THE BORDER REPORT
Cd. Juárez – A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent is being investigated on possible corruption charges after running an informant network that has imploded throughout the El Paso law enforcement community, a Mexican law enforcement source in Juárez said this morning.
THE BORDER REPORT
Mexico is abuzz this morning with news of the capture of a group of Sinaloans who were planning to kill Pres. Felipe Calderón.
Let's ignore the Guadalara summit for the moment and dismiss as completely ridiculous the idea that this arrest was manufactured to coincide with Pres. Obama's visit to Guadajalara for the North American Leaders' Summit.
Let's assume that this would be an absurd charge. Of course. Cláro que no.
THE BORDER REPORT
You know, it's been about a dozen years since someone publicly tried to form a pact with the Mexican government; the question is did it work then and will it work now?
The leader of La Familia, Servano Goméz La Tuta, supposedly made the call yesterday, in to a Mexican show, Voz y Solucíon de Michoacán to ask for a peace-out with the Mexicans.
It's a little astonishing, whoever made the call; and myself, I doubt it was La Tuta. The caller said his problem isn't with Mexican Pres. Felipe Calderón but with the federal police who keep harassing the families of the cartel members. "Tell them to come for me," instead, the caller said.
THE BORDER REPORT
The Mexican Senate has put forward a measure that will eliminate the Army's roving of Juárez's streets in light of a nasty spat of rights abuses in that poor city at the hands of soldiers.
Plenty of good and bad here to consider. First of all, what choice did Mexico have? Juárez is the country's largest border city, rendered utterly feral by the exhaustive war between Vicente Carrillo and Joaquín Guzmán Loéra. That conflict has gone on since 2007 and homicide stats from this summer show that there's been no relinquishing of territory by either side. Juárez had an average of seven murders a day in June alone. Clearly an intervention was needed.
THE BORDER REPORT
As far as border enforcement ideas, it was amongst the most hare-brained; set up web-cams along the Texas border and let citizens log in and report any illegal activity they saw. 
It reduced what should have been a serious issue, monitoring a border gone awry, into a perversion of Neighborhood Watch; a fine mess we'd all be in if they'd pointed those damned things north.
And now, like so many other intervention programs by governments that should have had little say anyway, I want to know where the money went.
