THE BORDER REPORT

The very best of Mexican minds, powerful men who can actually instill change in this country are quietly leaving, an exodus of this country’s hope. And it’s impossible to criticize, faced with death for themselves and their families; it’s what most anyone would do. But each time another of these prominent idealists leave, it’s another hammer-blow to a crippled state under siege by organized crime. And like most short term solutions, the long term fallout is not going to be palatable. This summer has seen two of these prominent Mexican men leave for the relative safety of the United States; PAN gubernatorial candidate David Figueroa and Alejandro Junco de la Vega, president of newspaper conglomerate, Grupo Reforma. Last year, Congressman Figueroa was attacked, shot at in public just outside Mexico City’s World Trade Center building.  He survived this second attack even though the would-be killer ran right up to him in a classic quema ropa, security videos show. It was the second attempt on his life. Almost exactly a year before, Figueroa, then the Sonora campaign coordinator for Felipe Calderón’s candidacy, was shot and wounded in Toluca. And a year before that, his father, David Figueroa Coronado, was shot and wounded in Agua Prieta. I knew Figueroa when he was the mayor of Agua Prieta, Sonora, on the Arizona border. A quiet, diminutive, deadly young mayor with a bristly, neat mustache and an easy manner. A life-long PAN-ista, he kept his city shrouded in that same implacable silence that has come to define Agua Prieta. But he also gave journalists at least some access to his city; unlike former – and future – mayors, he actually picked up the phone when a reporter dialed him. Earlier this year, Figueroa announced his candidacy for governor of Sonora. I must admit, I had my doubts; Sonora, the state where the PRI was born, has always been a PRI state, back to the time the Charter of Agua Prieta was signed in those smoky post-Mexican Revolution times. As late as this past summer, Figueroa had people lined up to manage his campaign in Sonora, a growing force moved by a very local loyalty that grew out of Agua Prieta’s old families which still dominate the Sonora political structure. Inexplicably, this past July, Figueroa shut down his campaign for governor of Sonora. It wasn’t a dramatic withdrawal, but every Sonoran knew who was going to be the PAN’s candidate, that was clear. Figueroa had set up an election campaign committee and appearing on local and regional newspapers and television stations talking about his potential run. Next thing everyone knows, Figueroa pops up again, this time as the consul general in San Jose, Calif. According to an interview with McClatchy Newspapers, Figueroa admitted he’d left because a third murder attempt was about to go down. Then last week, Junco de la Vega said he was also leaving, for Austin, Texas, in order to protect his family. “I was in a dilemma: Compromise our editorial integrity or move the family to a safe place,” he stated in a letter to Nuevo Leon governor Natividad Gonzalez before cruelly blaming the governor for that state’s public security crisis. “I write to tell you not to allow our Monterrey’s spirit to drown … You’ll save many families much pain.” As I said, impossible to criticize. I live on this side of the line. But these men, one who had a shot at taking the reins of a powerful Mexican state and another, at using journalism to keep his government honest, have chosen to seek refuge elsewhere. Meanwhile, it is Junco de la Vega’s employees and Figueroa’s one-time constituents que andan aguantando los golpes. When men of their caliber leave their country, it’s not a temporary move. They’ve abandoned Mexico at a time when Mexico needs men like them to advance and to evolve beyond organized crime. Now I wonder if they’ll ever be welcome back.

THE BORDER REPORT

Sources on both sides are saying Francisco Hernandez García, aka El Dos Mil, was captured by the Mexican Army day before yesterday in Hermosillo. Hernandez, the intellectual author of some very, very interesting hits in Sonora going back at least eight years was also blamed for engineering the 2007 attacks in Cananea that left 24 people dead. After the death of his compadre, Raul Enriquez Parra in 2005, the Cananea-born narco-trafficker was picked up by the Beltrán Leyva family back when Mochomo controlled the Nogales and Naco corridors. Afterward, he linked himself to the Gulf Cartel, smashing a pacto between the Sinaloans and the Gulf cartels in 2007. (Photo courtesy, Sonora State Police) The information of his arrest is unconfirmed by the Mexican Army and the Sonoran state government. I'm working to corroborate the information by tomorrow.

-- Michel Marizco

THE BORDER REPORT

So it seems BorderReporter.com's been invited to a little party in the next few days, northern Sonora, where, readers tell me, a gunfight's been brewing for a while between the Jaibiles and a few others. We shall see.

-- Michel Marizco

THE BORDER REPORT

Pres. Felipe Calderón issued stirring words this morning, saying: "This is a moment of historical definition, what we do now and what we fail to do after this 15th of September will forver mark the way Mexicans in the future will remember our history," before a convening of his security council.

We shall see. It didn't long for members of the Mexican Congress to start laying this week's grenade attacks at his feet like a corona de muerte. Here's congresswoman Petra Santos of the leftist PRD trashing the president for opening a pandora's box of problems because  he's "out playing little soldier."

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SECRETO A VOCES

Look at these headlines from the past month: murderous grenade attacks on innocents, 30 beheadings in a single week, battalions large enough to overwhelm 24 men and meticulously put them down, cruising around Mexico. Some readers have called them psychopaths and maybe that’s not far from the truth; there is always a logic to killing, be it emotion, money or chemical imbalance. But there are other faces to killing that are being left out of the conversation, ignored because the blood isn’t soaking their hands.

Last week, we had one, and it should have been a strong example of the U.S.’s backing of Pres. Felipe Calderón’s war. Instead, it was roundly ignored, not even the U.S. government was interested. Victor Varela, a community college graduate, 23 years old, slim, the fat still evident on his baby-faced cheeks, with a pretty bride and a newborn baby, is another face behind the killers inside Mexico’s drug cartels. I do not know if it was that boyish appearance that led to the U.S.’s failed opportunity to make an example of the arms traffickers that are decimating this border. Much of this story is metaphorical old hat: American firepower acting as the fuel for Mexico’s violence. By U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms estimate, 90 to 95 percent of weapons used in crimes in Mexico came from the U.S. I’m guessing that 90 to 95 percent stat is simply the U.S.’s weasel word way of saying 100 percent, but I won’t digress. I think it's a foolish argument worthy only of leftist ninnies to argue Mexico's problems lie in the U.S.'s Second Amendment. But we do have a legal system in place and in the case of one significant arms trafficker, it failed us. Not because they couldn't prosecute, but because they wouldn't. Didn't even try. Varela looks like an all-American kid, his beautiful wife at his side, the couple had a child this month, he worked for a mining firm in the Phoenix area.  Somewhere, he went down another road, started running weapons for the Juárez Cartel. Varela, who likes to decorate his MySpace page with dollar signs surrounding his name, was ambitious too. He wasn’t simply running semi-auto AKs and handguns down. He ran at least two fifty-caliber machine guns to Columbus, New Mexico. He must have been doing a great job for Vicente Carrillo’s people, decided to push it beyond legal U.S. guns, maybe hit the big time. Last April he went down trying to buy an M-60 from undercover cops in Phoenix, Ariz. Mexican Army units identified one of the fifty-cals as being used to kill a police commander in Juárez, Francisco Ledesma Salazar. That’s where the story takes a particular twist. Even though ATF agents in their highly-vaunted “Project Gunrunner” arrested Varela, he never faced federal weapons trafficking charges. Instead, the young man only faced two state charges, neither of which had anything to do with arms trafficking, a crime I don’t believe the state of Arizona has the capacity to enforce. Instead, Varela was sentenced last Friday to two-and-a-half years in state prison on one fraud and one forgery count. I was surprised. With all the hounding of the Merida Initiative, Project Gunrunner, and this country’s clamoring support for Pres. Calderón’s security measures, I honestly expected the U.S. to string Varela up by his nostrils. This week, Congress received the Merida Initiative budget from the Bush Administration. They have until Sept. 22 to punch holes in it (not likely) or rubber-stamp it (most likely). Instead, the Americans tossed him over to the state and because they relinquished the case, he’ll never face a single weapons trafficking charge. Part of the reason is because ATF never pushed the U.S. Attorney’s Office to take the case. And privately, folks at ATF tell me they didn’t push the case to the federal prosecutors because they didn’t feel they’d take the case. I cannot say who’s to blame here, ATF or the U.S. Attorney’s Office, though it does seem to me that ATF should have at least tried to take the case to prosecutors. Herein lie the problems far more profound than the Varelas of the border. Federal agents are spooked from introducing cases to what’s considered a lenient prosecutor’s office and if they’re tossing easy, headline grabbing cases like Varela to the state for prosecution, what else are they giving up? When he was arrested, Varela was peddled as the narco-armadór of the year, effigied from the halls of the federal building in Phoenix to national stories coast to coast. If he’s smart, and he may be, he’ll do his time, probably get out after 40 percent of the sentence and stay the hell away from his relatives in Columbus who likely got him involved in all this murder with a cómpa slap on the back and a roll of bills in his jacket pocket. But our problems in Arizona are only beginning. If Feds can’t – or won’t – prosecute easy, big cases like this one, what possible chance will they ever have of bringing this place under even a semblance of control? It's easy for the gringos to criticize Mexico for these beheadings, grenade attacks and high body counts. But the U.S. legal system has a deep responsibility in all this as well.