The morning after - Day 1
Sep 1, 2007 General Interest
I awoke this morning in my palatial estate south of the Rio Bravo to the sounds and smells of fresh coffee beans being ground in the Cuisinart cafetaria, surprised that the world wasn’t in an upheaval over the thought that the border would soon be opening to Mexican trucks transiting for the United States. After all, the Mexican border south has been open for 48 hours to the Americans.
But no, life is as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow, and the next day and the next.
The business of business is still being conducted in the manner it was yesterday and as it will continue to be in the days, months and years to come.
The border shuttle trucks have been lined up at the border at Bridges III and IV, awaiting the 0800 opening as they do every morning except for holiday.
The Texas DPS inspection stations are opening and preparing for another day of revenue enhancement
And the cars are filling the two main bridges to America, with Mexican families going across to shop, spend money, visit family or take off on a vacation.
So everyone have a wonderful and safe Labor Day weekend as we bring the summer of 2007 to a close.
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September 3rd, 2007 at 8:59
Who in their right mind would want to go into Mexico to be kidnapped or stopped by your ignorant police that loves to throw Americans in jail and let them rot? You want to talk about idiots? Look in the mirror!
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September 3rd, 2007 at 11:03
Debby, I don’t know what Mexico you are thinking of? Perhaps the Mexico of 20 years in the past when the PRI ruled the country.
The Americans allegedly kidnapped in Mexico are punks who go there looking for trouble and find it. They are family of people who owe drug dealers money and the family members are held until it is paid. These are the facts.
Our police, in the past few years have been transformed from the corrupt jokes of the past into a professional police organizations. The PFP or Federal Highway Police have always been the best paid and therefore the least likely to be corrupt.
When Americans get thrown in jail, you can bet it is because they broke a law. Be it drunk and disorderly in the bordellos or being drunk and stupid in Centro, or carrying a pocket knife, which is prohibited, they are prosecuted according to Mexican law.
I look in the mirror and I like what I see. And it is not an idiot looking back at me either.
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September 4th, 2007 at 11:10
You say 20 years ago? I don’t think so. Here are just three examples, one written in 2007, one in 2006 and the other in 2005, out of thousands of reports on this subject. You are trying to tell me that everyone reporting on this is just crazy? Even if it was only done by the drug people…Mexico is a dangerous and corrupt country and you may want to take another look in that mirror!
Terror Plagues Border: Corruption, Kidknapping, Crime Ruining Texas Town
Richard Walker
Residents of Laredo on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande are experiencing terror, and it is not coming from Arab revolutionary groups but from Mexican criminals and drug cartels, one of them comprised of former members of Mexico’s special forces.
In Laredo, a city of 250,000, which has seen massive growth through cross-border trade over the past decade, there is a real fear that there are insufficient federal and local law enforcement personnel to protect Americans living there.
In recent years, aside from violent home invasions by illegal aliens and the spread of narco-trafficking by Mexican drug lords, the Laredo area has seen a spate of kidnappings followed by ransom demands and the disappearance of several dozen of its citizens.
Time and again, the Border Patrol there has warned Washington that neighboring Nuevo Laredo, which is just across the Mexican border, has been the source of violence and illicit drug running that has spread to Laredo and as far as Dallas.
To make matters worse, until a month ago, the DEA and the FBI had made it plain to lawmakers in Congress and in Texas that the entire Nuevo Laredo police force was in the pay of the drug cartels, especially the Zetas, a bloodthirsty group of heavily armed ex-Mexican special forces officers.
The Zetas made their mark along the Gulf of Mexico, waging gun battles with their rival, the Juarez Cartel. According to the FBI, which has been tracking Zeta hit men in the United States, the Zetas’ expertise is in assassination and moving drugs from Mexico into United States.
For the people of Laredo, the most frightening dimension to the violence that has engulfed their region has been the kidnapping of U.S. citizens, who are taken across the border into Nuevo Laredo, some of them never to reappear.
Official figures confirm that, in the past year alone, 30 to 40 Americans have been kidnapped or murdered on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, in the vicinity of Nuevo Laredo.
Traditionally, the half-million inhabitants of Nuevo Laredo depended heavily on tourism from Texas, but with the arrival of the drug gangs and criminals from Mexico City, U.S. citizens have stayed away. As a result, the economic damage to ordinary shopkeepers has been considerable.
From a Border Patrol perspective, the real issue is that Nuevo Laredo poses a potent threat to U.S. security because of what could be hidden in the 10,000 trucks that daily carry goods across the border into the United States.
In early June, Mexican President Vicente Fox, under pressure from Washington, agreed that Nuevo Laredo had to be “cleaned up.” However, he failed to give immediate authorization to his security people to do that, and on June 8 a new police chief in the border town was assassinated.
Mexican agents from the Agencia Federal de Investigacion, AFI, the equivalent of the FBI, were dispatched to Nuevo Laredo to investigate the murder. However, when they arrived in the center of the town, they were stopped at a roadblock by local police, one of whom shot one of the AFI agents in the chest, claiming he had gone for his gun. As it turned out, the AFI agent who was shot was not even armed at the time.
Following the shooting, some 1,000 Mexican troops, special forces and scores of Mexican federal agents moved into Nuevo Laredo and sealed it off. Forty police officers were arrested and questioned about the assassination of the police chief and the shooting of the federal agent.
Those actions were followed by the arrest and questioning of all 700 members of the town’s police force. During the opening hours of the clean-up, Mexican troops found 43 kidnap victims in several different houses. Most of them were members of drug cartels.
That effectively dashed the hopes of American families who had prayed their loved ones would be freed when the town was liberated. No one was more shattered than William Slemaker, who had been holding out hope from September 2004 that his stepdaughter, Yvette Martinez, 27, and her friend, Brenda Cisneros, would be found. They had simply vanished on a trip to Nuevo Laredo and, unlike other kidnap victims, no ransom demands were ever received from their kidnappers.
Violence is a way of life in northern Mexican border towns, and much of that can be attributed to drug cartels and the movement of illegal aliens by organized crime syndicates.
According to the Border Patrol the fault lies with Mexico’s traditionally corrupt police force and judiciary.
The scale of the drug business can be seen in the fact that in four years there has been a 74 percent increase in the seizure of methamphetamine shipments at the border.
Dangers of the Texas-Mexico Border
Border Citizens Are Threatened
By Leanna Teague
Published Jul 18, 2007
Lengthwise down the U.S. border of Texas and Mexico the threat of thugs, criminals, and terrorists continues to worsen. Counties are allotting what little funding they do have to cover the expense of autopsies and to recover and rescue people who get caught between the war that surrounds border towns. Brave county sheriffs and deputies enforce law to the best of their ability while continuing efforts to help border patrol agents has become part of their daily ritual.
The land that runs along the border is broad and accessible. Its open space with some coverage along the way that works as an advantage for an illegal wanting to break into the U.S. When spaces are open there isn’t going to be a struggle with thick bush. A person can get an easier view of where they want to go. This is one reason why the border patrol has such difficulties despite that it doesn’t have enough people to cover all the open areas at one time.
U.S. property owners that have land near the borders are constantly in danger. People entering the U.S. illegally often trespass on their property. They cut their fences, litter their land with trash and sometimes forget to put out their campfires. There have been attacks on property owners in their own home at gunpoint. A property owner rebuilding their fences or just taking a stroll may accidentally come across an illegal and be attacked.
U.S. citizens living in border towns are facing the possibility of being kidnapped and dragged across the border into Mexico. They may be used for extortion, killed or simply used to set an example of what will happen to other U.S. citizens. Some kidnapped victims may be involved with the drug cartel while others don’t have anything to do with it. People are just kidnapped. It’s happened many times before and will happen again.
A lot of the drug problems and trafficking stems from drug dealers owning the land in Mexico that sits opposite the U.S. border. They do human trafficking to and will gladly smuggle any illegal across the border for a price including terrorists. Many a terrorist has been caught making their way into the U.S. through the Texas-Mexico border. Because drug traffickers and smugglers own such land it makes it that much easier to cross back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico. Drug cartel carry arms and weapons that the U.S. county sheriffs and deputies don’t possess, which puts them at risk every time they are called out to do what seems to come natural to them and that is to protect.
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Updated: 11:43 a.m. CT Dec 20, 2005
MEXICO CITY - Kidnappers in Mexico are three times more likely to kill their victims than are their counterparts in Colombia, the country long considered to have the worst problem, a Mexican anti-crime group said Monday.
About one out of every seven people kidnapped in Mexico died at the hands of their captors in 2005, compared to one out of every 26 victims in Colombia, according to a report by the Citizen Council for Public Safety, a private-sector think tank.
Mexico overtook Colombia this year as the world leader in reported kidnappings in the first six months of 2005 with 194 cases, compared to 172 abductions registered over the same period in Colombia, according to the think tank.
The group is still compiling data for the entire year, but it doesn’t expect Mexico’s ranking to change.
“We are seeing a larger number of victims murdered during kidnappings,” said Jose Antonio Ortega, president of the Citizen Council. “There is more violence against the victims, because they (kidnappers) think that with more violence they are going to break them quicker, and squeeze them for their last cent.”
The problem has worsened over the last 35 years, Ortega said.
Between 1970 and 1976 — when leftist guerrilla groups in Mexico launched a campaign of kidnappings of prominent businessmen — 32 kidnap victims were killed.
Between 1994 and 2000, years marked by economic crisis, 115 kidnap victims died.
That number rose to 199 between 2000 and 2005, with 43 people killed this year alone.
While some kidnappers in Mexico may kill their victims to eliminate witnesses or because they have botched a kidnapping, others use violence selectively, Ortega said.
“We have seen cases in which they have sent videos of victims being tortured to their families, to get bigger ransoms,” Ortega said. “The gangs are becoming more sophisticated.”
One recently captured gang allegedly hired a French employee of an expensive Mexico City hotel to help them scope out potential victims “to get bigger ransoms,” Ortega said.
Ortega said police or former police officers were involved in many kidnappings. He called for an investigation into reports that police had provided protection for gangs in some recent high-profile cases.
Mexico also has seen a boom in so-called express kidnappings, in which victims are abducted briefly and forced to withdraw funds from ATMs. Express kidnappings were not included in the citizen council report.
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September 5th, 2007 at 4:00
I’ve read all of those Debbie and more and for whatever reason they are being written, they are not telling the truth, telling a half truth or twisting the truth to fit whatever agenda they are pursuing.
I have a home in Nuevo Laredo. Never once, have I felt threatened anywhere in that town. Even at the height of the cartel wars, it didn’t affect the “citizen on the street”. The cartel’s seemed to do their best to keep the violence away from the public, but if they wanted someone dead, that person was dead.
The “Express kidnappings” you put the post up of happen. They happen to rich Mexican citizens mainly. That small “insignificant” fact is what is ommitted from the particular story you posted.
The American citizens allegedly being kidnapped are Mexican-Americans, as I said. Relatives of residents of Nuevo Laredo and other places who in most cases owe the cartels money. The one exception, possibly, that I see are the two young women. Both Mexican American. Possibly, they could fit the same profile. It is hard to say. But for the average American who crosses the border to shop, party in the tourist clubs, and for the truck drivers whose money drives the economy of the red light zones, it’s safer than many cities in the U.S. You simply have to mind your manner and remember you are in a foreign country.
I am not saying everyone reporting on this is crazy. But it is easy to sit in their ivory towers and take bits and snippets from the wires and put together a report. I don’t think that there would be more than 800.000 Americans choosing to make Mexico their home if it was as dangerous and backwards as all would have you believe.
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September 5th, 2007 at 10:56
I can see that you seem to know so much more than anyone else. It is nice to know that you have cleared all those reports up for me. Wow…I may come and live there now that I know the thousands of reports on this subject are just from mis-informed people that feel it’s their duty to put “snippets” together to form a story. Thanks! Have a great day! Maybe we will be neighbors soon!
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