Law Enforcement South Of The Border Is Badly Outgunned. A murder in the Mexican state of Chihuahua last week horrified even hardened crime stoppers. Police Commander Martin Castro's head was severed and left in an ice cooler in front of the police station in the town of Praxedis with a calling card from the Sinoloa drug cartel. According to Mexico's attorney general, 6,616 people died in drug-trafficking violence in Mexico last year. A high percentage of those killed were themselves criminals, but many law enforcement agents battling organized crime were also murdered. The carnage continues. For the first 22 days of this year the body count is 354. [continues 658 words]
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - In this carnage-racked border city of 1.3 million, more than 80 murders have been clocked in the past three weeks, and kidnappings, extortions, robberies and rapes further bedevil an already rattled population. So far, the new year looks to be bringing as much if not more havoc than the last. The demons are loose. "Walking in the streets of Juarez is an extreme sport," said political scientist Tony Payan, an expert on border violence, repeating a grim quip making the rounds. [continues 791 words]
President-elect Barack Obama met Monday with Mexican President Felipe Calderon to discuss bilateral issues of major importance for the two countries. In addition to NAFTA and immigration policy, Mexico's ongoing plague of prohibition-related violence was high on the agenda. More than 5,400 people were killed in the violence last year, and more than 8,000 in the two years since Calderon ratcheted up Mexico's drug war by sending thousands of troops into the fray. The multi-sided conflict pits rival trafficking groups -- the so-called cartels -- against each and the Mexican state, but has also seen pitched battles between rival law enforcement units where one group or the other is in the pay of the traffickers. [continues 1153 words]
Before you venture into Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, brace yourself to hear Texans tell you that you're crazy. Visiting friends in neighboring El Paso, Texas, a few days before Christmas, I was immediately warned, "Don't even think about going into Juarez." Just across the shallow creek known as the Rio Grande from El Paso, one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, Juarez is a city under siege, the worst victim of Mexico's growing wars between drug cartels. [continues 665 words]
Before you venture into Ciudad Juarez, brace yourself to hear Texans tell you that you're crazy. Visiting friends in neighboring El Paso a few days before Christmas, I was immediately warned, "Don't even think about going into Juarez." Just across a shallow creek, known as the Rio Grande, from El Paso, one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, Juarez is under siege, the worst victim of Mexico's growing wars between drug cartels. The tragedy is etched in daily headlines. The day I arrived, two Mexican police offers were ambushed, shot to death while sitting in their patrol car. Just another bloody day in Juarez. [continues 634 words]
EL PASO -- Mexico is one of two countries that "bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse," according to a report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats. The command's "Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008)" report, which contains projections of global threats and potential next wars, puts Pakistan on the same level as Mexico. "In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. [continues 317 words]
Before you venture into Ciudad Juarez, brace yourself to hear Texans tell you that you're crazy. Visiting friends in neighboring El Paso a few days before Christmas, I was immediately warned, "Don't even think about going into Juarez." Just across the shallow creek known as the Rio Grande from El Paso, one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, Juarez is a city under siege, the worst victim of Mexico's growing wars between drug cartels. [continues 675 words]
Murders across Mexico more than doubled last year to more than 5,600. That's more than the total Americans lost so far in the Iraq war. Most of those murders have been happening in border towns. More than 1,600 were killed in Juarez, Mexico's fourth-largest city, with a population of 1.7 million. The bloodbath of unspeakable brutality includes kidnappings and decapitated bodies left in public places as a grisly form of advertising. "There have already been 20 murders in Juarez this year," Beto O'Rourke, a member of El Paso's City Council, told me in a telephone interview this week as President-elect Barack Obama met with Mexico's President Felipe Calderon Monday. "That doesn't include the kidnappings and extortions." [continues 364 words]
As I've written before, the escalating and increasingly violent drug wars in Mexico represent a serious national security threat to the United States. And recognizing the proven link between drug trafficking and illegal immigration, we should urge our elected representatives to reject amnesty programs disguised as "comprehensive immigration reform." Last October I wrote a column quoting local terrorism expert Larry Martines, a former homeland security adviser to Gov. Jim Gibbons, on the connection between illegal immigration and drug trafficking in Northern Nevada and elsewhere throughout the nation. According to Martines, four ultra-violent Mexican drug cartels are battling for control of lucrative drug routes into the United States. He also reported that more than 5,000 Mexicans - including women and children caught in the crossfire -- have been killed since 2006. [continues 550 words]
We're continually told that the raging war between Mexican drug cartels isn't expected to cross to the U.S. We've only half -- sort of - -- believed that when told so by local law-enforcement leaders the past year. Now it's time to believe, and we'd better be prepared in case the little bit we've seen turns into a surge. Be prepared. That's the message given by one of the nation's smartest minds on drug warfare, former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey. [continues 289 words]
EL PASO -- Former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey contends that millions of people may rush to cross the U.S. border if security conditions worsen and lead to a governmental collapse in Mexico. "A failure by the Mexican political system to curtail lawlessness and violence could result (in) a surge of millions of refugees crossing the U.S. border to escape the domestic misery of violence, failed economic policy, po verty, hunger, joblessness, and the mindless cruelty and injustice of a criminal state," McCaffrey said in an after-action report based on the Dec. 5-7 International Forum of Intelligence & Security Specialists in Mexico, an advisory group to Mexican law enforcement leaders. [continues 419 words]
Representative Jim Ramstad, a Republican from Minnesota, is said to be a candidate for drug czar in the Obama administration. This would take bipartisanship one step too far, at the expense of public health. Ramstad, who is retiring after 18 years in office, gets high marks for working with a Democratic colleague, Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, to require insurers to cover mental health and addiction treatment (the two men are alcohol recovery partners). But Ramstad has also voted repeatedly against federal funding for needle exchange programs for drug users to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS. Washington's paralysis on this issue goes back to when President Clinton let his drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, sabotage funding efforts by Donna Shalala, then secretary of Health and Human Services. McCaffrey hyperbolically called clean-needle programs "magnets for all social ills." In 2002, Clinton admitted that "I was wrong" not to lift the funding ban. [continues 149 words]
Upton Sinclair once remarked that it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. This observation is borne out by the reactions of Barry McCaffrey to the extraordinarily damning revelations contained in a very long front-page New York Times story, regarding McCaffrey's role as a military analyst for NBC. The story, which is remarkably detailed and well sourced, really has to be read in its entirety. The gist of it is that McCaffrey, a retired general, has spent the last few years getting paid a whole lot of money by defense contractors to go on TV and shill for their products, while giving his audience the impression that he's providing them with a disinterested analysis of what the U.S. military ought to be doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. [continues 523 words]
In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity. The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles. Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007. [continues 5191 words]
On paper, Jim Ramstad -- who is rumored to be Obama's choice for drug czar -- looks like the ideal man for the job . He's a recovering alcoholic himself and a Congressman who championed legislation recently passed to provide equal insurance coverage for addictions and other mental illnesses. To top it off, he's a Republican, giving Obama what looks like a relatively harmless way to make his cabinet more bipartisan. Choosing Ramstad would appear to make a powerful statement about addiction as a medical, not a moral issue. [continues 734 words]
In case you haven't noticed, there's a low-level civil war under way south of the border, and the bad guys seem to be winning. In the 24 months since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against Mexico's drug cartels, over 6,500 soldiers, narcos, cops, judges and innocent bystanders have been gunned down, beheaded or blown up. Absolutely no one is safe. In May the country's top law enforcement officer was riddled with bullets after his bodyguards dropped him off at home. The assassins were waiting on the other side of the door - literally an inside job. [continues 750 words]
The craft poke out only a foot above water and can carry 12 tons of drugs. WASHINGTON - Drug cartels have turned to a new and effective vehicle to smuggle their goods, using small, homemade "semi-submersibles" that are hard to detect and yet effective at carrying millions of dollars worth of cocaine and other illicit drugs that end up in the United States. Military officials who oversee Latin and South America have grown alarmed by the increased use of these boats, which poke out above the water only a foot or so but carry more than 12 tons of cargo. The military's ability to interdict the craft is hampered in part because its attention has been focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on border security. [continues 718 words]
The Arbitrary Distinctions at the Root of Prohibition High Society: How Substance Abuse Ravages America and What to Do About It, by Joseph A. Califano Jr., New York: Public Affairs, 270 pages, $26.95 The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World's Most Troubled Drug Culture, by Richard DeGrandpre, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 294 pages, $24.95 On the opening page of High Society, which aims to explain "how substance abuse ravages America," Joseph Califano declares that "chemistry is chasing Christianity as the nation's largest religion." Although it is not always easy to decipher Califano's meaning in this overwrought, carelessly written, weakly documented, self-contradictory, and deeply misleading anti-drug screed, here he seems to be saying that opiates are the religion of the masses. Americans, he implies, are seeking from psychoactive substances the solace they used to obtain from faith in God, and better living through chemistry is nearly as popular as better living through Christ. [continues 3891 words]
I read with interest the comments of Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a paid adviser to CRC Health Group, which operates a methadone clinic in Huntington, and of CRC CEO Barry Karlin published in The Herald-Dispatch on Feb. 15 urging West Virginia lawmakers to embrace methadone clinics. The information supplied is not balanced or complete. Methadone maintenance was described as being a safe and efficacious method for treatment of opioid addiction. McCaffrey stated that methadone programs "... can get many people addicted to maintain sobriety." [continues 413 words]
When it comes to feeling today's financial crunch, Arizona is no different than any other state in our Union. So it's no surprise to see that Governor Napolitano is proposing to save the state over $60 million by transferring responsibility for prisoners in the state penal institutions to the counties. In the early 1970s, Arizona had a state prison population of around 2,000. By the end of 2000 that population had grown to almost 28,000. Today Arizona houses some 37,000 prisoners in the state system and the prison population is expected to grow by over 50 percent in the next decade, a trend that is double that for the general population. Arizona's prison system now costs some $900 million a year, or about 10 percent of total state expenditures from General Fund dollars. [continues 679 words]
