Aug 06 2008
Just Another (Yawn) Armed Confrontation With Foreign Military Inside US Border
Fences? We don’t need no steenking fences. It was just another skirmish with Mexican troops inside the US border. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent was held at gunpoint Sunday night by members of the Mexican military who had crossed the border into Arizona, but the soldiers returned to Mexico without incident when backup agents responded to assist.
Agents assigned to the Border Patrol station at Ajo, Ariz., said the Mexican soldiers crossed the international border in an isolated area about 100 miles southwest of Tucson and pointed rifles at the agent, who was not identified.
It was unclear what the soldiers were doing in the United States, but U.S. law enforcement authorities have long said that current and former Mexican military personnel have been hired to protect drug and migrant smugglers.
“Unfortunately, this sort of behavior by Mexican military personnel has been going on for years,” union Local 2544 of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) said on its Web page. “They are never held accountable, and the United States government will undoubtedly brush this off as another case of ‘Oh well, they didn’t know they were in the United States.’
