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| Posted: March 26, 2009 |
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Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently announced plans to boost personnel and surveillance equipment at the U.S.-Mexico border and coordinate more with Mexican authorities to help contain Mexico's increasingly deadly drug war. |
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| Juan of St. Cloud, Minn. asks: |
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| Is the new border fence a cause of the increase in violence? Before, traffic of people and drugs was a small time operation by many small coyotes. Now, the few openings are valuable and criminal entrepreneurs compete for control. |
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| Andrew Selee responds: |
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 The fence itself doesn't seem to have intensified the violence, since the drug trafficking organizations were already fairly cohesive. In fact, they are starting to break up a bit, which is the root of much of the violence. But you are completely right that the fence -- and, more generally, intensified border security without any reform of immigration laws -- has finished off the small mom-and-pop coyote operations and turned immigrant smuggling into big-time organized crime, often with close links to the drug trafficking organizations. One of the most effective policies the U.S. could pursue to deal with drug trafficking would be immigration reform, since this would allow resources at the border to be deployed for pursuing criminals and not immigrants, but that seems a long way off at the moment with the economic crisis. |
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| Jose Diaz-Briseno responds: |
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 You are right in the diagnostic about the border. Nevertheless, it is not the border fence alone. After increased border enforcement efforts by the U.S. using more technology, doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and a larger effort in fencing, drug traffickers are fighting for the control of the gateways to the largest consumer market of drugs in the world: the U.S. Most of the toll of the current surge of violence in Mexico occurs in the U.S.-Mexico border areas. Of the more than 1,000 killings this year, 300 alone occurred in Ciudad Juarez, the city lying south of El Paso, Texas. Even when there are no exact figures, more than 90 percent of the killings involve people related one way or the other to the drug trade. Nevertheless, violence has also sprung in other areas deep inland like Durango or Michoacan, where different drug syndicates fight both for the control of routes and also against the step up of enforcement in Mexico through the military. So, I guess we could conclude that the main causes of violence are enforcement efforts on both sides. |
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