Mexican Soldiers Smuggling Drugs

My local paper, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, reported this morning that yesterday, U.S. Border Patrol agents squared off against the Mexican military at a border crossing near El Paso, Texas. The Mexican soldiers were well-armed with machine guns and were attempting to smuggle "what appeared to be thousands of pounds of marijuana" into our country. The agents immediately called for backup, which arrived quickly in the form of sheriff's deputies and highway patrol officers. The officers apparently intimidated the soldiers back across the border. According to the report, "deputies captured one vehicle in the incident, a Cadillac Escalade reportedly stolen from El Paso, and found 1,477 pounds of marijuana inside. The Mexican soldiers set fire to one of the Humvees stuck in the river."

The Bulletin has been reporting stuff like this for some time, now, and especially in the past week they've had several articles (here and here) related to some documents that someone brought to them which detail incursions by the Mexican military over the past decade. One document "outlines 216 incidents since 1996 where Mexican military personnel crossed the U.S.-Mexican border and were spotted or confronted by the Border Patrol." The other, a map with the official seal of the Mexican government's Drug Control agency, showed 34 of those incursions.

That the Mexican military is smuggling drugs across the U.S. border, you would think, is a major problem. Imagine if the U.S. Army were doing this to the south. However, our government absolutely refuses to address the problems at the border, regardless of how bad they get. Doug McIntyre on KABC radio here in L.A. routinely refers to President Bush as "Vicente W. Bush," a melding of his own name and that of the Mexican president, as his positions on these sorts of matters are well-known. Confronted about these recent incursions, the head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, had this to say: "I think the stories are overblown," and he explains it by suggesting these soldiers aren't really soldiers: "We do have instances where we have Mexican police or military who have deserted and become involved with criminal activity. But we've also had bad cops in the United States, too. It happens." This is the head of our national law enforcement agency talking, folks.

The Bulletin reports that ICE, our own Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, part of the DHS, wouldn't comment at all about the matter, which I suppose shouldn't be surprising. They are the department that the U.S. government always directs people to, instead of the Border Patrol, when discussing these kinds of matters, yet they have no teeth whatsoever; no interest in actually enforcing the border laws.

Why? It figures that Democrats won't do it because they focus on the humanitarian aspects of the illegal immigration issue and believe we shouldn't even HAVE an enforced border to begin with. The Republicans apparently are more interested in their own corporate contributors, who love the cheap labor, and won't do anything, either. In the middle, the Border Patrol officers get support from citizens but not their own government. The whole thing is simply amazing.

In the latest Bulletin article, the head of the Border Patrol, TJ Bonner, had this to say about Chertoff's uninformed comments: "Were he to go out there on actual patrol with Border Patrol agents ... and experience what we experience -- where you encounter a group of highly trained, very well-armed Mexican soldiers coming across our border, and your closest backup is an hour or more away -- I think he would be a lot more concerned about it."

Despite the Mexican government's total denial that any such incursions have ever happened, TJ Bonner told the Bulletin this in an earlier article:

In one 2000 incident, more than 16 Mexican soldiers were arrested by border agents in a small town west of El Paso, in Santa Teresa, N.M., after Mexican soldiers fired on the agents. None of the agents was injured in the gun battle, and U.S. State Department officials forced the border agents to release the soldiers and return them to Mexico with their weapons, Bonner added.

It makes one wonder what it will take before our government actually takes real steps to secure our southern border. I predict it will take the death of a few Border Patrol agents. It pains me to say that, but what other conclusion can you possibly reach?