Border Violence Grows Worse

Outmanned and outgunned the Mexican police have no control of their own side of the border. How then, are they going to provide security against terrorists? It's time to use our military. Why is our government sitting on its hands?

U.S.-MEXICO BORDER – The dead include university students, assembly-plant workers, farm hands, businessmen, journalists, money couriers, drug gang henchmen and dozens of police officers.

At least 550 people have lost their lives in drug-related executions in Mexico so far this year – with 300 of those killings in the six Mexican states bordering the U.S. All are thought to be linked to organized crime, according to a review of press accounts by The Dallas Morning News.

Among the latest: A police commander assassinated in Nuevo Laredo early Thursday. Enrique Cardenas Saldaña was gunned down in front of his 9-year-old daughter. He was the sixth police officer – and the fourth commander – killed in the border city this year.

"The recent rise in drug-related killings is extremely disturbing," said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo. "I think it's clear we have a real problem on our hands that needs to be dealt with."

The killings have rattled residents on both sides of the border. A State Department warning about travel in the region is in effect through the end of July. And the rising death toll is shaking many Mexicans' faith in their government's ability to stop the violence brought on by drug gangs caught in a bloody turf battle.

"It's a war," said human rights activist Mauro Cruz, who compared his country's anti-drug fight to America's conflict in Iraq. "Kidnappings, murders and disappearances are the order of the day."

Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca told reporters last week that the execution total had reached 550 this year. But accounts indicate the number could be higher. El Universal newspaper says it has documented 545 such murders just since February. And the Mexican Editorial Organization, which owns 62 newspapers, last week put the number at 800 – about 37 per week.

"The number of deaths is extraordinary," said Victor Clark, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in the border city of Tijuana. "It's chilling."

Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the Mexican government's point man in the battle against organized crime, said the Fox administration has made progress. But unless the government keeps up the pressure, traffickers will "flourish and rule our country," he told reporters in Mexico City this weekend.

More than 46,000 people have been arrested over the last five years, he said, including 15 cartel leaders, 43 financiers, 70 under bosses, 256 hit men and 166 corrupt officials who worked for the drug gangs.

And U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza told a crowd in Monterrey in May that "drug cartels...are destroying the economic and social fabric of our communities."

"If that violence – whether prison riots in Matamoros or gangland-style shootings right here in Monterrey – is not controlled, it will badly undermine both investment and tourism."

Read the rest at the Dallas Morning News.