Border Battle and What to Believe

I have a Google Alert for Nuevo Laredo. I get everything that pops up about the city including blogs. These alerts make you think that there is a constant gun battle going on in Nuevo Laredo because every incident is written about and blogged about over and over and over even days after it happened. I could just stop the Alert but we have to drive through Nuevo Laredo if we drive back to Texas and I want to know what is happening there.

Recently the Nuevo Laredo alerts lit up with the news that two ranches near Laredo had been taken over by the Zetas but the news sources were blogs and on-line publications. Supposedly the government was keeping this invasion of the United States of America quiet. But can the government keep FOX and CNN from sniffing around at any story that might help fill up their 24/7 need for news. When Anderson Cooper didn't show up on some South Texas road within about six hours with a bullet proof vest to interview the ranch owners who had been kicked off their land, I figured that it was a hoax.

No one in any government jurisdiction would confirm the invasion of the Zetas but that did not stop the Cypress Times, a christian, conservative on-line publication, from continuing to send out reports. Several days after this Zeta take over was refuted, they still ran a story about it but they at least by that time were saying that they could not confirm the story but their eye-witness reporter was still standing by what he wrote....and they published the whole thing again.

I have gotten better at censoring the alerts. If it is from the Cypress Times, I'm probably not going to read it. Sometimes things are repeated over and over and over. Did these four bodies just show up or are they the same four bodies that were reported on five days ago. I'll read a border blog a time or two but if I get a sense that they are very biased, I'll stop reading them. I don't twitter but I understand that the twitters on the border situation have become a gumbo mix of truths, lies and exaggerations, so that would not be a reliable way to know what is happening.

The Mexican newspapers and TV stations can not be relied on because the cartels have managed to terrorize the Mexican media especially along the border so that it seems that they can dictate the news that gets published. The loss of a free press anywhere in Mexico is a terrible threat to Mexico's democracy.

Some of the sources that I'm following are:
The Laredo and San Antonio news reports about Nuevo Laredo
On Facebook: Nuevo Laredo Tamaulipas
Blog:  I really don't have one to recommend. News and rumors get blogged and reblogged so many times that I can't sort out fact from fiction. I do read Que Fregados from Laredo. She writes mostly about Laredo but at times when she recounts hearing guns and explosions from across the river, the post is thoughtful.
Yahoo Groups: The Civil List here in San Miguel. People often report about their drive to and from Texas. Most say that they had no problems but often enough to be worrisome someone will report problems. In the past is was about being stopped for a "traffic violation" but recently it is taking a bit uglier turn...being stopped by eight "policemen" and a knife planted in the car so that the mordita became a much larger sum. Being chased at high speed by a strangely marked police car. And reports outside the Civil List of car hijackings.
United States Travel Warnings - especial when they are a local report from Nuevo Laredo or Monterrey.

The situation in Nuevo Laredo and all along the border is terrible. You don't know what is really happening because the news is censored, muddled and many times biased toward different political agendas on both sides of the border. Do you have a news source or blog that you trust?

Driving North

Mexican Highway 57 doesn't look dangerous does it? But near the Texas-Mexico border peridocally it is because the Mexican drug cartels battle each other to control routes and the Mexican government battle the cartels to try to stop the flow of drugs to the USA. About a week before we drove back to Texas, we read that the cartels had a battle in Nuevo Laredo near the zoo. If the reports are correct the battle included military assault weapons and grenades. The US Government periodically issues warnings about travel along some highways or in some Mexican cities.

Our route to the International Bridge II takes us near the zoo. So we were on high alert as we drove along the Rio Grande. We didn't see any building that looked like it had been damaged. We did see men playing golf and on the other side of the road there were baseball games in progress.

I'm not minimizing the terrible situation along the border. Too many people have lost their lives and too many people have businesses that have failed because the tourists aren't coming south. I just wonder how the majority of people who live in the cities like Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Juarez can live with the stress day after day.

But there is something else that I don't understand. The cartels are battling for the routes to the US so what happens once the drugs get across the border? And they must be getting across the border or they would not be so profitable that the cartels fight about them. After they get across do they just magically move across the US? Is there little need to pay bribes, corrupt police or kill many people to protect their routes?

I'm just asking.........

Tres Pechos

The Fair still has the side shows. This poor woman has three breasts. We didn't go see them.

But that isn't what I'm writing about today. While we were at the fair, we talked with a young man for quite a while. His story is still going around in my head. I'll call him Juan. He was a good looking, cleancut man. The kind of guy you would like to have in your neighborhood.

When Juan was a boy his mother took him to the USA. He said that when they crossed the border they just walked across and went to stay with some relatives. He graduated from high school in the USA. His English was perfect. After high school he went to work and as young men do, he fell in love, got married. She was a US citizen. As the government began cracking down on businesses for hiring undocumented aliens, his boss told him he needed papers. He wanted Juan to get them because he was a good worker and the boss wanted to promote him.

By this time a baby was on the way. Juan knew he needed to get his immigration status settled so he could take care of his family. Moving to Mexico to live wasn't an option with his wife. So Juan returned to Mexico alone to try to get permission to live in the USA. The baby has gotten very sick when the wife has visited him in Mexico so she doesn't want to visit here either and besides it is very expensive for her and the baby to come back and forth. Juan told us how much he misses his family and how he is especially missing seeing his baby doing all the "firsts" that babies do.

Juan decided that while he was here working on the paperwork and waiting, and waiting, he would go to college and that would help him when he got back to the USA. He went to the University in Guanajuanto to enroll. When he showed them his high school diploma, the University said that since he didn't graduate in Mexico, he would have to pay three times the tuition even though he was a Mexican citizen. The only jobs he has been able to find are jobs that pay $10 a day.

Juan is a sad man with a foot on both sides of the border. He was such a nice young man. My heart goes out to him and his family. I hope that the attorney who is helping him try to get his papers through the US Consulate is really "helping him" and not just taking his money. I have a feeling that there are a lot of other Juans.

Border Tactics

On a regular basis the San Miguel "chat" group called the Civil List gets into a discussion about immigration laws in Mexico, how difficult it is to get Visas, FM3s, or FM2s. There seems to always be someone who thinks that the Mexican bureaucracy is inefficient, excessive and/or overbearing. We have never found that to be the case. All in all, maybe some of those who are complaining should take a good look back North of the Border at what is happening.

Recently at a party we were talking with a couple who have a second home here in San Miguel. They recounted bringing a sum of cash to Mexico, a large sum but not more than the $10,000 which by USA law must be reported. They were questioned about what they were going to do with that amount of money in Mexico. Excuse me. If they weren't breaking any laws in the USA or Mexico, why did the government need to know what they planned to do with their money. Another time when returning from Mexico they were questioned about what they did in Mexico for 21 days.

Back in April, a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you're entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days.

Border agents now scan license plates and passports of all exits and re-entries by USA citizens at land crossings as well as by air and all of this is being stored in a traveler database. Ellen Nakashima in an article for The Washington Post, writes that the information will be stored for 15 years and may be used in criminal and intelligence investigations. There are a lot more issues about this data base that should worry all of us because depending on the way it is used, it could become worse than THE WATCH list which theoretically only lists someone for a reason. I hope you will take the time to read the article.

Another blogger, Eddie Willers, wrote this week in his blog, Adventures of a Third World Shopkeeper, about his experience at the McAllen border. He has a British passport, is married to a Mexican, and works in Mexico. Although for a number of years he has regularly crossed the border from Mexico to the United States with his British passport with out a problem, this time he was denied entry. Read about it here.

Hey, all I'm saying is that this just doesn't "feel" right to me and it seems to open the door to more and more ways of invading our privacy. Once they have the data, who will use it and how will it be analyzed?