Florida Obit, El Paso Postcards
(Border • Crime)
Occasionally I read the El Paso Times crime reports to see how far the drug killings have spread. They used to be known as a problem south of the border, but they’re steadily marching north.
Will they travel, like the fire ants, to my back yard soon?
Juárez, El Paso’s ugly sister city across the border, is seething:
“It was unknown whether the person arrested in January was the person killed in Tuesday’s multiple shooting, which is part of a surge in violence with double-digit homicides daily,” Times reporter Daniel Borunda wrote this morning, for instance.
The violence is tied to drug smuggling, which is tied to the idea of quick incredible riches, which my memory ties to a recent obituary in South Florida.
The obituary was for a 56-year-old childhood friend of mine. According to official accounts, he had a heart attack while driving, and plowed his car into a power pole.
His name was Mike, but he referred to himself, in third person, as “Miguel,” right up until the last time I saw him, years ago before he was arrested and restricted to living within the borders of a certain Florida county as part of his probation.
About the time I began reporting for my college newspaper – long, long ago in a galaxy far, far way – Miguel went to work for an ex-pro basketball player who invested his money into building his own drug-smuggling ring.
Ever since he was little, Miguel had always desired to impress, and he was so proud of his exploits as part of the drug gang that he and one of his cohorts agreed to a series of interviews during which they provided great details of how they managed to import thousands of pounds of high-grade Colombian marijuana.
They told me they weren’t worried about me revealing their identities in any of my stories, because they knew where my family lived. This gives you an idea how close our friendship really was.
For a time, their drug ring was sailing large sailboats from South Florida to Colombia, where members of the Colombian army helped load up the boats with bales of Colombian Red – a trade name for a particularly potent strain of marijuana – approximately the size of telephone booths.
Exact details of what transpired next are kind of beside the points I’d like to make.
The first point is this: When Ronald Reagan became president, he vowed to stop the Florida marijuana smugglers, and in a way, he did it – by using the Navy to form a kind of trade blockade.
Faced with higher risks, drug rings including the one my friend worked for did not dissolve and go straight. They responded by discontinuing the pot smuggling in favor of cocaine. A few ounces of the powder could bring more profit than many pounds of marijuana. And it was far easier to smuggle.
Thus did Ronald Reagan became the Father of our Cocaine Country.
The second point is that the drug gangs couldn’t be stopped, even by the Navy, thanks to human nature.
My friend’s drug ring cast bribes like bread upon the waters, in order to import their wares with impunity. Sheriff’s deputies, assistant district attorneys and others were on their payroll.
This is why, some 35 years later, guys like former Starr County (Texas) sheriff Remundo Guerra will be sentenced later today for taking bribes from a Mexican drug cartel.
And this is why, despite it being a major delivery artery for the cocaine trade from Mexico to the rest of the United States, drug agents rarely bust anyone driving up U.S. 59, near my home, with even a pound of coke, let alone a significant shipment.
In law enforcement as everywhere, there are always people whose will to do the right thing can be bent in exchange for the right amount of money.
So in that way, little has changed, and less than nothing has been accomplished in the decades-long and ironically named War on Drugs.
What has changed is the ferocity with which drug gangs now fight for their territory.
More from Borunda, the Times’ crime beat reporter in Juárez:
“Chihuahua state attorney general’s office spokesman Julio Castañeda said the latest mutilated person was found Saturday with the body in the trunk of a car, both arms amputated in the back seat, the genitals on the street and the severed head on the hood of the Dodge Intrepid.“The body was identified as 46-year-old Raul Heberto Gutierrez Peña. An autopsy determined he died of a stab wound to the chest.
“Last Wednesday, the bodies of five men were left in a sport utility vehicle with a severed head on the hood at the same bustling location.”
The cartels and their tendency toward murder don’t stop at the border. They have been traced to El Paso and Houston and cities all over the U.S., for longer than you’d think.
This is what concerned me during the Bush II years, and it’s what still concerns me under Obama: We as a country have a lot more to fear right now – day in and day out, right down the street – from drug gang terrorism than from Al-Qaeda.
But while we’re using the Army, Navy and Marines in the War Against Terror From Somewhere Else, we’re still using the same old failed tactics and failed agencies in the War Against Terror From Down The Block.
The result? In Juárez last month, 248 homicides. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg flowing north.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 27, 2009, 08 00 am
