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Juárez civic leaders like Vargas have long called for the kind of Mexican police and judicial reform that both countries are only now starting to make a priority. Meanwhile, Americans like El Paso County sheriff Richard Wiles want the U.S. to renew the assault-weapons ban that George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress allowed to expire in 2004. If it doesn't, they fear, the few Black Hawk helicopters that Washington ships to Mexico's antidrug warriors won't make up for the thousands of AK-47 rifles and even rocket-propelled grenades pouring into the hands...
...El Paso itself has been relatively unscathed by the drug wars, in part because the cartels don't want to jeopardize their trafficking corridors on the border's U.S. side. Still, cartel-associated violence is beginning to reach into U.S. cities from the Sun Belt to the Pacific Northwest. Attorney General Eric Holder, who visited Mexico City in April with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, has called Mexico's drug savagery a "national security threat...
...term antidrug strategy doesn't need the sort of hysteria that has had some in Washington comparing Mexico to failing states like Pakistan. "Obama needs to throw a bucket of cold water on that kind of rhetoric," says Tony Payan, a Mexico expert at the University of Texas at El Paso. "He needs a Mexico approach for the next 20 years, not 20 days." Mexico is making some progress. Juárez saw violence spike last year when at least three cartels started a pitched battle for its valuable trafficking turf. (Most of the drugs from Mexico enter the U.S. through...
...just U.S. weapons that are moving south. Many of the thugs being picked up by the military are from the Barrio Azteca gang, which is based in El Paso but whose members are recruited to work for La Línea in Juárez. That makes it all the more urgent for U.S. law enforcement to sap Barrio Azteca's strength on the U.S. side. Six Azteca bosses were recently convicted in El Paso on federal racketeering charges. Sheriff Wiles, a Democrat, believes that this attention to localized border strategies is deepening under the Obama Administration and Napolitano, who was governor...
Still, until Juárez's crisis finally lifts, there are plenty in El Paso who will demand more and "weigh in on national policy," as O'Rourke, the city-council member, puts it. Talk of legalizing marijuana is growing; the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs in March heard prominent drug researchers argue that cannabis should be sold legally and taxed like tobacco. Ernesto Zedillo and César Gaviria, former Presidents of Mexico and Colombia, respectively, have said the same. And Mexico's Congress is again debating decriminalization of marijuana use, after backing off the issue a few years ago under...