Different law enforcement agencies have different names for cross-border violence, and with it different definitions, I’m told.
According to one definition, there hasn’t been any “spillover” violence from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso (yet — it’s gone to the West and East, but not openly E.P.). There is concern for the growing threat, particularly as gunshot victims — police officers and others — have been taken to El Paso for medical treatment, as discussed in this LA Times article by Miguel Bustillo.
The only hospital within a 280-mile radius to offer state-of-the-art trauma care, Thomason has become an unwilling treatment center of choice for law enforcement officials and others in the vicinity wounded in Mexico’s drug turf battles. The violence has killed more than 2,000 people this year, and more than double that number in the 20 months since President Felipe Calderon began deploying 40,000 troops across the country to crack down on narcotics trafficking.
Thomason has treated 28 people wounded on the other side of the border this year, spending an estimated $1 million, hospital administrators said. Nineteen were U.S. citizens or had dual citizenship, and the rest had legal permission to enter the country.
Mexican police officers in a number of border towns have come to U.S. ports of entry, seeking asylum out of fear of drug traffickers. In one incident, the police chief of Puerto Palomas, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, just south of Columbus, New Mexico, and nearly 80 miles west of El Paso, came to the port after several officers quit the force in March.
From Manuel Roig-Franzia of the Washington Post:
Javier Emilio Pérez Ortega, a workaholic Mexican police chief, showed up at the sleepy, two-lane border crossing here last month and asked U.S. authorities for political asylum.
Behind him, law and order was vanishing fast. In the four months he had served as Puerto Palomas police chief, drug traffickers had threatened to kill him and his officers if they tried to block the flow of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United States, his former colleagues said on condition of anonymity.
After a particularly menacing telephone call, his 10-man force resigned en masse. His bodyguards quit, too. Abandoned by his men and unable to trust the notoriously corrupt Mexican authorities, Pérez Ortega turned to the only place he believed he could find refuge — the United States, the former colleagues said.
While the violence may not have hit El Paso (at least not reported), it’s certainly happened elsewhere, particularly with kidnapping in Arizona and California.
