Mexican corruption disease spreads to US border area

Houston Chronicle:

Border Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez first noticed the curious behavior of a longtime deputy last spring.

The Zapata County lawman wasn't coming to work very often.

Then, he began wearing expensive clothing. More strangely, the deputy was spotted a few times in his unmarked car in border areas where narcotics traffickers were under surveillance.

On Tuesday, the sheriff's suspicions seemed to be confirmed when ex-deputy Manuel Martinez, 43, was arrested by FBI agents on charges of extorting more than $20,000 in bribes from drug traffickers. Martinez, who took office in January as a justice of the peace, is also charged with passing on bribes to a county official and a building code inspector.

A spate of recent high-profile arrests not only have given border law officers a black eye, they are worried that corruption of lawmen is on the rise. Heightening that concern is the looming arrival — and potentially more corruption — of thousands of new law enforcement personnel on the border.

''You see a lot more of (the corruption) than before," said Gonzalez, whose office assisted in the FBI investigation of the three officials. ''If you look at it real closely, as time goes by, I guess everybody's morals and ethics are eroding away."

The arrests of the former deputy and two other Zapata County officials came a day after three Texas National Guardsmen — assigned to help Border Patrol agents with immigration control — were charged with smuggling 24 illegal immigrants in a van leased to the guard.

Also on Monday, a veteran Border Patrol agent was sentenced to 16 months in jail for transporting 11 illegal immigrants he picked up outside Laredo last July. In March, a U.S. Customs inspector was sentenced to 14 years in prison for taking bribes to allow drugs across a border bridge.

These recent cases were not isolated.

The inspector general's office of the Homeland Security Department reported last week that 282 employees of Customs and Border Protection stationed on the Southwest border have been investigated for corruption since fiscal year 2004. And 52 of those cases were investigated so far this year, compared with 66 in all of last year. There were 151 cases in Texas in that time.

The Bush administration last year stepped up recruitment efforts to boost the U.S. Border Patrol to 18,000 agents by December 2008, an increase of nearly 6,000 agents. On Thursday, President Bush called for $4.4 billion in immediate funding for border security proposed in the pending immigration bill.

''The graft and corruption will increase," said Robert Lee Maril, a sociologist who spent two years researching a book on Border Patrol operations in South Texas.

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The big difference on this side of the border is that they are prosecuted. As more enforcement comes to the border there should be more scrutiny of efforts to corrupt that enforcement. In fact that may be an opportunity to exploit against the drug thugs and the body smugglers. Law enforcement whould put in more sting operations targeting not only the drug thugs by officers who are willing to extort money from them.