No Spillover
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!