Sheriff: Mexican Cartels Control Parts of Arizona

I'm usually not political in my posts, but having just been to Mexico and hearing about the murder of the Hidalgo state police chief, I believe it's time to see the real tragedy of what is happening in Mexico and spilling over into our border states. A good friend of mine, who lives close to Interstate 8, forwarded this news article from the Washington Times. She says:

"This story is from today's Washington Times...anyone else shocked and outraged by this response from the federal government to illegal immigration and drug cartels?  This is happening just a few miles from where I live on a major highway I have traveled."

Wednesday, 01 Sep 2010 08:18 AM

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By: Jerry Seper and Matthew Cella

The federal government has posted signs along a major interstate highway in Arizona, more than 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers, and a local sheriff says Mexican drug cartels now control some parts of the state.

The signs were posted by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) along a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, a major east-west corridor linking Tucson and Phoenix with San Diego.

They warn travelers that they are entering an "active drug and human smuggling area" and they may encounter "armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed." Beginning less than 50 miles south of Phoenix, the signs encourage travelers to "use public lands north of Interstate 8" and to call 911 if they "see suspicious activity."

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, whose county lies at the center of major drug and alien smuggling routes to Phoenix and cities east and west, attests to the violence. He said his deputies are outmanned and outgunned by drug traffickers in the rough-hewn desert stretches of his own county.

"Mexican drug cartels literally do control parts of Arizona," he said. "They literally have scouts on the high points in the mountains and in the hills and they literally control movement. They have radios, they have optics, they have night-vision goggles as good as anything law enforcement has.

"This is going on here in Arizona," he said. "This is 70 to 80 miles from the border - 30 miles from the fifth-largest city in the United States."

He said he asked the Obama administration for 3,000 National Guard soldiers to patrol the border, but what he got were 15 signs.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer condemned what she called the federal government's "continued failure to secure our international border," saying the lack of security has resulted in important natural recreational areas in her state being declared too dangerous to visit.

In a recent campaign video posted to YouTube, Mrs. Brewer - standing in front of one of the BLM signs - attacked the administration over the signs, calling them "an outrage" and telling President Obama to "Do your job. Secure our borders."

BLM spokesman Dennis Godfrey in Arizona said agency officials were surprised by the reaction the signs generated when they were put up this summer.

"We were perhaps naive in setting the signs up," he said. "The intention of the signs was to make the public aware that there is potential illegal activity here. But it was interpreted in a different light, and that was not the intent at all."

He said there should be "no sense that we have ceded the land," adding that no BLM lands in Arizona are closed to the public.

"I kind of liken it to if I were visiting a city I were not familiar with and asked a policeman if it were safe to go in a particular area," Mr. Godfrey said.

Rising violence along the border has coincided with a crackdown in Mexico on warring drug gangs, who are seeking control of smuggling routes into the United States.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has waged a bloody campaign against powerful cartels, yesterday announcing the arrest of Texas-born Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez - a powerful cartel leader captured outside of Mexico City on Monday evening.

More than 28,000 people have died since Mr. Calderon launched his crackdown in late 2006, and the bloodshed shows no sign of ending. Law enforcement authorities have been warning for more than two years that the dramatic rise in border violence eventually would spread into the U.S.

T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents all 17,500 of the Border Patrol's front-line agents, said areas well north of the border are so overrun by armed criminals that U.S. citizens are being warned to keep out of those locations.

"The federal government's lack of will to secure our borders is painfully evident when signs are posted well north of the border warning citizens that armed and dangerous criminals are roaming through those areas with impunity," he said. "Instead of taking the steps necessary to secure our borders, politicians are attempting to convince the public that our borders are more secure now than ever before.

"Fortunately, some responsible civil servants are candidly warning the public about the dangers that exist not just along the border but, in some cases, well beyond," he said. "This situation should alarm all sensible people, and should spur endless demands that our legislators take whatever actions are necessary to restore law and order to these areas."

Rep. Ted Poe, Texas Republican and a member of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, said the federal government's new border security plan apparently is to "erect some signs telling you it's not safe to travel in our own country."

"If you are planning on loading up the station wagon and taking the kids to Disneyland, the federal government doesn't advise going through Arizona - it's too dangerous and they can't protect you," said Mr. Poe. "These signs say to American citizens, the federal government has ceded this area to the drug cartels. Don't come here; we can't protect you."

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called the signs "an insult to the citizens of border states."

"American citizens should not have to be fearful for their lives on U.S. soil," he said. "If the federal government would do its job of enforcing immigration laws, we could better secure the border and better protect the citizens of border states."

Michael W. Cutler, a retired 31-year U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) senior criminal investigator and intelligence specialist, said the BLM warning signs suggest the U.S. government is "ceding American territory to armed criminals and smugglers."

Meanwhile, he said, politicians in Washington, D.C., including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, continue to claim the border is now more secure than ever and, as a result, it is time for comprehensive immigration reform.

"How much more land will our nation cede to drug dealers and terrorists? At what point will the administration understand its obligations to really secure our nation's borders and create an immigration system that has real integrity?" Mr. Cutler said.

"At the rate we are going, the 'Red, White and Blue' of the American flag will be replaced with a flag that is simply white - the flag of surrender."

Ms. Napolitano said this week that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would begin flying a Predator B drone out of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday, extending the reach of the agency's unmanned surveillance aircraft across the length of the 1,956-mile border with Mexico.

Last month, Mr. Obama signed a $600 million bill to beef up security along the southwestern border. The bill funds 1,000 more Border Patrol agents, as well as 250 CBP officers and two more unmanned aerial vehicles.

Two years ago, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the investigative arm of Homeland Security, said in a report that border gangs were becoming increasingly ruthless and had begun targeting not only rivals, but federal, state and local police. ICE said the violence had risen dramatically as part of "an unprecedented surge."

The Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center, in its 2010 drug threat assessment report, called the cartels "the single greatest drug trafficking threat to the United States." It said Mexican gangs had established operations in every area of the United States and were expanding into rural and suburban areas. It said assaults against U.S. law enforcement officers along the southwestern border were on the increase - up 46 percent against Border Patrol agents alone.

At the same time, the Justice Department brought a lawsuit to stop a new immigration enforcement law in Arizona, saying it violated the Constitution by trying to supersede federal law and by impairing illegal immigrants' right to travel and conduct interstate commerce.

Mr. Cutler said it was "outrageous" for the BLM to direct travelers to dial 911 to report suspicious activities since the calls do not go to the federal government but to state and local police. He said the signs are telling Americans to call state and local law enforcement authorities to deal with border lawlessness while at the same time telling Arizona that only the federal government can write and enforce immigration laws.

"You can't make this stuff up," he said.

Mr. Godfrey said that just because the signs direct travelers who witness illegal activity to call 911, "that does not mean that only a local agency will respond."

"The idea is that people will get help as quickly as they can," he said.

Sheriff Babeu has dealt firsthand with the rising violence in his county since his 2008 election. One of his deputies, Louie Puroll, was shot and critically wounded in April after he spotted five men he suspected of transporting drugs along a remote span of desert near Interstate 8 and Arizona 84.

He said his experience makes him see the issue differently from the administration in Washington.

"The president is only looking at this from a political perspective," he said. "Everything is not fine. Everything is not OK."

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC

Don’t Quote Me On That!

I have this friend I'll call Jane. Her name isn't really Jane, but she tells me not to quote her and since this is all about her, a fictitious name is in order. I don't blame her, of course, because I know what she meant by that.

In years past, she was the one who listened to me drone on about whatever life was dishing me at the time. At a critical juncture, she would calmly turn to me and say something profound meant to set me straight and put my life in perspective. Saying something like, "Why are you worrying about something that hasn't happened and that you have no reason to believe ever will happen?" Duh! (or do we say, Ah-Ha, now?).

For as much as she made those quiet comments that were not only introspective on her part as much as reflective of me, she balked at the idea of being quoted. A dread-filled grunt coming up from her throat, she would ask apprehensively what she had said that was so memorable. Then I would relate the entire conversation, how I felt, what was bothering until I got to the point where she stunned me with blinding logic. Oh, okay, she would answer grudgingly.

To understand the symbiosis of our friendship, two characteristics stand out. I remember blocks of conversation as well as I remember my address; Jane has locked inside her mind a vault of observations, interpretations, and no-nonsense philosophies about people that she mainly keeps to herself. When she steps out of her quiet, contemplative state to make one of her existential comments, I am there to embrace her clarity and store it in my long-term memory until needed again for my next dramatic scene.

Likewise, our writing styles are vastly different. Hers is surreal and dark exposing the irony of society, as in her long-forgotten "Dead Pet Store," to my dark attempt at optimistic realism struggling to find truth, such as in my story, "The Protector." Back in the day, when we wore tight mini-skirts and high heels to elegant affairs, where I watched with amusement as men stumbled over themselves watching from across the room as her long legs passed by, and while we stood laughing between ourselves about all of those who didn't "get" our inside jokes (oh-la-la!), neither of us wrote too much. No wonder. There was a period when I did write. Jane read some of my short stories that I now think are ridiculously self-absorbed, but she never came out and said that. That was kind.

During revisions of some of my old short stories, I cringed at parts that were opinionated, childish or just not well put. I relived the political climate of that time in those stories, sometimes radical, sometimes naïve. Rolling my eyes as I furiously wrote over those bad bits, Jane pops into my head to remind me of why she does not like to be quoted. Jane said the comments were not as important as her feelings about being quoted. When I asked her why, she said that she did not like to be quoted because she might change her mind about the subject later and would not want to be accountable for the previous statement.

I had to think about that for awhile, but not long. Just the other day, I had a conversation with another writer about the daring of putting ourselves out there in blogs, where once it's out there, the words remain even when you pull them down from your website. Someone somewhere will have copied it, reprinted it or otherwise saved it, just as we all do. Then, there is another writer I know who told me long ago that anything that is written is never lost and can always resurface. It all makes Jane's statements all the more chilling. I only hope that in twenty years, I don't find this piece as bad as what I wrote twenty years ago. I certainly hope no one quotes me on that.

Lemonade

As the mid-year point passed in 2010, I reflected on what a crazy year it had been up to that point. Recovering most of the year from two surgeries necessary to put my face back together after an accident in January, there had been plenty of down time to reflect on what one can reasonably expect from life and, to coin a cliché, how it is possible to turn lemons into lemonade.

After waking up on the kitchen floor, finding my trusty Bichon Frises on either side of me, not to mention the blood on them and on the floor, I remember the first view of myself in the mirror. While the memory is now vague with the passing of time, I recall my nose was sideways and my forehead almost obliterated with large lacerations. Without a conceivable notion of the miracles of plastic surgery, I chided myself on all the times I complained about my nose, longing for the opportunity to have it back the way it was. Standing there, observing the damage, I convinced myself that life would never be the same. With my characteristic determination to be independent, but more than likely attributable to being in shock, I washed up the blood from the floor before driving myself to the hospital.

Walking into the Emergency Room at John C Lincoln Hospital, I can only imagine what my appearance said to the nurses. Along that journey which led me to surgery the next day, I was shocked to find that the consensus of the hospital staff was that I had been beaten by a person I was unwilling to name. So much did they not believe me that they sent a social worker to speak to me. While I understand why they took that position, there is something distressing and humiliating about not being believed. Later at home recuperating, I wrote a short story, "Spiked Heels" in response. To appear in the inaugural edition of Literati coming in December 2010, the story is about a similar situation but where the presumed victim is anything but a victim.

In that hospital experience, what stands out the most are the nurses. Standing around me, comforting me, they kept assuring me that the plastic surgeon being called in to work on me was so good that there would be no scars. I'm skeptical most of time knowing that people, especially in their attempts to be kind, will say the most outrageous lies in order to comfort someone in distress. I remember one nurse leaning in toward me, pointing to her pristine forehead while telling me Dr. Prichard's stitch work was so good that no one could tell a nasty wound had ever been there. I thought, wow, I must be in big trouble for her to lie like that since even straining I saw no sign of a scar. Happily numb from the pain medication pumped into my veins, I thought how kind they were to take the trouble. Six months later, I have to laugh at that memory when I look in the mirror and see scars so faint they are undetectable under foundation.

As for my nose, well, I have an improved version of the original with a softening at the end that my mother would have been pleased to see. Her main disappointment in me (one of many) was my resemblance to my father's side of the family. If she is watching now from that lofty perch beyond the clouds, she would have the satisfaction of seeing that I now have her nose, amusing and ironic since the design had more to do with Dr. Prichard's creative interpretation and sculpturing techniques than anything else.

Looking back over the last six months, between the trauma, the reconstruction and repair of my face interjected into with tax season, friends and pets, if this experience has taught me anything it is the return of the joie de vie I had lost prior to the accident. With the realization that the fall I took while unconscious and without resistance could have killed me, I feel blessed for whatever or whoever is my guardian angel, but also for the kindness of all of those around me who showed patience and support through the worst of it. That is the best lemonade.