From the Village Voice:On April 27, Janet Napolitano pronounced that the border separating the United States from the Republic of Mexico is more secure than ever.
Napolitano sounded convinced, even though she also has spoken of Mexico's 6,000 drug-related murders in 2009 alone, more than twice the total in 2008.
But Napolitano's words rang hollow to those who live at or near the border in Cochise County, a beautiful, sparsely populated expanse in southeast Arizona.
They live at ground zero in the United States for the smuggling from Mexico of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin — and human beings.
(The U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector was responsible for almost half of all illegal aliens arrested and marijuana seized along the nation's borders during fiscal 2009, which ended September 30. Try to imagine 1.2 million pounds of pot, an all-time record for any sector. The zone includes Cochise County and covers 262 miles of border).
Most people in this fabled county — home to Tombstone (the shootout at the OK Corral), Fort Huachuaca (a major U.S. Army base), funky border towns (Douglas and Naco), and almost unimaginably open spaces — agree on this:
The executive and legislative branches of the federal government have set up Cochise County for disaster by not coming up with a border policy to effectively handle what's known as "illegal immigration."
In the early 1990s, the feds tightened the leaky border around San Diego and El Paso with mega-operations called Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line, respectively.
The result was a monumental funneling of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens from the steep mountains and unforgiving deserts of northern Mexico into southern Arizona.
Before then, Cochise County was not a prime point of entry for illegal aliens (the Tucson sector accounted for only 9 percent of the U.S. Border Patrol's arrests in 1993).
Then, as now, drug smugglers pretty much had free rein, with law enforcement seemingly always a step behind most of the criminals.
With the redirection of the migrants came dire ramifications, including death for untold hapless migrants ill-equipped to negotiate the desert and mountain trails in brutal summers and cold winters.
The influx also has upended the lives of many on this side of the border, especially American citizens who live anywhere in the southern portion of Cochise County.
Some of them simply are hungry and desperate. But others are of a more malevolent bent, committing robberies, burglaries, and other crimes against Americans in remote spots like Portal, Apache, and Palominas.
5 comments:
some of them are only desperate and hungry while others commit burglaries and robberies in towns like woodside,jackson hgts.,maspeth,bayside and forest hills.
some even rape and murder in flushing.
coming sooner than you think to Queens ,N.Y.
see:secureourborders now.org and sign the petition to obama.
A great solution for this would be for the U.S. to annex the rest of Mexico. If Mexico became part of the U.S. and all of their untapped oil reserves were managed and exploited managed the U.S. would once again become a great oil exporting nation and we would have energy independence. Plus we could then throw out B.P.
The US already has huge reserves of oil. Discoveries have been made all over North and South Dakota. But it doesn't matter, the feds won't let them drill.
The feds tend to forget who they work for. Time to remind them that they are not in charge.
These are potential terrorist entries - Obama's administration is lax on security and everthing else except tax collection legislation. They are more focused on killing industries that provide good jobs (Wall Street - Big oil) and turning a blind eye to wetbacks entering the country illegals. Democratic POLS love their Mexican cooks, maids and gardeners and can't wait to reward them with citizenship.
Cochise County is a indeed a very scenic area of Arizona. I've gone camping there over 10 times. Fly into Tucson, in neighboring Pima County, rent a car, and visit. Besides camping, great hotels/motels and visitor sevices. Don't be scared of the headlines. Stay on the beaten path and don't go crawling around the isolated stretches of desert at night and you'll be fine. You'll see more camera-toting Europeans and Japanese by the OK Corral in Tombstone than illegals. Additional things to see: Chiricahua Nat. Monument, Bisbee Ghost Town, Karchner Caverns, sunsets to die for, and Fort Bowie where Geronimo was imprisoned thus ending the last of the Berengian resistance to civilization.
www.arizonaguide.com
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