Cartel's latest contraband found dead near border

Houston Chronicle:

Back in October, asBarack Obama and Mitt Romney jousted about immigration issues in the second televised debate, the president made a remarkable assertion about control of the southern border.

“The flow of undocumented workers across the border is actually lower than it's been in 40 years,” he said.

And indeed, after a decade of increased enforcement that included construction of hundreds of miles of steel border wall and a doubling in size of the U.S. Border Patrol, the results are undeniable.

The 327,577 people caught by the Border Patrol on the southern border in fiscal year 2011 were the fewest since 1970. And it was about one-third of the apprehensions made in 2005.

But don't try telling folks in Brooks County that things are under control.

Here, apprehensions of immigrants crossing illegally, rescues of people lost in the brush and wild car chases all have increased markedly in the past couple of years.

A far more tragic indicator: the death toll of those trying to sneak around the Border Patrol checkpoint south of town on U.S. 281 has risen dramatically.

By late December, the remains of 127 people had been found in the brushy ranchland around the checkpoint, nearly double last year's total and the highest anyone can remember. In 2010, 20 bodies were found.
“When you have 127 people die in your county in one year, it's too much. One body would be too much,” said County Judge Raul Ramirez, who recently ran out of space for “John Doe” burials at the county's Sacred Heart Cemetery and is looking for a new place to bury the unidentified dead.

At Sacred Heart, their simple graves are marked with bright plastic flowers and small signs that tell what little is known, such as “skeletal remains” or “skull case” or “unknown female,” and the ranch where they were found.

Those that later are identified by DNA tests or other information are exhumed and sent back to their families, most often in Mexico or Central America.

The judge said the annual costs to his poor, rural county of dealing with illegal immigration and the unknown dead, including mortician fees and autopsies, run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

With an annual budget of about $6 million and just six full-time patrol deputies, Brooks County is ill-equipped for the task. And because it's not a border county, it receives very little state and federal aid.

“It all comes through Falfurrias. It's the No. 1 checkpoint in terms of seizures and illegal drugs,” the judge said, adding later, “I ask myself, why us?”

... 

There is much more.

There is another possibility that is not being discussed.  The border patrol is not catching as many illegals because the cartels have gone into the trafficking business.  My speculation is that all the dead they are finding near Falfurrias are the ones that could not pay when they were smuggled across the border.  There have been unusual reports of traffickers  being discovered when a tire blows out on a pick up and 20 illegals are found in the wreck.  Houston cops have stash houses with 40 or more illegals waiting to be transported to other ares.  Oklahoma cops made a routine traffic stop of an SUV and 16 people poured out like something from a Keystone Cops movie.

It is likely that the numbers are low because the cartels have found away to take advantage of their infiltration tactics to get the illegals in without being caught.

I suspect that most of the victims are from Central America.  They jump on the train coming up along the Mexican Gulf Coast and if caught, rather than deporting them, they are given a ticket and told to be out of Mexico in 30 days.  So they keep on heading for the Texas border where the Zetas or some other cartel agrees to get them across the border for a price.  If they don't have the money, they sometimes kill them in Mexico.  Many don't survive very long if they make it to this side of the border.

What is clear to me is that Obama is grossly misled or is deliberately misleading US voters when it comes to cross border trafficking.