Shootout At El Paso City Hall
Posted 07/02/2010 06:59 PM ET
National Security: In his speech Thursday, President Obama assured us that our "southern border is more se cure today than at any time in the past 20 years." So why is El Paso's City Hall taking fire from Mexico?
The president made his pitch for "comprehensive immigration reform" by assuring us problems on the border were already taken care of, so the next course of action was a modified amnesty program for 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.
But a funny thing happened on the same day he was urging Americans to go along: El Paso's City Hall found itself in a war zone as gunfire from the Mexican side from either traffickers or the Mexican lawmen trying to fight them pocked the edifice. News reports said as many as seven bullets hit the building. No one was hit — this time.
It's another sign of the horror in Mexico spilling onto the U.S. side.
Further down the border on the same day, 12 miles from Nogales, Ariz., 21 people were massacred in a fight between rival smuggling gangs over the right of way to bring their illegal immigrant "shipments" and narcotics into the U.S.
It all gives the president's assurances to Americans that the border situation is being dealt with an aura of unreality.
Statistics can be cut a number of ways, and some areas do have better border security. But the fact that it's uneven has left other areas — such as the Arizona border, more vulnerable as traffickers fight over the last remaining routes with intensity.
And dramatic events are happening across the border area anyway that suggest bottoms dropping out, with horrors unimaginable in the past becoming the new norm:
• The U.S. has lost control of actual U.S. territory to drug and migrant smugglers as much as 80 miles inland in Arizona. Any American who enters this area risks being shot dead.
• The Falcon Dam on Texas' lower Rio Grande was targeted for destruction by a Mexican cartel to destroy a rival's drug and alien-smuggling route. Had the foiled plot succeeded, 4 million people could have ended up downriver with mass casualties and deaths.
• Arizona now has the second-highest kidnapping rate in the world, behind only Mexico City, with nearly all of it due to drug and migrant smugglers and their quests for cash and territory.
• Mass graves have been discovered in New Mexico, believed by lawmen to be the work of cartels.
• Two U.S. border consulates have been attacked, and three people connected with them have been killed in the past three years.
• In Washington state and others, national forests and Indian reservations have seen large swaths of land converted by cartels to drug cultivation operations guarded by illegal immigrants, making them also no-man's lands.
Now the Mexican shootout that hits a large U.S. city, and it's hard not to question how much urgency the White House has.
Obama's speech is a case in point, with amnesty for the illegals taking priority over border security. That comes as a Fox News poll Friday showed 59% of Americans favor securing the border before dealing with amnesty. Obama did say he was sending 1,200 National Guard troops to the Arizona border, but the Guardsmen are there to perform clerical tasks — not to protect and defend.
Meanwhile, even as the drug war spills over our border, the U.S. has given just $310 million to aid Mexico's fight this year through the Merida Initiative, and only $720 million in 2009, given the era of multibillion-dollar boondoggles?
The cash given so far has performed productively already, according to an analysis by Shannon O'Neil in Americas Quarterly, citing the intelligence-sharing and cooperation in 2009 that brought down two cartel kingpins, as well as the coordinated bust of 300 traffickers on both sides of the border last October.
With the war hitting our border now, it's time to finance more such success.
But all we're seeing is a can't-do attitude and a lack of urgency. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano's recent declaration: "You're never going to totally seal that border," doesn't suggest any sense that there's an emergency here, even as the depravities of Mexico's criminal cartels penetrate ever deeper into the U.S.
We wonder: When does it become
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