America's Mexican Border Wars

[Tosh Plumlee]

For those who may be interested in this subject matter. New release:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

THE BORDER REPORT

I expect the Homeland Security Department to engage in paranoid fantasies; it’s good for budgets, great for morale, and delineates a nice, clear boundary between friend and foe. That’s the game.
The latest fantasy is somewhat astounding in that the Feds attribute the new threat to their successes on the border. I guess I expect that, too. What I don’t expect is a newspaper the stature of the Los Angeles Times to allow itself to be used as a tool for those fantastic delusions. But that’s exactly what the paper did yesterday when it published a story about an internal law enforcement report that Joaquín Shorty Guzmán had lain down the order to kill any Fed that gets in the way.
The report itself exists; no question there. The only problem is, it wasn’t Chapo who wrote it. It was issued in February after Chapo visited Trincheras, near Sonoyta, Sonora. It’s been discounted as not credible, say sources in the FBI whom I asked this morning. Lending to the belief that it’s not credible, here is a similar and more recent one from the Chihuahua/Texas border, warning U.S. law enforcement that the Zetas are also planning to kill U.S. agents. Either the Feds need a wider variety of snitches or Sinaloa and Tamaulipas are holding a contest.
This one from New Mexico actually holds a little more water than the Chapo alert because it gives some specifics about how the Zetas have been seen practicing with paintball guns on traffic stops.
Going back to the LA Times for a moment, I knew I’d read this quote correctly yesterday but I still had to read it a few times over because it was incredible in its sheer audacity:
Here’s Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector chief Robert Gilbert expounding to the Times on the attacks on his agents: “The tactics, the aggressiveness. We’re victims of our own success.” Now, he said, “they’ll fight us.”
I’d love to know which successes the Border Patrol would like to point to. The agency can point to apprehensions all it wants, gotaways are the only number that matters and I know for a fact that narcotic street prices are as stable as ever, perhaps he meant job security.

Then they happily filled in the reporter with all the conjecture he needed for his piece:
A crew of bajadores took out another crew on the highway to Phoenix (happens about twice a month going back to 2003).
Agents in Tucson Sector were assaulted 113 times between October and March. True. One of those was cracked in the head with a cinderblock. Unless Chapo has issued orders to lay siege Donkey Kong-style, I’m fairly certain that was an attack by some angst-filled slob on the southside.
There was a suppressive fire incident in Douglas three weeks ago. That was fairly impressive with Customs helicopters and floodlights – but also old hat in southeastern Arizona. Agua Prieta cowboys pinning down the Feds until their load trucks can slip back into Sonora is a story as old as Pancho Villa.
Again with the “barrages of rocks,” a little above that. Does the Times believe that the Sinaloa Federation, the dominant supplier of a $58 billion a year cocaine addiction industry in the U.S. alone is hucking rocks at Border Patrol agents?
The Chihuahua bulletin gives a better level of detail about what may be expected in New Mexico and Texas. The bulletin was issued April 23 alleging that the Zetas have issued orders that if you lose a load to a U.S. agent, you die.
The orders came with an example of a recently murdered drug smuggler who had lost a load of narcotics a few days before, the intel report notes.
One particular detail that caught my eye was this one: “Los Zetas members have been training for confrontations with law enforcement by practicing traffic stops using paintball guns.”
The underscoring difference between the Zetas and the Sinaloans is that the Zetas may actually be stupid enough to pull a stunt like this. Their public relations has always been horrible; nobody’s going to forget what they did to Nuevo Laredo anytime soon.
So maybe it’s true, and maybe it’s Sinaloans blaming Zetas who are blaming Sinaloans, no sé. But this we do know; the last time shooting incident involving a Border Patrol agent in Tucson Sector was January 2008; the agent opened fire on the driver after the guy tried driving off with the agent trapped by the door. The last time someone hunted a Border Patrol agent in Tucson Sector was summer 2005 when Los Numeros took down two agents with high-powered rifles near Nogales. Of course, there was that minor incident a few weeks ago when one Border Patrol agent shot another in the back here in Tucson, but apparently nobody wants to talk about that …