Reply #36: I guess it's election year in Texas. The folks who want the border fence completed are [View All]

[struggle4progress]

busy stirring up anxiety. Oh look: somebody got murdered in Arizona, so we'd best all crap our trousers in Texas! Since Gov Perry directed the Homeland Security money elsewhere, it must be time to attack the Dems as weak on border security

Hudspeth county is beautiful open desert, for those of us who like desert: those who don't like desert tried diligently for a while to put a national radioactive waste dump there. Hudspeth fought it off, and Andrews county got the dump instead. It's the kind of dry arid landscape with the brutal summers that inspired the old cowboy saying, I'll do what I want without fear of Hell, because I rode through Texas once. I'd bet you can still stuff yourself some of the best home-cooked Tex-Mex dinners in the world there for five or six bucks in one of the small roadside diners around there

But why would the drug cartels fight over Hudspeth? They can fight with impunity over Mexican territory, where they only contend with the Federales, instead of pissing off the whole US by bringing their vicious squabbles across the border. Ciudad Juárez has been a disaster for years: in the last few decades, literally hundreds of pretty young women have been murdered and dumped in the surrounding desert there -- without anybody across el Río Bravo del Norte bothering even to yawn

Making Ciudad Juárez safer might be the smartest move -- and the way to accomplish that might be to change US drug policies. The border drug mafias aren't earning their money from Mexicans: they're funded by US consumers