Along the northern Mexican border, fear rules
Police jobs go unfilled and a terrorized public demands reform as the death toll grows in a drug smuggling war.
By Sam Enriquez and Richard Marosi, Times Staff Writers
November 23, 2006
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO — The top cop in this unhinged border city has 300 openings on a 600-member police force, and his fearful greeting gave a big clue why.
“Please, please don’t use my name or take a photograph,” the interim chief begged.
One police chief was killed last year, a second quit in the spring, and no one else appears brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to work this side of the law in Nuevo Laredo.
Mexican President Vicente Fox quietly withdrew the federal police he dispatched with great fanfare last year to bring peace, leaving the city virtually unprotected in a smuggling war that has claimed 170 lives since January.
This isn’t the only border city where law and order are on the ropes.
In Tijuana, the rate of kidnappings ranks among the world’s worst and some state police have refused postings after the killings of more than a dozen officers, some at restaurants and on city streets.
Organized crime is out of control, Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon said after a police commander was ambushed this month. The killing of police officers, he said, “speaks to the impunity of organized crime, that they think they’re above the law, or protected.”
Note from D.A. Yikes, “organized crime [1]is out of control”? Maybe they should try what the American President is doing…just ignore the crime. Maybe a special process [that is also illegal] to make mortgage loans to the criminals [2]…
As Mexico prepares for a peaceful transfer of power Dec. 1 with the inauguration of Felipe Calderon, the president-elect must take stock of the country’s 2,000 drug-related slayings this year, residents and officials say.
“Calderon needs to apply the law or reform the law,” said Nuevo Laredo resident Ana de la Cruz, the mother of two teenage daughters. “We urgently need help.”
You can read the rest of La Times report here. [3]
But relax, the Meth factories [1]and false ID mills here in Georgia [4]are NOT a preview of things to come here because of the fact that we have defacto open borders with that lovely nation to our south that the millions of illegals are working so hard and so successfully to reproduce here. Right?
We think this quote says a lot about the priorities of the Bush administration in a war on terror:
Here’s the arithmetic, said Daniel Covarrubias, the director of economic development in Nuevo Laredo: “The U.S. checks maybe 10% of the trucks that pass. Any more than that and it slows commerce. You run 10 trucks and take your chances.”
It isn’t about a sovereign nation with defined secure borders, a common laguage and a rule of law that is equally applied..it is about commerce and all negative effects on the nation President Bush is sworn to protect [5] are merely the price of doing business.
The plan is to erase the borders [6]entirely – they are barriers to increased profit.
The American middle class [7]will be nothing but a memory.
This is not a weather event folks, the situation can be changed, but time is running out.
Please call your U.S. Senator!