Beating A Caballo Muerto

Caballo muerto, for all you non-Spanish speakers out there, is a dead horse.

The dead horse we're going to beat today is more drug cartel-related violence in Mexico.

For those of you not familiar with Mexican geography, Nuevo Laredo is the sister city of Laredo, Texas. It's actually one city split in two by the Rio Grande river. I work at a state university in Laredo, so I follow events like this with keen interest.

Recent violence in Nuevo Laredo fires up concerns again of spillover

A car bomb that left eight Nuevo Laredo officers wounded just four miles from the U.S. border has one valley lawmaker calling for action saying this war isn't just Mexico's --it effects everyone.

Congressman Henry Cuellar said if we don't help Mexico now, their problems could soon become ours.

Congressman Cuellar said the recent bombing in Nuevo Laredo is just another indication that the cartels are taking their operations to a very dangerous and deadly level.

One he fears could eventually pose a threat to those living in the U.S. along the border.

Congressman Cuellar, like most of his ilk, is a day late and a dollar short. The cartels already pose a threat on the U.S. side. We hear the explosions. We've had buildings impacted by bullets. Shots have been fired from the Mexican side aimed at U.S. Border Patrol agents and other LEOs. The cartels have established a presence in over 1000 U.S. cities, while "authorities in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Alabama and other states have reportedly investigated abductions and killings suspected to be tied to cartels."

In this most recent event, Mexican state police staying at a Nuevo Laredo hotel were met with gunfire early Thursday to lure them outside. Then an explosion was triggered that left several injured, some of them critically.

That particular hotel is where out-of-town LEOs and federales often stay. The explosion followed arson attacks on three Nuevo Laredo nightclubs and coincided with gunbattles on city streets and a 'hot pursuit' of suspects through a local university, alarming students and staff.

NOT the university where I work, thank goodness, but worrisome nonetheless.

Car bombs, ambushes, running gun battles ... sounds more like Iraq or Afghanistan than a country sharing a 2000-mile long border with the United States. In fact, there have been reports that the Iranian-supported Shi’ite terrorist group Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard have developed relationships with Mexican drug cartels. These are not the-sky-is-falling claims by conspiracy theorists, but concerns voiced this year by Michael Braun, a former chief of operations at the Drug Enforcement Agency in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Of course, this being an election year, most of the committee members are more worried about getting re-elected than about taking action to secure our borders and prevent future terrorists acts on U.S. soil.

In other developments a little further from my home away from home, a Mexican snack food company's vehicles and facilities were attacked recently by a Mexican drug cartel. What makes this worthy of note is that the company, Sabritas, is owned by US-based PepsiCo.

Five Sabritas warehouses and vehicle lots were attacked Friday and Saturday in the Mexican states of Michoacan and Guanajuato. Witnesses in one case described armed, masked men who tossed firebombs and torched dozens of the company's distribution trucks and some warehouses.

Gerardo Gutierrez, president of Mexico's Business Coordinating Council, said Monday that it was "an isolated case" of the kind of extortion that gangs have previously practiced with small and medium-sized businesses. He called on authorities to act immediately to prevent the practice from spreading.

According to investigators, the attacks were launched after the company repeatedly refused to pay $50,000 pesos per month in extortion fees.

This is the first known large-scale attack against a multinational corporation in Mexico. Generally, the cartels have targeted small and medium-sized Mexican businesses for extortion. For the most part they've avoided large US firms, presumably because they haven't wanted to attract more attention from law enforcement agencies that might interfere with their bread-and-butter drug and human smuggling operations. After all, no one cares what happens to illegal immigrants and drug users, but once corporate profits are affected action must be taken.

It's doubtful that there is any connection between these attacks and the Iranian terrorist groups, but one thing about Mexico ... no one knows what in the hell is going on down there. Even the cartels are so balkanized that they don't know what each other is doing. That makes it all the more difficult for law enforcement agencies to get a handle on things.

And that's before Eric Holder started running guns to the cartels...