Global News Journal

Numbed by Ciudad Juarez’s endless killings, Mexico shrugs off teen party deaths

The people of Ciudad Juarez are starting to lose all hope. When gunmen burst into a birthday party on Friday and killed 14 people, the horrific act should have at least shocked Mexican authorities into action. But even the sight of blood running out of a suburban patio, the broken chairs and the party-goers’ bodies slumped on the concrete have become all too familiar in the desert city across from El Paso, Texas.

It was at the start of 2010 that another, gruesomely similar shooting was warning enough that the city was spiraling toward criminal anarchy.

In January in a working class neighborhood just blocks away from Friday’s shooting, gunmen killed 15 people, again mainly teenagers, at a party. Back then, just like on Friday, a nearby federal police checkpoint seemed to turn a blind eye to what was going on and did nothing to stop the killers.

At the very least in January, the mother of one of the slain teenagers had the chance to vent her anger in person at Felipe Calderon, the conservative president who launched Mexico’s drug war four years ago. The Mexican leader was sufficiently moved by the January killings to fly to Ciudad Juarez and there, amid national outrage, he announced a plan to rebuild the broken, dirty mess of the city that was once lauded as a poster child for free trade, with its factories producing fridges and television for U.S. consumers.

Poverty, joblessness and a lack of a future for the young, it was rightly said, were the sources of much of the drug gang warfare that has broken out in Ciudad Juarez since 2008.

That reconstruction has included thousands of education grants, parks and community centers, hospital beds and giving almost 140,000 more people access to free medical care. There is even a sports field dedicated to the teenagers killed in January. But most of the streets of Ciudad Juarez are still folorn and many in the downtown that once catered to free-wheeling American tourists are filled with crumbling buildings. Childrens’ playgrounds lie abandoned, covered with graffiti. Killers are still at large.

Residents say that after eight months, a new federal police operation to fight drug gangs, and hundreds more murders, Calderon’s plan has failed. It’s hard to disagree.

In Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, new police are charged with stopping the violence

It is difficult to imagine things getting much worse in Ciudad Juarez, the manufacturing city across from El Paso that has become one of the world’s most dangerous places. Extortions, beheadings, bombs in cars, daylight shootouts and kidnappings are all daily fare in the border town once better known as a NAFTA powerhouse and party zone for fun seeking Americans. Even the Mexican army stands accused of abusing the trust citizens once placed in it, carrying out possibly hundreds of wrongful arrests and illegal house raids.

Things are so bad that business leaders are calling for a state of emergency to be called in the city on the Rio Grande with nighttime curfews in a bid to control the violence.  Around 10,000 businesses have closed in Ciudad Juarez over the past two years. A military-enforced curfew doesn’t resound much with residents who want the thousands of troops sent in by President Felipe Calderon to leave town for good. More than 6,700 people have died in drug killings since the army arrived in early 2008 and locals say the army-led crackdown on gangs has only provoked more violence across the city and its surrounding Chihuahua state.  (Click here for full Mexico drug war coverage)

The latest initiative implemented by Chihuahua state Governor Cesar Duarte, who took office for a six-year term this week, is to create a new, state-wide police force dissolving notoriously corrupt local cops. It fits in with Calderon’s plan to send a constitutional reform to Congress soon to give governors more power over the police in cities and towns where local mayors run the municipal police. The thousands of disparate municipal police forces across Mexico are the most ineffective and corrupt, seen as an outdated model unfit to fight drug gangs.

But things don’t look promising. Many mayors across Mexico are against the reforms and in Chihuahua, where the reform is going ahead, many of the same corrupt officers are being absorbed into the new force, despite promises of tough checks on dishonest police. Several officers accused of allowing criminals to steal 69 weapons from Chihuahua police headquarters last week were included in the new Chihuahua force.

The federal police are hardly setting an example either. In August, some 450 federal agents held a public protest to denounce their superiors that they say force them on pain of death into the drug trade. “They sell as foot soldiers to the drug gangs. Why isn’t the violence stopping? Just take a look at our bosses,” an agent told Reuters who declined to be named.

A costly U.S.-Mexico border wall, in both dollars and deaths

By Robin Emmott

Securing the United States’s border from illegal immigrants, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction “continues to be a major challenge,” says the United States Government Accountability Office in a new report. It is also proving to be expensive in both lives and money.

In dollar terms, the outlay is substantial. Every time someone breaks a hole in the U.S.-Mexico border wall, it costs about $1,300 to repair. The estimated cost of maintaining the 661-mile (1,058 km) double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile (3,000 km) border with Mexico over the next 20 years is $6.5 billion, the GAO report says. 

That is on top of the $3.7 billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative since 2005 to build a system of fencing, lighting, sensors, cameras and radars to keep out job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers.

While border agents say the wall is a tool that helps them protect the United States, the GAO report found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection cannot accurately determine the fence’s impact on improving border security, suggesting the money might not be well spent.

“What a waste in resources and creativity ,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera Valladares of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). “Our tax dollars are being wasted on an ineffective, old strategy instead of urgently working on serious, long term, workable immigration reform,” he said.

Arizona marijuana seizures hit all-time high

Large marijuana seizures are frequent in the sweltering Arizona deserts that straddle the superhighway for people smuggling from Mexico — although this year they are breaking all records. Last month the Tucson sector of the U.S. Border Patrol announced that agents had seized more than 500 tons of marijuana smuggled up from Mexico since October, a leap of about 40 percent over the same period last year.Border Patrol spokesman Mike Scioli says seizures of marijuana – which is grown in Mexico by the country’s powerful drug cartels, and forms the backbone of their profits — have become more frequent as security along the border tightens, with more agents and infrastructure, including miles of vehicle and pedestrian fencing.“Smugglers used to just drive vehicles over the border, now that the fence is in place, that’s prohibited them from doing that,” Scioli said of the barriers, part of 670 miles (1,080 kms) of fencing under construction border wide that block or snag trucks crossing north. “They’ve had to change and do things differently.”Scioli said agents are seizing more marijuana walked north over the searing deserts by smugglers carrying it in backpacks, as well as bundles attached to ultralight aircraft and flown below radar surveillance — which have appeared in recent months in Arizona.Federal border police have also found at least 16 clandestine drug tunnels punched beneath the border city of Nogales, Arizona, since October, which investigators say were used by affiliates of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel in a bid to avoid beefed up security at the ports of entry.The spike in seizures comes as both U.S. and Mexican authorities battle Mexico’s powerful cartels, which have killed more than 13,000 people since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006.President Barack Obama will fly to the western Mexican city of Guadalajara for his first North American leaders’ summit with Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Sunday, at which the current state of the war to crush the traffickers will be high on the agenda. Meanwhile, U.S. federal police say stepped up enforcement is hurting the drug gangs.“They are finding more resistance from both Mexican and U.S. law enforcement,” said Ramona Sanchez, a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Phoenix division. “Nowadays the stakes are too high, nowadays they cannot afford to lose a load” of narcotics.But while authorities make security gains, the multi-ton quantities of marijuana seized by border police in Arizona are but a tiny fraction of the total grown by Mexican cartels and smuggled north to meet the demands of an estimated 25 million Americans who smoke the drug.A recent drug threat assessment published by the U.S. government’s National Drug Intelligence Center pegged Mexican marijuana production at a massive 15,500 tons in 2007, the most recent year on record.Furthermore, it noted that the powerful cartels have moved much of their drug-farming operations to remote areas of the Western Sierra Madre Mountains, away from the Pacific coast states of Guerrero, Michoacan, and Nayarit, which had been the heart of eradication programs.The report also highlighted the resilient cartels’ savvy in relocating production, which also sought ”to reduce transportation costs to the southwest border and gain more direct access to drug markets in the United States.”For more Reuters coverage of the drug war click here.(Photos: Reuters and U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

from India Insight:

India, China take a measure of each other at border row talks

China and India are sitting down for another round of talks this week on their unsettled border, a nearly 50-year festering row that in recent months seems to have gotten worse.

China's Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo and India's National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan are unlikely to announce any agreement on the 3,500 km border, even a small one, but their talks this week may well signal how they intend to move forward on a relationship marked by a  deep, deep "trust deficit", as former Indian intelligence chief B. Raman puts it.

While the entire Himalayan border is disputed, including the Aksai Chin area, it is the row over large parts of India's Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern stretch of the mountains that has strained ties in recent months.

The Chinese, says Raman,  are demanding that at least the Tawang tract of Arunachal Pradesh, if not the whole of it, should be transferred to it.  They are apparently adamant that if that doesn't happen, there won't be any border settlement, he says.

India's position is that there can't be a transfer of populated areas in any border settlement. Tawang is a populated area, its citizens are Indians, New Delhi says.

So firmly have the Chinese dug their heels in, that they refused to endorse an Asian Development Bank  irrigation project in Arunachal Pradesh in June on grounds that it was its territory. Last month, India's Foreign Minister S. M. Krishna confirmed to parliament in a question-answer session media reports about the Chinese objection to the project which appeared to have stung India.

U.S. border agents under fire as Mexican smugglers fight back

Gunmen shot and killed U.S. Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas in California near the U.S.-Mexico border fence on July 23, the first such fatal shooting in more than a decade. In rugged desert where people smugglers and drug traffickers roam, Rosas was tracking a suspicious group of people near the rural town of Campo, about 60 miles (97 kms) east of San Diego.

After radioing for backup, he got out of his vehicle and started to follow members of the group as it split up. He was attacked, robbed of his weapon and shot several times in the head and abdomen.

Mexican police have rounded up five suspects believed to be coyotes, or people smugglers, and drug gang members, although the FBI, which is heading the investigation, considers the case unsolved.

While it unfolds, the probe into the murder of 30 year-old Rosas, father of two small children and whose memorial service is on Friday, is a test for U.S.-Mexican cooperation. Both countries are at pains to show a unified alliance in the drug war, underscored again by U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s visit to Mexico this week.

But Rosas’ murder is also a warning that Mexican organized crime is increasingly undaunted by U.S. law enforcement. In Mexico, well-armed drug cartels take on the army at will. Mexico’s escalating drug war has killed some 12,800 people since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his army-backed crackdown on cartels.

from India Insight:

Xinjiang – the spreading arc of instability

China's troubled Xinjiang region shares borders with eight countries, which is perhaps one reason President Hu Jintao dropped out of the G8 summit to head home, underscoring the seriousness of the situation and the need to quickly bring the vast oil-rich region under control.

Xinjiang touches Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, besides the Tibet Autonomous Region.

China, as this piece for the Council on Foreign Relations points out, has long been concerned that these states on its periphery both in central and south Asia may be tempted to back a separatist movement in Xinjiang because of the Uighurs' cultural ties to its neighbours.

To that extent it has cultivated close ties with some of these neighbours, even trying to promote direct trade between Xinjiang and the provinces of neighbouring countries just over the border.

In April this year, the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region signed an agreement to establish friendly provincial relations with Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, according to this report in the state-run China Daily.

The two sides agreed to explore partnership in oil and gas resources, bilateral trade and agriculture besides vowing to accelerate work on a long-planned direct rail link.

More importantly, Pakistan's ambassador to China, Masood Khan, who signed the agreement, said the two sides must deepen their partnership to oppose "terrorism, extremism and separatism."

Video Stories from Both Sides of the USA-Mexico Border

By Juliana Rincón Parra

Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content of this post — the views are the author’s alone.

Frontera Filmmakers is social networking website based in San Diego, California that unites video producers from both sides of the USA-Mexico border. Its members share links to more than two dozen films and trailers related to border politics and culture.

One documentary on the site, 389 Miles, tells the story of residents on both sides of border. In the 4 minute trailer, the director Luis Carlos Romero-Davis invites us to meet migrants who brave the desert crossing the border, volunteers searching for them in order to provide aid, and others who are there to protect their country from illegal immigrants. He also shows a partial interview with a smuggler who tells all about the human trafficking trade in the region.

In Contaminacion 202 [in Spanish] youngsters from Tijuana, Mexico explain why it is important to control pollution and contamination, with examples of ground, water and air pollution. 

A third video is titled Entre Corazón y Mar (Between Heart and Sea), and shows the building process of the fourth Pacific Rim Park in Baja California, Mexico, where Mexicans, US citizens, Russians and Chinese have gathered together in spite of language differences to build a monument that honors diversity.

There are many other videos on the Frontera Filmmakers site including animations, TV show pilots, and cultural excursions into the lives of people who live their lives at the edge of two worlds.