Texas, You're Violence is 'Spilling Over' into Mexico

Thank God Texas Governor Rick Perry has sent his Ranger Recon teams to the Tex-Mex border, now maybe they can put an end to some of that nasty Texan sicario and straw buyer violence which has started spilling over into our loving Mexico.

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Perry's announcement Thursday comes amid increasing border violence, particularly in El Paso, mostly involving people with ties to Mexican drug gangs.

-El Paso Times

I know, you probably think I have mistakenly said Texas' violence is spilling over into Mexico. I mean, the entire world knows it's the other way around. After all Texan's, for that fact all Americans when it comes to the War on Drugs blame game, are considered Pan de Dios, each and every one of them, right?

Seriously though a lot is happening in regards to the Tex-Mex-border-drug war, especially in El Paso, one of the safest cities in the United States.(Which ironically happens to share a border with one of the most violent cities in the world, Ciudad Juarez.)

The Mexican army arrested, on Thurday, an El Paso man on suspicion of being a hit man for the Juárez drug cartel. He is reportedly suspected in at least 18 gruesome narco slayings.

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Michael Escalante, 29, is allegedly a sicario, or hit man, for La Linea crime organization, said Joint Operation Chihuahua officials. He was arrested while putting up a banner threatening a state official, soldiers said.

Escalante, who is listed as Michael Escatel in a news release, is a U.S. citizen, said Enrique Torres, a spokesman for the federal anti-crime operation in Juárez.

-El Paso Times

Apparently Escalante was caught with two others hanging a narco banner on a bridge. You might say "Hanging a banner on a bridge isn't illegal", and you'd be right. The problem is the narco banner just happened to include a little something, a warning you might call it, about snuffing the life of a Mexican state official. Oh, and as if that wasn't enough, Mr. Escalante just happened to have an AK-47 as a strap on at the time of his arrest.

Another serious issue is gun smuggling. In 2008, a year when more than 7,000 Mexicans were killed in drug violence, a record number of weapons confiscated in Mexico were traced to U.S. retailers, the largest percentage of them in Texas.

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The number of traced firearms — 12,073 — is more than double the previous two years combined, the U.S. Bureau More.. of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reported.

The 2008 figure brings the total number of guns confirmed as having been bought in the U.S. and smuggled into Mexico to 22,848 since 2005.

The new numbers, to be officially released in a report next month, are significant in that ATF tracings of confiscated firearms partially measure the extent to which guns from the U.S. arm Mexico’s cartels. An estimated 10,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico during the past few years.

Texas led the nation as the source of the traced weapons smuggled into Mexico with 40 percent of the total, or 4,800 firearms, last year. California was the No. 2 source, about 18 percent of the traces, followed by Arizona with 10 percent.

-ATF Texas spokeswoman Franceska Perot

Of course, Texas disagrees. How can one possibly just go out and buy assault rifles, after all they're illegal. And don't even start talking about gun shows, that's just ridiculous.

In the over 300 page newly published report, Inside Gun Shows: What Goes On When Everybody Thinks Nobody's Watching," it was alleged that many gun shows feature rampant straw purchases, assault rifle sales with no questions asked, and illegal transactions by federally licensed gun dealers. Many of these acts are committed in the open, with no attempt to conceal the illegal trade.

The report also said gun shows were a major source of guns traced to violent crimes in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Of course Duane Wheeler, director of the Paso del Norte Gun Collectors Gun Shows, like many, tends to disagree.

"It's all a bunch of crap. If a criminal wants to get a gun, he is going to break into your car or home to get it," Wheeler said. "He is not going to go through legal channels so the weapon can be traced back to him. The laws that cover gun shows are fine. They just need to enforce them. We have police officers at the show to make sure everything is aboveboard."

-Duane Wheeler, Paso del Norte Gun Collectors Gun Shows

Let's take another look at Wheeler's last statement: "We have police officers at the show to make sure everything is aboveboard." I live in Mexico, I know about cops and trust me just because you have officers around does not insure everything stays all nice and pretty inside a perfect little legal basket. Sorry, but it's the cold reality of the matter: Cops can be corrupted, doesn't matter if it's here, there, or in China.

U.S. law enforcement officials have always tended to point their fingers South to Mexico's notoriously corrupt cops and broken judicial system, but as President Calderon once told the AP: This isn't just a Mexican problem.

"To get drugs into the United States the one you need to corrupt is the American authority, the American customs, the American police -- not the Mexican. And that's a subject, by the way, which hasn't been addressed with sincerity. I'm waging my battle against corruption among Mexican authorities and we're risking everything to clean our house, but I think there also needs to be a good cleaning on the other side of the border."

-President Felipe Calderon H.

At the time, many Americans shook their heads in anger, how dare the President of the country responsable for so many Americans being junkies, spew such venomous lies. However, as time went by, it was no longer possible to deny: American law enforcers and border officials had, too, began to fall prey to the cartels and the money at play.

An Associated Press investigation has found U.S. law officers who work the border are being charged with criminal corruption in numbers not seen before, as drug and immigrant smugglers use money and sometimes sex to buy protection, and internal investigators crack down.

In Texas, which has more than half the U.S. border with Mexico, the commission that oversees state and local law enforcement officers reported that criminal misconduct cases were opened against 515 officers in fiscal 2007 and 550 officers in fiscal 2008. Some form of disciplinary action was lodged against 324 and 331 peace officer licenses, respectively, in those years.

The cartels increasingly recruit law enforcement officers on both sides of the border," Steve McCraw, then Texas's homeland security chief, told state lawmakers earlier this year. "It's not just a Mexico problem because of the amount of money involved. And as we've increased presence between the ports [of entry], there's an increased desire to recruit law enforcement personnel to move across the bridge or use them between the ports."

-AP investigation

I'm glad to see action being taken, I honestly hope the Ranger's Recon can make a difference, before this war gets any worse. In the past, we've each made half assed efforts, maybe now, working from both sides of the border we can make a difference.