Few topics in Texas are more politically charged than the issue of violence spilling into Texas from the ongoing drug war in Mexico.
Border politicians, many of them Democrats, tend to embrace crime statistics that show the border as less violent and less crime-ridden than the rest of the country. And that’s not so surprising. What mayor doing his best to entice new investment and business wants his city presented as a battleground in the drug war?
Meanwhile, many state officials, most of them Republicans, accuse the federal government of being in denial when it comes to border violence. That’s no surprise either. The issue of border violence is an effective tool to hammer Washington D.C. (especially in the context of a presidential campaign) and provides ammunition for pleas for more manpower and resources for law enforcement from the federal government.
But what’s been missing in the debate is conclusive evidence of whether spillover violence is actually occurring along the Texas border. While crime rates along the border have generally declined since 2006, the year Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent the military to confront the cartels, FBI statistics don’t differentiate between drug or cartel-related crimes and run-of-the mill criminality. Thus while their stats show a mild decline in crime, it’s possible that hidden in those numbers are indicators of growing violence from cartel members and their associates.
As we reported in Tuesday’s paper, the latest report seeking to bring clarity to the issue is the $80,000 “Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment.” Produced by two retired generals and commissioned by the Texas Departments of Agriculture and Public Safety, the report comes to some powerful conclusions: Not only is spillover violence real, but conditions on both sides of the Texas border are akin to a “war zone” and border residents are under attack “around the clock.” America’s fight against “narco-terrorism” is taking on “the classic trappings of a real war.”
But the report relies not on new statistics, or analysis of existing statistics. Instead it largely uses anonymous anecdotal evidence from ranchers and farmers, most of it culled from online postings. (The website, protectyourtexasborder.com is run by the state agriculture department and aims to win more federal help for border security.)
At the report’s release at the capitol Monday, retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales argued that anecdotal information is a more valuable predictor of the future than statistics: “What we’ve learned is that the evidence of where a war is going begins with anecdotal evidence.”
Predictably, the report sparked outrage from border mayors and a particularly scathing response from U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, who said the report made “outrageous claims to promote reactionary measures, such (as) militarizing the border, that are not grounded on validity and reason.”
What the report and its response did show is that different parts of the border experience violence in different ways. While residents in cities like El Paso and Laredo take offense to the border being painted as a “war zone.” there is no doubt that many rural residents, especially those living along human and drug smuggling routes near Border Patrol checkpoints, feel increasingly under attack, undefended and vulnerable.
But perhaps the biggest lesson of the report is that we still need a more comprehensive, detailed and exact picture of the violence that is or is not raging on our side of the border.