Border insecurity
Cartels keep drugs, weapons and people flowing freely
Cartel lookouts perched with binoculars on Juárez hilltops keep watch over the U.S. border crossing in El Paso, homing in on the secondary inspection stations. That’s where agents direct suspicious vehicles to search for drugs and other contraband. When those secondary inspection stations are full, the lookouts give the “go” signal to drivers of drug-hauling vehicles waiting on the Mexican side for an optimal chance to carry their cargo into the United States.
The race to U.S. markets is on. Journal investigative reporter Mike Gallagher, who has covered drug smuggling for more than two decades and authored most of the 2017 Journal series “The Cartels Next Door,” recounted the lookout story in a recent talk to the Albuquerque International Association.
The story is a useful reminder that the savvy cartels are still winning this war, as they have for years. And the stakes are more deadly than ever.
While we already are awash in cheap, potent Mexican methamphetamine and heroin, Gallagher reported in the Journal on June 5 that seizures of deadly fentanyl have soared in the United States. In April, a tractor-trailer rig in Nebraska was stopped by police with 118 pounds of the drug — enough to kill 26 million people. It was headed for the East Coast.
In March, narcotics agents in New York City arrested Francisco Quiroz-Zamora, also known as “Gordo,” after seizing 44 pounds of fentanyl in a raid in the Bronx. Quiroz-Zamora allegedly has direct ties to the Sinaloa Cartel. He is charged with running a Mexicoto-Arizona-to-New York trafficking operation.
On Tuesday, U.S. border agents seized 335 pounds of methamphetamine and arrested two Mexican nationals in busts at Santa Teresa and at the Antelope Wells crossing in Hidalgo County. Authorities will try to sort out which cartel operations these busts are tied to: Juárez, Sinaloa or New Generation Jalisco.
While the political debate rages over “Trump’s border wall,” Gallagher points out that significant new investment in secondary inspection stations would do a lot more to interrupt the flow of drugs into the United States. It’s also true that a real wall would help in some areas. Take the case of three Mexican nationals who were being held hostage in Columbus until smugglers — who also dealt in guns and drugs — could extort money from the immigrants’ families to get them to U.S. destinations. The three, working with coyotes, came across the border illegally through the desert near Columbus.
On the flip side of the coin, smugglers are making big dollars taking guns and ammunition into Mexico FROM the United States. Mexico, which has strict anti-gun laws, recorded between 29,000 and 32,000 murders last year compared with about 16,000 in the U.S. — despite having a much smaller population.
Mexicans have a legitimate complaint here.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was wounded by gunfire near the border in Arizona early Wednesday. The fifth generation cattleman who runs a 50,000-acre ranch where the shooting occurred says “we have drug runners coming through our ranch, and this has become a very dangerous situation.”
An ardent supporter of Trump’s wall, the rancher says the border barrier in some parts of the area is a few strands of barbed wire.
The cartels also play a significant role in illegal human trafficking into the United States, sometimes directly involved in smuggling like the case of more than 90 illegal immigrants found stuffed in a tractor trailer in Texas, or charging a fee to others crossing illegally. People aren’t as profitable for the cartels as drugs, but they do constitute another profit center.
At the end of the day, we need to be smarter, less political and more diplomatic about this enormous illegal flow of drugs, guns, people and money. On our side of the border, roughly two-thirds of the 60,000plus overdose deaths in the U.S. last year are attributed to illegal drugs — mostly courtesy of the cartels. The murder toll in Mexico is tied to guns from the U.S.
At this point, law-abiding citizens of both countries are the big losers.