The Longest Romance

Author:Humberto Fontova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2013-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

COMING TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU

Some perspective: Castro’s guerrilla war, plus the urban insurgency against Batista in Cuba that saw the U.S. State Department issue travel warnings and evacuate Americans from the island, cost a grand total of 898 Cuban casualties on both sides, including all collateral damage.

When this writer secured the first U.S. interview with Honduran interim president Roberto Micheletti in July 2009, the U.S. State Department was issuing travel warnings on Honduras and American Airlines had cancelled all flights to Tegucigalpa. An utterly bloodless and scrupulously constitutional coup had triggered these jitters among U.S. officialdom.

But the wholesale slaughter along our Mexican border triggers nothing of the sort. In March 2011, Janet Napolitano, standing on the very Bridge of the Americas that joins El Paso, Texas with Juarez, Mexico (where over three thousand people were murdered last year, far surpassing the murder rate of Mogadishu or Baghdad), attempted to allay any and all jitters. With cameras rolling and surrounded by mikes, the chief of Homeland Security clarified that, although “there is a perception that the border is worse now than it ever has been, security along the U. S.-Mexican border is better now than it ever has been. The so-called spillover violence is not yet a serious issue.”23

This perception generally issues from Americans who currently live and work along that border, instead of in Washington D.C. “Mexican drug gangs literally control parts of Arizona,” says Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona. “This is going on here in Arizona—30 miles from the fifth-largest city in the United States. And these gangs are armed with radios, optics and night-vision goggles as good as anything we have. We are outgunned, we are outmanned and we don’t have the resources here locally to fight this. President Obama’s promise of 1,200 troops spread out among four border states will fall short. What is truly needed is 3,000 soldiers for Arizona alone.”24

In March 2010 the same U.S. State Department that seems so complacent regarding our border with Mexico forced U.S. government employees at six border-area U.S. consulates to evacuate their families for safety’s sake. The six consulates are in the border cities of Tijuana, Nogales, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros.

The State Department evacuation order was prompted by the murders of Lesley Enriquez, 35, a U.S. consulate employee in Juarez, and her husband Arthur Redelfs, 34, a prison guard. The couple, driving their vehicle (sporting Texas license-plates) home to El Paso, were chased through the streets of Juarez by another vehicle and finally cornered when they crashed into a sreetlight pole and murdered in a hail of automatic fire behind Juarez’ City Hall. When local cops opened the bullet-riddled car they found the murdered couple’s three-month-old daughter in her baby chair on the back seat, bawling but unharmed.

If the border is secure, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security forgot to tell the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. “Warning! You are Entering Active Drug and Human Smuggling Area!” declare signs recently posted along a stretch of Interstate 8 east of Phoenix, more than 100 miles north of the “secure” Mexican border.

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