THE BORDER REPORT

They're lying. Or, they're wrong. Or both.

Suddenly, everyone's blaming La Linea for the murder of a consulate employee, her husband and the husband of a second employee. The Mexicans are saying it was the Juárez Cartel's La Linea who pulled the job; the FBI is saying it, the media is saying it. Not only are they saying it was La Linea/Barrio Azteca, they are saying it was a case of mistaken identity. This is infuriating.

Why?

Again and again and again, we have been told that the murders in Juárez are little more than bad guy on bad guy; that the cartels very rarely kill without good reason, that collateral killings are being kept to a minimum. It is a suggestion of success, of course. It's a handy point that implies ultimate victory on behalf of the "good guys;" that they're only killing each other tells the outside world that sooner or later, the cartels will run out of thugs or it will grow too expensive to maintain a war and they'll give up.The folks in the Department of Justice say collateral damage is minimal. The Mexicans say it. The media, particularly the American media, tries and tries to prove it is not so but without access to the resolved investigations of 16,000-plus murders since Pres. Felipe Calderón took office, we cannot know.

Well, excuse me but bullshit.

After two years of war with "minimal collateral damage," you want to suggest to me that La Linea, a professional group of experienced assassins, screwed up? That they went after three people with no more intelligence to go off of than the fact that the targets would arrive in two white vehicles, then managed to fuck up which pair of white cars it would be?

I have heard American agents claim that less than five percent of the murders in Mexico involved innocents; i.e., cartel killers shoot straight. The Mexican Federal Attorney General's Office has made similar claims.

Suddenly, they manage to err so eggregiously that they killed the worst possible victims, politically-speaking, people attached to the American consulate?

No. They're lying or they're wrong. Either someone specifically targeted Lesley Enriquez and her husband, and the third man, or La Linea, this vaunted group of highly trained sicarios shoot like Stormtroopers and are a bunch of idiot thugs who blast away  indiscriminately and the resulting collateral killing percentages are a lot higher than either country wants to admit.

I will stand by my initial reaction that this was not a case of mistaken identity. History suggests that the probability of either cartel pulling such a politically stupid move does not happen. It does not.

Furthermore, I will maintain that my sources, both in CISEN and now a guy in the PGR, are correct. The murders were not the doing of the Juárez Cartel. Three days since I first asked, they continue to say it was the Sinaloa Federation who pulled the job. When I think of the number of times that the Mexican government protected Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, most recently in the case of El Jábali, here in Sonora, I do not doubt for a moment that Sinaloa is, once again, being protected; and this time, not only by the Mexicans but by the Americans.