THE MEXICAN CARTEL THREAT JUST INSIDE OUR DOOR: SIESTA TIME AT HOMELAND SECURITY?
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/569220/201104141855/The-Threat-Just-Inside-Our-Door.htm
National Security: The Defense Department warns that the cartels making Mexico a war zone are operating easily here too. And a secret U.S. report leaked in Mexico warns of even worse. So why isn’t anyone talking about it?
To hear Janet Napolitano tell it, as she did March 25 at El Paso’s Bridge of the Americas, security at the U.S.-Mexican border “is better now than it ever has been.” The secretary of homeland security has since denounced those warning of Mexico’s war spilling into the U.S. as “simply inaccurate” and dismissed warnings from state leaders from Texas to California as nothing but bids to score “political points.”
But it’s Napolitano who’s playing politics, as evidenced by statements she’s made that stand in contrast to what the rest of the government says and knows.
On Tuesday, William F. Wechler, deputy assistant secretary of defense, told a Senate armed services subcommittee on emerging global threats that “all of your constituencies are under threat.”
“It is important to recognize,” Wechler testified, “that when we discuss the transnational nature of this threat, this includes criminal activities that take place outside as well as within the United States.
“The drug trade is inherently associated with creating instability” and is “often a localized funding source for insurgent and criminal groups.”
As for Mexico’s cartels, he said they operate in Atlanta, Chicago and Detroit. Amazingly enough, that was an understatement.
According to an internal Justice Department report leaked to Mexico’s El Universal this week and available only in Spanish, Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have affiliates in at least 1,286 U.S. cities, with 143 reporting directly to cartel leaders.
Translating from the El Universal report, InsightCrime.com said the Sinaloa Cartel, run by Mexico’s biggest kingpin, Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, operates in 75 U.S. cities.
The Zetas, a separate organization known for beheadings, operate in 37. Then there’s the Gulf Cartel operating in 37 cities, the Juarez Cartel in 33, the Beltran-Leyva Organization in 30, La Familia in 27 and the Tijuana cartel in 21.
That would explain why Phoenix has seen beheadings, Las Vegas has seen child kidnappings, Los Angeles has seen freeway shootings and both El Paso and Brownsville, Texas, have seen the murder of American college students.
No such news, however, has been forthcoming from the U.S. press, and Napolitano dismisses as politics warnings from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who last year notified President Obama of “a dire threat massing on our border.”
Politics? Who has failed to build a border fence, enforce immigration laws or get serious about U.S. aid to help Mexico clean itself up and fight the drug war? Doing nothing, which is the Obama administration’s way of pleasing the open-borders lobby, is directly responsible for the new menace of the cartels inside our border.
The implications of this are major. The cartels here are the same monsters responsible for the mass graves turning up south of the border. Two more were discovered in Sinaloa and Durango this week, after the discovery of 127 dead in an open pit in Tamaulipas (near Mexico’s 101 “Highway of Death”) and 30 dug up in Tijuana.
Had such atrocities occurred in Libya, there’s little doubt it would be front-page news. But since it’s on and inside our border, it takes second place to Napolitano’s constituency-group politics
At the same time, everything we can possibly do to secure the border, extradite major suspects and combat this scourge goes wanting. It’s time for the Obama administration to wake up to this real and growing threat.
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