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<p>Back in April, 2008 I reported on how the Border Patrol was dropping it's requirement for a High School Diploma or GED, lessening training from 88 days to 55 days and basically encouraging a Border Patrol that will enable corruption and incompetence to enter the agency. Now this has proven true as arrests for corruption within the Border Patrol has skyrocketed.</p>

Crossing a Mexican drug cartel usually comes with a price — death. On the U.S.- Mexico border, that price is being paid daily with an endless stream of execution-style slayings in a war to control drug routes to the north. As Mexican officials crack down on these cartels, violence spreads. Lives are merely the cost of doing business, and since 2007 the international press has documented more than 7,400 drug war-related murders on the border. Police are gunned down in public squares. Failed drug smugglers are tortured to death and bound from head to toe in duct tape. Enemies are...

During his visit to Mexico last week, President Obama suggested that Americans are partly to blame for the appalling violence associated with the illegal drug trade there. "The demand for these drugs in the United States is what's helping keep these cartels in business," he said. "This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States."Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it's the war on...

In 2006, I conducted a three-part interview with former US Border Patrol Supervisor David J Stoddard. For 27 years, David served in Calexico, California, Vermont, Yuma, Tucson Sector Headquarters and Naco, Arizona and worked in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and other locations. He also provided testimony about immigration reform to Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner's (R-WI) House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims in 1999 and a Congressional subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources in 2002. With the current US-Mexico border crisis — including an actual ongoing war on our southern border — I thought it was time to...

MEXICO CITY — As Mexico suffers from an onslaught of massacres, decapitations and execution-style hits, six major drug cartels have carved up the country into fiefdoms. Like the armies of authentic warlords, the cartels attempt to completely dominate their territories, controlling trafficking routes, local drug sales and other criminal enterprises. Clashing over disputed turf, the cartels all have carried out murders on an epic scale. Sinaloa Cartel City base: Culiacan (northwestern Mexico) Kingpins: Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, Juan Jose Esparragoza (El Azul) States in sphere of influence: Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango, Morelos, Chihuahua, Baja California, Mexico City,...

AT least 15 people have been killed in the past 24 hours in northern Chihuahua state, local officials said, hours after US President Barack Obama said violence in Mexico has "gotten out of hand". The bodies of five men were found on Saturday in an irrigation ditch outside of Rosales, in the central part of the state, the local prosecutor's office said, adding that the bodies were apparently dumped from a pick-up truck. In Chihuahua capital, another four bodies were dumped by gunmen from a car near a petrol station, the office added. Late Saturday, three people were murdered in...

From the original 31 members, the Mexican organized criminal faction Los Zetas has grown into an organization in its own right, operating separate from the Gulf Cartel and just as violent Between the first of the year and mid-March, 2009, the Mexican criminal organization most commonly known as "Los Zetas" has been busy. Members of this group have been linked to a death threat delivered to the president of Guatemala, a grenade thrown into a bar in Pharr, Texas, the death of a high-ranking military general in Cancun, and a fair share of the organized crime-related deaths registered this year...

WASHINGTON — Tighter gun control and stronger law enforcement in Southwestern states were recommended Thursday by lawmakers concerned about drug violence in Mexico possibly spilling across the border. --snip-- "The United States and Mexico border violence can only be solved if we look at all parts of the equation," Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., said Thursday during a House subcommittee considering changes to U.S. gun laws. "Let’s examine our gun laws, let’s cut down on U.S. drug consumption, let’s ask there to be more resources to root out drug-money laundering," he said...

Reporting from Monterrey, Mexico -- The small houses of the Independencia neighborhood climb a hill that rises from the bone-dry Santa Catarina riverbed. Gang graffiti proliferate the higher you go, until they completely cover the cinder-block walls with slogans, threats and declarations. Young men in baggy pants, sweat shirt hoodies pulled tightly around their faces, populate the desolate street corners, in between vacant lots and shattered wooden stoops. Look out from the top of the hill and in the distance you see the impressive skyline of Monterrey, the wealthiest city in Mexico, its fancy museums, glistening high-rises, leafy plazas and...

For eight years Joaquín Guzmán Loera reportedly managed his international drug smuggling operation from behind bars while enjoying a lavish prison life with access to booze, women and a home entertainment system. Then in January 2001, facing extradition to the U.S., Guzmán slipped into a laundry cart and escaped. Since then "El Chapo," or Shorty, as he is called, has tightened his grip on Mexico's drug trade as head of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the biggest suppliers of cocaine to the U.S. It is a lucrative business to be in these days. Thirty-five million people in the U.S. use...

The failure to secure the border to prevent illegal drugs from entering into the United States from Mexico in the first place is inexusable. The Mexican drug cartels have established distribution networks and supply lines in at least 230 American cities, and the enforcement violence among the rival cells has been brutally incessant in Phoenix, Atlanta and Houston. The governors of Arizona and Texas have requested national guard troops to secure their borders only to be rebuffed by resident Barack Obama who "said that now is not the time to send troops": "We've got a very big border with Mexico,"...

Expert Tom Diaz says that imports of certain semiautomatic rifles were regulated under the first Bush and Clinton administrations. But he told a House panel Wednesday the import rules were relaxed under the most recent Bush administration.

WASHINGTON — President Obama weighed in Wednesday on the escalating drug war on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that he was looking at possibly deploying National Guard troops to contain the violence but ruled out any immediate military move. "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense," Obama said during an interview with journalists for regional papers, including a McClatchy reporter. "I don't have a particular tipping point in mind," he said. "I think it's unacceptable if you've got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens."

Obama Considering Deploying Troops to U.S.-Mexico Border President Obama tells regional reporters it is "unacceptable if you've got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens." FOXNews.com Thursday, March 12, 2009 President Obama says he's considering whether to deploy National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, after Texas Gov. Rick Perry made an urgent call fort 1,000 more "boots on the ground" to deal with the growing violence. The president weighed the option during a meeting with regional reporters Wednesday afternoon. "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they...

President Obama weighed in Wednesday on the escalating drug war on the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that he was looking at possibly deploying National Guard troops to contain the violence but ruled out any immediate military move. "We're going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense and under what circumstances they would make sense," Obama said during an interview with journalists for regional papers, including a McClatchy reporter."I don't have a particular tipping point in mind," he said. "I think it's unacceptable if you've got drug gangs crossing our borders and killing U.S. citizens."Already this year there...

FORT HUACHUCA — The Phoenix area has literally become the kidnapping capital of the United States, Arizona’s attorney general said Tuesday. The fight to control illegal immigrant smuggling routes into the United States has seen a lot of one gang of coyotes trying to take another gang’s human treasure, Terry Goddard told a number of federal, state and local law enforcement officials. Drop houses, which is where the gangs hide illegal immigrants smuggled into the country from Mexico, are a lucrative business, and that is why gangs belonging to different cartels try to kidnap people staying in those facilities, Goddard...

On Monday’s CBS Evening News, correspondent Ben Tracy filed a report documenting the thousands of guns that are illegally smuggled to Mexican drug cartels which they use in battle with the Mexican army, and suggested that lax gun laws in America are to blame. Without delving into the possibility that greater availability of guns in Mexico might help the country’s citizens to reduce that country’s overall crime rate, Tracy informed viewers that it is "nearly impossible" to buy guns in Mexico legally, as he pointed out America’s less strict laws: Mexican law makes it nearly impossible to buy guns there...

ACAPULCO, Mexico — Gunmen killed six people, including a local police chief, in a series of attacks Monday in mountain towns in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero. The police chief of Pungarabato was repeatedly shot while driving his red Mustang on a highway near the small town early Monday, Guerrero state public safety department said in a news release. Five other men were found gunned down in different towns in the isolated mountainous zone known as the Tierra Caliente, or the Hot Land, the state police said. In the border city of Tijuana, soldiers detained 60 people at a...

WASHINGTON — Americans got a wakeup call last week about the threat posed by Mexican drug traffickers when the State Department issued a travel advisory warning vacationers heading for warmer climes of the danger they would face visiting our closest neighbor to the south. The violence has escalated to the point where in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, the police chief was forced to flee the city after drug traffickers demanded his resignation, systematically killing his deputy and three of his men until he capitulated. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has dispatched soldiers and more federal police to patrol the...

Mexico City (dpa) - Mexican police found five human heads Tuesday in portable coolers on a road in Ixtlahuacan del Rio, some 600 kilometres northwest of Mexico City. On the inside of the coolers' lids, two messages had been written in black ink, with threats addressed to someone that was only identified as ``Goyo,'' a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in the state of Jalisco told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. The authorities said the heads of the five men had been severed just hours before they were found. Police were combing the rural area where the heads were found, some...