THE BORDER REPORT

El Imparcial is reporting that Puerto Penasco’s chief of police was gunned down last night along with his bodyguard.

Police chief Erick Landagaray Macías took six AK-47 rounds and his bodyguard another seven. Both men survived and were taken to a hospital in Hermosillo. It’s the third or fourth shooting in that area since last week; there have also been gun battles up the highway in Sonoyta.

Last month, the government of Sonora grew testy with the State Department who had published a warning that armed men were running fake checkpoints on the highway from Sonoyta to Rocky Point. The state government and the American business community in Rocky Point, in their typical fashion, claimed the warnings were not true.

THE BORDER REPORT

Here’s a story I wrote for High Country News about a murder mystery on the Arizona-Sonora border. Well, the mystery, and its ensuing political theatrics.

THE BORDER REPORT

Well here’s a fine idea from our elected politicos. Madres, que bola de ratas.

Fearing that terrorists will smuggle a nuclear weapon (!!!) across the border, a Republican nominee for a northern New Mexico district thinks it’s a fine idea to install land mines along the U.S.-Mexico border.

I would like to say that Republican hopeful Tom Mullins is merely stoking the fires of fear that propagate so many wild tales of the borderlands, but I don’t know the guy well enough to judge whether he’s serious or merely insane. Or both. On one hand, he could be taking the land mine position to posture for the low hanging votes of northern New Mexico’s hard right wing.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Well here’s a move we didn’t predict: It appears that first came the gun, then came the rocks.

A cellphone video obtained by Univsion shows a U.S. Border Patrol agent drawing his weapon to keep two Mexican nationals from fleeing back to Mexico, an escalation that puts last Monday’s killing of a teenage boy nicely in context.

The Americans were quick to inform the media last night that the dead kid, Sergio Hernandez, was a known migrant smuggler, a tactic that suggests a bit of desperation on the their part. And I think we’re beginning to see why.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Monday’s border shooting has become a question of mere yards, but those yards change everything and the FBI appears to be changing its initial assessment of what exactly happened when the Border Patrol agent shot and killed the teenage boy.

El Universal reports that the mother of the 14-year-old boy slain at the U.S.’s border with Ciudád Juárez  claims the agent walked into Mexico and shot the boy at close-range. First question is, how would she know? Tearful interviews make great drama but unless she witnessed the shooting herself, she’s a poor source. Maybe she did, that’s not clear in the story or any others that I’ve read so far.

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