Wilderness On The Border? 8 Articles On Border Violence

Fear grips Mexican border families amid violenceParents in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, are afraid to venture into the streets amid a turf war between two powerful drug cartels that has left more than 4,500 people dead during the past two years. Their fears spiked last weekend when hit men attacked two white SUVs leaving a birthday party, killing parents from two U.S. Consulate families in front of their screaming children. The violence has risen to such levels in Ciudad Juarez that everyone feels at risk in the city of 1.3 million, where innocent people have been increasingly caught in the crossfire. Hit men have gone to wrong addresses or shot indiscriminately into homes, mowing down not only the targeted people but anyone nearby. Mothers have driven into daytime shootouts, bending over their children to protect them. Toddlers have been fatally pierced by bullets while playing on the swings at city playgrounds. Waitresses have been slain for having the misfortune of serving marked men. At night, some couples drive in separate cars so one spouse can call the other on a cell phone upon seeing something suspicious. Many restrict their children to socializing at the homes of neighbors and relatives instead of meeting up at cafes and discos. But even those measures are sometimes not enough...read more

COMMENT: Apparently Senators Bingaman and Udall have no fear. They've introduced legislation to create a 400 square mile playground for the drug cartels and human traffickers along our southern border with Mexico.

U.S. puts brakes on "virtual" border fence The U.S. government is pulling $50 million in funding from a problematic "virtual fence" meant to secure stretches of the Mexico border and is freezing additional funding for the project pending review, authorities said on Tuesday. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said an allocation of $50 million in funds made under the Recovery Act would be taken away from the ill-starred SBInet program, which seeks to mesh video cameras, radar, sensors and other technologies into a high-tech system to detect smugglers. Napolitano said the project, which started in 2006 and was being developed by Boeing Co, has been beset by technical problems, missed deadlines and cost overruns. "Effective immediately, the Department of Homeland Security will redeploy $50 million of Recovery Act funding originally allocated for the SBInet ... to other tested, commercially available security technology along the Southwest border," she said. The SBInet program is focused on securing the areas between the ports-of-entry on the Mexico border. Its goal is to integrate new and existing technologies to enable federal border police to detect and respond to incursions at the border...

Crime and terror The victims of the drug barons have traditionally been rival drug traffickers and police. That was already changing with some recent shootings of innocent bystanders, before the latest murders, the first of American officials and their families, put President Obama under pressure to rethink America’s strategy. So far this has consisted of funnelling more than $1 billion into Mr Calderón’s fight against the cartels. As investments go, this one has not paid blistering returns. For all Mr Calderón’s good intentions, and for all America’s cash, drug-related violence in Mexico has soared. Despite the presence of 8,000 troops and federal police in Ciudad Juárez, 4,600 people have been killed there in two years. It’s the world’s deadliest city outside a war zone — more dangerous as a place to live as the Iraqi city of Fallujah in its darkest days of 2005, before US-led troops moved in to take the city back from insurgent forces. Washington’s anxiety about developments in its southern neighbour was already simmering before Saturday’s shootings brought it to a boil. It is not just that most of America’s foreign-grown marijuana comes from Mexico, or that it is US-generated profits that keep the Mexican drug cartels in machineguns and money. It is also that its borders are porous...

Mexican drug war killings hit closer to U.S. Over the past two years, more than 4,000 people have been killed in a bloody drug war here - slaughtered almost daily in their homes and in the street, at drug clinics and youth parties, at funeral homes and outside neighborhood schools. But the killings Saturday of Lesley Enriquez, who worked at the U.S. Consulate and was four months pregnant; her husband, Arthur Redelfs, a corrections officer in El Paso, Texas; and Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, whose wife worked at the consulate, brought the murderous mayhem even closer to home in United States than perhaps it has ever been. Two of the victims were U.S. citizens; one of them a U.S. government employee. The apparently coordinated attacks took place in broad daylight as the three were leaving a consulate children's party. Three children were with them when the two separate assaults took place...

Texas senators invite president to visit border Texas' U.S. senators pressed the White House Wednesday to take more seriously the threat that Mexican drug cartels' murder and mayhem could spill across the border and claim the lives of Texans. The threat is “real and it is escalating,” Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Dallas, and John Cornyn, R-San Antonio, told President Barack Obama in a letter. “Our border patrol agents and local law enforcement are more regularly engaged with gunmen associated with drug cartels, but our resources and personnel are limited.” The senators urged Obama to accompany them on a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, craft a plan to address the violence and provide senators a classified intelligence briefing on whether the wave of cartel killings poses a threat to safety and overall national security...

Perry orders beefed-up presence on border in wake of killings Gov. Rick Perry moved Tuesday to step up Texas' law enforcement presence along the Mexico border to handle the threat of spillover violence from escalating drug cartel warfare in cities like Juarez and Matamoros. The governor also continued his call for additional federal assistance, saying he was activating the state violence contingency plan in the meantime because “with the safety of Texans on the line, we can't afford to wait.” His remarks come in the wake of the Ciudad Juarez killings of a U.S. consulate worker, her husband and the husband of another consulate worker as they left a children's party on Saturday. More than 4,000 people have been killed there in the past two years. U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler said officials would review Perry's request for Predator-style surveillance over the Texas border, but he cautioned that the Obama administration is not seeing evidence of spillover violence warranting a stepped-up U.S. response. Drug cartels are “engaged in an armed, violent struggle to control shrinking drug routes and territories,” Chandler said. “They are targeting and killing rival cartel members, innocent Mexican civilians, police, and senior government officials, among others. We are not, however, seeing any indications of similar violence here in the U.S.”...

Mexico border city relives nightmare of violence Residents of this scruffy border town thought they had seen the worst of the violence five years ago, when rival drug gangs staged wild gunfights in the streets and a new police chief was slain just hours after being sworn in. Now, like a recurring nightmare, dread again hangs over Nuevo Laredo amid a new bloody feud that has ignited widespread fear of a return to the earlier carnage. Adding to the potential for skyrocketing violence, the Gulf cartel has reportedly reached out for help against the Zetas by enlisting the heavily armed trafficking group headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, based in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. U.S. officials say they have yet to confirm the alliance, but take the reports seriously. Such an alignment would reshuffle Mexico's drug underworld and could produce prolonged and bitter warfare here...

Killings Cast Pall on Mexico Drug Plan The gangland-style murders of three people with ties to the U.S. consulate in this border city have confirmed for many people what residents here already knew: President Felipe Calderón's strategy of sending in the troops to corral drug gangs has failed. The gritty working-class city of 1.5 million has become a litmus test for Mr. Calderón's antidrug strategy and, by extension, his presidency. The conservative leader took power vowing to bring cartels to heel, and chose Mexico's army rather than local police to do the job, sending 45,000 troops to various hot spots, including 7,000 to Juárez. But violence has skyrocketed in Juárez, an assembly center for export goods that never escaped its roots as a border playground for Americans. Juárez, considered the world's murder capital, is caught in a turf war between two Mexican drug gangs fighting to control smuggling rights to the giant U.S. market. The violence scares away investment needed to reduce poverty and undercut drug gangs. The local manufacturers' trade group estimates nearly $1 billion in potential investment has been lost over the past two years due to the insecurity. Amid a wave of extortions, many city businesses have shut their doors. Many families with the means have fled across the border to El Paso, Texas...