Guns, cartels and escaping Mexico.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/02/16/3140568.htm


Guns, cartels and escaping Mexico

By Craig McMurtrie

Updated Wed Feb 16, 2011 3:24pm AEDT

Drug cartels tax smugglers and close their routes down if they start drawing too much attention from US authorities. (Thinkstock)

"Why did Australians give up their guns so easily?" the man behind the counter in the black baseball cap asks, as he leans on the glass case chock full of Glock pistols.

Off to one side a uniformed policeman, who had been showing a woman how to hold a handgun, pauses to hear my answer. I mutter something about the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, but the Texans in Jim Pruett's Houston gun store are disbelieving.

"Would never happen here", someone mutters. I don't doubt it.

This particular gun shop was the victim of a smash and grab raid last month that the owner believes was a drug-cartel-inspired crime. Two men, who completely ignored the fake patrol car parked outside to deter such an attack, threw a huge rock through the front window and within seconds made off with all the Glocks and assault rifles they could carry.

They're still a little jumpy in Pruett's store.

A group of dark skinned workmen wearing baggy sweatshirts and pants wanders in, speaking in muffled Spanish. They're immediately yelled at to get their hands out of their pockets.

Jim Pruett, a feisty Vietnam veteran, pats the sub machine gun he's now licensed to carry. He has some flare rounds in the magazine he tells me, if the thieves ever return he won't just shoot them; he plans to set them on fire too.

The flow of US guns stolen or bought for the cartels and slipped across the border into Mexico (hotly disputed by the National Rifle Association) is matched by a stream of drugs and people coming the other way.

In San Juan I meet a round-faced Mexican woman with dyed blonde hair. She smiles nervously as she tells me how she came to America.

Reyna Torales was 21 and living in the border town of Nogales when she resolved to get out of Mexico. She was willing to risk everything, including her seven-year-old daughter and one-year-old son.

She had to find $1,000 to pay the people smugglers, who charged $400 to take an adult across the border and $300 for a child.

One frightening night Reyna dosed her toddler son with a drug to keep him quiet and strapped him tightly to her back. Herded by the smugglers, she and her daughter and more than a dozen others literally scrambled and jumped from rooftop to rooftop until they eventually dropped into Arizona.

The ordeal was just beginning.

A three-day trek across the desert followed. They were ill prepared, short on water and totally reliant on the men leading them on. Her voice faltered as she described how during a rest period one night the smugglers tried to rape her. She was saved only when others in the group came to her rescue.

She had a crazy dream of making it all the way to Seattle, but on the third day her young son collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration. Some stayed with her but the smugglers and most of the others simply walked on.

They were only saved when a US border patrolman discovered them. He was the one who delivered them to a nearby hospital.

In the years since she's tried to make a success of her life in America, even though her immigration status remains uncertain. Tears come as she tells me how her son, now a teenager, has joined a gang and is back in Mexico.

In the neighbouring border town of La Joya, a police chief in a cowboy hat shows me crime scene video to demonstrate the extent of people smuggling activity in the area. Jose Del Angel points to a grainy picture of an SUV that's been pulled over. As one of his officers interrogates the unhappy driver, a dozen people clamber out.

Another officer takes me for a drive through a rundown neighbourhood. He points to a tired-looking green house with shuttered windows where police recently discovered a group of 60 smuggled people.

Mexican American himself, Lt Julian Gutierrez thinks up to half the locals in La Joya may have entered the US illegally.

He says the smugglers often double dip, demanding cash in advance to take people across the border and then holding them in a stash house until their American connections pay a ransom.

The drug cartels tax the smugglers and close their routes down if they start drawing too much attention from US authorities. They might rule by intimidation in Mexico but so far they have preferred to run rather than fight on American soil.

Gutierrez takes me to the edge of the muddy Rio Grande River where I could throw a stone into Mexico. He spots an empty dinghy low in the water and draws his handgun as he steps down to investigate.

Fifteen thousand Mexicans died last year in the bloody drug war.

The locals on the US side say that sometimes they hear gunfire. I don't hear anything except the wind and the beefy policeman ploughing back up the riverbank toward me.

He used to be an electrician but decided to swap for what he thought would be the safer life of a beat cop. What will happen to his life I wonder, if Washington really starts squeezing the heavily armed cartels...

...and they stop running?

Craig McMurtrie works for ABC News in the Washington bureau. Tweet