Mexican drug insurgency spills into US

LA Times:

Violent crime along the U.S.-Mexico border, which has long plagued the scrubby, often desolate stretch, is increasingly spilling northward into the cities of the American Southwest.

In Phoenix, deputies are working the unsolved case of 13 border crossers who were kidnapped and executed in the desert. In Dallas, nearly two dozen high school students have died in the last two years from overdoses of a $2-a-hit Mexican fad drug called "cheese heroin."

The crime surge, most acute in Texas and Arizona, is fueled by a gritty drug war in Mexico that includes hostages being held in stash houses, daylight gun battles claiming innocent lives, and teenage hit men for the Mexican cartels. Shipments of narcotics and vans carrying illegal workers on U.S. highways are being hijacked by rival cartels fighting over the lucrative smuggling routes. Fires are being set in national forests to divert police.

In Laredo, Texas, a teenager who had been driving around the United States in a $70,000 luxury sedan confessed to becoming a Mexican cartel hitman when he was just 13. In Nogales, Ariz., an 82-year-old man was caught with 79 kilograms of cocaine in his Chevrolet Impala. The youth was sentenced to 40 years in prison in one slaying case and is awaiting trial in another; the old man received 10 years.

In Southern California, Border Patrol agents routinely encounter smugglers driving immigrant-laden cars who try to escape by driving the wrong way on busy freeways. And stash houses packed with dozens of illegal immigrants have been discovered in Los Angeles.

But a huge U.S. law enforcement buildup along the border that started a decade ago has helped stabilize border-related crime rates on the California side; a recent wave of kidnappings in Tijuana has been largely contained south of the border.

The sprawling border has been crisscrossed for years by the poor seeking work and by drug dealers in the hunt for U.S. dollars. For decades neither the United States nor Mexico has managed to halt the immigrants and narcotics pushing north. But with the Mexican government's newly pledged war on the cartels, and an explosion of violence among rival networks, a new crime dynamic is emerging: The violence that has hit Mexican border towns is spreading deeper into the United States.

U.S. officials are promising more Border Patrol and federal firearms officers, more fences and more surveillance towers along the desert stretches where the two nations meet.

But law enforcement officials are wary of how this new burst in violence will play out, especially because the enemy is better armed and more sophisticated than ever. Among their concerns are budget cutbacks in some agencies -- including a hiring freeze in the Drug Enforcement Administration -- and community opposition to the surveillance towers.

Johnny Sutton, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said he would need at least 20,000 new Border Patrol agents in El Paso alone to hold back the tide. But that is the total number of agents that Washington hopes to have along the whole border by the end of 2009.

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Sutton is rather notorious for locking up border agents and giving a drug mule immunity.

However, the problem of the drug insurgency in Mexico cannot be ignored because it is related to fighting over control of access to the US market for drugs. I have been posting about this for years and you can check recent post by clicking on the Mexico subject designation below.

Vigorous law enforcement on both sides of the border is needed. we also need to get a handle on the export of firearms from the US into Mexico that is arming the insurgency.

There is much more in this LA Times story. There will be much more written in the future. The drug insurgents have been copying the Islamist religious bigot insurgents in Iraq with beheadings and other forms of intimidation. There have been some suggestions in Congress that there is an alliance between the two groups. The Islamic terrorist are posing as Mexican and blending in with some of the gangs on this side of the border.

The war on terror continues to evolve.