Word: paso
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Solutions on the Front Line In El Paso, which is receiving a stream of Juárez exiles like Rojas, plenty would like to see an even broader shift in policy. The city council recently voted unanimously to ask Washington to consider legalizing marijuana, whose casual use is widely considered no more harmful than that of alcohol. The move would seriously crimp the drug cartels' cash flow, estimated at more than $25 billion a year. El Paso's mayor vetoed the resolution, but "the discussion is changing," says council member Beto O'Rourke, who insists the U.S. has for too long...
...tragic wisdom has emerged at this dusty junction of developed and developing worlds. On one side of the Rio Grande is Juárez, whose maquiladora assembly plants fuel dreams of modernity but which is now one of the hemisphere's most dangerous cities. On the other side is El Paso, which is one of the U.S.'s safest communities (16 murders last year, compared with Juárez's 1,600) but which nonetheless knows that its future is linked to that of Juárez. "Washington and Mexico City need to know the solutions to this crisis are here...
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...
...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...
...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 Ju?...