All posts by mll4510

A Boiling Pot

Mexican Visitor Soon Coming To The States

Plata o Plomo

Jun 19 at 7:52am

The phrase is common in Mexico and I first heard it from the personal physician of a Mexican President that was a friend. He said the phrase expressed the threat to honest cops and politicians in Mexico. This street as I recall is about 2 miles south of the UTEP campus in El Paso.

from La Prensa and Diario

The blanket-wrapped body of a man was discovered on a dirt road  near colonia Felipe Ángeles in Juarez, has been identified as Jorge Mauricio Melendez Herrera.  Melendez, was an active member of the Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (Sedena).

The federal PGR agency has taken over the investigation, after it was confirmed that Melendez was assigned to the special federal operation in charge of the Juarez prison custody of  Joaquin Guzman Loera (“El Chapo”).

Melendez’ family reported to the Chihuahua State Attorney General (FGE North Zone), that they had not seen or heard from him in several days.  It was relatives who positively identified the deceased man as Melendez.

Melendez showed signs of torture, and sustained multiple stab wounds, but authorities reported his death was due, to a coup de grâce gunshot blast to the back of his head

On May 7th Chapo was transferred from Altiplano Prison No.1, to the Juarez Prison, Centro Federal de Readaptación Social (Cefereso) No. 9

Soldier guarding ‘El Chapo’ Guzman found murdered in Mexico

  • 15 June 2016

Mexican police are investigating the murder of a soldier who was part of the team guarding the recaptured notorious drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, at a prison in northern Mexico.

The body of Jorge Mauricio Melendez Herrera, 20, was found on Friday in Ciudad Juarez, with signs of torture.

Investigators said Mr Melendez was part of the first ring of security guarding the outside of the jail in the city.

Guzman has previously escaped from two top security prisons in Mexico.

Who is ‘El Chapo’ Guzman? (Links to an external site.)

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has twice escaped from maximum security prisons

January 2001: Escaped from Puente Grande maximum security prison, reportedly hiding in a laundry basket

February 2014: Captured after 13 years on the run in a hotel in Sinaloa state

July 2015: Escaped via tunnel from Altiplano prison

January 2016: Recaptured in city of Los Mochis, Sinaloa state

May 2016: Moved from Altiplano maximum security prison to a jail in Ciudad Juarez, near the US border

A forensic expert said Mr Melendez had died from a blow to the back of the neck. He had also been stabbed a number of times.

His body was identified after his family reported him missing.

Officials said the case was currently with authorities in Chihuahua state, where the jail is located, but could be passed on to federal investigators because of the victim’s job guarding Guzman.

Three hundred soldiers have been deployed from nearby barracks to boost security at the prison in Ciudad Juarez.

He was moved there at the beginning of May from the maximum security Altiplano prison. Officials said the move was part of a routine rotation for security reasons.

Extradition moves

The United States has asked for Guzman’s extradition so he can stand trial on drug trafficking charges there.

Image copyright EPA Image caption Lucero Sanchez has been suspended from the Sinaloa Congress

While Mexico has agreed, Guzman’s lawyer is currently appealing.

The US has in the past expressed concern about whether Mexico can keep Guzman locked up after he twice escaped from maximum security jails.

Eleven guards and officials are in prison pending trial on charges that they helped the drug lord escape from Altiplano prison through a 1.5km-long tunnel last year.

And on Tuesday, a regional lawmaker from the state of Sinaloa was stripped of her post for her alleged links with Guzman.

Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez (Links to an external site.) allegedly visited Guzman in prison prior to his jailbreak in July 2015, giving a false identity.

An undated picture shows member of congress of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Lucero Sanchez, in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico

Election Year

Spillover?

No Spillover

Image result for ih35 map

Since 2010 publications and television news in the United States and perhaps most puzzling in Texas have acclaimed that there is little evidence of “spillover” violence from Mexico into the United States. That year, 2010, was in the light of the highest daily violence in Juarez where that city was averaging 10 murders a day as the local Cartel and one from Sinaloa fought to control the “plaza” that contained the highways and bridges to and from El Paso. I had begun the year before chairing the new Public Safety Commission for the City of Austin and asked my fellow board member and founder of Texas Monthly, Mike Levy, how that magazine could be so far off base in its August 2010 feature story http://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/nearfar/ declaring that the violence in Mexico had little direct spillover into Texas. Mike put me into contact with the editor, Skip Hollandsworth and I wrote a reply to the article by Nate Blakesley contending there was more spillover of violence into Texas than was being recognized http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/spill-way/ .

To some extent one might suspect that such assurances are more wishful thinking in Texas than built on fact. In reality the tens of thousands that flee Mexico and the even more impoverished nations to its south bring in its numbers some of the “failed culture” attributes to neighborhoods in Texas and then the rest of the American states. Central to the “failed cultures” is a lack of civic engagement including trust of non-family and avoidance of government especially police but also institutions of education and health. This lack of engagement provides conditions for the development of public corruption as well as shelter for organized crime.

Austin, which lies 235 miles north of the border, has several neighborhoods that consist substantially of persons from Mexico and Central America. As early as 2003 Austin Police identified a small isolated street west of IH35 (Brownie Lane) that consisted only of rentals and mainly women that worked as maids and kitchen help in nearby restaurants and hotels. The 3 block area turned over every 6 months or so and landlords failed to maintain utilities and often to return deposits. This was probably Austin’s first “transitory” neighborhood in the last half of the 20th Century populated by immigrants. This set a pattern that now occurs in two areas of Austin, one on the north side of the city along IH 35 and the junction of U.S. 183 and in southeast Austin. By 2010 as violence in Mexico reached high levels making Juarez, the most dangerous city in the world, these growing neighborhoods of immigrants from Mexico provided cover for a multistate drug operation from the Mexican state of Michoacán. In a DEA-termed Operation Delirium, the DEA and Austin Police collaborated in efforts to identify and arrest the Cartel operatives. The Michoacán Cartel would place members as restaurant employees or owners and then use them in the movement and sales of narcotics sourced from that western Mexican border state. Cocaine and marijuana were the main drugs. That DEA operation interrupted this process in Austin and other cities in the nation but such activity was again visible 6 months later. In reality new members moved from Mexico into Austin and many otherwise law-abiding Mexicans helped provide the cover providing places to stay and short-term jobs.

In 2014 the City of Austin secured a competitive award from the Justice Department to address one of the city’s highest crime neighborhoods. It is at the junction of two large highways, IH 35 that runs north from Laredo and 183 that runs west from Houston into the Hill Country. The award provided an increased number of police officers and with several of my colleagues we provided training and electronic tools to permit more effective engagement with the local population, most of whom had close ties back to Mexico. This engagement focused upon community policing that worked to secure trust from community members and more reporting to police when crimes occurred. But those funds have mainly ended and like the results from the Project Delirium roundup of 2010, crime is increasing as the number of officers declines.

One irrefutable conclusion can be reach from this more than half decade attempts to control highly visible crime. The process is part of the “spillover” from Mexico!

Mexico Watch

Beyond El Chapo and Sean Penn

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kateDelCatiilloAmerican media like those in Mexico focus upon celebrities but there are deeper, more complex currents that create the fame of the celebrities. El Chapo’s wealth comes not from his 2nd Grade education but his skills in supplying the drug market in the United States. The money from drugs can corrupt American efforts as a case reported in the Texas Valley provides. From The Monitor in McAllen:

McALLEN — A former Starr County narcotics officer was sentenced to seven years in prison Friday for his role in a scheme that involved stealing drugs from drug cartels.

Noel Peña, 30, was charged with two counts of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than 5 kilograms of cocaine last April. In the scheme, Peña was tipped off to the location of cocaine and then staged a law enforcement operation, the complaint states.

Peña spent seven years as a Rio Grande City police officer, including four assigned to the Starr County High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force, where he worked since 2011.

HIDTA was created in 1990 to diminish drug trafficking in the U.S. Southwest border. Fourteen counties across Texas have HIDTA task forces. The one in Starr County reports to 229th District Attorney Omar Escobar, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy website. Hector Salinas-Hinojosa, of Roma, was also charged with conspiring with Peña in the distribution operation, according to court documents. Both men pleaded not guilty to two counts of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine from April 1 to April 17.

In July, Peña and Salinas-Hinojosa agreed to plead guilty to the first count in exchange for a lighter sentence and had the second conspiracy charge dropped by prosecutors, according to court documents. Salinas-Hinojosa was also sentenced Friday and received five years in prison for his role in the conspiracy, according to court records. Federal agents arrested the duo April 18 after they said the two conspired to hand over a falsified police report to an undercover officer they thought was a cocaine trafficker, a criminal complaint states. The undercover officer told them he needed help stealing the bulk of a 22-pound load of cocaine he was holding for a drug cartel, according to the complaint.

Noel Peña

Hector Salinas-Hinojosa Jr.

Driving much of the chaos in Mexico is the extreme differential between incomes in Mexico compared to the United States. Across decades this differential remained largely unnoticed but the movement of world manufacturers to create factories in Mexico to export finished products to the United States highlights this differential. The differential is apparent in twin border cities like El Paso and Juarez.

This story from The Atlantic illustrates:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Women and men, more than 70 of them, were fired on December 9th from the factory on the Mexican side of the Mexico-Texas border where they made printers for the American company Lexmark. They say they were terminated because they were trying to form an independent union. The company says they were fired because they caused a “workplace disruption.”

Now, the workers protest by occupying a makeshift shack outside the factory, still advocating for a raise and for a union, even though they no longer have jobs. Outside, a spray-painted banner reads “Justicia A La Clase Obrera” meaning “Justice for the Working Class.” Inside, a wood stove burns as they make coffee and cook tortillas and wait for someone to hear what they have to say.

“We are hungry. Our children are hungry,” Blanca Estella Moya, one of the fired workers, tells me. “You cannot live on these wages in Juarez.”

In the Lexmark maquiladora, or factory, Moya made 112 pesos, or roughly six U.S. dollars, a day. Her shifts were nine-and-a-half hours long, her lawyer, Susana Prieto Terrazas, says. That’s about 39 cents an hour. That wage is a legal one in Mexico, but Terrazas argues it shouldn’t be.

“It’s not possible to live on these wages. It’s not human,” said Terrazas, who has dark, curly, dyed-red hair, and was wearing a plaid checkered blouse and jeans. “They are creating generations of slaves.”

It’s not just Lexmark: Workers at Mexican subsidiaries of FoxConn, Eaton, and CommScope in Juarez have all protested working conditions and compensation in recent months. Women tell of sexual harassment at the factories and of working multiple shifts to make ends meet. The devaluation of the peso has meant their money buys less than it once did. The protests come at an inopportune moment for Mexico. Many companies, especially automakers, are moving production to Mexico after deciding that the costs and logistical headaches of manufacturing in Asia are too great to bear. Mexico is trying to welcome them with open arms.

Signposts To A Failed State

More Signposts

NuevoLaredoHangingsTwo significant features of modern Mexico are the lack of a civic culture and government corruption. A story from the NY Times illustrates both as a mob seizes and kills two brothers. Growing vigilante actions track violence between Cartels using public threats as an attempt to assert control in a country flying apart. This picture is from an action in Nuevo Laredo about 2012 of one Cartel threatening another using lynchings. Such tactics are beginning to appear by outraged publics lacking trust in municipal police. The two brothers were working as pollsters visiting the town, Ajalpan, and were perceived as kidnappers of village children. The community is about 200 miles southeast of Mexico City in the state of Puebla.

The killings raise difficult questions for Mexico, highlighting an alarming development: By some accounts, there were more public lynchings this past year than at any other time in more than a quarter-century. There were at least 78 lynchings last year in Mexico, more than double the number the previous year, according to data collected by Raúl Rodríguez Guillén, a professor and an author of the book “Mexico Lynchings, 1988-2014.”

The mob actions were born of a sense of hopelessness and impotence shared by many in Mexico, where 98 percent of murders go unsolved and the state is virtually absent in some areas. By some estimates, just 12 percent of crimes are even reported in Mexico, largely because of a lack of faith that justice will ever be served.

Signposts To A Failed State

Oil and Mexico

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fut_chart.ashxUnlike Germany, Japan, China and to some extent the United States, Mexico’s economy is not built on manufacturing or the creation of high technology. While the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has moved thousands of jobs from the United States to Mexico and visible in auto and appliance manufacture, the bulk of jobs in Mexico are minimum wage jobs in service like waiters and maids in tourism. Its most important export earnings are from the production of petroleum. The crushing collapse of oil prices felt in Canada and states like the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas is many times as severe for Mexico. Mexico depends on grains, poultry and cattle imports as key food sources for its young population and it must have export earnings to make these purchases.

The drop in the price of oil may reach 20 dollars a barrel and will fuel increased immigration to the United States and enhance the power of the Drug Cartels as earnings from oil fade!

Leadership Failures

The Escape and Capture of El Chapo

Penn-ChapoMonths ago Mexico’s most notorious Cartel Leader, Joaquin “el Chapo” Guzman Loera escaped from Mexico’s nationally most secure prison and met early in October in the Golden Triangle of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa with the Mexican soap opera star, Kate del Castillo and the Hollywood actor, producer and sometimes journalist, Sean Penn to discuss a biographical film that Guzman had discussed with Castillo and she in turn was the connection to Penn.

Looks like el Chapo is ready to be retired as a cartel and media feature. In many ways he is of the bandit variety of national hero in Mexico extending back to Pancho Villa. There are a thousand standing in line to take his place. As long as addiction is a central theme in our country and Mexico’s corruption continues unabated the line of Pancho Villa, Felix Gallardo, Pablo Acosta, etc. continues.

The only new thing I can add is that the drop in oil prices and automation in manufacturing removes the two other, than drugs, central exports of Mexico to earn money: energy and human labor.

The interview which appeared in Rolling Stone received this editorial remark from the NY Times(January 10, 2016):

“But widespread support for Mr. Guzmán’s extradition to the United States, after years of governmental resistance to the move, was an acknowledgment of continued concern about government corruption and weakness.

“It draws the frivolous interest of many people, the story by Sean Penn,” said Enrique Krauze, a prominent historian in Mexico. “But the main point is that we have an immense problem with drugs and crime in Mexico, with impunity and with the lack of the rule of law in the criminal system.”

“The underlying thing is — here is El Chapo, but what about the other protagonists of Mexican impunity and violence, the politicians and police forces that for decades have been their allies and partners?” he added.”

“The government so far has struggled to assert itself through the wave of celebrity fascination and chaos that came after the news of Mr. Guzmán’s arrest. The accounts by officials left many details unclear. Conflicting reports, about who knew what and when, and what intelligence led to the raid that took down Mr. Guzmán, have emerged.

With Mr. Guzmán placed back in the same prison he escaped from last July, the government did release a statement assuring the public that he would be well guarded this time. Some news reports claimed that Mr. Penn and Kate del Castillo, the actress who helped orchestrate the interview, were under investigation, without specifying anything further.

Mr. Penn’s turn as a journalist prompted hard feelings among those who recalled all too well how many Mexican reporters have died covering the drug war. To some, Mr. Penn’s account felt less like journalism than mythmaking, an extension of the Hollywood machine that Mr. Guzmán seemed eager to leverage.

Both the capture and the publication of the interview have fed the persistent international image of Mexico as a nation hopelessly trapped in the vicious tides of a drug war. The kingpins, with their resources, egos and catchy nicknames, never fail to capture the imagination of the world.

That all comes as bad news to people who have been remaking Mexico as something different: a country in the midst of reforms with a more responsive government and a growing center of culture and tourism.

The theatrics also distracted from the nation’s real and persistent problems. Analysts asked why, if the government could hunt down El Chapo, it could not locate 43 students who disappeared from a teachers college in the state of Guerrero. Or why it could not halt the peso’s slide against the dollar, down nearly 20 percent in the past year.”

Signposts To A Failed State

Bodies On Texas Ranches

SouthTexRanchLnd

From KRGV in the Rio Grande Valley:

Ranchland Owners Speak Out on Death Tolls

People going missing on ranch land

 BrushLand

WESLACO – In CHANNEL 5 NEWS Special Report: “Paying the Price,” we reported how a Honduran woman went missing on private ranch land in Brooks County.

Human rights activist Eddie Canales said the woman is one of hundreds who die in the brush. He said the biggest obstacle to finding remains of missing people is getting access to do searches on private property.

Landowners are speaking out about being associated with the number of people dying. The count of bodies found this year in Brooks County so far is 41.RanchSkull

“We just think the landowner shouldn’t take the blame on this,” Susan Kibbe said. She represents most of the landowners in Brooks County. She’s the director of the South Texas Property Rights Association.

Kibbe said the deaths that happen on the vast ranches are tragic, but property owners don’t deserve any blame.

“Somehow the U.S. is blamed for their deaths, or ranchers are blamed for their deaths, or others are blamed for their deaths,” Kibbe said. “When they know when they come into the country illegally, they’re taking this chance.”

A Honduran woman went missing on one of the largest ranches in south Texas. We tried to contact the landowners to get permission to be on the property. No one called back.

Kibbe said the owners called her after our report aired. She said Border Patrol and the local sheriff’s office have access to the property. No one else has the right to be there.

“So we really feel like the landowner is doing all they can that’s reasonable, that they know it’s law enforcement doing on their property,” she said.

Kibbe said people dying on ranches are not the biggest problem. “This is after the fact. This is a symptom of the overall issue,” she said.

The main issue Kibbe said is people in the country illegally are fleeing from their homelands. She said human rights activists should change their focus from the ranches to Central America.

“I think if they want to help these people, they need to go down and help them in their countries,” Kibbe said.

The South Texas Property Rights Association is calling on congress to secure the border, enforce current laws, reform immigration laws and create a guest worker program. Kibbe said those things will keep people from dying. Congress has that power, not landowners.

Here is the context to understand why so many risk the trip to the North:

Mexico and Central America are a demographic disaster, producing persons needing employment as economic decline and automation, worldwide, destroy jobs by the millions. Conservatively there are populations south of the Rio Grande that equal half in number of the United States, about half children and all lacking education and skills for the job markets of today and much less for the jobs of the future.BorderStates.jpg

Country Population Median Age
Belize 330,000.00 21
Costa Rica 4,500,000.00 29
El Salvador 6,000,000.00 24
Guatemala 13,000,000.00 20
Honduras 8,000,000.00 21
Nicaragua 5,600,000.00 23
Panama 3,400,000.00 28
TOTALS 40,830,000.00 23
Mexico 114,000,000.00 27
United States 314,000,000.00 37
The Slide Returns

Depression In Texas

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jwj_Gonzales_0161 WEB_oil-rig-declineThese graphics are from the front page of the Saturday morning edition of the Austin American Statesman. The story looks at Gonzales, Texas historically at the beginning of the war of Texans against Mexico and in the most impoverished areas of Texas that extend into the Valley to the Rio Grande. Like other communities in the oil rich areas with the boom that began about 2001, a bust started as oil plunged from 100 dollars a barrel. Jobs are disappearing from the oil patch and now as well as businesses like restaurants, hotels, general stores with the exception of pawn shops. Government service spending has risen as much of those revenues come from oil and gas taxation and the formerly booming retail activity. But those expenditures are more fixed and increased taxes loom.

The story is a quick read of the boom and bust nature of areas that rely on natural resources as the major source of wealth. Texas today as compared to the late 1980’s has developed other areas of wealth such as high technology, medical research, insurance, higher education, etc., but the “trickle down” effect of declining oil prices is yet to fully play out!

The Slide Returns

The global surplus of oil is even bigger than Goldman Sachs Group Inc. thought and that could drive prices as low as $20 a barrel.

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Since early August of 2014, oil that many presumed was permanently 100 dollars or more a barrel has plummeted as low as 38 dollars in September and a recent forecast advises it may go as low as 20 dollars.

Texas like Mexico has an economy heavily dependent on the extraction and sale of natural resources. For both the key resource is oil and gas. By 1970 Texas had pumped most of its readily available oil and began to have costs at the wellhead of about 10 dollars. That accounted for Texas’s last deep economic decline in the 1980’s when the Saudis angry at other OPEC and non-OPEC production rates drove the price of oil below 10 dollars. Indeed much of the economic history of Texas derives from the price of oil.

Two recent Texas Governors, George Bush and Rick Perry touted the growth of the Texas economy and attributed that to their leadership. Bush only got a slight bump from rising oil prices late in his administration, but Perry’s benefited from rising prices until the end, a full 14 years. Now with the slide in oil, so too has Perry’s slide begun as he withdraws from the Presidential race for 2016.PerryOil at 20 dollars for any length of time, a year or more will cause huge negative repercussion in the Texas economy. Unemployment will skyrocket in the West Texas towns of the Permian Basin, particularly Midland and Odessa. The larger oil shale plays near Ft. Worth and south of San Antonio are already slowing down as are the local economies. Houston, the state’s largest city, is seeing rising unemployment in the gas and oil industries. As the Texas economy slows, the tension with Mexican immigrants will rise even as Mexico like Texas has an economy highly dependent on the price of oil. News reports in Texas are beginning to document dropping incomes associated with oil.

The chart below shows how radical a drop, oil at 20 dollars is. The longer term pattern of oil’s price is complex. By 1970 all of the cheap oil in the world had been identified and has now been pumped. That is the central topic of the concept of “peak oil”. Over the next several decades the oil that comes to market will be more expensive to find and pump. However if alternative enegy sources such as solar and fusion develop, we may be seeing the ending days of “King Oil”.

crude-oil-price-history-chart-2015-09-11-macrotrends

 

The Slide Returns

Important Reporting from Diana Washington Valdez in El Paso Times

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Ms. Valdez reports on a routine hearing in Washington, D.C. that goes beyond issues of the design of buildings in consulates around the world to general concerns of violence and corruption in Mexico

A congressional hearing Wednesday on border safety branched out into a broader discussion about insecurity in Mexico, with one U.S. representative calling to close down all the U.S. consulates in Mexico and a border official asking for 5,000 additional Border Patrol agents.

“We should close down every one of those (nine) consulates, and put the properties up for sale,” said U.S. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. “There has to be consequences the place (Mexico) is out of control.”

Brandon Judd, a Border Patrol agent and president of the National Border Patrol Council, testified that based on feedback from other agents, the agency charged with guarding the border has operational control of only 40 percent of the border.

He portrayed Mexico as largely lawless in places where drug cartels wield control, and provided statistics for the country’s extraordinary violence in recent years that authorities attributed to the cartels.

“These cartels are well organized, heavily armed, and pathologically violent,” Judd said. “The official death toll from the cartel violence in Mexico is 60,000. This is more than the U.S. military lost in Vietnam. However, the unofficial death toll in Mexico is over 120,000 killed and another 27,000 missing and presumed death.”

Judd also testified during the House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing that the border is vulnerable to encroachments by criminals.

Statistics show that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 177,000 convicted criminals in 2014, Judd testified, and of these, the Border Patrol arrested 91,000 of them as they tried to enter the country illegally. In 2014, the Border Patrol apprehended and arrested just under 500,000 undocumented immigrants, Judd said, and that one in every five arrested had a criminal record.

The committee, which includes U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, also received oral and written testimony from Robert Harris, director of Joint Task Force-West; Sue Saarnio, State Department/Western Hemisphere Affairs deputy assistant secretary; William H. Moser, State Department/Bureau of Overseas Building Operations deputy director and Gregory B. Starr, State Department/Bureau of Diplomatic Security assistant secretary.

Harris said the primary threats along the U.S.-Mexico border are southbound gun smuggling, northbound drug-trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, and violence associated with such illegal activities.

“The reach and influence of Mexican cartels, notably the Zetas cartel, Gulf cartel, Juárez cartel, Jalisco New Generation cartel and the Sinaloa cartel stretches across and beyond the Southwest border, operating through loose business ties with small organizations in cities across the United States,” Harris testified.

“Further, the escape of Joaquin Guzman Loera, “El Chapo,” could potentially instigate further border violence similar to incidents following his first prison escape in 2001,” Harris testified.

Harris mentioned the 2011 shooting attack in Mexico that killed ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata and injured ICE Special Agent Victor Avila (an El Pasoan), and the gun shots fired at a U.S. law enforcement helicopter over the Laredo area in June.

Starr, an experienced diplomat, said, “We need to accept that the battle to increase security, the rule of law and justice in Mexico is going to be a long-term battle.”

Hurd, whose district covers part of El Paso County, asked that State Department travel warnings reflect actual conditions in particular areas instead of issuing blanket warnings for regions that he believes are safe, such as Juárez.

In 2008, Juárez was called the murder capital of the world, and by 2010 it had half the murders of Detroit and Los Angeles, said Hurd, adding that 80 percent of the homicides in Mexico occur in 20 percent of the country. “It’s frustrating when we talk of Mexico as one place, when it’s not,” Hurd said.

“We are not pulling any punches on the level of danger down in Mexico,” Starr said.

The diplomatic officials said Wednesday that the U.S. consular presence in Mexico lends security to areas in which the consulates are located, and that consulates also promote U.S. trade and provide critical services to U.S. citizens that live and work in Mexico as well as to U.S. companies that operate south of the border, including U.S.-owned maquiladora assembly plants.

Starr said the United States can help Mexico to improve its security by using the same types of programs that helped in Colombia, such as assisting to strengthen police and judicial institutions.

U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the committee chairman, said he was skeptical about trying to help police in Mexico. He alleged that the drug cartels control local police in Nuevo Laredo, and mentioned that a former mayor in that city was murdered.

Last year, Benjamin Galvan Gomez, Nuevo Laredo’s mayor from 2011 to 2013, was on his way to Laredo, Texas, when he and another man were kidnapped. Their bodies were found a month later near Monterrey.

Chaffetz also criticized that U.S. consulate guards in Mexico are being paid only about $316 a month, opening them up to corruption, and that the State Department decided to eliminate hazardous pay for consulate staffs in Mexico.

According to other testimony Wednesday, gun-trafficking from the U.S. poses a safety problem for Mexico.

U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, who also serves on the committee, said the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) reported that 70 percent of weapons recovered at crime scenes in Mexico came from the United States.

 

Papers Relating to Mexico's Challenges from Cartel Violence

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