Word: mexicans
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...with nary a gringo dignitary in sight, Mexican officials carried out a less dazzling - but nonetheless remarkable - operation last weekend that should have grabbed Washington's attention. All 700 of Mexico's federal customs agents, a club notorious for corruption and a less than robust devotion to duty, were booted and replaced with a new force that's two times larger and apparently many times more professional. The 1,400 new agents, said a government statement, passed "a strict selection process that included psychological and toxicological tests, as well as the necessary investigations to ensure they have no criminal record...
...that fuel the country's horrific drug violence. But it's also a reminder that the U.S. needs to channel far more of its antidrug aid not at short-term, headline-grabbing hardware like Black Hawk helicopters but at longer-lasting, if less sexy, institutional reforms like Mexican customs overhaul. If the U.S. can help Mexico revamp its hopelessly venal and dysfunctional police forces in similar fashion - better vetting, training, pay and intelligence infrastructure - experts believe it will do much more in the long run to reduce the tons of drugs that flood the U.S. and the narcobloodshed that threatens...
...Mexican law-enforcement triumphs always seem to greet visits by top U.S. officials. When U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder arrived in Mexico City this year, a major drug-cartel kingpin was suddenly arrested. As President Obama met with Mexican President Felipe Calderón this month in Guadalajara, an alleged narcoplot to assassinate Calderón was foiled. Such spectacular collars are laudable, of course, but they're also timed to impress lawmakers in Washington who control hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. antidrug aid for Mexico...
Like a map with a scale of 1:1, Imperial is practically the size of the territory it describes: Imperial County, in southwestern California, right on the Mexican border. It's a bizarre book, but then, Imperial is a bizarre place. Home to such oddities as Slab City and the Salton Sea, it's an arid region caught in a cycle of convulsive agricultural booms and busts driven by massive irrigation projects and abetted by copious supplies of undocumented immigrant labor. A combination history book, documentary, autobiography and topographical survey, Imperial is Vollmann's obsessive, strangely engrossing attempt to articulate...
...riots and 22 escapes this year were in prisons in the arid north of Mexico where the drug trade is concentrated. With thousands more cartel soldiers flooding into these same jails, pundits fear the worst may be yet to come. "Mexico's prisons are a powder keg," wrote syndicated Mexican columnist Hugo Sanchez Gudino. "Sooner or later they are going to explode...