Mexico's Murderous Drug War Spills Over U.S. Border

Eighteen months ago, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer was excoriated for warning of spillover from Mexico's war reaching our soil. Well, beheadings are becoming common now. Yet that war is still ignored. Leading the charge in the summer of 2010, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank blasted Republican Gov. Brewer for claiming that Arizona's "law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded." Brewer did admit she was in error at the time, but that's not what really interested Milbank and his fellow media minions. Just one problem, though. Brewer may have jumped the gun months ago, but cartel beheadings have become a reality in Arizona — and are now jumping to other states. Four months after the Arizona governor spoke, the first grisly cartel beheading occurred — in Arizona. Martin Alejandro Cota-Monroy's body was found Oct. 10, 2010 in Chandler, in what police believed had been a revenge attack for stealing cartel drugs. A year later and 600 miles north in Oklahoma, the victim was not a person involved in the drug trade, but a 19-year-old human trafficking victim, Carina Saunders, who was killed by suspected cartel members to frighten another teenager into joining the cartel. Three months later, in Tucson, another headless body was found on a desolate stretch of road. What's seen here is the very swift regularization of crime that, until recently, was thought to be Mexico's problem. Just Friday, the Mexican government reported that the 2,276 war-related deaths in Mexico's Chihuahua state alone topped all civilian deaths in Afghanistan in the first 11 months of 2011 (2,177). A civilian in the state of Chihuahua had a nine times greater chance of being killed than an Afghan...more