THE BORDER REPORT

Thank you, vinotinto, for placing these photos together so we can compare. Click to enlarge.

THE BORDER REPORT

Mexico's Televisa network announced today it will no longer broadcast news of the disappearance of former presidential candidate Diego Fernandez de Cevallos until the case is resolved. Fernandez, the prominent PAN politician who disappeared in the state of Querétaro last week, has not been found. Yesterday, investigators told El Universal they weren't even sure the blood traces left in his SUV belonged to him, an assessment that already suggests the delicacy with which the Mexicans are handling the matter. Today, Televisa, the largest media conglomerate in all of Latin America announced that "out of respect for his family and in order to not interfere with possible kidnapper negotiations", they will not cover the case until its resolution. It would be like CNN choosing not to cover the kidnapping of Al Gore. To be fair, Grupo Televisa's CEO Emilio Azcarraga has made this decision before. Earlier this year, he asked the media in general not to speculate on the case of Paraguayan soccer star Salvador Cabañas' murder in Mexico City. But in this case, we're talking about the disappearance of one of Mexico's most powerful politcians at the height of a public security crisis sweeping the country. This is not a time for the media to be silent. I'm all for the reduction of talking heads and general noise that follow these cases when they hit the level of general buzz, but abject silence goes much too far. I'll be curious to see if the news blackout will extend to Univision in the U.S. Univision reaches something around 70 percent of the Spanish language tv market in the U.S. and Televisa owns 11 percent of that network.

THE BORDER REPORT

The border is abuzz this morning with the news that NORAD is now working drug interdiction. The incident happened early Sunday morning along the Arizona-Sonora border, federal officials aren't saying where. It's important to note that this was not an accidental interception. The North American Aerospace Defense Command noted the ultra-light crossing the border and dispatched the two F-16 Fighting Falcons from the air force base in Tucson to intercept the plane. High level Homeland Security Department officials tell me they weren't notified (which is absurd). Kind'a makes you wonder how long they'd been wanting to do that. Politically, NORAD's decision to get involved in drug interdiction comes at a good time for them. The day before they sent out the F-16s, Southern Arizona Democrat Gabrielle Giffords had announced a bill she was co-sponsoring that would close a loophole for aviation smuggling. Basically, the bill simply modernizes the existing aviation smuggling laws to include ultralight craft. The proposed legislation will now make ultralight narcos susceptible to drug trafficking charges and aviation smuggling charges. Soon as this was announced, here comes NORAD. The F-16s followed the ultralight for 30 minutes, which is also interesting. Even the most professionally built ultralights only have a top speed of 70 mph. The F16 Falcon stalls out at less than 140 mph. The pilots must have been doing fly-bys the whole time. I've often wondered when the heavy, very obvious presence of three powerful military bases in Southern Arizona, Fort Huachuca, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Yuma Proving Ground, would finally come into play on border enforcement. I guess we  just found out. Also worth noting: The Air Force isn't sharing the information with Homeland Security. I'd love to be a fly on the wall while Sec. Napolitano makes those phone calls.

THE BORDER REPORT

Did the Republican governor of Arizona knowingly use a murder that had nothing to do with random Mexican border violence at all to propagate the passage of a state law criminalizing illegal immigration? Did her Democrat opponent, the Arizona Attorney General, also allow that bad information to fester? Perhaps. Follow me for a moment; and please keep in mind that the governor is about to face off against her own attorney general for the governor's seat. And the A.G. is ahead in the polls.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Amnesty International released its report yesterday documenting abuses of Central American migrants passing through Mexico, throwing some brutal criticisms at Pres. Felipe Calderón's Administration at a very awkward time. Among the report's findings, more than half of the migrants reported abuses by public officials and an estimated 60 percent of women and girls reported being sexually assaulted while trying to cross through Mexico. On the one hand, good on Amnesty for speaking up but where were you guys when journalists, activists and rights groups throughout the Western Hemisphere have been clamoring for your attention on the matter throughout much of the past decade? I myself have written stories documenting these abuses as far back as 2004; some fine journalists have reported on the assaults for years prior to that; trying to show what these Central American migrants go through trying to cross through Mexico. For at least three years, the Gulf Cartel's Zeta faction owned migrant smuggling through east Texas and Mexico's Guatemalan border, kidnapping, beating, extorting and killing migrants. On the Southern Arizona border, people still speak of a "Casa Verde" in Nogales, Sonora, where young girls were being taken from Central Americans and trafficked in a ring that an old CISEN agent, Jose Nemesio Lugo, tried to bust up before his subsequent murder in 2007, Mexico City. Then there's the politics of the matter. Though I doubt they'll admit it; I don't think it's an accident that Amnesty released its findings days after Mexico started clamoring about Arizona SB 1070, the state's new law criminalizing illegal immigration. Mexico has roundly criticized the bill, announcing a travel alert for Arizona while Sonora Gov. Guillermo Padrés, in protest of 1070, cancelled an Arizona-Sonora Commission annual meetup that has existed for a half century. Amnesty has effectively, and rightly, diminished concerns of forthcoming abuses by law enforcement in Arizona, and placed the focus back where the most grotesque forms of abuse already exist, in Mexico. In the end, I won't minimize the entire sphere of blame in the abuse of people heading north. It's no more Mexico's fault, as a whole, than it is the migrants', or the U.S. employer who hires them on, or the consumer who chooses to remain happily oblivious. We're all responsible; we've allowed illegal immigration to become a standard practice sustaining our way of life and our economies. That's the embarrassment of the Western Hemisphere and I hope history remembers us for it. But Amnesty's report certainly puts into context the threat against Hispanics that 1070 presents. Never mind "papers, please," here we have rape. Protest that. Mexico, and Hispanics living in the U.S. are outraged that a threat against them exists here. Central Americans, who, admittedly make up a very small slice of the illegal migrant population (U.S. Border Patrol statistics report about seven percent of illegal migrants captured are Central American), are, as usual, ignored. Over the past few days, singers like Shakira, cities like San Francisco, and "activists" have taken to the streets in Phoenix, and, let's be honest, the Internet, raging against 1070 as if by eliminating this questionable law, the rights of the illegal migrant are somehow restored. 1070 has become a distraction to the very real situation of exploitative servitude. Amnesty International just brought us back to reality. Whether anyone listens remains to be seen. A cursory check of my news feed this morning suggests few will.