Pubdate: Sun, 20 Apr 2008
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A20
Copyright: 2008 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post Foreign Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Mexico (Mexico)

FROM MEXICO, DRUG VIOLENCE SPILLS INTO U.S.

Brutality Gives Rise to Formidable New Problems for Both Countries

PUERTO PALOMAS, Mexico -- Javier Emilio Perez Ortega, a workaholic 
Mexican police chief, showed up at the sleepy, two-lane border 
crossing here last month and asked U.S. authorities for political asylum.

Behind him, law and order was vanishing fast. In the four months he 
had served as Puerto Palomas police chief, drug traffickers had 
threatened to kill him and his officers if they tried to block the 
flow of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United 
States, his former colleagues said on condition of anonymity.

After a particularly menacing telephone call, his 10-man force 
resigned en masse. His bodyguards quit, too. Abandoned by his men and 
unable to trust the notoriously corrupt Mexican authorities, Perez 
Ortega turned to the only place he believed he could find refuge -- 
the United States, the former colleagues said.

As President Bush meets this week with Mexican President Felipe 
Calderon in New Orleans, the repercussions of Mexico's battle with 
drug cartels are increasingly gushing into the United States, giving 
rise to thorny new problems for Mexican and U.S. officials, as well 
as the millions of people who live along the border.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in January while chasing 
suspected traffickers fleeing back to Mexico, AK-47 bullets have been 
found a half-mile inside U.S. territory after shootouts in Mexican 
border towns, and wounded Mexican police have been taken to the 
United States for treatment at heavily guarded hospitals.

Here in Puerto Palomas, a wind-swept desert town south of Columbus, 
N.M., spillover from Mexico's drug war is measured in bullet-pocked 
bodies. In the past year, at least 10 gunshot victims have been 
dumped at the border checkpoint -- taken there by friends or 
colleagues who believed their only hope of survival lay across the border.

In the calculus of U.S.-Mexican border relations, the living were 
rushed to medical treatment -- sometimes with law enforcement escorts 
- -- but the dead were not allowed across. Either way, the fallout from 
Mexico's drug war was being dropped at the doorstep of the United States.

"Mexico's problem is Sheriff Cobos's problem," Sheriff Raymond Cobos, 
whose jurisdiction in Luna County, N.M., stretches to the border with 
Puerto Palomas, said in an interview. "No doubt about it."

Cobos ordered a major state highway closed after shootouts in Puerto 
Palomas and recently sent deputies to monitor the funeral in Columbus 
of a Mexican man killed in Puerto Palomas. His force goes on alert 
when drug gangs start shooting in Puerto Palomas, deploying with 
semiautomatic weapons to the lonely roads and cactus-dotted expanses 
on the U.S. side of the border. Gunfire is often heard by residents 
of Columbus, as well as by Border Patrol agents, who have 
significantly increased their vigilance.

More than 130 miles of rough driving from Ciudad Juarez, Puerto 
Palomas was once known as a placid outpost marred only occasionally 
by violence. But since the beginning of the year, more than 30 people 
have been killed in the town, Puerto Palomas Mayor Estanislao Garcia 
said in an interview.

Puerto Palomas became strategically important because Ciudad Juarez, 
the traditional drug-trafficking hub, has been inundated with Mexican 
army troops sent to contain a war between the rival Juarez and 
Sinaloa cartels blamed for more than 200 deaths this year.

The cartels probably knew that the Mexican military was coming months 
before its arrival in late March and saw Puerto Palomas as an 
acceptable alternative, a high-ranking Mexican federal government 
official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was 
not authorized to discuss the campaign against cartels.

"They have their own intelligence operations," the official said of 
the cartels. "For them, it's like a chess game."

The cartels quickly brought daylight gunfights to the streets and 
dumped victims around town. In March, Eddie Espinoza, the Columbus 
mayor, was in a dentist's chair in Puerto Palomas when armed gunmen 
stormed the office, making off with $2,000.

"They're getting brazen down there," Espinoza, who was unhurt, told reporters.

In the past two years, as cartels spread terror, the population 
dropped from 12,000 to 7,500, Garcia said. Row after row of abandoned 
houses line eerily quiet neighborhoods. Tourists, the town's 
lifeblood, have stopped coming.

"When people stay here, they don't go down to Mexico anymore," Martha 
Skinner, a former Columbus mayor who owns a bed-and-breakfast three 
miles from the Mexican border, said in an interview. "They're afraid."

On March 17, several Puerto Palomas police officers quit after being 
threatened by drug traffickers. Garcia said the officers believed 
that they were targeted because of an inaccurate Mexican newspaper 
article that implied they would confront drug gangs.

Within several hours, the entire police force had resigned, rendering 
the town lawless. Even Perez Ortega, the stern police chief, left to 
seek asylum. He awaits a decision in a federal detention center and 
could not be reached for comment.

Palomas recently recruited a new police chief and nine officers, but 
they have only two revolvers and two assault rifles for the entire 
force. The drug traffickers tote automatic weapons and grenades.

"Trying to fight the drug traffickers would be like a race in which I 
was on foot and they were in a car," Salomon Baca, Puerto Palomas's 
new police chief, said in an interview.

Baca, like his officers, has refused to move his family to Puerto 
Palomas. The officers all sleep on cots crammed into a backroom of 
the police station.

Baca, who hopes to move to the United States, is hopeful that his old 
friend Perez Ortega will get asylum. For many here, especially as 
border towns have become shooting galleries, flight to the United 
States is an ever more pressing dream. But moving north sometimes 
creates as many problems as it solves.

In 2000, Mauricio Rubio, then a Puerto Palomas police officer, sought 
asylum. He had been arrested by Mexican state police after helping a 
New Mexico sheriff's official arrest two men outside Puerto Palomas. 
The men were suspected of killing a woman in Deming, N.M., and 
presumably were being protected by corrupt Mexican police.

Rubio and the New Mexico sheriff's official, who also was detained, 
were released after U.S. diplomats intervened. Afraid that corrupt 
police would kill him, Rubio and his family asked for, and were 
granted, permission to live in the United States. But within days, 
his family was falling apart.

"My daughters were crying all the time, yelling at me and saying, 
'Why did you have to get involved in things you shouldn't have been 
getting involved in?' " Rubio, who now lives in New Mexico, said in 
an interview.

His wife left him six months later. Since then, he has pined for the 
cozy feel of his Mexican neighborhood, where everyone knew him. But 
he is afraid to return -- in the months before he fled, 11 friends in 
the Ciudad Juarez police force were murdered.

Cobos, the Luna County sheriff, said it is likely that more Mexican 
police will seek asylum in coming months and years, as the war 
between drug cartels that has cost more than 5,000 lives in the past 
two years shows no sign of abating. Asylum requests are long shots at 
best -- of the 2,611 requests from Mexicans in 2006, the most recent 
year for which figures are available, 48 were granted.

Cobos considers Mexican police officers, especially those who assist 
U.S. law enforcement in drug cases, perfectly suitable candidates for 
asylum. But he also worries that increasingly brazen drug cartels 
will simply slip across the border in pursuit of Mexican police given 
refuge there and that he is not equipped to combat them.

For that reason, Cobos has a blunt message to any Mexican policeman 
who wants to live in his county: "I don't want you around." 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake