ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER...Corruption, Drugs, Gangs, and More...

[Lucinda F. Boyd]

Investigators on scene following a shootout near the border. Gallery | Video ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER Corruption, Drugs, Gangs, and More 08/02/10 The U.S. border with Mexico extends nearly 2,000 miles, from San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas. At too many points along the way, criminals ply their trade with surprising ease and devastating results. Drug cartels transporting kilos of cocaine and marijuana, gangs who think nothing of kidnapping and murder, traffickers smuggling human cargo, corrupt public officials lining their pockets by looking the other way—any one of these offenses represents a challenge to law enforcement. Watch Video: The FBI's role on the border. Taken together, they constitute a threat not only to the safety of our border communities, but to the security of the entire country. During the next several weeks, FBI.gov will take you to the Southwest border for a firsthand look at our efforts there to fight crime. We will take you to San Diego—home of the world’s busiest port of entry—and across the border into Tijuana. We will also visit El Paso, Texas, whose sister city in Mexico—Juarez—has become as deadly as any war zone thanks to the drug cartels. In articles, pictures, and video, we will chronicle the Bureau’s efforts to combat Southwest Assistant Director Kevin Perkins border crime through our participation in drug, violent crime, and public corruption task forces; our extensive intelligence-gathering efforts; and our vital partnerships with Mexican law enforcement. Despite our continuing successes, however, much work is left to be done. “With such a great expanse of territory to cover,” said Kevin Perkins, assistant director of our Criminal Investigative Division, “there are places where the border is permeable. In some areas of the desert, people can cross illegally at will, and they do. The U.S. government has built fences and other barriers that our adversaries are continually trying to defeat, and in some cases they are defeating them,” he added. “Either they're tunneling under, flying over, or actually cutting through the various defenses we've put up.” About This Series Inside our efforts to fight border crime through our participation in drug, violent crime, and public corruption task forces; our intelligence-gathering efforts; and our vital partnerships with Mexican law enforcement. The cartels make billion-dollar profits trafficking drugs. Gaining and controlling border access is critical to their operations. They maintain that control through bribery, extortion, intimidation, and extreme violence. Some areas on the Mexican side of the border are so violent they are reminiscent of the gangster era of Chicago in the 1930s or the heyday of the Mafia’s Five Families in New York. In Tijuana, for example, a man who came to be known as "The Strew Maker"—El Pozolero—worked for one of the cartels dissolving hundreds of murder victims in acid to dispose of the evidence. In Juarez, decapitated heads of murdered cartel members have been displayed on fence posts to intimidate rivals. “We think al Qaeda is bad,” said one of our senior agents in El Paso, “but they’ve got nothing on the cartels.” The disturbing level of violence sometimes overshadows the national security risks along the border, Perkins said. “Unfortunately, there are border guards who are corrupt—people who can wave vehicles through checkpoints. Those vehicles could contain narcotics or illegal aliens, but they could also be pieces to the next dirty bomb brought into the country by terrorists. We are working very hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

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