May They All Rot In Hell

This is a long post, and in many regards a disturbing one. It's something that's always in the back of my mind, given my work and home locations in proximity to the Mexican border. It was prompted by a couple of things. One, an ICE agent killed yesterday in Mexico was assigned to the Laredo office. I happen to work in Laredo. Special Agent Jaime Zapata's death has had a significant community impact.

Two, JammieWearingFool had a post on a related topic. Excerpt printed below.

Obama Really Serious About Border Enforcement, Slashes OT for Agents

He manages to find an 11% increase in education spending and $451 million for NPR and PBS, but when it comes to securing our borders, suddenly the president is a spendthrift.

Border Patrol agents would lose money under a change in the overtime pay proposed in the $3.7 trillion budget President Barack Obama sent Congress Monday, the agent's union said Wednesday.

The proposal is an attempt to save $110 million by changing the overtime system for Border Patrol agents, who are paid time and a half for their first ten hours of overtime per week, and half-time for any additional unscheduled overtime hours. The president's budget proposes to pay agents straight-time for their first ten hours of overtime per week, and no compensation for any additional, unscheduled overtime hours.

That ought to provide a great incentive for agents to work harder. They bust their asses with little reward and now have even less. Maybe they ought to look into getting a job at NPR.

What is obama and the federal government doing to keep us safe? With apologies to my border patrol neighbors, I have to say that overall the answer is zip, zero, nada. Individual agents and officers do their best, but the government's overall efforts don't amount to a hill of beans.

Now settle back, pour yourself another cup of coffee or an adult beverage, and read the following excerpts from a lengthy piece in Vanity Fair, of all places. While you're reading this keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens who live and work along the border are exposed to this on a daily basis.

During the past several years, drug-related violence in northern Mexico has soared to unprecedented levels as drug cartels wage war on one another—and on anyone deemed uncooperative, unfriendly, or otherwise inconvenient. There have been more than 28,000 killings since 2006. And, inexorably, the violence is spreading northward, into the United States—whose appetite for drugs is largely responsible for the present tragedy.

There is a method of sorts to the madness. Each different mutilation leaves a message

• If the tongue is cut out, it means the person talked too much—a snitch, or chupro.

• A man who has informed on the cartel has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth. This makes sense: a traitor to a narco-cartel is known as a dedo—a finger. 

• Castration means that the victim may have slept with or looked at the woman of another man in the business. 

• Severed arms mean that you stole from your consignment.

• Severed legs mean that the victim tried to walk away from the cartel.

In some cases the message is very blunt and all too clear, such as the message delivered by the 12 festering bodies lined up outside the Valentín Gómez Farías elementary school, in Tijuana, one morning in September 2008. The victims were naked, or partially dressed, and all of them had been tortured. Most had their tongues cut out. This was a message sent directly to children, something for them to think about as they consider their future lives in the community: Don’t talk too much. “It was a warning, and it means what it means,” said the head teacher, Miguel Ángel González Tovar.

Murder extends to family members, even children. This is not entirely new: during the 1980s, the original Mexican godfather, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, needed to deal with an encroachment into his Guadalajara turf by an interloper named Hector Palma. Gallardo tasked one of his operatives to seduce Palma’s wife and run off with the wife and the children—which he did. One day, Palma received a package by courier: it contained his wife’s severed head. Palma learned later that his children had been pushed to their deaths off a bridge. In Ciudad Juárez, in August 2009, a seven-year-old was shot dead while cleaning windshields at a traffic light. Last January, 16 young people at a party in Juárez were trapped and summarily executed.

There used to be honor among thieves, of a sort. Families were off limits. Now they're targeted. And what kind of sick human being can commit acts like this on kids under the age of ten? Sick, sick, sick...

The killing in northern Mexico has become qualitatively more grotesque. “Bone tickling” involves scraping the bone with an ice pick sunk through the flesh. Doctors are employed to ensure that those questioned or tortured do not lose consciousness. Bodies turn up with the phone number for emergency services carved into their skin—in effect, “Call 911.” One cartel, La Familia, made its “coming out” known in a famous episode: bowling five severed heads across the floor of a discotheque. In Sonora in 2009, a white S.U.V. was found abandoned, and inside it a butcher’s display of mutilated bodies—hacked, chopped, castrated, decapitated. It was a carful of human cutlets, with no apparent relationship of one piece to another until they were matched by forensic authorities. Earlier this year, 36-year-old Hugo Hernandez was abducted in Sonora; his body turned up a week later in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, but not in a single piece. His torso was in one location, his severed arms and legs (boxed) in another. The face had been cut off. It was found near city hall, sewn to a soccer ball.

If the violence was confined to Mexico there might be some rationale for Americans to overlook it. Not morally justifiable, but perhaps understandable. However, the violence is spilling over the border at an increasing rate. How long before our schoolkids are exposed to and affected by it?

Mexico’s violence has crossed the border in many ways and many places. The Zetas have been linked to killings across the Deep South. In August 2008, five men were found with their throats slit in Columbiana, Alabama, after being tortured with electricity. The F.B.I. says the victims owed a debt of $400,000 to the Gulf Cartel. In July of that year, Atlanta police had shot and killed a Gulf Cartel operative arriving to pick up a $2 million kidnap ransom. In the summer of 2008, police found a citizen of the Dominican Republic bound, gagged, and chained to a wall—but alive—in the Atlanta suburb of Lilburn; he owed $300,000 to the Gulf Cartel. To give some idea of the degree to which Mexican cartels are operating inside the United States: a government sweep called Operation Xcellerator, which ended in February 2009, rounded up more than 750 members of the Sinaloa Cartel throughout the country, from California’s Imperial Valley to Washington, D.C. In the process, the authorities also seized 26,000 pounds of cocaine and some $59 million in cash.

Houston has become the new hub for cartel criminality north of the border, replacing Los Angeles. The F.B.I. in Houston describes how two generations of gangs have put themselves at the service of the Gulf Cartel in particular: the older Texas Syndicate, with its tight structures, life membership, and culture of what the Italian Mafia calls omertà, or silence, and the younger Houstone Tango Blast gang, which one agent told me was “more like Facebook—the gang changes according to what you need that day.” A reporter for the Houston Chronicle, Dane Schiller, has been writing for years on the internecine killings organized by Mexican cartels in Houston. For instance, there is the case of Santiago “Chago” Salinas, a Gulf Cartel operative shot in the head at point-blank range at the Baymont Inn & Suites on the Gulf Freeway, in 2006. There is the case of the married couple found tortured to death in their home on Easingwold Drive, in northwest Houston, with 220 pounds of cocaine stashed in the attic. And there is the case of Pedro Cárdenas, the nephew of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, founder of the Zetas, who was murdered and dumped in a ditch near Fort Bend County.

The degree to which American law-enforcement agencies have themselves been penetrated by the cartels is a subject of debate—but no one doubts that they have been. One longtime customs special agent, now retired, told me, “While it gets harder for us to infiltrate them, they’ll use relatives and friends to infiltrate us.” Another former special agent, Butch Barrett, who lives in Douglas, Arizona, observes, “There’s going to be a situation where you have a guy in law enforcement and his cousins are across the border. And he’s going to get a call saying, ‘Hey, we’d like you to join the customs service and do as you’re told’—let this car through or turn a blind eye there. And that’s going to be said by your cousin on the other side, and it’s going to be an offer you can’t refuse. And that’s happened, because I know it has.”

How can we stop this? One way, one obvious and effective way, is the simple adage: just follow the money. So why isn't that being done? Well, when's the last time a really rich person was convicted of anything? Yes, I know Bernie Madoff is in prison, but that's primarily because he ripped off a bunch of other rich people. If it was just us common folk that got hammered do you think he'd be serving time? How many people from Wall Street or Freddie and Fannie - or congress - are behind bars as a result of the mortgage scandel and meltdown?

The Mexican cartels now supply some 90 percent of the cocaine and a substantial portion of other drugs entering the United States. It is a business estimated by the Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) to be worth roughly $323 billion a year.

Where does it go? How does it travel from the cartels back into the economy? What financial institutions are helping to launder these dollars? Former customs special agent Lee Morgan said to me, “Kinda strange, ain’t it, how Washington’s got all this technology, but never goes after the money?”

Last March, the Bloomberg financial-news Web site reported that Wachovia Bank, now owned by Wells Fargo, had admitted to federal prosecutors that, in the years 2003–8, it had failed to prevent the laundering of at least $110 million of drug-cartel money through the exchange houses it operated in Mexico. The bank also admitted that it had failed to monitor $420 billion in transactions through these same exchange houses. Wachovia agreed to pay $160 million to end the criminal investigation, acknowledging “serious and systematic” violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. Jeffrey Sloman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, stated that the bank’s “blatant disregard for our banking laws” had given the international cocaine cartels “a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations.”

Again, how many of those bankers are in jail?

So yeah, obama, cut the Border Patrol's funding. Spend the money on crap like NPR or obamacare or high speed rail. That's a much better 'investment' than protecting this country's citizens.

Screw you and all your politician buddies who go along with this farce.

I hope that someday you will all reap what you sow...