by Ted Galen Carpenter
The killing
of a U.S. Border Patrol agent on October 2 in a notorious southern
Arizona drug-smuggling corridor fueled speculation that Mexico's drug
cartels were becoming bolder about operating on the U.S. side of the
border. Agent Nicholas Ivie's death apparently was a tragic case of friendly fire.
The immediate assumption that the cartels were responsible is an
indicator of just how jittery Americans living along the border with
Mexico have become.
People have ample reason to be jittery. Three BP agents
have died in violent incidents involving the drug gangs over the past
two years, including Brian Terry, a victim of Washington's botched Fast
and Furious gun-running sting operation.
Major southwestern U.S. cities remain relatively peaceful,
and that has caused some observers to argue that the concerns about
spillover from Mexico's drug war into the United States are overblown.
But while violent crime rates in such American cities as El Paso and
Tucson remain low, the situation in rural areas is more worrisome.
Residents along the border from California to Texas are experiencing a
slow but steady rise in drug-related violence and intimidation.
Border Patrol agents haven't been the only victims. Robert Krentz,
a prominent rancher near Douglas, Ariz., was found murdered, and
evidence indicated that he had paid with his life for stumbling upon a
scout for a trafficking shipment. Gunmen attacked David Hartley
and his wife Tiffany while they were jet skiing on Falcon Lake on the
Texas-Mexico border. David was fatally shot in the encounter. That
incident, and other problems with drug gangs on Falcon Lake, caused
Texas authorities to deploy a small fleet of heavily armed speedboats in
early 2012 to improve security.
Ranchers and farmers throughout the borderlands increasingly report
nasty encounters with cartel enforcers. Farmhands in the Rio Grande
valley near La Joya, Tex, were burning stalks of sugarcane for harvest
when four masked men on all-terrain vehicles approached them. The armed
men surrounded the crew and ordered them to leave the area. The farmer
who employed the crew said he had no doubt that the masked men were
drug traffickers. "They hide stuff in there," he said, referring to the
dense fields of sugarcane, and try to intimidate anyone who gets too
close.
The incident on his farm occurred just two weeks after masked men
threatened a county employee in Hidalgo County, Texas, and ordered him
to stop clearing brush along a small river near the border. On another
occasion, men in a pickup truck fired shots at a foreman on a ranch
adjacent to property owned by country music star George Strait.
No comments:
Post a Comment