THE BORDER REPORT
I'm hearing that a pair of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rangers were shot at again in the Buenos Aires refuge southwest of Tucson. That's the second incident in a month's time; the first happened in June, pair of men firing a nine-millimeter at rangers on ATVs.
Don't know yet if anyone was hurt.
THE BORDER REPORT
The government of Chihuahua seems to find it appropriate to turn its Anglo residents into weapon-toting vigilantes and let them deal with any future kidnappings or murders that come down on the Mormon communities in the state.
The attorney general stepped up to offer training in the polygamist community of LeBaron after a brutal execution earlier this week. Benjamin LeBaron was kidnapped along with a relative, taken from his home under threat of a grenade attack. He was beaten of his family, some reports say the killers attempted to rape his wife; the two bodies were found on a dirt trail outside of town on Monday. In response, his brother Julian says the community's cut a deal with the state.
Out on a totally unrelated assignment down on the Ambos Nogales border when a friend suggested I take a drive down the federal border road that runs east of the twin cities.
I hadn't been out here in some time, not enough reason to justify the road-trip really, but I'm glad I listened because the engineering that went into the wall is astonishing.
Myself, I've never believed that the United States' mandate to slap steel down along the border is ever going to change a thing – though not for the reasons that are usually given as why it won't work.
The U.S. first grew serious about building border walls back in 1994, a Clinton Administration security plan that walled off the San Diego area from Mexico. It was the same year that the NAFTA treaty came into effect, and, as they say, things ever ain't been the same since.
The wall worked, sort of. It drew San Diego-bound traffic east out to Arizona and Sonora but it's never had an effect on drug trafficking in either region. The rise of the Arellano Felix brothers in the same time period as Gatekeeper demonstrates that. Federal data shows that wall or no, Tijuana is back in action as a growing cocaine corridor (that should make El Ingeniero proud). The ports of entry, the fulcrum points of cross-border trade, go ignored as the portals for narcotics. In fact, it's only this year that the Feds released $720 million in stimulus money to upgrade the ports of entry, many of which are beleaguered by poor lane splits and technology from the seventies. The same strategies from the seventies were merely applied to the new century with the same, predictable results – illegal migrants moved to other areas to try and cross while drug trafficking maintains, rooted in the border cities on both sides. No surprise there, not for even the most casual readers who take an interest in following the recent histories of the border. I've long maintained and I always will, that the walls are built to appease Americans, not to blockade Mexicans.
Which leads me back to this structural wonder here. 
The wall, polished steel rails some twelve feet high and a few feet deep, follow the rolling mountains like some shaded protrusion, a ribbon of dark steel. It looks impermeable and though I didn't drive it out to Cochise County, my friends in that area of the state say it's mostly intact all the way out.
You look at this steel wall (and no matter how badly Homeland wants to deny it, this is a wall) and you can almost believe; there's no way a pack of drug mules is going to scale that thing with 50-pound sacks of weed on their back and not be noticed. No way for beat-to-hell Ford F-150s laden with a ton of Sinaloan schwag to slip through on their way to Interstate 10.
Some sad group of migrants is going to end with badly sprained ankles or worse trying to clamber over, you would think.
Then I noticed the gate. 
Gates, actually. Immense eight footers with a six inch cross-beam and a simple lock protected by a steel sheath. One every mile or so. I'll admit, for a second, all the conspiracy theories that generally buzz around in my head suddenly made sense. Calm down, I thought, nobody's that obvious.
But I did want to know what in the world these gates were doing here.
"Man, just look at the size of that thing," said an old friend on the Arizona side when I showed him a picture. "You could fit a Humvee through there."
Oh, come on.
He grinned, warming to his fantasies. "Or a tank."
"No te digo, cabrón," says an even older friend, a radio reporter on the Sonora side, one of these crusty old guys, with theories going back to Jose Luis Portillo and Jimmy Carter.
Finally, I got the answer from a state cop.
Turns out the gates were built into the wall for the use of the International Water and Boundary Commission, the binational agency who monitors the boundary of the two countries.
Okay, I was a little disappointed, I'll admit.
"Of course," the guys says, "that doesn't mean you can't drive a tank through," he said. "You're just not supposed to." THE BORDER REPORT
So, yeah okay. I was gone. Some of you apparently noticed; bola de culeros. Spent my birthday camping up in the Chiricahua Mountains on the Arizona/New Mexico/Sonora border. Pine trees and rain and rare steak and sake. My cell didn't get any service, didn't even take a camera with me. I liked the disconnect. Pile on a magazine gig, a cop ride-along and some feverish hacking and this week's about had it. But I'm back and you can shove your coup right up in there with your movie quotes, mi estimádo. So what's been happening while I was gone? Juárez has exploded yet again. La Polaka is reporting nine murders since yesterday and an average of seven a day in June (ever the diligent scorekeeper, it's "July opens with Nine"). Are they ever going to settle this? We need a winner; whether that's Vicente or Shorty is nearly irrelevant at this point. This thing between them is taking on global dimensions. From what I'm told, the Utah Department of Public Safety is quietly beginning training of Chihuahua's state police. Couple things there. First, I suppose that's because of Meredith Romney's kidnapping in Janos, Chihuahua, last month (turns out Meredith is a man, who knew, sorry about that). Finally got to the bottom of that. Turns out the former Mormon leader and businessman was taken from outside his ranch. Gunmen shot out the tires on his truck, left his wife sitting there. The Mormon community was furious, they've been staging protests in Chihuahua and Mexico City, demanding that the government exercise some control. Nothing will happen of course; people protest every day in el D.F. But if Chihuahua A.G. Patricia Gonzalez is appealing to Utah, that's interesting considering the limited level of involvement the Utah cops could take. What're they gonna do, teach the judiciales how to serve warrants? Equipment and training isn't the problem for Mexican cops; they're not riding around on burros, after all. Border residents would be better served by an internal affairs unit coming in, if you catch my drift. Over to my right, much excitement in Baja Cali after a hush-hush arrest in Ensenada. Teo, fue el Teo, went the chisme, pero no; it wasn't Teodoro García after all. Instead it was a norteño singer, Fabian Ortega, El Halcón de la Sierra, along with 18 associates of Teo. That's the third time since the spring that Teo's arrest has been whispered around town. Which doesn't mean it didn't happen, of course ... Then the big break down south; which you've already discussed but I'm just getting to.
So you're telling me that these two are finally on the outs?
Incredible. Arturo is wanted in both countries with a $2 million price on his head on either side of the line. (In my opinion, he's gained weight in this recent photo sent to me by a very badass compa). Edgar "Barbie" Valdez is still wanted on a Lousiana pot smuggling case from 2003 and in Mexico for $2 million, U.S., but if he's broken with Barbas, he's got a lot more troubles than the po-lice. But then again, so does Arturo. It wasn't too long ago that Barbie was negotiating one million a month bribes to the offices of Genaro Garcia Luna, Minister of Public Safety for the country. Garcia, it is alleged, had ordered his AFI agents to torture a crew of Zetas for Barbie back when he was AFI boss in 2005. That allegation surfaced in a PGR expediente that since then has become meaningless, i.e., ignored.
Beltrán has been in a unique position of all the cartel figures currently burning Mexico to the ground. He's never terrorized the way the Zetas always have, and he doesn't appear in international magazines the way Shorty did.
But what he has done is build an infrastructure of corrupted federal and local police that stretches from Sonora (or a little north of there) down to Mexico City. Shorty took a big hit when Beltrán split with him. And one of the reasons for the value loss was Barbie.
And now, Beltrán's lost Barbie.
This thing's like a big atom split; are we going to see yet another organization surface, one headed by Barbie? The problem with splitting atoms of course is that if you split the wrong kind, things get hinky and you go nuclear. UCTI - The United Chismosos of The Internet
Who’s signing up? i got the staff chosen out:
