Vehicle searches yield few weapons at U.S.-Mexico border

Searches of vehicles crossing into Mexico are yielding few weapons in what U.S. officials concede is a frustrating effort to slow the flow of guns to violent Mexican cartels operating across the U.S. border.

Almost immediately after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced a stepped-up vehicle search program beginning in March 2009, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials went five consecutive months — May through September — without recovering a single weapon in El Paso, within sight of the bloodiest battleground in the Mexican drug war.

Weapons seizures from vehicles moving through the Southwest border’s busiest crossings have increased to 310 so far in fiscal year 2010, up from 155 in fiscal year 2009, CBP records show. Besides guns, weapons include grenades and rockets.

Yet the seizures represent a tiny fraction of arms flooding Mexico from the USA, at a rate of 2,000 per day, according to Brookings Institution estimates.

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Vehicle searches yield few weapons at U.S.-Mexico border

What? Seriously? The U.S. government isn’t finding those guns being transported to Mexico that they said they would? Surely not…

What about all the Texas Gun Shows? Weren’t we, Texas gun owners, being accused of making *straw-man* purchases and abusing our Second Amendment rights? Weren’t honest Texas gun dealers subjected to accusations of impropriety and subjected to all kinds of BATF audits?

And about those Texas Gun Shows…weren’t they supposed to be a wholesale market for fully automatic assault weapons, grenades, land mines and myriad other weapons of war?

You would think a state like Texas, one that held the BATF and federal gun regulations in such low esteem would be flagrantly exploiting the U.S. - Mexican border weaknesses and transporting tons of guns to the cartels and bringing back loads of money in the process.

You would think.

“It is a challenge for us,” says Steven Stavinoha, director of CBP’s outbound search operations. He says the agency is revamping its strategy.

Stavinoha says federal authorities have been hampered by staffing limitations, spotty intelligence and gun smugglers who alter their operations to elude capture. “Smuggling organizations are able to adapt to our activities and use it against us,” he says.

OR…maybe the guns are coming into Mexico from Central America, or into seaports, or beaches. Just sayin’.

Maybe the guns are coming in on the same routes, via the same sources that are exporting drugs into America. It doesn’t seem to me that the DEA is doing all that great at stopping drugs from coming in, how can BATF be expected to stop guns from going out?

He says smugglers monitor search teams’ locations and redirect shipments to alternate crossings or wait for the teams to move to other locations.

Well, imagine that, the smugglers are monitoring your actions.

I am going to let these guys in on a little Op/Sec Intel that I tried to share with the military and the folks in charge when talking about how our troops are ambushed and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. military and ALL of our Intelligence agencies are fully and thoroughly infiltrated.

Bet on it. That is what PCness and liberalism have done for us.

The Taliban and al-Qaida have their operatives in high places within the military and intelligence agencies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and everywhere else we operate. Some have even offered speculation that the infiltration extends to the highest office in the land.

The Mexican drug cartels have accomplished the exact same thing. Infiltration runs rampant in the drug and gun business. And think about this; the drug cartels and gun importers have more disposable income than the entire United States government.

Police departments are infiltrated. Governments themselves are also infiltrated and in many case, fully complicit in ALL of these actions, on both sides of the border, drugs and guns.

If the United States wants to win the war on drugs, guns and terrorism they must 1st LOSE a thing or two. Political correctness being first and foremost.

Long time readers know my opinion when it come to fighting, and winning a WAR. If you are not in it to win, by any means necessary, you are not going to win at all.

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New foe in U.S. drug war: Mexican assassins

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - A cross-border drug gang born in the prison cells of Texas has evolved into a sophisticated paramilitary killing machine that U.S. and Mexican officials suspect is responsible for thousands of assassinations here, including the recent ambush and slaying of three people linked to the U.S. Consulate.

The heavily tattooed Barrio Azteca gang members have long operated across the border in El Paso, dealing drugs and stealing cars. But in Ciudad Juarez, the organization now specializes in contract killing for the Juarez drug cartel. According to U.S. law enforcement officers, it may have been involved in as many as half of the 2,660 murders in the city in the past year.

Officials on both sides of the border have watched as the Aztecas honed their ability to locate targets, stalk them and finally strike in brazen ambushes involving multiple chase cars, coded radio communications, coordinated blocking maneuvers and disciplined firepower by masked gunmen in body armor. Afterward, the assassins vanish, back to safe houses in the Juarez barrios or across the bridge to El Paso.

“Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people, intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization,” said David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso division. “They work day in and day out, with a list of people to kill, and they get proficient at it.”

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New foe in U.S. drug war: Mexican assassins

We ALL know that the Feds and Police LIE to us. Right?

Isn’t that what so many said about the Hutaree militia sting? The FBI is lying? The government is making this up? They’re just peaceful people that like guns and God? The FBI is only targeting them because they’re Christian? This is Waco or Ruby Ridge all over again?

Does that just about cover it? I can add MORE if you like.

Make no mistake, I have absolutely NO faith in Obama, Holder, Napolitano or anyone else in the hierarchy of the Obama regime when it comes to having the competency required to protect this nation from threats of violence.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some top notch federal, state and local officers out there doing an outstanding job given the constraints imposed on them by the Obama regime. Politics, and those that play politics be damned, there are some truly great men and women working to keep this nation safe.

It’s not some diabolical plot to snatch up LAWFUL, and law abiding Americans, these people are working in the most dangerous environment a LEO can work in, and they are not only in a battle with the drug cartels, terrorists and such, they too are having to fight the political minds that preach PCness, open borders and whatever else it is that is turning the U.S. border states into Norte Mexico.

The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in El Paso, Joseph Arabit, said, “Our intelligence indicates that they kill frequently for a hundred dollars.”

How do you combat that? How do you stop a people that hold life so worthless that they will take it for $100? These drug cartels aren’t humans, they are animals! They are worse than animals, I am pretty sure animals don’t kill for a thrill or for money.

Arabit said investigators have no evidence to suggest the Barrio Azteca gang includes former military personnel or police. It is, however, working for the Juarez cartel, which includes La Linea, an enforcement element composed in part of former Juarez police officers, according to Mexican officials.

Now we get into that area of political correctness known as doublespeak. There’s no evidence to suggest that Barrio Azteca has former military or police involved, but, the cartel they work for does. That is the utterance of a career bureaucrat. Arabit may have been a hard working field agent, once upon a time, but now he’s in the office and you know how it goes, C.Y.A.

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Amid drug war, Mexico less deadly than decade ago

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Decapitated bodies dumped on the streets, drug-war shootings and regular attacks on police have obscured a significant fact: A falling homicide rate means people in Mexico are less likely to die violently now than they were more than a decade ago.

It also means tourists as well as locals may be safer than many believe.

Mexico City’s homicide rate today is about on par with Los Angeles and is less than a third of that for Washington, D.C.

Yet many Americans are leery of visiting Mexico at all. Drug violence and the swine flu outbreak contributed to a 12.5 percent decline in air travel to Mexico by U.S. citizens in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, a blow to Mexico’s third-largest source of foreign income.

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Amid drug war, Mexico less deadly than decade ago

I never make accusations if I don’t have rock solid proof, so, I am stating this as MY opinion.

This Alexandra Olson, the person that wrote the original story, does she work for the Mexican Tourist Bureau or one of the cartels maybe? When I saw this story on the Houston Chronicle a day or 2 ago, some comments were asking if she was on *crack* and wanting to know what she was smoking!

This story, 13 Mexican Students Killed After Armed Men Stormed Party and here we have the updated numbers, 15th person dies from Juárez massacre – El Paso Times, these stories paint a different picture from that splattered by Alexandra Olson.

Mexico, Colombia and Haiti are the only countries in the hemisphere subject to a U.S. government advisory warning travelers about violence, even though homicide rates in many Latin American countries are far higher.

But Mexico is the only one that borders this nation. Mexico is the most easily accessible to our citizens. If those citizens haven’t got the good sense to stay OUT of Mexico, and they run into an armed gang and get caught up in a massacre, as long as it happens in Mexico, and NOT on U.S. soil, I have gone past the point of caring WHAT happens to them!

Mexico’s homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said. The national rate hit a low of 10 per 100,000 people in 2007, according to government figures compiled by the independent Citizens’ Institute for Crime Studies.

Apparently, Alexandra Olson isn’t too adept at reading figures either. Mexican homicide rates fell from 17 per 100K in 1997 to 10 per 100K in 2007, then rose to 14 per 100K in 2009. Those figures are not indicative of a safer Mexico, they are indicative of a rise in murders. Maybe that’s why Olson is a writer for AP, she’s too dense to write anything comprehensible.

CULIACAN, Mexico (AP) - Gunmen killed six people at a bar Saturday in the northern state of Sinaloa, a drug-violence hotspot, state prosecutors said.

At least three gunmen walked into Las Herraduras bar in the resort city of Mazatlan early Saturday and opened fire, killing a customer and two waiters, said Martin Gatelum, spokesman for the Sinaloa state prosecutor’s office. 6 killed at bar in cartel-plagued Mexican state

Just a quaint, peaceful little resort and vacation community I suppose.

By comparison, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates of between 40 and 60 per 100,000 people, according to recent government statistics. Colombia was close behind with a rate of 33 in 2008. Brazil’s was 24 in 2006, the last year when national figures were available.

Mexico City’s rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.

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Rio gangs shoot down police chopper, 2 cops dead

This is what Rio De Janeiro is made of! Chicago isn’t that much better, they just haven’t shot down a Police helicopter. Yet.

Me and mine wouldn’t be attending anything in Rio to begin with, no matter if it’s the Olympics, the Rio Carnival, makes no difference. I have seen Rio, back in my younger days, 30 or so years ago, and even then, it was a dangerous place if you ventured out from the normal tourist haunts.

Rio police frequently use helicopters to take on gangs that dominate drug trafficking in the city’s more than 1,000 slums, but were unable to say whether this was the first time one of their helicopters had been shot down by gang members who use illicit military-grade weapons for combat against their rivals and authorities.

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