On the first Sunday of October, the Texan city of El Paso recorded its 10th murder of the year. On the same day, El Paso’s Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juarez, recorded its 1,809th murder of 2009. Mayhem on one side of the border, relative peace on the other.

The contrast is stunning. According to an annual ranking compiled by CQ Press, a Washington publishing house, El Paso is the third-safest large city in the U.S. (after Honolulu and New York). According to a Mexican think tank, Ciudad Juarez became the world’s most violent city this year, torn by a vicious free-for-all involving warring drug cartels, hit squads, common criminals, and the military.

The two cities form a sprawling metropolitan area of some 2.5 million, divided by a river and a border fence; united by family and business ties, history and now a shared fascination with Ciudad Juarez’s gradual descent into criminal anarchy. El Paso’s citizens follow the bloodletting across the river with rapt and horrified attention.

Border mayors, business executives and many residents along the 1,240-mile frontier between Texas and Mexico - more than half the 1,951-mile line between the U.S. and its southern neighbour - tend to frown at such phrases as “spillover violence” and “border war” because they conjure up an image of the U.S. border region as a lawless no-go area.

“There’s a wide gap between perception and reality,” says Manuel Ochoa of the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation, a non-profit consultancy for companies considering setting up shop in El Paso, southern New Mexico and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. “And the figures speak for themselves.”

You hear similar remarks elsewhere along the frontier. “Crime on the Texas border is still on the way down after decreasing 65 percent over the past several years,” according to Chad Foster, the mayor of Eagle Pass (its Mexican twin is Piedras Negras) and chairman of the Texas Border Coalition of mayors, county judges and economic development experts.

Many of them complain that politicians in Washington and Austin, the Texas state capital, make decisions on the border region without consulting the people most intimately familiar with its problems. The coalition reacted with irritation to an announcement by governor Rick Perry in September that he would send National Guardsmen and Texas Rangers to “high-crime areas along the border.”

“Your remarks…create a public impression of lawless hordes overrunning the border region and do not reflect our collective experience,” the coalition said in a letter to Perry. “While each of our communities has their own unique issues, being overrun by criminal elements from Mexico is not one of them.”

CARTELS AND BUSINESS SENSE

If that is the case, why not? Answers to that question range from a strong law enforcement presence in border towns to tightened border controls. Last but not least: it doesn’t make business sense for the drug cartels to export their violent disputes across the river.

“Let’s not forget the economics at stake here,” Richard Wiles, the sheriff of El Paso county and a former El Paso police chief said in an interview. “These are illicit business enterprises which exist to make profits. The last thing they want are even tighter controls of the ports of entry in response
to violent actions here. They remember what happened after September 11.”

After the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, scrutiny at border crossing points was so intense that south-north traffic backed up for endless hours in delays that crippled both legal and illegal trade. “They don’t want that to happen again.”

For good reason. According to estimates by the Department of Homeland Security, smuggling drugs across a port of entry presents less than 30 percent risk of detection, compared with a 70 percent risk for those crossing the Rio Grande and the open spaces between crossing points.

The sharply different levels of violence south and north of the border do not mean that American border cities have entirely escaped contagion. The suspect arrested in El Paso’s tenth murder this year, for example, was a teenager from Ciudad Juarez. And in May, three gunmen killed Jose Daniel Gonzalez, a drug trafficker turned informer for the U.S. government, in front of his suburban El Paso home.

Still, these cases are exceptions - so far. Curiously, the two American cities most affected by disputes between drug traffickers do not sit astride the border but are several hours’ drive from it. They are Tucson, 60 miles from the Arizona-Mexico frontier, and Phoenix, 120 miles away.

Tucson has been plagued by a rash of home invasions, most of them tied to the drug trade, that often feature criminals pretending to be law enforcement officers. They burst into houses to steal drugs, cash or guns. In Phoenix, kidnappings for ransom have become so routine that law enforcement officials call the city the U.S. kidnap capital. Most of the kidnappers, and their victims, have ties to Mexican criminal organizations.

Their activities in the U.S. have grown quietly and relentlessly. In 2006, according to a Senate hearing on Mexican drug cartels in March, they were active in around 50 U.S. cities. Now, they dominate the world’s richest drug market (move over, Colombians!) and have a presence in at least 230 cities, says the National Drug Intelligence Center. Its website has a map showing those cities.

Economics 101. Supply meets demand, as far away from the southern border as Kalamazoo, Michigan and Billings, Montana.

– You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com –

Why have billions of dollars and thousands of anti-narcotics agents around the world failed to throttle the global traffic in cocaine, heroin and marijuana? Blame wrong-headed policies, largely driven by the United States, and what experts call the balloon effect.

Squeezing a balloon in one place makes it expand in another. Destroy drug crops in one region and cultivation moves to another. Cut a supply route in one place and another one springs up. Take the example of Colombia and Mexico, at present a focus of U.S. attention because of large-scale violence that threatens to spill across the border.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, almost all the cocaine consumed in the United States was grown in Colombia and shipped to South Florida along a variety of sea and air routes. Colombian traffickers fighting for market share turned Miami into a city where shootouts, contract killings and kidnappings became part of daily life.

That began to change when enraged citizens appealed to the federal government for help to crack down on the “cocaine cowboys.” Then President Ronald Reagan established a special force to cut the cocaine pipelines and end the violence. “The Mexicans must rue the day the South Florida Task Force was set up,” said Peter Reuter, a scholar at the University of Maryland. “That was the beginning of the problems it faces today.”

Within weeks of its formation in 1982, the task force scored several spectacular successes. A string of seizures of large quantities of cocaine and marijuana prompted Colombian trafficking organisations to shift their smuggling routes to Mexico, where they partnered with criminal networks.

By 1988, the balloon effect had become obvious: The Mexican Defence Ministry reported it had discovered 4.8 tonnes of cocaine in a cave in Chihuahua near the U.S. border. It was then the world’s biggest seizure of the drug. Its Colombian origin was not in doubt — Mexico produced no cocaine of its own.

Now, two decades later, the U.S. State Department estimates that as much as 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States comes through Mexico, which is also a major source of heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana. The State Department’s estimates speak volumes about the failure of policies that emphasised crop eradication, interdiction and punishment for drug users.

FARTHER AWAY THAN EVER

As a Latin American commission led by three former presidents (of Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil) put it recently: “Prohibitionist policies based on the eradication of production and on the disruption of drug flows as well as on the criminalization of consumption have not yielded the expected results. We are farther away than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs.”

If it were possible to seal the border, there would be no reason for Mexico’s drug mafias to wage war against each other. They are fighting for access to the main gateways into the U.S. In one border city alone, Ciudad Juarez, more than 1,000 people have been killed in the first two months of the year.

There has been growing criticism of the war on drugs, and not only from advocates of legalization who argue that drugs should be sold and regulated in the same way as alcohol and tobacco is now regulated.

On a visit to Mexico this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade.” Though it was a statement of the obvious — the drug trade is driven by the laws of supply and demand — officials of previous administrations have not been nearly as blunt.

Discussing the drug problem as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama he said he believed in “shifting the paradigm, shifting the model so that we can focus more on a public health approach.”

The public health approach, know as “harm reduction” in a global dispute over drug strategies, means treating drug addicts not as criminals who participate in an illegal market but as patients who deserve care in the public health system. Most of Europe favors harm reduction over filling the prisons with drug abusers, the standard procedure in the United States.

On any give day, about half a million people are behind bars in the United States for drug offences. Obama’s choice of drug czar, Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowski, signals a new direction, at least in the drug war at home. Seattle has been on the forefront of drug reform developments, including a needle exchange program for addicts. And for Seattle police, marijuana arrests have been the lowest law enforcement priority.

The drug czar heads the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, a 130-member group which sets anti-drug policy. “The success of our efforts to reduce the flow of drugs is largely dependent on our ability to reduce demand for them,” Kerlikowske said after his nomination.

Reducing demand for illicit drugs in the United States, the world’s largest market, is an ambitious goal. Earlier attempts have failed, including Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. A program still active called DARE — Drug Abuse Resistance Education — aimed at high school students is drawing mixed reviews.

But optimists point to the success of campaigns to discourage smoking by making it socially unacceptable. It took a long time. But it worked.

On January 12th, President Felipe Calderón and then President Elect Barack Obama held their first working meeting in Washington, DC, reflecting their commitment to strengthen the bilateral relationship. The conversation between the two leaders made it abundantly clearly that designing a framework that will simultaneously ensure the common prosperity and the common security of both our peoples remains the central conundrum our two nations face in a post 9-11 world.

Mexico is fully aware that a threat to the security of the United States will profoundly affect the bilateral relationship, and therefore common border security has been and will continue to be a top-priority. In this regard, a clear and present threat we both face is transnational organized crime.

From the outset of his administration, President Calderón committed himself to spearheading a battle aimed at dismantling drug trafficking organizations. These efforts have yielded significant results, including world-record seizures of narcotics, cash and weapons, as well as unprecedented levels of cooperation with the United States in the area of extraditions. As a result, on the U.S. side of the border, there are positive indications of decreased cocaine and methamphetamine availability, and a consequent increase in the retail price and decrease in the purity of these drugs.

These advances have not come without a steep human and financial cost for Mexico. Yet President Calderón is fully committed to continue this fight. But the transnational nature of this phenomenon makes it difficult for our country to successfully confront this threat on its own.

The most critical challenge, given the recent violence unleashed by drug traffickers, is the illegal flow of weapons from the United States into Mexico. The Mexican Government, with the help of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, estimates that 90 percent of the weapons that have been seized from drug-traffickers have entered our country illegally from the U.S.. This percentage should come as no surprise given the abundance of Federal firearms licensed dealers (FFL’s) and gun shows along the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2007 there were approximately 7,600 registered FFL’s in border states alone.

The latest record-seizure of weapons in Mexico is indicative of what law enforcement officials confront in the field and why they are often outgunned, and a powerful reminder of why the U.S. has to put a stop to the traffic of weapons into Mexico. Last November, in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexican authorities seized in a single shipment of 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 288 assault rifles, 14 Herstal semi-automatic pistols, 7 Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, 2 grenade launchers, 1 LAW rocket launcher, and 287 fragmentation grenades. This cache of arms adds to the staggering total so far seized during President Calderón’s first two years in office: 30,231 weapons (16,401 of which were assault weapons), more than 3.5 million rounds of ammunition, and 2,196 grenades.

In the face of this flood of weapons, there is much that the United States can do to help Mexico roll back drug syndicates. For example, enforcing existent legislation, such as the Arms Export Control Act, would effectively criminalize the sale of weapons to individuals whose intent is to export these firearms to countries such as Mexico where they are illegal. Furthermore, a return to the import ban on assault weapons in accordance with the 1968 Gun Control Act would prohibit the importation of such weapons unless they are used for sporting purposes, while the passage of a bill to regulate .50 mm caliber firearms under the National Firearms Act would go a long way in helping to reduce the number of assault weapons flowing into Mexico.

Beyond the enforcement of existing legislation and the enactment of new provisions, the three main agencies that have authority over this issue —the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF); Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)— are all in dire need of the resources that would enhance their interdiction and intelligence capabilities, enabling them to put a stop to the southbound flow of weapons, and to investigate, determine and detain individuals that are bundling weapons from gun shows and FFL dealers so as to introduce them illegally into Mexico.

Mexico needs the support of the United States to stop the illegal flow of weapons into our country, as this would have a significant impact on Mexican criminal organizations, de-fanging the drug trafficking organizations of their fire-power and further fragmenting the drug syndicates. At the end of the day, our ultimate challenge is whether Mexico and the U.S. are able and willing to play chess instead of checkers and move toward the most fundamental paradigmatic shift of our common history: building a true strategic partnership. We can succeed together, but if Mexico fails, the U.S. will also fail. We need bold visions, statesmanship and hard questions tackled head-on on both sides of the border.

Mexico is ready to play its part with the new U.S. administration.

What do Pakistan and Mexico have in common? They figure in the nightmares of U.S. military planners trying to peer into the future and identify the next big threats.

The two countries are mentioned in the same breath in a just-published study by the United States Joint Forces Command, whose jobs include providing an annual look into the future to prevent the U.S. military from being caught off guard by unexpected developments.

“In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico,” says the study - Joint Operating Environment 2008 - in a chapter on “weak and failing states.” Such states, it says, usually pose chronic, long-term problems that can be managed over time.

But the little-studied phenomenon of “rapid collapse,” according to the study, “usually comes as a surprise, has a rapid onset, and poses acute problems.” Think Yugoslavia and its 1990 disintegration into a chaotic tangle of warring nationalities and bloodshed on a horrific scale.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan, where al-Qaeda has established safe havens in the rugged regions bordering on Afghanistan, is a regular feature in dire warnings. Thomas Fingar, who retired as the U.S.’s chief intelligence analyst in December, termed Pakistan “one of the single most challenging places on the planet.”

This is fairly routine language for Pakistan, but not for Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile border with the United States.

Mexico’s mention beside Pakistan in a study by an organization as weighty as the Joint Forces Command (which controls almost all conventional forces based in the continental U.S.) speaks volumes about growing concern over what’s happening south of the U.S. border.

Vicious and widening violence pitting drug cartels against each other and against the Mexican state have left more than 8,000 Mexicans dead over the past two years. Kidnappings have become a routine part of Mexican daily life. Common crime is widespread. Pervasive corruption has hollowed out the state.

In November, in a case that shocked even those (on both sides of the border) who consider corruption endemic in Mexico, former drug czar Noe Ramirez was charged with accepting at least $450,000 a month in bribes from a drug cartel in exchange for information about police and anti-narcotics operations.

A month later, a Mexican army major, Arturo Gonzalez, was arrested on suspicion he sold information about President Felipe Calderon’s movements for $100,000 a month. Gonzalez belonged to a special unit responsible for protecting the president.

DESCENT INTO CHAOS?

Depending on one’s view, the arrests are successes in a publicly-declared anti-corruption drive or evidence of how deeply criminal mafias have penetrated the organs of the state.

According to the Joint Forces study, the possibility of a sudden collapse in Mexico is less likely than in Pakistan “but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.”

It added: “Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.”

What form such a response might take is anyone’s guess and the study does not spell it out, nor does it address the economic implications of its worst-case scenario. Mexico is the third biggest trade partner of the United States (after Canada and China) and its third-biggest supplier of oil (after Canada and Saudi Arabia).

No such ties bind the United States and Pakistan but the study sees a collapse there not only as more likely but also as more catastrophic.

It would bring “the likelihood of a sustained violent and bloody civil and sectarian war, an even bigger haven for violent extremists, and the question of what would happen to its nuclear weapons. That ‘perfect storm’ of uncertainty alone might require the engagement of U.S. and coalition forces into a situation of immense complexity and danger … and with the real possibility that nuclear weapons might be used.”

It is not clear where on the long list of actual and potential crises around the world Mexico and Pakistan will rank once Barack Obama takes office as U.S. president on Jan. 20. During the election campaign, Obama repeatedly criticized Pakistan for not cracking down hard enough on terrorists inside its borders.

Since then a new Pakistani president came to power. Not long after, tensions between Pakistan and India, also a nuclear power, rose sharply after gunmen attacked two luxury hotels and other sites in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, and killed 179 people. India described the attack as a conspiracy hatched in Pakistan and carried out by Pakistanis.

Closer to home, the U.S. economic crisis looks likely to slow down a $1.4 billion assistance program (military equipment, training, technology) to help the Mexican government gain the upper hand over the drug cartels and re-establish control over what some have called “failed cities” along the border, places where shootouts, beheadings and kidnappings have become routine.

It would take a very rosy outlook on the future to expect rapid progress.

For previous columns by Bernd Debusmann, click here. You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com.

On the campaign trail, President-elect Barack Obama pledged to rethink U.S. trade policy.   The initial nomination of Xavier Becerra as United States Trade Representative was a signal that Obama will work to fulfill that promise. Congressman Becerra declined the offer and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk has been chosen to head the office instead.  Given Kirk’s enthusiastic support for NAFTA, he will receive close scrutiny as he takes over a USTR that has the mandate of rethinking U.S. trade policy.

Regardless of the messenger, Obama has pledged to fundamentally change U.S. trade policy.  To this end, there are four early priorities for Kirk and Obama: honor existing commitments under the WTO, press for an equitable completion of the Doha Round, conduct a thorough evaluation of major U.S. trade agreements, and enact comprehensive trade adjustment assistance legislation.

The immediate first step is to honor the WTO ruling that deemed that the $3.2 billion in annual cotton subsidies and $1.6 billion in export credits violate trade rules.  The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy estimates that U.S. cotton subsidies caused damages of $400 million between 2001 and 2003 alone for poor African cotton-producing countries, where more than 10 million people depend directly on the crop.

Returning to multilateralism by honoring the cotton ruling would not only aid poor farmers but would also allow the U.S. to regain legitimacy at the WTO by sending signal to developing countries that the U.S. no longer preaches a global trade policy of “do as we say, not as we do”.

Second, Obama and Kirk should move to complete the Doha Round on terms that benefit both the U.S. and its trading partners.  A core principle of a reconfigured Doha Round should be the recognition that developing countries need the policy space to deploy the kinds of government measures that have been proven to work for development in the west.  According to separate studies by the World Bank and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the deal debated while Bush was in office would have yielded only $6.7 billion to 21.4 billion (or less than a penny per person per day) for the poor.  Rich countries were projected to see per capita income gains 25 times those in developing countries. (Read the full report here.)

Third, Obama’s first year in office should also honor his pledge to evaluate impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other major trade agreements. It is essential that the assessment analyzes the economic, environmental, social and regulatory impacts of past agreements on the U.S. economy– and on our trading partners.

Under NAFTA, Mexico did witness a surge in exports and foreign investment, and for a while a bump in employment. However, such increases did not translate into growth and prosperity - economic growth in per capita terms has been just over 1percent annually and poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation remain persistent.  This has cost the U.S. in terms of lost markets and raises political tensions at home due to the fact that NAFTA’s failure in Mexico gives 500,000 Mexicans a year the incentive to migrate to the U.S.

Until a comprehensive assessment of NAFTA and other past agreements is completed, there should be a moratorium on new U.S. trade agreements – including the pending deal with Colombia. According to the UN, the agreement as tailored will actually make Colombia worse off by up to $75 million or one-tenth of 1 percent of its GDP. In addition, reducing tariffs will strip the government of funds needed for combating guerrillas, fighting crime and developing their economy. According to a new study by the Inter-American Development Bank, the tariff revenue losses for Colombia will amount to $520 million per year.

The findings from a comprehensive review should guide the formation of new Trade Promotion Authority legislation that forges clear guidelines for the renegotiation of past agreements and provides a template for future trade policy. Two Democrats, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Congressman Mike Michaud of Maine, have recently introduced the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (Trade) Act that can provide a guidepost for the assessment process. The Trade Act requires a review of existing trade agreements and a renegotiation of those agreements based on the review. It sets terms of what must and must not be included in future trade agreements.

Finally, any new U.S. trade policy should be coupled with strong Trade Adjustment Assistance legislation in the United States that extends assistance to more manufacturing workers and to services workers, creates incentives to redevelop communities hit by the loss of manufacturing, extends healthcare to those affected by plant closures and reforms unemployment insurance for those displaced by trade policies.

Barack Obama supported these types of policies when serving in Congress.  He made a promise on the campaign trail to rethink U.S. trade policy while president.  Ron Kirk’s job is to help make these promises a reality.

Last year, around 2,500 Mexicans died in the twin wars drug cartels are waging against each other and against the Mexican state, using weapons smuggled in from the United States. In the first 11 months of this year, the death toll was 5,367, according to the Mexican attorney general. Next year?

There is no end in sight. At least two of the lethal ingredients in the toxic brew that fuels Mexico’s ever-widening violence are unlikely to change: lax American gun laws and a Mexican border that barely controls north-south traffic. On many of the crossing points along the 2,000-mile frontier, travelers coming in from the United States, by car or on foot, are routinely waved through without even having to show identity papers.

Weak Mexican border controls rarely feature in official or academic reports on a problem that has prompted some experts and U.S. publications to wonder whether Mexico is a “failing state”. That’s the headline over a cover story on Mexico in the latest edition of the business magazine Forbes. Mexican officials reject the label.

But privately, they concede that Mexican authorities are doing a less-than-thorough job in searching and monitoring north-south traffic. They tend to point in the other direction, to the easy availability of guns in the United States, the armory of Mexico’s criminal mafias.

According to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the agency charged with regulating the firearms industries, there are 9,161 licensed arms dealers in the four states bordering Mexico — California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Buyers from licensed establishments need to go through a background check and the serial numbers of their purchases can be traced.

No background checks and no paperwork is necessary for weapons traded between private citizens on the “secondary” market — gun shows, over the Internet, through classified advertisements. Around 40 percent of all gun sales in the United States, where private citizens own at least 200 million guns, are on the informal market, estimates the Violence Policy Center, a Washington-based group in favor of tougher gun controls.

How many guns are smuggled across the porous border? Nobody knows, and a frequently used figure of 2,000 every day appears to be more of an urban legend than an estimate based on evidence. It would amount to 730,000 smuggled guns a year.

Whatever the number, it is enough for the U.S. State Department, on its website, to advise citizens contemplating a visit to Mexico that “recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have taken on the characteristics of small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and, on occasion, grenades”.

AMONG WEAPONS OF CHOICE: COP KILLERS

Almost all the weapons seized inside Mexico or left at the scene of shootouts have been traced back to the United States through eTrace, an electronic system the ATF set up to trace illicit firearms. The cartel killers’ weapons of choice: AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles. Favorite pistols: Colt .38 Super, Glock 9 millimeter, and the FN 5-7, nicknamed “cop killer” because it can pierce a flak jacket at a range of 300 meters.

All these can be legally (and easily) acquired in the United States by citizens and legal residents without a criminal record, after a background check with the Federal Bureau of Investigations that often takes less than 15 minutes. The ease with which Americans can get arms flares into public controversy at regular intervals, usually after a gun owner with a grudge commits a massacre in a school or other public place.

Attempts to introduce more restrictions have failed regularly, and this year the Supreme Court ended decades of legal argument by ruling that the second amendment of the U.S. constitution, written 219 years ago, does guarantee an individual’s right “to keep and bear arms”.

Even Eduardo Medina Mora, the outspoken Mexican attorney general who makes no secret of his frustration with the flow of weapons from the north, seems resigned to the prospect that the United States will not change its gun laws to keep Mexico from sliding into deeper trouble.

“Although … it may seem absurd to us that a (U.S.) citizen can buy an AK-47, an AR-15, or a Barrett .50, it’s the law of the land,” he told the Spanish newspaper El Pais in November. The last item on his list is a sniper rifle that costs $8,650, weighs 30 pounds and can punch through an armored vehicle from a mile away.

On the U.S. side of the border, the ATF has just launched an advertising campaign in Arizona to remind citizens that buying guns on behalf of others — so called-straw purchases — carries penalties of up to 10 years in jail. Using straw buyers has been one of the cartels’ methods to evade background checks. Gun shows are another.

Just before entering Mexico, large signs at crossing points read: “Warning: Firearms and Ammunition Illegal in Mexico.” Chances that you are stopped and searched by Mexican officials are slim.

Reuters correspondent Tim Gaynor, author of a forthcoming book on the frontier (Midnight on the Line: The Secret Life of the U.S.-Mexico Border) reports: “In scores of crossings I have made to Mexico over several years, I have been stopped on just two or three occasions. Never once have I had my car searched. The odds are heavily in favor of the smugglers.”

Time for Mexico to start watching its border rather than pointing a finger at the United States?

You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com. For previous columns by Bernd Debusmann, click here.