THE BORDER REPORT

TIJUANA – The beefy white police truck careened around the street corner, its siren screaming, taking the curb and landing hard, a piece of the back fender snapping off, not bothering to slow down as it raced up Revolucíon Boulevard. The rest of the cops ran to their own trucks, pulling away from the curb in a frenzy of shrieking sirens and tires.

Tourists and Tijuanenses stood at the intersection, warily watching the brewing fiasco.

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THE BORDER REPORT

The latest rumor is that one of the Beltrán Leyva brothers was arrested last night at the Mexicali port of entry. We'll find out. I'm still in the field, but check back periodically, I'll have updates throughout the day.

THE BORDER REPORT

Among the U.S.'s first foreign policy involvements in Latin America was Mexico during the Revolution. Just about a century ago, Mexico was in turmoil, its military dictator, Porfirio Díaz dead and the country in shambles. Pancho Villa tearing it up in the north, Emiliano Zapata to the south. The machine gun was barely 25 years old.

At the time, Pres. Woodrow Wilson turned to the U.S. military, ordering soldiers to the border with Mexico to keep the war from spilling over. Infantry divisions were ordered to the Rio Grande in Texas and Naco, Ariz., to keep the Revolution in Mexico. It either worked or, more apparent, the Revolution never reached beyond El Paso (and Patrick Murphy's drunken bombing of Naco).

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THE BORDER REPORT

Just received another email from a college kid's parent, worried about their safety on Spring Break in Mexico this year.

I've had a good dozen or so of these questions thrown at me this year, some from Americans who want to travel to Puerto Peñasco, some from parents worried about their kids heading to Mazatlán or Cancún. And the University of Arizona starts its Spring Break today, so today's as good a day as any to get into this.

The short answer is yes, your kids are fine. Yes, they can go down to Mexico and sun on the beach, drink, tan, fornicate and have a great time.

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THE BORDER REPORT

This poor bastard is a U.S. Border Patrol agent from Tucson sector who someone hit on the head with a broken cinderblock, Monday afternoon. The agent had walked up to the border wall west of Nogales to look at a hole when someone clambered up to the top of the wall from the Mexican side and dropped the block on his head. You have to give the Border Patrol credit for audacity. Even though the agent was hospitalized, Border Patrol officials still managed to take this photo of him and disseminate it to the media this morning. Along with the photo, this message from ever-persistent Tucson sector chief Ron Gilbert: "As we gain operational control of our border, smugglers and other types of criminal elements have become frustrated and the result is an increase in assaults." The man is immutable in his insistence that every incident that goes down on this border, good, bad or both, is one more clear signal that the Border Patrol is winning. It's not his fault of course, he has to say that, he has jefes too. And they've been boasting about operational control of the border since the Clinton era. I just hadn't seen them out drag out their wounded agents to try and illustrate the point before.