THE BORDER REPORT

The U.S. State Department has ordered its consulate employees along the border, specifically, Tijuana, Nogales, Juárez, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros to send their families out of Mexico for a month following the murders of three people, a consulate employee and her husband and the husband of a second employee this weekend in Juárez.

Leslie (or Lesley) Enriquez and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, were shot in a drive-by coming into Juárez. Ten minutes earlier, the body of the husband of a second consular employee, Jorge Alberto Salcido, was found by Chihuahua police.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Found this one during a casual search of the Federal contract solicitation page. The Homeland Security Department is requesting bids for narcotics incineration here in Tucson. I'll ignore, for the moment, that they're simply repeating steps from DEA who already has an incineration facility here in town. Writing about the Feds would be less entertaining if they worked efficiently, after all.

Homeland is asking for a price breakdwon to burn 215,000 pounds of dope per year; that's 210,000 pounds of weed and 5,000 pounds of "hard" narcs; synthetics, meth, steroids, coke, and heroin.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Update: I don't know why it's so easy for me to forget that the U.S. engages in the same inanities as Mexico. See below.

Having a conversation with an old friend last night, he made the point that with its level of political and social abuses, you would think Mexico would be a more powerful country. It's a bit Machiavellian but I think he's correct. Instead, the country acts like a 1980s banana republic.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Reading through the U.S. State Department's travel alert for Mexico, the succinct quote a consulado official gave me once, "You're fine, just hope to hell you don't get in the way," continues to hold true today.

But a few things have happened over the last few days in Sonora that go ignored by the press north of the line but shouldn't. They change the dynamic of the drug war and its threat against the non-involved.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Manuel Clouthier Carrillo is fast becoming my favorite Mexican politician. The Sinaloan Congressman was the publisher of Noroeste newspaper until last spring when he resigned his position to run for Congress. His father, Manuel J. Clouthier, was the PAN candidate for the presidency in 1988 against the PRI's Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the PRD's Cuathemoc Cardenas, whom many in Mexico believed had actually won the presidency. He died in a car accident a year later.

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