Border 'Surge'; Mexican Troops' Big Build-Up

There is another military surge at work in the world, but, unlike Iraq, this one doesn't seem to be yielding any results. And the U.S. may be partly to blame. The El Paso Times reports that the Mexican Army has deployed to the border towns of Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa in order to stem the escalating violence along the border. Pictured to the left is a Mexican soldier manning a Mk19 automatic grenade launcher at a checkpoint in Juarez. That's the same type of weaponry we have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the Times:

B**ut in Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros and Reynosa, soldiers in armored cars surrounded police stations to check whether the police officers' weapons, radios and phones were connected to crimes. No arrests were reported.

Soldiers blocked streets and checked cars Tuesday in Central Juárez, and they stood guard in front of the Centro Medico de Especialidades, a hospital on Americas Avenue where Fernando Lozano Sandoval, the commander of the Chihuahua state bureau of investigation, was being treated for severe gunshot wounds.
Lozano was ambushed by several men in two vehicles Monday night.

Since the beginning of the year, Juárez has had
29 homicides, state police said, or more than one killing a day. Many of the killings were drug-related street executions, but the statistics also include the sexual murder Sunday of a 10-year-old girl in her house, and the murder Monday of a pregnant housewife, allegedly by her father-in-law.

The number of homicides has been going up -- 304
homicides in 2007 compared with 243 the year before -- the attorney general of the state of Chihuahua said. El Paso had 16 homicides in
2007.

The military deployment in Juarez is modest, but is a reflection of the growing escalation of violence along the border. Up to 25,000 soldiers from the Mexican Army are operating all along the border, but this didn't stop three Mexican police officers in Tijuana from being kidnapped and executed in early January. And, citing security concerns, the US Army has even banned soldiers at Fort Bliss from crossing into nearby Juarez.

**

Drugs and the shift of meth production from the US to Mexico is fueling the violence as groups like Los Zetas battle for control of the drug trade. But, US appetite for drugs isn't the only driving force. Back in July 2007, the Christian Science Monitor reported that guns smuggled from the US were being used in the Mexico's drug wars.

*Marcelo Garza y Garza, the top state police investigator in Nuevo Leon, walked out of a church in an upscale neighborhood in Monterrey to take a cellphone call last September, when two bullets struck the back of his head.
*

*The shots came from a semiautomatic pistol that did precisely what its colloquial name – **matapolicia, or "police killer" – suggests. Mr. Garza y Garza died immediately.
*

*"Police killers," so named because they were created to penetrate bulletproof vests, are among the newest weapons streaming into Mexico from the
United States. Some 200 seized in Mexico last year – including the one used in the Garza murder – had been purchased in the US, and many more are in circulation, say authorities. *

These guns, though, are a fraction of the high-powered weaponry purchased legally or illegally in stores and at gun shows in Texas, Arizona, and California and smuggled by the thousands into Mexico. Moreover, the demand for combat-style guns is on the rise, as drug traffickers arm themselves to the teeth to compete for control of trade routes into the US and, more recently, to resist a massive military crackdown that began when President Felipe Calderón took office in December.

Mexico has very strict gun laws so most of the weaponry used in crime in Mexico has to be smuggled in.
To stem this crisis, US and Mexican authorities have recently expanded their crackdown on gunrunning.

*Taking aim at smugglers supplying weapons to
Mexican drug cartels, federal law enforcement officials on Wednesday announced they are strengthening efforts to identify people and routes involved in the illegal trade. Michael J. Sullivan, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, traveled from Washington, D.C., to announce that the bureau will spend more than
$10 million annually to add 35 special agents and 15 investigators to its Southwest border operations. In the past two years, the bureau has dedicated about 100 agents and 25 investigators to the region, officials said.

*The expansion of "Project Gunrunner" also will provide access to a weapons-tracing system, called eTrace, to six more
U.S. consulates in Mexico by March 2008, Sullivan said. The system is already available in three consulates and is the source of the relatively sparse information that is now available.

Although officials say they don't know the problem's true scope, about 90
percent of the approximately 12,000 confiscated weapons Mexican authorities provided in the past three years were traced back to the
U.S.

*From the data available, it appears demand is increasing for combat-style weapons with more punch and capacity, officials said. The trend to more powerful weapons has been attributed to turf wars among drug cartels and an increased official effort in
Mexico to confront drug smuggling and gang activity.

I grew up on the border (26.8 miles from Matamoros to be precise), and it always seemed to be more of an abstraction than a "concrete" barrier. People, goods, money, and illicit activities permeate back and forth. Plus, Mexico's troubles have a history of migrating north so their problems become ours.

Friends in South Texas have told me that shops are shuttered in Mexican border towns, and that in Laredo, TX the violence as created a mini housing boom as Mexicans with the means have moved north. And for your average Mexican? I'm guessing that the desire to get out of the crossfire makes "El Norte" look more and more attractive. As violence escalates, so might illegal immigration. So either we'd better get to work on that fence or continue to expand programs like Project Gunrunner.