Could we have a situation where violence gets so bad in Mexico, that we will actually see war refugees gathering at the border? Imagine thousands of people, all trying to get on the US side of the border, all because things have gotten so bad in Mexico that the people no longer trust that their government can protect them. Things are already bad enough economically there, that people are willing to risk illegal immigration to cross into the US. If you add the fear of violence caused by the drug war to the mix, well then now you can see how this is something we need to look at.
At this point, we are just seeing the political asylum cases increase. The next stage if things got really bad, is just camping out at the border. If cartels are taking over entire towns, and the Mexican military is having to retake those towns, then you could see why people wouldn’t want to live there.
And to follow this train of thought, where would we put them all? Well, if things got that bad, I am afraid that my tent city idea that I brought up for illegal immigrants, would more than likely turn into refugee camps. When you start thinking about the problems in Mexico in this way, it really puts into perspective as to what the potential is and why we should care. I also think that looking at other drug wars like in Colombia are particularly helpful, just to get an idea of where it is all going.
Finally, check out the last story I posted. It is about a coordinated attack on Mexican army bases, by cartel henchmen. That is a new chapter in this drug war, and I am sure we will see more of this.-Matt
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Will we see this in the U.S., in order to deal with a humanitarian crisis caused by the drug war in Mexico?
Worse Than Colombia
by Brandi GrissomMarch 31, 2010
The violence raging in Mexico’s drug war is worse now than the terror that enveloped Colombia during the 1980s and 1990s ever was, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told state lawmakers Tuesday.
“Colombia was never threatened like the government of Mexico is with the level of violence,” McCraw told the House Select Committee on Emergency Preparedness at a Capitol hearing.
The committee and its chairman, state Rep. Aaron Peña, D-Edinburg, focused many of their questions about the state’s emergency preparedness on the current violence just across the border in northern Mexico, particularly in Juárez. “Each and every day we hear about killings, shootings, assassinations, kidnappings,” said Peña, whose hometown is about 10 miles from the Mexican city of Reynosa. While McCraw said the violence will get worse before it gets better and has already outpaced the scariness of Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel in Colombia, at least one border expert disagreed, saying that the United States would never let the situation in its neighboring country devolve into the lawlessness that plagued Colombia. “I think maybe he’s exaggerating,” said University of Texas at El Paso professor Howard Campbell.
Peña asked McCraw to compare the violence in Mexico to that during the drug war in Colombia. McCraw said the situation in Mexico is worse. The United States eventually intervened to help the Colombian government quell the violence and take down Pablo Escobar in 1993. “That hasn’t happened in Mexico,” McCraw said. Though Mexican President Felipe Calderón is trying to control the violence, McCraw said those efforts so far have not worked. “There has never been a more significant threat as it relates to cartels and drug and human smuggling on the border today,” he said. Juarez alone has seen more than 4,800 drug war deaths since 2008, according to recent reports in the El Paso Times, including at least 600 killings this year.
Lawmakers on Tuesday said their primary concern is preventing the violence from spilling over into Texas — or at least stopping more of it from spilling over. “Do you see this getting worse before it gets better, and what can we do as state to make it better?” Peña asked. McCraw said the war is likely to worsen before it improves and that state legislators need to continue doling out dollars for state border security initiatives. Since 2005, lawmakers have spent at least $200 million for state-led border security efforts. “We can never be too good,” McCraw said.
Alex Posey, tactical analyst for Latin America at Stratfor global intelligence company, agreed with McCraw that Mexico is now worse off than Colombia was at the height of its drug war. Calderón’s plans so far have mostly amplified the violence, Posey said. What makes the situation in Mexico worse is the deep corruption. “From the federal security forces all the way down to the local mayor, corruption is completely pervasive throughout the whole spectrum,” he said. In Colombia, Posey said, the government was able to weed out some of the corruption that powered the cartels.
Another problem in Mexico, Posey said, is that the regions the federal government and cartels are warring over — primarily northern border areas — have never been truly controlled by the government. “This is the land of Pancho Villa,” he said. “People just go out there and run around and do whatever they want.” The Colombian government, on the other hand, never lost complete control over metropolitan areas where cartels once held sway, Posey said. With U.S. help, they were able to retake power.
And that’s the last big factor, Posey said: American help. The Colombian government was open to military help from the United States to bring down Escobar and the Medellín cartel. In Mexico, the government would face severe political blowback if it were to allow U.S. intervention. “As of now, U.S. military boots on the ground in Mexico is just not going to happen,” Posey said. “It’s a very culturally sensitive issue.” Until that intervention takes place or the Mexican drug cartels come to some internal agreement and then make peace with the federal government, Posey said he expects the bloodletting to escalate for the foreseeable future. “Definitely years,” he said, “decades maybe.”
But UTEP’s Campbell — an anthropology professor and border crime expert — said Mexico has not seen the mass civilian casualties like those the Medellín caused with car bombs and airplane attacks. Colombia still has more than 2 million internal refugees displaced by drug-related violence, he said. Flight from the Mexican violence is increasing, he said, but nowhere near that level. And in Mexico, the cartels have not taken to murdering high-profile politicians and businessmen on the scale the Medellín did in Colombia, Campell said. While the violence in Mexico is certainly frightening and growing, and comparisons to Colombia are not unwarranted, he said, it’s not worse. Mexico is larger, more resilient and closer to the United States. “The U.S. is not going to let Mexico fall as hard as Colombia,” he said.
Story here.
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Asylum approvals for Mexicans up
April 02, 2010
“In fiscal year 2008, asylum officers and immigration judges combined approved 250 Mexican asylum petitions compared to 153 the previous year and 133 in 2006 — the formal start of the war on drugs launched by Mexican President Felipe Calderón. Separate figures from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services show an increase in Mexican asylum case approvals from fiscal year 2007 to 2008 — 146 to 264 — but a decrease to 249 in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2009. USCIS cases often cover more than one person.
Though still relatively small compared to the number of asylum petitions from other countries, Mexican asylum approvals are significant when you consider that virtually all were were denied in the early 1990s. The majority of new asylum applicants are former police officers, lawyers and journalists.”
Read the rest of the story here.
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Mexicans Facing Drug War Violence Could Seek Political Asylum in U.S.
April 01, 2010
By Ed Barnes
The violent drug wars in Mexico could upend efforts to curb illegal immigrants.
The spreading violence of the drug wars along the Mexican border may have one unintended consequence. It could upend efforts to curb illegal immigrants by giving Mexican border-crossers a tool they never had before: a valid claim for political asylum.
For decades, immigrants coming from Mexico were denied asylum because Mexico was a stable and relatively peaceful democracy. But that is changing now.
Last week, at least 30 Mexicans from the town of El Porvenir walked to the border crossing post at Fort Hancock, Texas, and asked for political asylum. Ordinarily, their claim would be denied as groundless, and they would be turned back. Instead, they were taken to El Paso, where they expect to have their cases heard.
No one doubts that they have a strong claim. Their town on the Mexican side of the border is under siege by one or more drug cartels battling for control of the key border crossing. According to Mike Doyle, the chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas, one of the cartels has ordered all residents of the town of 10,000 to abandon the city within the next month.
“They came in and put up a sign in the plaza telling everyone to leave or pay with their own blood,” Doyle said. Since then there has been a steady stream of El Porvenir residents seeking safety on the American side of the border, both legally and illegally. Among them are the 30 who are seeking political asylum.
In recent days the situation in the impoverished, dusty border town has grown worse. According to Jose Franco, the superintendent of schools in Fort Hancock, the cartels have threatened to execute children in school unless parents pay 5000 pesos in protection money.
And on Wednesday night, according to Doyle, several houses in El Porvenir were set on fire, and there were reports of cars loaded with furniture leaving the town.
Authorities fear that an incident might spark a mass exodus by the residents of El Porvenir that might cause them all to surge across the border at once.
Doyle says there are no plans yet to set up camps for an influx of refugees. “There is just no way to plan for that,” he said. “We are waiting to see what happens. We will use the standard natural disaster procedures if it happens — the Red Cross and housing at the schools, and if it gets worse, the state and the federal government will have to step in.”
If political asylum is granted and made available to a large section of the Mexican population, immigration experts say, it could have implications far beyond El Porvenir. They say it could open the floodgates for a new wave of immigration from Mexico, much as allowing Chinese to seek political asylum because of China’s one-child policy created a huge migration when it happened. After that ruling, tens of thousands of Chinese boarded boats and planes and told immigration officials they were seeking asylum because they were allowed to have only one child. Most were granted immigration papers and allowed to stay. Even those who made spurious claims were granted a hearing and often simply disappeared.
According to Will Matthews, an American Civil Liberties Union spokesman, the wall that has kept Mexicans from requesting political asylum has already cracked. He says that a decision by Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to send an police informant, Guillermo Eduardo Ramirez-Peyro, back to Mexico was overturned by the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that asylum could be granted to him and others based on the Convention Against Torture.
“The court said that under the convention, ‘acquiescence by government officials that could lead to a petitioner’s harm’ was grounds to grant political asylum,” he said. The court, however, did not grant asylum; it ordered the BIA to rehear the case. Last week, after five years, the BIA reversed course and granted Ramirez-Peyro political asylum.
According to Shuya Ohno of Reform Immigration for America, even if hundreds or thousands of Mexicans sought asylum because of the drug wars, it is not likely that many would get it. “It is a hard case to make and very few succeed,” he said. “Often it requires that those committing repression or threatening harm admit to it.”
However, he said, it is likely if that if thousands of Mexicans made the claim, “it would stress the system incredibly” as well as delay their deportations. He said that the immigration court system is already overloaded and often staffed by volunteers just to keep it moving, and that if it was flooded with asylum claims it would be in danger of failing.
Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said the situation was troubling. “The entire system of political asylum claims was set up for a different era,” he said. “It was to protect people from repressive governments but now is being used when there is just a general breakdown of order.”
He said that making a political asylum claim available to Mexicans along the border could result in a swamping of the already overloaded system and bring it to a grinding halt. “Once an avenue of appeal is opened, then it will become used” he said. And not just by those who qualify, but by thousands who don’t.
Story here.
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Drug cartels target Mexican army in brazen attacks
By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN and ALEXANDRA OLSON
April 02, 2010
REYNOSA, Mexico — In a ratcheting up of tactics in a long, bloody war, drug cartel gunmen made seven especially brazen assaults on Mexican soldiers in one day this week, throwing up roadblocks near army garrisons and spraying checkpoints with automatic weapons fire.
The apparently coordinated assaults raise the prospect that parts of Mexico could be descending into open warfare between the cartels and the government.
Drug bosses appeared to have little to show for Tuesday’s attacks near the Texas border except a body count for their own side: 18 attackers dead, while the military said its own casualties were limited to one soldier with a wounded toe.
But there have been more attacks since, and the battles have shown that gang henchmen are as well armed, if not as well trained, as the soldiers. Armored vehicles, explosive devices and grenade launchers were among the items the military seized.
The attacks are occurring as two cartels are engaged in a violent power struggle of their own. Experts on the drug war say drug lords are trying to get military patrols out of the way of the gangs’ increasingly bloody battle for trafficking routes in the northern border states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas.
“There does seem to be a shift in what’s permissible to the cartels. The army used to be off limits,” said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “There is an escalation in what the drug trafficking organizations are willing to do, but it’s hard to tell if it’s a permanent change in strategy.”
The battles climaxed Tuesday with seven assaults against army positions that left 18 attackers dead across Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas.
The first came when gunmen ambushed soldiers on patrol between Matamoros and the border city of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas. An hour later, cartel gunmen used trucks and cars to blockade a garrison in Matamoros and the main army base in Reynosa.
Troops were ambushed six more times throughout the region, including once in Reynosa when soldiers rushed to check reports of another blockade near the offices of Mexico’s state oil company. In each of the two deadliest battles, five gunmen were killed.
“What we saw … over the past couple of days is definitely an escalation in tactics,” said Alex Posey, a tactical analyst at Stratfor, a global intelligence company in Austin, Texas.
“When they have engaged the military patrols (previously), it’s been a shoot-and-run scenario. Maybe they throw a hand grenade and use small arms fire,” Posey said.
The battles indicate that at present, cartels are no real match for Mexico’s army — even when soldiers can’t call reinforcements from nearby army bases.
“This proves that (soldiers) are tactically superior to the cartel henchmen,” Posey said. Soldiers “were able to defeat pretty decisively an ambush on their locations. It actually appears like it was a botched operation from the cartels.”
The cartels, however, do match Mexico’s military in firepower: Soldiers confiscated more than 50 assault rifles, 61 grenades and eight homemade explosive devices, as well as grenade launchers and six armored vehicles.
The explosives underscore concerns that drug lords may turn to bombings. E-mails and other intercepted communication indicate that the cartels are seeking explosives for attacks, possibly on buildings or along roadsides, according to a federal intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release sensitive information.
In February, assailants stole a tractor-trailer carrying 18 tons of industrial explosives in the northern state of Coahuila, although it was later abandoned on the side of a road as federal police hunted for it.
“The explosives that they have seized have been relatively crude and unsophisticated,” Posey said. “But as with any bomb maker there is going to be a learning curve. The fact that we are starting to see (explosives) pop up and becoming more visible is definitely concerning.”
Brig. Gen. Edgar Luis Villegas said the cartels’ increasingly aggressive tactics are “desperate reactions by criminal gangs to the progress made by federal authorities.”
The government has arrested several top drug lords and their lieutenants since President Felipe Calderon deployed troops and federal police across the country more than three years ago to wrest territory from the cartels.
The human cost has been high: Drug-related violence in Mexico has claimed 17,900 lives. Killings of police and journalists are common, and gang members have resorted to especially brutal tactics such as decapitations and killing their enemies’ relatives in hopes of intimidating any who would oppose them.
The cartels have been battling not only authorities but each other, competing for turf and drug routes. Much of the current violence centers on a split between the powerful Gulf cartel and its former allies, the Zetas.
The Gulf cartel has apparently formed an alliance with other cartels seeking to exterminate the Zetas. Through banners and e-mails, it has warned residents not to leave their homes, saying the conflict will get worse.
“With the crime, we can’t do anything. We have a lot of fear of a stray bullet,” said a woman who sells roast chicken from her dirt-floor home next the main army base in Reynosa.
The woman, too terrified to give her name two days after gunmen blockaded the base, said her children are forbidden to leave the house except for school. She won’t let her 13-year-old daughter return to her job bagging groceries, even though the family desperate needs the money.
“When the children go to school, I’m scared that they’re not going to come back,” she said. “I want to go to church to pray for help but I can’t leave.”
Gunmen kept up the fight Thursday, blockading roads again in Reynosa. One attacker was killed in a shootout between soldiers and armed men in the city’s main Hidalgo Boulevard, according to the state government. Farther south in the port city of Tampico, gunmen ambushed a state police checkpoint, killing a commanding officer and wounding another policeman and bystander.
Mexican cities near the eastern end of the U.S. border had until recently been calm while drug violence claimed thousands of lives to the west. That started changing recently with the breakup of the Zetas-Gulf alliance.
The feud escalated when a member of the Zetas was killed in Reynosa in January, perhaps because he was in the Gulf cartel’s territory without properly announcing himself. Battles ensued when the Gulf cartel refused to hand over the man responsible to the Zetas, U.S. officials have said.
Story here.