THE BORDER REPORT

Something strange is brewing in the U.S. Attorney's Office for Arizona and I have a sneaking suspicion what it may be.

The federal prosecutor's office has been declining some significant cases in the past year and I wonder if it's because the attorneys are buried with immigration cases. Homeland Security started pushing for prosecution of the migrants it captures in its Arizona sectors last year, part of its latest strategy called Operation Streamline. Take a look at this year-old release from Customs and Border Protection; 1,200 immigrants were prosecuted from December 2006 to July 2007 in Yuma alone.

I don't have the stats for Tucson, but it's got to be equally high. From my talks with some of the Feds involved, most of those cases are low-end rubber stamp prosecutions, but the federal courts in Tucson and Yuma only have a handful of prosecutors and an average of 200 cases a month for eight prosecutors is a bureaucratic nightmare.

I bring it up because I wonder how much these relatively insignificant cases are taking away from hard cases involving far more important criminals. I realize it's a subjective assessment, but nobody is ever going to convince me that the threat from weapons traffickers and narcos is over-shadowed by illegal migrants.

Consider the case of Victor Varela, the narco-armadór from Phoenix who'd been buying up .50-cal. machine guns for the Juárez Cartel.

Varela acted as a straw-buyer, he was captured trying to buy an M-60 to send down through Palomas, Chihuahua, at the time. Varela went down last April and even though ATF was involved in the bust, the case never made it to federal court. The Feds demurred to the Arizona Attorney General's Office instead. From what I gather, ATF didn't even try to push federal charges on Varela because they knew prosecution wasn't going to happen. (The photos are from his MySpace account; I see he's been updating them.)

Today, Varela was sentenced to two and a half years in state prison and seven years probation. Had the Feds taken the case, he would have faced five to ten years under federal statute; as it was, the state only nailed him on one count of fraud and one count of forgery.

So the question arises, how many other cases has the U.S. Attorney's Office for Arizona declined because their prosecutors are absorbed in immigration proceedings?

-- Michel Marizco