I am glad we still retain a wild streak in our habits and habitat.
But living near a border with Mexico is not as it once was, where you could take a weekend and go shopping for knick-knacks and quaint antiques among the throng at the Mercado- a block- long building where you could haggle prices to your heart’s content. Nowadays, you would have to dodge bullets from the narco- terrorists, if you were not just kidnapped for ransom, or just for the heck of it.
“It’s very hard to stop this trend,” a senior military official in Ciudad Juarez said, speaking of the unyielding bloodshed. “We are fighting an enemy we don’t know and don’t see and only feel their results.”
The drug gangs appear as strong and as vicious as ever as they fight not just for smuggling routes but for shares of the growing domestic market. Mexican cartels are now the dominant force in an industry once led by Colombians.
latimes.com
And it’s heading this way, despite the best efforts of the military in Mexico- but then they have had the tradition of the “mordidia” or the bribe, as a way of life down there for as long as memory serves, so the crookedness begins in infancy for many, accepted as a way of life.
Now, narcos take refuge in Phoenix, Arizona, and Houston, Texas, where they feel somewhat safer, but it is an illusion, as Phoenix has now the dubious honor of being the second most likely city in the world to be kidnapped. The sad truth is that in the absence of a tightened border, this is all coming to a neighborhood near you.
Troops were dispatched in February this year to the northern border state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico’s wealthiest and long a symbol of relative stability. Traffickers quickly mobilized low-level dealers and their families to protest the military presence and to create the impression that the traffickers had a broad social base. Monterrey, the capital, and other cities were paralyzed for days.
Then the army started arresting police in Monterrey and other Nuevo Leon municipalities. In early June, troops backed by federal agents rounded up dozens of police officers and several commanders. When the police got wind of what was happening, they challenged the troops and tried to block roads.
As punishment, the federal authorities ordered the police to turn in their rifles. A day later, they confiscated their cellphones, suspecting the cops were using them to pass intelligence to traffickers.
A politician from the Monterrey area’s richest district was caught on tape describing the power of the drug lords. Mauricio Fernandez is heard saying that the area was relatively peaceful because the Beltran Leyva cartel wanted it that way.
“Their families live here,” he said. “You don’t think it’s the police [that maintain order], do you?”
latimes.com
Despite the presence of the army, the cartels are attempting to maintain a base near the border from which they can smuggle both drugs and people into the United States. From there, they begin to establish bases of operations in various cities, and that is where ICE comes into the picture. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement organization is supposed to return the illegal immigrants to the countries of their origin, but lately, Hussein’s administration has tried to relax the enforcement aspect of this, in order to go after the employers of illegal aliens. Some of these “aliens” have no job other than smuggling, and these are who absolutely must be taken off of the streets.
A little after 3 a.m. Dec. 12, Carlos Garcia-Hernandez was booked into Harris County Jail on an aggravated assault charge, accused of slicing a man’s nose down to the bone after a disagreement at a birthday party.
At the jail, the first in the country with full access to a Department of Homeland Security database that contains millions of immigration records, a Harris County detention officer ran Garcia-Hernandez’s fingerprints.
Within minutes the system found a hit. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had deported Garcia-Hernandez in November 2007 after a string of convictions including marijuana possession and escaping from law enforcement custody, the system showed.
The DHS system also showed Garcia-Hernandez had two outstanding murder warrants in Mexico. “A year ago, we wouldn’t have gotten that,” said Lt. M. Lindsay, the point man for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office’s efforts to identify suspected illegal immigrants in the jails.
chron.com
Still, ICE doesn’t get nearly all of these violent offenders, indeed, their rate is about 25% right now, and that is not good enough for our people. The “Immigration Czar” or whoever in this twisted administration is responsible for enforcement needs to actually do their job and to hell with La Raza, or LULAC, or the ACLU or anyone else who cries foul, because our people, our citizens deserve the best protection possible, and if that includes a wall, barbed wire, and/ or guards with guns, Do It.
The rolling army patrol was summoned to a bleak neighborhood called Rancho Anapra. In the waning desert light, a man lay lifeless in the dusty street. He had been shot four times, in full view of a dozen houses.
Residents regarded the arriving troops with bored expressions, amid a cacophony of barking dogs.
There were many bystanders, but few witnesses. “Puro mirón,” grumbled a military police officer. “All just onlookers. We could ask them, but nobody will know anything. Nobody saw anything.”
The scene encapsulates one of the government’s biggest challenges in the drug war: overcoming the deep mistrust of ordinary Mexicans. “Only when something happens — that’s when they come,” said one of the bystanders, Laura Valdivia, 36, who works in a factory that makes fake Christmas trees.
Other than his name, Daniel Chavez, and age, 35, no one seemed to have much to say about the victim, whose torso was a spider’s web of tattoos.
The crowd slowly evaporated. In darkness, the body was hauled away and the soldiers clambered back onto the pickups, knowing as little as when they arrived.
latimes.com
Scenes like this will be coming to a neighborhood near you, if we aren’t careful- in some places, like Houston, Phoenix and Los Angeles, the scene is already there in dying, bleeding color.
It’s up to Mexico to take care of it’s side of the equation, after all, they are a country with their own laws, but we must aggressively enforce ours- now is not the time to quibble about half- measures needed to stem the flow of drugs and people across the border. If we dawdle, we die- it really can be that simple.
And the downside is that if the Federal Government does not do this., it will be up to the border states to do this, and then the Feds will just have to shut their mouths and sit on the sidelines and accept what and how the states do take care of this problem we all have, and believe me, it won’t be pretty.
It’ll be pretty bloody.
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Tags: drugs, enforcement, ice, narco-terrorism