It’s the second time in as many months that stray gunfire from an incident in Juárez has come across the border, striking a building in El Paso. Nobody in El Paso was injured, but again Texas officials are using the incident to argue for arming the border.
According to the El Paso Times, a stray round struck the glass window in a University of Texas at El Paso building before continuing on to strike the door of an interior office. Police say they are investigating whether the stray round is connected to a shootout in Juárez on Saturday evening. Three Mexican officers were injured during the incident that killed one of the gunmen.
Last month we reported that stray shots had hit El Paso’s city hall building, one of which landed in the office of an assistant city manager. Again, no one was hurt, but Attorney General Greg Abbott took the opportunity to complain to President Barack Obama that the time for “talk” about border enforcement was over, and the time to secure the “porous” stretch along the Rio Grande is now.
Flash forward and now we’ve got Gov. Rick Perry singing a similar – and similarly inane – tune. In a Monday afternoon statement, Perry argued that Obama is “gambling” with American lives by not heeding the call to further arm the border; Obama’s inaction, Perry said, was “unconscionable.”
Still confusing is what, exactly, armed soldiers or agents would do to stop a stray bullet from entering El Paso. Governor?
Of course, a far better discussion might be one aimed at figuring out how to bring the four-decades-old Drug War to an end – a war that is the single greatest cause for violence on the border. But no one seems interested in that, at least not in Perry’s office or even in Washington, D.C. I guess that’s at least one thing they’ve got in common.
But that discussion is on the mind of Mexican officials, including President Felipe Calderon, who is now saying that he might actually reconsider the country’s approach to fighting the cartels – a strategy that has cost Mexico some 28,000 lives since he took office in late 2006. Calderon has said he would be willing to discuss whether legalization makes sense, but that it would be “absurd” for his country to do so alone.
This article appears in August 20 • 2010.