Mexican Military Finds 72 Bodies Near Border

[Borderwatch]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...LEFTTopStories

By DAVID LUHNOW and JOSE DE CORDOBA

MEXICO CITY—Gunmen from a drug cartel appear to have massacred 72 migrants from Central and South America who were on their way to the U.S., a grisly event that marks the single biggest killing in Mexico's war on organized crime.



Mexican marines discovered the 72 bodies—58 men and 14 women —on Tuesday after the lone survivor of the massacre, a wounded migrant from Ecuador, stumbled into a Navy checkpoint the previous day and told of being shot on Monday at a nearby ranch, Mexican officials said on Wednesday.

When the marines went to investigate, they were met with a hail of gunfire from cartel gunmen holed up at the ranch, which sits 90 miles from the U.S. border. One marine and three alleged gunmen died during a two-hour battle, which ended when the gunmen fled in a fleet of SUVs, leaving behind a cache of weapons.

The Ecuadorean migrant told investigators that his captors identified themselves as members of the Zetas drug gang, said Vice Adm. Jose Luis Vergara, a spokesman for the Mexican navy.

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Associated Press

An Ecuadorean citizen escaped from a remote ranch in eastern Mexico and stumbled wounded to a highway checkpoint, where he alerted Mexican Navy marines. One marine was killed in a firefight after marines went to investigate the ranch.
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"This illustrates that organized crime has no limits or moral qualms about what they are prepared to do," Alejandro Poire, head of the government's national-security council, told a news conference.

The incident highlights the extent to which Mexican drug gangs, which used to focus exclusively on ferrying narcotics such as cocaine to the U.S., have diversified into other lucrative criminal activities such as human smuggling and extortion.

At the going rate of $5,000 to $7,000 charged by smugglers to cross the U.S. border, the 72 people represented about $500,000 to the drug gang, said Alberto Islas, a Mexico City-based security consultant. The gang may have simply killed the migrants after they refused to give them more money than they had already given them, he said.

Mexican officials said they didn't know why the migrants—believed to be from El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador and Brazil—were killed. Mexican newspapers, citing an unnamed federal official, speculated that the migrants were killed for either refusing to give the drug gang more money to cross the border, or for declining to join the gang's criminal activities as drug couriers, gunmen or prostitutes.
Mexico's War on Drugs

Review key events in the fight to break the grip of Mexico's drug cartels.

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Mexico's Drug Killings

Nearly 23,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006, according to the government, with northern border states experiencing the worst of the violence.

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* More photos and interactive graphics

A study by Mexico's National Human Rights Commission published last year found that 9,758 migrants from Central and South America had been kidnapped by presumed drug gangs between September, 2008 and February, 2009. The commission found that in many cases, government officials and police worked with criminal gangs in carrying out the abductions.

The commission said that the number of migrant kidnappings could be as high as 18,000 a year. It estimated the average ransom at $2,500—making the business worth an estimated $50 million a year..

Some 28,000 people have died in Mexico's war on organized crime since President Felipe Calderón took power in December 2006 and declared an all-out battle against powerful drug-trafficking gangs that were gaining immense power and challenging the Mexican state.

The death toll is rising fast, including more frequent discoveries of mass graves. In May, authorities discovered 55 bodies in an abandoned mine near Taxco, a colonial-era city south of Mexico City known for its silver. Last month, another 51 bodies were found near a trash dump outside the northern city of Monterrey.

Both of those mass graves were sites where drug gangs disposed of rivals killed during a period of weeks or months. This latest incident could be the single biggest instance of bloodshed from a Mexican cartel to date, experts said.

Tamaulipas has become one of Mexico's bloodiest states since the dominant local cartel, the Gulf cartel, split with its former enforcers, the Zetas. Mexican officials say that they believe the Zetas, initially formed by Mexican army forces who defected to the other side, are responsible both for the June assassination of a leading gubernatorial candidate in Tamaulipas and the recent killing of a local mayor in neighboring Nuevo Leon state.

The Zetas thrive on the publicity from their killings, said George Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William and Mary. "This kind of thing helps them burnish their image as the meanest, most sadistic, cruelest organization—not only in Mexico but in the whole of the Americas. That helps them raise money from targets of extortion, who are terrified of them," he said.

Despite the dangers faced by migrants, desperate people from poor countries will continue to try to cross into the U.S., providing more opportunities for exploitation by gangs such as the Zetas, according to Williams Murillo, Ecuador's former minister for migrant affairs.

Mr. Murillo, who now gives legal advice to Ecuadorean migrants, said he recently came across an Ecuadorean woman who crossed into Mexico with her young child. The child was taken by the Zetas who are now demanding a ransom, according to Mr. Murillo.

"Sadly, stories like this don't stop people from risking their lives to try to get to the U.S. They just don't see enough opportunity here in Ecuador," Mr. Murillo said.
[Tamaulipas]

At least four of the bodies discovered were those of Brazilians, according to a spokeswoman at Brazil's foreign ministry in Brasilia.

Brazilian consular officials in Mexico, she said, would soon travel to the site where the bodies were found to help try to identify the victims and determine whether any more of the bodies were those of Brazilians.

Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com and Jose de Cordoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com

[wetibbe]

The best thing that can happen to the USA.

I do not want to sound sanguine or cold blooded but it seems time to pull up a chair, pop a beer, put out the chips and just sit and watch the show !

Those guys are much more effective than our DHS, CBP and ICE !

Between the massacres, hacking off heads, and intermutal gang shootouts they are doing much to stem the flow of illegal aliens.

The other best thing is our economy tanking. It's eliminating aliens too who are going back home. But unfortunately it is taking down Americans too. But maybe the storm will flush out the debris.

Here's the downside of the Mexican killings.

Immigration
Mexicans Facing Drug War Violence Could Seek Political Asylum in U.S.
By Ed Barnes

Published April 01, 2010
| FOXNews.com
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AP

FILE: In this March 26, 2010. photo, a crossing guard holds up a stop sign as a parent and child cross the street to get to school at Fort Hancock, Texas, located about 50 miles southeast of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, epicenter of a bloody drug war that has sent Mexican families fleeing. (AP)
The spreading violence of the drug wars along the Mexican border may have one unintended consequence. It could upend efforts to curb illegal immigrants by giving Mexican border-crossers a tool they never had before: a valid claim for political asylum.

For decades, immigrants coming from Mexico were denied asylum because Mexico was a stable and relatively peaceful democracy. But that is changing now.

Last week, at least 30 Mexicans from the town of El Porvenir walked to the border crossing post at Fort Hancock, Texas, and asked for political asylum. Ordinarily, their claim would be denied as groundless, and they would be turned back. Instead, they were taken to El Paso, where they expect to have their cases heard.

No one doubts that they have a strong claim. Their town on the Mexican side of the border is under siege by one or more drug cartels battling for control of the key border crossing. According to Mike Doyle, the chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County, Texas, one of the cartels has ordered all residents of the town of 10,000 to abandon the city within the next month.

"They came in and put up a sign in the plaza telling everyone to leave or pay with their own blood," Doyle said. Since then there has been a steady stream of El Porvenir residents seeking safety on the American side of the border, both legally and illegally. Among them are the 30 who are seeking political asylum.

In recent days the situation in the impoverished, dusty border town has grown worse. According to Jose Franco, the superintendent of schools in Fort Hancock, the cartels have threatened to execute children in school unless parents pay 5000 pesos in protection money.

And on Wednesday night, according to Doyle, several houses in El Porvenir were set on fire, and there were reports of cars loaded with furniture leaving the town.

Authorities fear that an incident might spark a mass exodus by the residents of El Porvenir that might cause them all to surge across the border at once.

Doyle says there are no plans yet to set up camps for an influx of refugees. "There is just no way to plan for that," he said. "We are waiting to see what happens. We will use the standard natural disaster procedures if it happens -- the Red Cross and housing at the schools, and if it gets worse, the state and the federal government will have to step in."

If political asylum is granted and made available to a large section of the Mexican population, immigration experts say, it could have implications far beyond El Porvenir. They say it could open the floodgates for a new wave of immigration from Mexico, much as allowing Chinese to seek political asylum because of China's one-child policy created a huge migration when it happened. After that ruling, tens of thousands of Chinese boarded boats and planes and told immigration officials they were seeking asylum because they were allowed to have only one child. Most were granted immigration papers and allowed to stay. Even those who made spurious claims were granted a hearing and often simply disappeared.

According to Will Matthews, an American Civil Liberties Union spokesman, the wall that has kept Mexicans from requesting political asylum has already cracked. He says that a decision by Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to send an police informant, Guillermo Eduardo Ramirez-Peyro, back to Mexico was overturned by the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that asylum could be granted to him and others based on the Convention Against Torture.

"The court said that under the convention, 'acquiescence by government officials that could lead to a petitioner's harm' was grounds to grant political asylum," he said. The court, however, did not grant asylum; it ordered the BIA to rehear the case. Last week, after five years, the BIA reversed course and granted Ramirez-Peyro political asylum.

According to Shuya Ohno of Reform Immigration for America, even if hundreds or thousands of Mexicans sought asylum because of the drug wars, it is not likely that many would get it. "It is a hard case to make and very few succeed," he said. "Often it requires that those committing repression or threatening harm admit to it."

However, he said, it is likely if that if thousands of Mexicans made the claim, "it would stress the system incredibly" as well as delay their deportations. He said that the immigration court system is already overloaded and often staffed by volunteers just to keep it moving, and that if it was flooded with asylum claims it would be in danger of failing.

Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said the situation was troubling. "The entire system of political asylum claims was set up for a different era," he said. "It was to protect people from repressive governments but now is being used when there is just a general breakdown of order."

He said that making a political asylum claim available to Mexicans along the border could result in a swamping of the already overloaded system and bring it to a grinding halt. "Once an avenue of appeal is opened, then it will become used" he said. And not just by those who qualify, but by thousands who don't.

[wetibbe]

Let me say that when I see the illegal aliens, Los Zetas, their families, the Government of Mexico,Guatemala, Ecuador, Brazil and their citizens and churches express even a modicum of condolences, compassion, regrets for all of the Americans who have died, been mowed down by drunks, been raped, abused, robbed by the aliens then I will dust off my Christian values and think about it.

In the meantime I have to consider the invaders as non-uniformed combatants creating great damage to our country. *( Incidentally those invaders do include many countries who are on the US watch list for terrorism ).