Mexico Drug-War into US

Mexico's Murderous Drug War Spills Over U.S. Border

Posted 01/20/2012 06:39 PM ET

The Border: Eighteen months ago, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer was excoriated for warning of spillover from Mexico's war reaching our soil. Well, beheadings are becoming common now. Yet that war is still ignored.

Leading the charge in the summer of 2010, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank blasted Republican Gov. Brewer for claiming that Arizona's "law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded."

Brewer did admit she was in error at the time, but that's not what really interested Milbank and his fellow media minions.
I
n his column, Milbank cast Brewer's claim as misinformation intended to scare people into thinking violence from illegal immigration is worse than it actually is.

"Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world's No. 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong," Milbank wrote.

He wasn't the only one to pile on — CBS and the Guardian also jumped in.

Just one problem, though. Brewer may have jumped the gun months ago, but cartel beheadings have become a reality in Arizona — and are now jumping to other states.

Four months after the Arizona governor spoke, the first grisly cartel beheading occurred — in Arizona. Martin Alejandro Cota-Monroy's body was found Oct. 10, 2010 in Chandler, in what police believed had been a revenge attack for stealing cartel drugs.

 

 

A year later and 600 miles north in Oklahoma, the victim was not a person involved in the drug trade, but a 19-year-old human trafficking victim, Carina Saunders, who was killed by suspected cartel members to frighten another teenager into joining the cartel.
Three months later, in Tucson, another headless body was found on a desolate stretch of road.

Just this month, in Hollywood, Calif., the same sort of headless body was found in a canyon by some dog walkers. Police are saying they think the last two may be linked.

If so, it looks like the work of Mexico's cartels, says former Drug Enforcement Administration supervisor Phil Jordan. "It would lead me to believe the message wanted to be sent," he told KRGV television in Texas.
What's seen here is the very swift regularization of crime that, until recently, was thought to be Mexico's problem.

Brewer made her then-errant call for more vigilant border enforcement and was blasted by the media as if there wasn't an underlying problem.

Now the problem has grown, and the worst aspects of the Mexican drug war are flowing northward, becoming as hideously normal here as they are there.

That portends considerable trouble in coming months as what's "normal" grows ever more hideous.

Will car bombs be next? Twitterers and journalists be hanged from bridges? Political leaders corrupted and killed? Villages be emptied and their residents made refugees?

Just Friday, the Mexican government reported that the 2,276 war-related deaths in Mexico's Chihuahua state alone topped all civilian deaths in Afghanistan in the first 11 months of 2011 (2,177). A civilian in the state of Chihuahua had a nine times greater chance of being killed than an Afghan.

Now that war has spread here, the threat sounds extreme. But then again, so did Brewer when she warned of beheadings in the desert — and was mocked for it.

One thing is certain: They're here now.

So where are the mainstream media that had been so quick to criticize Brewer for calling attention to the very serious issue of Mexico's vicious drug war, which is now spilling over onto American soil?