The Slaughter on the Southern Border

At a joint press conference with Mexican President Felipe Calderon last year, President Obama vowed to make ending border violence a “top priority.” How’s that hope and change working out? Drug-related crime is out of control, the State Department is warning spring-break vacationers to avoid the Mexican states of Durango, Coahuila and Chihuahua, and the bloodshed has now reached the U.S. consulate’s office.

A young American consulate worker and her unborn baby were slain this weekend in Mexico, along with her U.S. detention officer husband and the Mexican husband of another consulate worker. The wanton murders appear to have been a coordinated drug cartel hit; the victims had all just left a children’s birthday party in Juarez and were headed across the border back into Texas. The pregnant American official, Lesley Enriquez, is reportedly the first consulate employee to die in drug-related violence since 1985. Her 7-month-old daughter, terrorized by the gunfire while strapped in her car seat, was the lone survivor of the attack.

The State Department has now authorized the evacuation of dependents of U.S. personnel in six Mexican cities along its northern border with the U.S. And the resort town of Acapulco saw at least 13 murdered over the past week — including four beheadings. The total death toll over the past three years is nearing 20,000.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-ed-mexico18-2010mar18,0,1529244.story

Countering the cartels
The war on Mexico’s drug traffickers has produced little but more violence. Will increased spending on social problems help?

3:32 PM PDT, March 17, 2010

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The decomposing bodies of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent and his pilot are discovered wrapped in plastic bags at a ranch about 60 miles from the Guadalajara streets where they were kidnapped by the cartel controlling drug trafficking in central Mexico. The agent’s corpse bears traces of the drugs a doctor administered to keep him alive during some 30 hours of interrogation, as his torturers crushed his jaw, ribs and windpipe, and drilled a hole into his skull. “We are in a war and cannot accept that Enrique Camarena died in vain,” the U.S. ambassador says.

That was 25 years ago. Last weekend, a U.S. consular official, her husband and the husband of another consulate employee were fatally shot after attending a children’s birthday party in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called the killings “brutal, unconscionable and unforgivable.” This was another crime in a different city controlled by a different cartel. But it is all part of the same war of attrition that has been underway for more than a quarter of a century. What progress do the United States and Mexico have to show for it? Drug consumption in the U.S. has continued unabated, and the violence has only increased.

Just out!

59% Say U.S. Should Continue To Build Fence on U.S.-Mexico Border - Rasmussen

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republicans think the fence still should be built, a view shared by 51% of Democrats and 58% of adults not affiliated with either major party.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/mexico/59_say_u_s_should_continue_to_build_fence_on_u_s_mexico_border

President James K Polk a principle implementer of Manifest Destiny, sent General Winfield Scott and his aide Capitan Robert E Lee to conquer Mexico. They entered the Halls of Montezuma, defeated and threw out Santa Anna for good. They conquered Mexico.

Polk left Mexico alone. He did not want it.

Mistake? perhaps, but it was also a terrible burden better left alone.

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