U.S. agents under greater attack on Mexico border

Source: yahoonews

LAREDO, Texas (Reuters) - Frustrated by tighter security on the U.S.-Mexico border, illegal immigrants and drug traffickers are taking it out on U.S. agents, increasingly attacking them with guns, rocks and petrol bombs. Assaults against Border Patrol officers rose 10 percent to 843 incidents in the year to September 2006 from the same period a year before, officials say. It is also a near three-fold increase from two years previously. Mexican drug cartels, locked in a turf feud and under pressure from an army crackdown, are lashing out at law enforcement officers in Texas. "The attacks against us are becoming more brazen. Drug cartels have instructed their people to go down fighting, to do whatever is necessary to get the narcotics through," said Rick Flores, Webb County sheriff in Laredo, Texas.

When I was a kid of about eight my parents got divorced, I ended up living with my dad. Dear old Dad really didn't care to be the disciplinarian so I basically ran around the neighborhood like a monkey with a BB gun, not the best combo I'm sure you'll agree. This went on for several years until he remarried then suddenly out of the blue he wanted to start cracking down.

How do you think I responded? Delight? Shivers of anticipation? Or did I tell him to go screw?

Here's our basic problem on the border, by standing aside and pretending there was no problem we have emboldened what are by any measure the 'bad guys .' Now after years of neglect we are kinda-sorta clamping down, kinda-sorta being the operative terms here.

So on the one hand we are increasing the pressure on the border without providing those protecting the border with increased capability to handle the increased violence? How does this end well? How is it possible to do this without Border Patrol agents or Guardsmen being seriously injured or killed?

I have predicted and stand by the statement that we will see a Border agent of some sort beheaded in the near future, just a matter of time as this has become the new cool thing to do for the drug cartels. Can we put the military on the border then?

I continue to argue that we have a war going on with Mexico in all but name. When they feel entitled to commit acts of violence against our border guards for denying them illegal entry into this country? When their military continually crosses into this country and is almost entirely corrupted by the drug cartels, and Mexico is simply melting down into a failed narco-state. This doesn't even get into the open attempts to frustrate our sovereignty perpetrated by their government.

At what point can we simply acknowledge that we are fighting a war on our Southern border? Because we cannot stop something we won't acknowledge, and god knows our government would rather lose the Southwest rather than acknowledge these homely facts.

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