New Mexico
The U.S. state of New Mexico is under attack by drug cartels
and smugglers and little can be done to stop the border violence
without federal troops.
This state's 180 mile border with Mexico is nearly devoid of
human habitation. Isolated ranches and small farms dot the border
area. Because the population is so small (less than two million
in a state of 50,000 square miles) , little federal funding is
available to build adequate border infrastructure.
Because New Mexico occupies such a strategic east - west position
it has been favored with an extensive Interstate Highway System.
The combination of fast roads and no people bodes catastrophe
for the residents of this state. The drug cartels have taken over.
Don't think that even the federal government will help. Even when
smugglers and drug gangs are arrested, the embarrassingly under-
funded federal prosecutors have to prioritize cases and that means
some very bad people go free for lack of prosecutors to handle
the cases. New Mexico has the fourth highest federal case load
in the United States yet has but one city worth the name : Albuquerque.
This isolated town is home to one of the largest nuclear weapons
facilities in the world. What it would take for the al Qaeda and
Mexican criminals now operating in New Mexico's border areas to
repeat the attack of 1916 but against a nuclear weapons facility
is unknown but a nightmare worth Hollywood's attention.
The efforts of Texas to stem the flow of cross-border Mexican
army troops and drug gang attacks plus new efforts to stem the
flow of illegals in Arizona has put tremendous pressure on New
Mexico. While Texas has gone high-tech by placing video
cameras along the border accessible over the Internet. Showing
border violence to the world has caused "civil rights"
groups of all stripes to protest and New Mexico seems eager to
keep its drugs and violence a secret to itself.
The 53 mile stretch of border near Columbus / Deming, the USBP
has installed seven camera towers. This area also has some vehicle
barrier systems.
Part of that vehicle barrier, 17 miles west of Columbus, N.M.
was built in 2000 by Joint Task Force North out of Fort Bliss,
Texas and it was discovered to encroach into Mexico territory
between one and six feet along a 1.5-mile stretch.
The Mexican government threw a hissy fit and demanded that the
vehicle barrier be removed pronto. What they refuse to acknowledge
is that the entire border barrier along all 1,945 miles of our
southern border is between one and six feet north of
the border. This is done so that when the drug smugglers and illegal
alien smugglers tear it apart our crews can repair it without
entering the Republic of Mexico. By having our barrier north of
the border we have handed Mexico a combined area of over 1,000
acres of US territory.
In places like Lordsburg, 52 agents are responsible for 81 miles
of border and the 3,000 square miles of adjacent border area.
Unlike Texas and Arizona which have urban centers south of the
border that operate as staging areas for the drug smugglers, in
this part of the border the smugglers needed to be creative. Here,
the smugglers use the public school buses to move their people
and drugs from Mexican towns of Palomas and Las Chepas to the
border twenty miles away. The smugglers also use abandoned mining
towns and abandoned ranch homes in Mexico as operating bases.
If the ranch wasn't abandoned when the smugglers arrived, it was
when they started their smuggling operations.
Smuggler apprehensions have doubled over a single year -- from
2,588 in the first half of one year to 4,797 in the first half
of the next.
