What I heard on Geraldo’s border report in El Paso the other night had some very disturbing news. There is a high percentage of El Paso police and border patrol agents that have family members living in Ciudad Jaurez. There is no doubt that through intimidation and money that some of these officers are corrupt. Voluntary polygraph testing would help. Also randomly rotate the border patrol agents at the check points every hour. I’m sure phone calls are made to let the smugglers know which lanes are being manned by a corrupt official for safe passage. It wouln’t hurt to have some spanish speaking FBI agents acting as border patrol.
Last summer I was in Santa Fe and met a guy who had come to SF for the weekend. He had been in Juarez on a business trip, and the weekend before they had found four dead bodies right behind his hotel. His company then took him out of the hotel and sent him to stay in El Paso, but he still had to drive across the border every day. So he had taken the weekend to go north and get out of the “line of fire” for a few days. (I don’t recall what his line of work was... I want to say either engineering or manufacturing.) But he said it was really, really bad down there.