Free Republic

Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff soundly dismisses the claim that legalizing drugs will end cartel violence. There may be good reasons for legalizing some or all drugs, and in a libertarian vacuum perhaps there is a compelling case that individuals should be free to ingest whatever poisons their mind and bodies desire provided that the government is not required to pick up the costs from the inevitable wreckage in their addicted lives. However, the notion that legalization will remove the involvement of the drug cartels and other organized crime groups simply is preposterous. The fact is that not only...

WASHINGTON — Tighter gun control and stronger law enforcement in Southwestern states were recommended Thursday by lawmakers concerned about drug violence in Mexico possibly spilling across the border. --snip-- "The United States and Mexico border violence can only be solved if we look at all parts of the equation," Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., said Thursday during a House subcommittee considering changes to U.S. gun laws. "Let’s examine our gun laws, let’s cut down on U.S. drug consumption, let’s ask there to be more resources to root out drug-money laundering," he said...

Reporting from Monterrey, Mexico -- The small houses of the Independencia neighborhood climb a hill that rises from the bone-dry Santa Catarina riverbed. Gang graffiti proliferate the higher you go, until they completely cover the cinder-block walls with slogans, threats and declarations. Young men in baggy pants, sweat shirt hoodies pulled tightly around their faces, populate the desolate street corners, in between vacant lots and shattered wooden stoops. Look out from the top of the hill and in the distance you see the impressive skyline of Monterrey, the wealthiest city in Mexico, its fancy museums, glistening high-rises, leafy plazas and...

Mexican drug violence is decentralized, discombobulated and dangerous. Unfortunately, the recent U.S. response to Mexican drug violence can be characterized in exactly the same way. On Wednesday, President Obama announced that he would consider deploying the U.S. National Guard if violence escalates, and House Republicans called for the expansion of Operation Jump Start, a program that put the Guard in Texas from 2006-2008. Thursday, the House held two hearings and will hold another next week to discuss the Mexican threat. In February, Texas Governor Rick Perry asked for more troops to defend his state’s southern border. Yet Perry has come...

For eight years Joaquín Guzmán Loera reportedly managed his international drug smuggling operation from behind bars while enjoying a lavish prison life with access to booze, women and a home entertainment system. Then in January 2001, facing extradition to the U.S., Guzmán slipped into a laundry cart and escaped. Since then "El Chapo," or Shorty, as he is called, has tightened his grip on Mexico's drug trade as head of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the biggest suppliers of cocaine to the U.S. It is a lucrative business to be in these days. Thirty-five million people in the U.S. use...

As if he doesn't have enough domestic issues to deal with, Barack Obama is being forced to confront the escalating drugs war in Mexico that threatens to spill across the US border. In interviews with regional newspapers yesterday, the President revealed that he had contemplated the idea of sending an armed American force to patrol the border. "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense," said Obama, who also praised Mexico's President Felipe Calderon for "taking some extraordinary risks under extraordinary pressure to deal with the drug...

The failure to secure the border to prevent illegal drugs from entering into the United States from Mexico in the first place is inexusable. The Mexican drug cartels have established distribution networks and supply lines in at least 230 American cities, and the enforcement violence among the rival cells has been brutally incessant in Phoenix, Atlanta and Houston. The governors of Arizona and Texas have requested national guard troops to secure their borders only to be rebuffed by resident Barack Obama who "said that now is not the time to send troops": "We've got a very big border with Mexico,"...

Expert Tom Diaz says that imports of certain semiautomatic rifles were regulated under the first Bush and Clinton administrations. But he told a House panel Wednesday the import rules were relaxed under the most recent Bush administration.

WASHINGTON — President Obama weighed in Wednesday on the escalating drug war on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that he was looking at possibly deploying National Guard troops to contain the violence but ruled out any immediate military move. "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense," Obama said during an interview with journalists for regional papers, including a McClatchy reporter. "I don't have a particular tipping point in mind," he said. "I think it's unacceptable if you've got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens."

Obama Considering Deploying Troops to U.S.-Mexico Border President Obama tells regional reporters it is "unacceptable if you've got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens." FOXNews.com Thursday, March 12, 2009 President Obama says he's considering whether to deploy National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, after Texas Gov. Rick Perry made an urgent call fort 1,000 more "boots on the ground" to deal with the growing violence. The president weighed the option during a meeting with regional reporters Wednesday afternoon. "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they...

President Obama weighed in Wednesday on the escalating drug war on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that he was looking at possibly deploying National Guard troops to contain the violence but ruled out any immediate military move. "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense," Obama said during an interview with journalists for regional papers, including a McClatchy reporter."I don't have a particular tipping point in mind," he said. "I think it's unacceptable if you've got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens."Already this year there...

Warren Buffett. Bill Gates. Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman? As if Mexico doesn’t have enough image problems, a reputed drug cartel boss landed on the Forbes magazine list of billionaires. Guzman, whose nickname means "shorty," just made the cut as he was tied for 701st on the list, with a fortune estimated to be worth $1 billion. Guzman, 54, is said to be head of the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel. He follows in the footsteps of Colombian Pablo Escobar, who also made the Forbes list back in his day, and was considered the ultimate godfather until he was killed in a shoot...

FORT HUACHUCA — The Phoenix area has literally become the kidnapping capital of the United States, Arizona’s attorney general said Tuesday. The fight to control illegal immigrant smuggling routes into the United States has seen a lot of one gang of coyotes trying to take another gang’s human treasure, Terry Goddard told a number of federal, state and local law enforcement officials. Drop houses, which is where the gangs hide illegal immigrants smuggled into the country from Mexico, are a lucrative business, and that is why gangs belonging to different cartels try to kidnap people staying in those facilities, Goddard...

On Monday’s CBS Evening News, correspondent Ben Tracy filed a report documenting the thousands of guns that are illegally smuggled to Mexican drug cartels which they use in battle with the Mexican army, and suggested that lax gun laws in America are to blame. Without delving into the possibility that greater availability of guns in Mexico might help the country’s citizens to reduce that country’s overall crime rate, Tracy informed viewers that it is "nearly impossible" to buy guns in Mexico legally, as he pointed out America’s less strict laws: Mexican law makes it nearly impossible to buy guns there...

ACAPULCO, Mexico — Gunmen killed six people, including a local police chief, in a series of attacks Monday in mountain towns in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero. The police chief of Pungarabato was repeatedly shot while driving his red Mustang on a highway near the small town early Monday, Guerrero state public safety department said in a news release. Five other men were found gunned down in different towns in the isolated mountainous zone known as the Tierra Caliente, or the Hot Land, the state police said. In the border city of Tijuana, soldiers detained 60 people at a...

WASHINGTON — Americans got a wakeup call last week about the threat posed by Mexican drug traffickers when the State Department issued a travel advisory warning vacationers heading for warmer climes of the danger they would face visiting our closest neighbor to the south. The violence has escalated to the point where in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, the police chief was forced to flee the city after drug traffickers demanded his resignation, systematically killing his deputy and three of his men until he capitulated. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has dispatched soldiers and more federal police to patrol the...

Mexico City (dpa) - Mexican police found five human heads Tuesday in portable coolers on a road in Ixtlahuacan del Rio, some 600 kilometres northwest of Mexico City. On the inside of the coolers' lids, two messages had been written in black ink, with threats addressed to someone that was only identified as ``Goyo,'' a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in the state of Jalisco told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. The authorities said the heads of the five men had been severed just hours before they were found. Police were combing the rural area where the heads were found, some...

AUSTIN — Mexican drug cartel violence is not spilling into Texas, several frustrated border mayors told a state legislative committee Monday in an effort to dispel public perceptions that their communities are under siege. “For me to believe that our cities are so endangered by all this violence that we need to send the military to the border is a knee-jerk reaction,” McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez told the House Border and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee. Cortez, mayor for 19 years, said his daughter in San Antonio recently called to express apprehension about his re-election because of fears he might become an...

You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you're African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables. That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes. More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that...

With U.S. forces fighting two wars abroad, the nation's top military officer made an important visit last week to forestall a third. He went to Mexico. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the trip to confer with Mexican leaders about the Merida Initiative, a three-year plan signed into law last June to flood the U.S.-Mexican border region with $1.4 billion in U.S. assistance for law-enforcement training and equipment, as well as technical advice and training to bolster Mexico’s judicial system. That’s about 100 people every week for the last 14 months. The cartels usually do...