Drugs on the Border

This is an added feature to the Border Solution Task Force Web Page. The illegal importation of drugs across our borders is one of the most serious problems facing our nation and our nation's law enforcement today. Since almost no "hard drugs" like heroin and other opiates and cocaine are produced in the United States, they must be imported. Other than that opium and coca extract legally imported under extremely controlled conditions for medical purposes, all the "street drugs" are smuggled into the country. Massive quantities of illegal drugs, measured in tons are successfully smuggled into the United States each year to be sold on our street corners, in our school yards and wherever else illicit drugs are sold.

In order to get vast quantities of drugs across our borders, a complex system of transportation and distribution has been put together by some of the most evil enterprises in existence. They will stop at nothing to get their product to market in the United States. If bribery of our officials--as is common in Mexico--won't work, then they will use intimidation. If intimidation won't work, they will try murder to make it work. Our nation and society are at great risk from a most terrible threat from outside our borders. We are being invaded and infiltrated by a very real enemy whose greatest ally is our complacence.
From time to time the Border Solution Task Force will post in this location articles and opinions relating to our drugwars at the border.

Border Drug Problems Only The Tip of the Iceberg

It is difficult to substantiate that the rash of shootings at Border Patrol agents along the border is connected with the Mexican drug cartels, but the probabilities of such a connection is obvious. Intelligence sources have clearly developed information that the cartels are offering huge rewards up to $10,000 for the home addresses of Border Patrol agents and are also offering bounties on the lives of on-duty agents.

With the recent death of Mexico's major drug lord, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, a vacuum has developed in the leadership of the drug world in Mexico, and chaos now reigns. At stake are billions in drug profits that are believed to top $15 billion annually, equivalent to 5 percent of Mexico's gross domestic product, according to Latin Trade Magazine.

Many of the urban and even rural gangs that have been cropping up throughout the U.S. are extensions of foreign drug cartels. These gangs are a critical link in the cartels' distribution chain. Therefore the lawlessness and intimidation extend far beyond the border. Every man, woman and child in the U.S. is affected directly or indirectly by what is going on both here at the border and south of the border.

Some economists go so far as to say that if the flow of drugs into the U.S. is stopped, the national economy of Mexico could be seriously destabilized. Such a report is contained in a recent issue of the Miami-based business monthly, Latin Trade Magazine. In recent years the border state of Sonora, just south of our state of Arizona, has become a main shipping center for cocaine from Bolivia, Peru and Columbia, and that Mexican border state has much to lose if the drug trade is curtailed.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that Mexican-based gangs, with connections to their U.S-based equivalents, control the movement into the U.S. of 770 tons of cocaine, 5.5 to 6.6 tons of heroin and 7,700 tons of marijuana annually.

The apparent reason for the shift is that heroin is easier to smuggle, yields far higher profits than cocaine and represents a market the Colombians can control, for now, without fear of encroachment from Mexico's increasingly powerful drug cartels.

"The theory is that the Colombians are consciously ceding their (cocaine markets) to the Mexicans," a senior DEA official in Washington said. He added that Colombian cartels appear to have relinquished most of their cocaine markets on the West Coast, Midwest and Texas to Mexicans at the same time they are Bombarding the East Coast with heroin.

"We believe the whole structure is undergoing a fundamental change," he said. "In the past, if this (encroachment) had happened, there would have been a bloodbath."

To avoid having to cut Mexican cartels in on the heroin trade, Colombian traffickers are turning to smuggling routes by way of the Caribbean, even though overland routes through Mexico are better established and often have a higher probability of successfully landing the product in the U.S., officials said.

"We believe it is a result of stronger competition between the two," said Col. Leonardo Gallego, chief of Columbia's 2,300-member anti-narcotics police force. "We have every reason to expect the phenomenon to continue this way."

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