Desert Invasion - U.S.

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Mexican Army Invades U.S.

By Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com, March 12, 2003

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/3/7/134033.shtml

It’s the war nobody wants to talk about: well-armed Mexican soldiers storming across America’s southern border, sometimes with guns blazing.

“We are in state of war,” Edward Nelson, chairman of U.S. Border Control, told Soldier of Fortune magazine. “And we are fighting enemies who have brought the battle to our shores. If ever there was a time for the United States to put troops on the border, it is now.”

A blockbuster exposé in the magazine's March issue notes that over the past five years, there have been 120 documented incidents of Mexican military/police incursions, sometimes resulting in the arrest of Mexican army personnel on U.S. soil by Border Patrol agents.

Thousands of Mexican soldiers, often ill-trained draftees, have been moved up to the border allegedly to fight narcotics smuggling. Many times these armed men cross the border chasing drug traffickers....

The magazine cites incidents such as the one in March 2000 where soldiers in two Mexican army Humvees fired on Border Patrol agents in El Paso, Texas, and another in October, when 10 Mexican soldiers fired at a Border Patrol helicopter in California.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, said in a May 2002 press release that there were 23 incursions by Mexican authorities in 2001 alone.

In a letter to Soldier of Fortune magazine, a Border Patrol agent stated that “The vast majority of the American people are totally oblivious that armed forces of a foreign nation routinely violate the sovereignty of the U.S.”

Shockingly, the agent revealed, “Our government is aware of these incidents, but refuses to take any steps to stop these flagrant violations.”

Soldier of Fortune cites a series of incidents that have taken place this year:

# Humvees full of troops pointing a rifle at Border Patrol agents.

# Incursions by “groups of six to eight armed men, possibly Mexican cops wearing black bulletproof vest and carrying machine guns.

# A Chevy Suburban hit five times by gunfire and containing 22 “undocumented migrants,” more accurately called illegal aliens, eight of whom suffered gunshot wounds fired from a Mexican army vehicle, which then fled back across the border to Mexico. Some of these “anti-drug-trafficking troops” are themselves trafficking in drugs.

“Many U.S. law-enforcement officials working along the border acknowledge the involvement of Mexican military troops and police in narcotics trafficking and migrant smuggling business,” the magazine says.

“Many Mexican police agencies along the border are in the pay of the narcotraficantes and the corruption extends to high-ranking key Mexican military officers.”

And “Drug cartels spend $500 million a year to pay off corrupt Mexican generals and police officials.”

Said Congressman Tancredo: “There’s no doubt Mexican military units along the border are being controlled by drug cartels, and not by Mexico City. The military units operate freely, with little or no direction, and several of them have made numerous incursions into the Unite States.”

Trancredo warned that “unless we open our eyes and recognize that what’s happening along the U.S.-Mexican border is real, one of our guys is going to get killed.”

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