Posted on 02/09/2009 5:54:00 PM PST by shielagolden
Mexican drug violence spills over into the US
U.S. authorities are reporting a spike in killings, kidnappings and home invasions connected to Mexico's murderous cartels. And to some policymakers' surprise, much of the violence is happening not in towns along the border, where it was assumed the bloodshed would spread, but a considerable distance away, in places such as Phoenix and Atlanta.
Investigators fear the violence could erupt elsewhere around the country because the Mexican cartels are believed to have set up drug-dealing operations all over the U.S., in such far-flung places as Anchorage, Alaska; Boston; and Sioux Falls, S.D.
"The violence follows the drugs," said David Cuthbertson, agent in charge of the FBI's office in the border city of El Paso, Texas.
The violence takes many forms: Drug customers who owe money are kidnapped until they pay up. Cartel employees who don't deliver the goods or turn over the profits are disciplined through beatings, kidnappings or worse. And drug smugglers kidnap illegal immigrants in clashes with human smugglers over the use of secret routes from Mexico.
So far, the violence is nowhere near as grisly as the mayhem in Mexico, which has witnessed beheadings, assassinations of police officers and soldiers, and mass killings in which the bodies were arranged to send a message. But law enforcement officials worry the violence on this side could escalate.
"They are capable of doing about anything," said Rusty Payne, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman in Washington. "When you are willing to chop heads off, put them in an ice chest and drop them off at a police precinct, or roll a head into a disco, put beheadings on YouTube as a warning," very little is off limits.
In an apartment near Birmingham, Ala., police found five men with their throats slit in August. They had apparently been tortured with electric shocks before being killed in a murder-for-hire orchestrated by a Mexican drug organization over a drug debt of about $400,000.
In Phoenix, 150 miles north of the Mexican border, police have reported a sharp increase in kidnappings and home invasions, with about 350 each year for the last two years, and say the majority were committed at the behest of the Mexican drug gangs.
In June, heavily armed men stormed a Phoenix house and fired randomly, killing one person. Police believe it was the work of Mexican drug organizations.
Authorities in Atlanta are also seeing an increase in drug-related kidnappings tied to Mexican cartels. Estimates of how many such crimes are being committed are hard to come by because many victims are connected to the cartels and unwilling to go to the police, said Rodney G. Benson, DEA agent in charge in Atlanta.
Agents said they have rarely seen such brutality in the U.S. since the "Miami Vice" years of the 1980s, when Colombian cartels had the corner on the cocaine market in Florida.
Last summer, Atlanta-area police found a Dominican man who had been beaten, bound, gagged and chained to a wall in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood in Lilburn, Ga. The 31-year-old Rhode Island resident owed $300,000 to Mexico's Gulf Cartel, Benson said. The Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros just south of the Texas border, is one of the most ruthless of the Mexican organizations that deal drugs such as cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin.
"He was shackled to a wall and one suspect had an AK-47. The guy was in bad shape," Benson said. "I have no doubt in my mind if that ransom wasn't paid, he was going to be killed."
In July, Atlanta-area police shot and killed a suspected kidnapper while he was trying to pick up a $2 million ransom owed to his cartel bosses, Benson said.
State and federal governments have sent millions of dollars to local law enforcement along the Mexican border to help fend off spillover drug crime. But investigators believe Arizona and Atlanta are seeing the worst of the violence because they are major drug distribution hubs thanks to their webs of interstate highways.
In fact, drug officials have dubbed Atlanta "the new Southwest border," said Jack Killorin, a former federal drug agent and director of the Atlanta region's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force.
El Paso, population 600,000, is only a quarter-mile away from Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, which has seen open gun battles and 1,700 murders in the last year. But El Paso remains one of America's safest cities, something Cuthbertson said is probably a result of the huge law enforcement presence in town, including thousands of Border Patrol and customs agents.
In the past year, more than 5,000 people have been killed across Mexico in a power struggle among Mexico's drug cartels and ferocious fighting between them and the Mexican government. The cartels have established operations in at least 230 U.S. cities, according to the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center.
Payne said the U.S. and Mexico are working together to pressure the warring cartels. Payne cited the extradition of high-level drug suspects — four members of the Arellano Felix cartel in Tijuana were brought to the U.S. in December — and the capture or killings of several other top cartel leaders across Mexico in the past year.
"We have to make sure that we attack these criminal organizations at every level so that we are safer not only in Mexico and on the Southwest border, but here in the rest of the country," Payne said.
While some Americans may feel victimized by the spillover of violence, others are contributing to it. Americans provide 95 percent of the weapons used by the cartel, according to U.S. authorities. And Americans are the cartels' best customers, sending an estimated $28.5 billion in drug-sale proceeds across the Mexico border each year.
All this.. and STILL no border wall.
It does more than that...
There is a much greater number of women who avoid marijuana. Usually in teenagers, it is a far greater number of the boys...
It makes them feminized, docile, lazy and in many cases dishonest sneak thieves...
When the chronics don't get their stuff they become bitchy, vindictive and very petty over some of the stupidest things. I saw lots of fistfights over pot(and worse) in highschool.
I think with the whole drug issue most people ignore the real danger...
It has been chemical warfare against young people in this country and in the West since the 1960s.
I will agree with you there. Chronic users are @sswipes with no brains and no d*ck. It lowers testosterone. Plus the whole hip-hop culture is quite annoying. I can put up with hippies for maybe a second or two longer, but after awhile their crap get's old. It's really not about honoring the potheads so much as it's about creating wealth off of them and ending the violence connected with the drug trade, imo.
I don't use anything other than prescribed medicine now. If it were legalized I think I would consider it as an alternative to prescribed painkillers later on. My wife has cancer, and the warranty on my body seems to have expired so no telling what's coming up. Imagine the savings to taxpayers if we could simply “grow our own” pain meds.
Something tells me the pharmaceutical companies will object. ;)
That’s how it all started, if memory serves. The chemical industry came up with synthetic fibers so they lobbied Congress to outlaw hemp production. The switch was completed before the second world war finished and only a few hemp leggings and tents and naval ropes survive to this day.
It concerns me that we are spending so much money and man power in the Middle East and we are not doing enough to stop all the drug related violence that is impacting the US. I am currently visiting New Mexico from Alaska and every night I hear on the local news of more and more violence. It is quite scary. Mexico is our neighbor, and there is a war going on over there that the US is a part of. Why are we not doing more to stop it. Building walls and beefing up our border enforcement is not going to solve the problem. It would just hide the problem a bit more from the US, but it would still be there. We need to be utilizing our resources here and we need to be helping Mexico with this horrific issue.
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