THE BORDER REPORT

Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez Villarreal sang like a drunken perrico, grinning the entire time while he spoke of his relations to Shorty Guzmán, El Mayo Zambada, Arturo Beltrán, and even Ramon Ayala (I'm sure Ayala appreciated that). He boasted of sending semi-trucks full of dope north and bringing them back in to Mexico stuffed with cash. He lamented not having finished the job of murdering his Zeta rivals. Now, Mexican president Felipe Calderón says all the video-recorded declaraciones are out the legal window, since he didn't say them in front of a judge nor did he have his lawyer present. In the meantime, how the arrest happened is now being fought on the floors of the Mexican Congress. Either it was a high-level intelligence operation that took months to prepare (official version), or it was a snitch (my suspicion), or it was a traffic stop and the cops had no idea initially who'd they popped (version of the Mexican press based off federal police reports) Que desmadre. The general confusion has Manlio Fabio Beltrones, president of the federal Senate, former Sonora governor (and long-suspected associate of Amado Carrillo Fuentes), clamoring for clarity from the Mexican Feds into exactly how it apprehended La Barbie. Two weeks ago, when La Barbie first went down, the Mexicans had stated it was a Special Forces operation based off intelligence gathered over more than a year of where he would be. Then Mexican newspapers like La Razón noted he was captured because he and his cohorts sped past federal cops who then pulled him over. Quoting the arrest report, the newspaper states: "The vehicles moved close to us, passing us at high speeds and without any precautions, giving us reason to proceed after them, indicating by verbal command through the loudspeaker that they halt and pull over." Barbie stepped out, then a second man, bearing an M-16 and a 40-mm grenade launcher. They quietly surrendered to the cops, the story states. The events were further corroborated by El Universal, last Thursday. In my own research, I found that a former drug mule working for La Barbie, Jesus Ramos, was arrested, then released, then re-arrested then pleaded out to a reduced sentence within a week of Barbie's cocaine indictment earlier this summer. Then a lawyer source reported to me that Barbie had actually turned himself in, cutting a deal with the Americans for deportation to the U.S. U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, now insists that's not true because ... well, because (sorry, he doesn't really give much detail). Meanwhile, PAN Senator Gustavo Madero wants everybody to just shut up and quit asking questions. "What do we want? Do we want to always be looking for bugs within the rice or should we just look at the rice and know that we've succeeded in an extraordinary strike against organized crime with one of the largest capos in our country?" (Yeah, no, but now I'm hungry) And while these truths are spinning and spinning, Barbie's American lawyer, Kent Schaffer, came out to say that Barbie was reading from a transcript prepared by police. Which kind of suggests why Calderón is demanding that none of those declarations be entered into evidence against him, I suppose. My lawyer source continues to insist that Barbie will shortly be deported back to the U.S. and won't stand trial for murder in Mexico. We'll see.

THE BORDER REPORT When I used to write about illegal migrant deaths on a daily basis, there was a macabre joke that nobody cared about the people who actually died, merely the number. It was meant as black humor but it carried a certain truth: You could have 200 migrants dying in the desert but the only one who garnered notoriety was the record-breaker; if you had 200 this year and 200 last, the one who got the public's attention was the 201st. That's a little bit how I feel about these 72 migrants found murdered in a mass grave in Matamoros, in late August. Suddenly, Mexico and the United States perked up. Now Ecuador and Honduras are equally excited. Let's keep in mind that consistently, over the past ten years, an average of 200 people die every year trying to cross through the Arizona desert. The Pima County Medical Examiner told the Arizona Daily Star that it has processed 1,669 deaths since 2001. Keeping track by fiscal year instead of calendar, the ngo, Derechos Humanos, tracks 2,065 since 2001, its members tell the Tucson Weekly. Working in Sasabe with a broadcast crew from Spain last week, we ran into a group of 20 Guatemalans heading west along the border line. It was 103º out, early afternoon and they were standing in the shade of an orange building, waiting for the smuggler to give the signal. Vague with their answers of their destination, some said they had the idea of working in the U.S., saving up some money, a narrative that's common, and yet profound when you consider how many migrants share it. They started off with excitement, a few of them smiling, moving quickly, all young. Their smuggler was walking them seven miles along the Mexican side of the border to where the Homeland Security Department's fences stopped, replaced by easily breached vehicle barrier. The problem was, some of these people were clearly not going to make it. A mile in and some were already faltering, falling back, a little bit at first, then more, the gap widening. This woman in brown below was particularly a concern. How far is she going to make it? They've got a day's walk on the Mexican side, energy already depleted, heat, relentless, then a few hours waiting for a Border Patrol agent to clear from an area, then a walk to some Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation pueblo, at least another day's hike to there, then either one more day to Tucson or three to Phoenix, moving at 25-30 miles per day. Where's the outrage here? Anyone? Honduras is going after Ecuador for revealing there was a second survivor in that 72 or 76 person massacre in Matamoros. "We regret the president of Ecuador gave out this information irresponsibly, and didn't take into account the risk to the Honduran's life," complained Honduran Foreign Minister Mario Canahuati. Excuse me, but the Honduran's life was placed in jeopardy long before he ran into whomever pulled the trigger just south of the border. In the case of the 72 dead, the Mexican government was quick to blame the Zetas based on the account of the first survivor. I remain skeptical. These days, every disorganized thug who seeks affiliation calls himself a Z and it seems unlikely that a real Zeta would identify himself as such (what the hell did they say: "Hi, we're Zetas and we want you to work for us?" Yeah, no.) Blaming the narcos-non-grata of Mexico is also a convenient way to dismiss the likely involvement of authorities working with whomever pulled the trigger. So Honduras blames Ecuador. The New York Times blames the Americans. Mexico blames the Zetas. The Americans blame organized crime in general, all for 72 people who only garnered national attention because they happened to die together. The message is clear. This is not acceptable: And yet, this is: It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad.

THE BORDER REPORT Just got off the phone with a criminal defense attorney familiar with Edgar La Barbie Valdez Villareal's cases in both countries, including this one in Atlanta. Turns out La Barbie gave himself up, surrendering to Mexican officials and cutting a deal for deportation to face charges in the U.S. "He's got the Zetas after his ass. He's got the Beltrans after his ass. He's got the Sinaloans after his ass. He had no place to go to so he turned to the enemy of everybody. How's that saying go? The enemy of my enemy is my friend," the attorney says. That enemy, of course, is Pres. Felipe Calderón and the government of Mexico, who on Monday arrested La Barbie at a posh hacienda outside Mexico City. It will be interesting to see how his deportation is negotiated. In the U.S., Valdez faces trafficking charges with the potential for a life sentence. In Mexico, he faces an untold number of murder charges. The attorney I spoke with anticipates Barbie will be deported within the next three months to face cocaine trafficking charges here, then, perhaps, murder in Mexico. It's possible he'll never face murder charges in Mexico. The U.S. has had a history of heavily prosecuting drug traffickers in this country who faced murder charges there. Here's one case I wrote about last year, Antonio Frausto Ocampo, accused of murdering a Mexican journalist in Sinaloa but doing a life term in Nebraska. He's already singing, telling Mexican authorities that he knew the Western Hemisphere's top drug lords, from Joaquín Shorty Guzmán to Ismael Mayo Zambada to Hector Beltrán Leyva. He can't resist boasting, telling the story of how he considered financing a movie based on his life as a Mexican drug lord. More correctly, perhaps, as a white guy turned Mexican drug lord. And in his declarations, he's very subtly putting the blame for the 2008 murders of high level Mexican law enforcement squarely on the shoulders of a dead man, Arturo Beltrán, saying Beltrán had ordered the killings. I guess I'm not surprised. Valdez may have been a border rat; born and raised in Laredo, but in the end, he was a white guy working in Mexico. He wasn't from there, he wasn't part of the culture of the men with whom he cultivated relationships, Arturo Beltrán, his brother, Alfredo, Chapo, Vicente Carrillo (in 2003, Barbie bribed a high level AFI official, Domingo Gonzales, to provide protection for the Sinaloans and for the Juárez Cartel). So perhaps the smile makes sense, now. Perhaps that's the grin of an Anglo who got his hands a little dirty by playing in Mexico, but then, when the heat came down and Ramos began to talk to DEA in Laredo, with all the wolves on his tail, he could call off the game, turn himself in and know that he'd be deported back to the U.S. instead. There's a tremendous difference a deportation and an extradition. To be deported is to be expelled. To be extradited is to be surrendered. Barbie turned himself in. There's not many capos who would do that willingly. But they're not Anglos with the freedom to move around the U.S. As my attorney says in a later conversation, "There's a reason he was wearing a London shirt."

THE BORDER REPORT

About two weeks ago, a blog that professed to illuminate the drug wars in Mexico, but did little more than cut and paste news stories from Mexican news websites, made the big time with a write-up by The Associated Press. Today, it's under a new visage; BlogDelNarco was a blogspot account started in March of this year, a clearinghouse of Mexico drug cartel combat stories. Now it's mundonarco.com. The site was initially hosted by Google as a blogspot account, so it's possible that Google removed the site because of it's graphic content. You'll recall that a few months ago, they tried that nonsense with me, threatening to remove advertising if I didn't remove graphic photos. The AP profiled the blogger under a premise I considered misleading: "Narco-blogger beats Mexico drug war news blackout" The story made the argument that as Mexican media retreated from covering the drug wars and the cartels ravaging the country, a lone, anonymous blogger had taken to publishing accounts reporters feared to write themselves. The reality was a cut-and--paste clipjob that constantly lifts existing content without attribution or even a link to the original story. I found this and the resulting AP story offensive because it minimized the hard work of Mexican journalists who continue to do their jobs in spite of the threats against them. In fact, here's a blogger who accuses BlogdelNarco of plagiarism, saying the blogger steals not only his stories, but his photos, as well (thank you, ilegal, for pointing this one out). As an American journalist and blogger, I'm under no illusion that I live in the same threatening climate as my Mexican colleagues. It's simply not the same animal. An El Debate newspaper reporter whose family lives in Culiacán, whose kids go to the same schools as the children of the associates of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, is at far greater risk than me or any other American journalist working in Mexico. In fact, I can only think of two American journalists, a daily newspaper reporter and a television reporter who wouldn't appreciate their names being placed here, that work under the same threat as Mexican crime and political reporters. A blogger in Mexico, working remotely, never showing their face, is no Mexican crime reporter, I promise you. Journalism in Mexico is under siege and has been for several years running. The country has consistently maintained the top tier of dangerous places to work as a reporter since 2005. Profiling a cheap hack and pretending they're doing their own work is an insult to the country's profession. BlogDelNarco had some scoops in its short time - but so do narconews, lavidamafiosa, an excellent blog I used to check daily, El Ciudadano, a great Nogales, Sonora, blog, and Maggie's Madness, usually murder photos and videos passed around the Internet by people with a heavy interest in these affairs. One thing Blogdelnarco does do well is act as a portal for chats about narco-trafficking. This is an important dynamic, even in the age of anonymous commenters. But let's not pretend the site is replacing original fact-gathering. That is an expensive endeavor that doesn't happen by keyboard alone. I've written to the owner of BlogdelNarco to ask him about this lifting of content but haven't yet received a response. But whatever his answer will be, there is a tremendous difference between a journalist who creates original content and a blogger who cuts and pastes it and claims it for their own. Now, bloggers and new media pundits will argue that information wants to be free. I'd argue that information doesn't care. Ironically, The Associated Press recognizes the difference, or at least, it's lawyers do. Earlier this year, The Associated Press filed complaints and threatened to sue a blogger who'd done much the same thing blogdelnarco is doing. Apparently, when an American blogger lifts AP's stories, this is deemed "misappropriation." When a Mexican blogger lifts everybody else's, this is deemed giving the public "what they can't get elsewhere." Footnote: At the time The AP's story came out, I was also confused by the name: There's "blogdelnarco" the website that The AP profiled and there is "elblogdelnarco" a website that does much the same type of cut-and-paste lifting but has existed since 2007.

THE BORDER REPORT

Take a look at this story in El Imparcial about a lawsuit filed against the German gun manufacturer, Heckler and Koch. The company was prohibited from selling weapons in specific Mexican states, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Jalisco, and Chiapas - all states with relatively recent conflicts between indigenous populations, like the EZLN, and the Mexican government.

The weapons, mind you, are being sold to law enforcement in the rest of Mexico. In fact, H&K carried the sole contract up until 2007 I believe to arm the Mexican military with G36s. They're being phased out in favor of the Mexican industried FX-05 Xiuhcoatl. But from my conversation with a source in the U.S. State Department this morning, it is the Mexican government who decides which states it is prohibited for companies to sell to.

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