A Mexican Savior or a Sitting Duck?

by Diane Dimond

Remember the name Marisol Valles Garcia. She’ll either go down in history as a selfless heroine or she’ll soon be dead. Maybe both.

Twenty-year-old Marisol lives in the small and violent Mexican border village of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerro, population 9,149. Marisol is a criminal justice graduate student, married, and the mother of a little boy. The baby calls her Mama. The rest of her village now calls her Chief, their Chief of Police. It’s a job no one else in her village would take for fear they’d lose their lives if they put on a badge. The last man in Marisol’s position, Chief Manuel Castro, was kidnapped, tortured and beheaded last year. But Marisol says she took the job because she’s just tired of everyone being afraid. She said after being sworn in, “We have to reclaim our lives!”

It’s no wonder her villagers are scared. Their Juarez Valley community sits smack in the path of a war zone where two rival drug gangs fight for control of a nearby highway. And the senseless violence there is taking place just half a mile from the Mexican-Texas border, just about 100 miles south of Corpus Christi.

Tens of thousands of murders have been attributed to the marauding lawlessness that’s gripped Mexico so far this year. The outlaws are trafficking the most valuable of illegal commodities: drugs, guns and other human beings. They let nothing and nobody get in their way.

Children have been gunned down while having fun at a birthday party--innocents standing in the wrong place at the wrong time--and several Mexican police officers in communities all along the border region with the United States have turned up dead, many with their corpses' mutilated as a signal to others of how ruthless the criminals can be if someone tries to stop them. The death toll is sure to rise by the end of the year.

But Marisol Valles Garcia waves off the idea that her new job--for which she’s paid just $640 dollars a month--is akin to a suicide mission. She simply saw a desperate need for a return to peace and safety in her home village and so, she says, she stepped up to accept the challenge.

“There is a lot of fear in this town, but we can’t live like that,” she recently told a reporter.

Perhaps just as courageous is her bare-bones staff equipped with paltry resources. Marisol commands just 13 officers, nine of whom are women. They have just one patrol car and four guns. That’s it. That’s the sum total of their arsenal, and the Chief has decided she won’t carry a gun because she’d rather her officers have them out in the field.

“The best weapons we have are principles and values, which are the best weapons for prevention,” she told CNN en Español. Marisol readily admits she’ll have to rely on the Mexican Army to handle the traffickers and her influence will be limited to local crime prevention and minor infractions. For now, Chief Garcia says she’s content to concentrate on her own backyard and try to re-instill in her neighbors the idea that they can take back control of their community. This woman either has her head in the clouds or she’s on to something. I’d like to think it’s the latter. I’d like to think more brave souls will stand up with her and re-claim their peace of mind.

Why should we Americans care? Isn’t this Mexico’s problem? The answer is clear: Americans are getting caught in the crossfire. It’s only a matter of time before the violence spills across our border in even more vicious ways. Just last week, a Texas national guardsman was killed in the bloody border city of Ciudad Juarez which was once known as a popular party destination. Just why 21-year-old Jose Ramirez defied the military’s suggestion to stay out of the area is unknown, but he became the latest of at least three American service members killed in Juarez since the drug war began.

Last November, Staff Sgt. David Booher, an airman from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, was among six killed when gunmen suddenly shot up a bar. In 2008, Lance Cpl. Gustavo Zubia Lopez was shot and his body thrown off a cliff in Juarez after he ventured across the border to get his car repaired.

Look, we’ve spent one billion dollars so far trying to build an ill-conceived fence between our two countries to keep the violence “over there.” After four years, only 50 miles of the fence have been completed. Maybe our tax dollars would be better spent funding more Chief Marisol Garcia-type projects--providing vehicles, weapons and tools to empower the local Mexican population along our border. I’d much rather my money go to Marisol than to an ineffective fence.

The situation brings to mind the biblical saying that “A little child shall lead them.” Maybe in this case it’s a determined 20-year-old woman who could use some help.

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Crime Happens When We Least Expect It

by Diane Dimond

Crime happens when we least expect it. Criminal activity festers in places we can’t imagine and in the minds of those we least expect. We shouldn't be surprised when it's discovered.

The recent arrest of three seemingly low-key, nondescript men on charges of lying to federal agents about a plot to blow up American targets sounds like the stuff Hollywood makes movies about. But these arrests were all too real and should go to remind us that America’s fight against terrorism is far from over. The battlefield is worldwide.

These most recent suspects … all foreign-born Muslims, include a 24-year-old Denver airport shuttle driver, his father and an alleged accomplice in New York. They have not, of course, been found guilty of anything. But their case seems destined to go to trial.

FBI Agents on Watch

Before he stopped talking to the FBI, the suspected ring-leader, 24-year-old Najibullah Zazi, a native Afghani, allegedly told agents he received Al Qaeda weapons training in Pakistan last year. An FBI document claims Zazi’s laptop contained a recipe for making bombs and information about important New York-area targets like transportation hubs and sports and entertainment venues. They tied Zazi’s recent trip to New York (ominously on September 10th, the day before the nation marked the 9-11 anniversary) to his fingerprints on bomb-making ingredients found in apartments he visited in Queens. Media reports and FBI documents mentioned suspicions that Zazi planned to place bombs in rented vans or back packs. Authorities felt the plot had developed to include at least three separate teams of four men each preparing to carry out various U.S. attacks.

The round up of Zazi and his cohorts didn't happen in a vacuum. Every day in this country – as far removed as we are from the day the towers fell, the Pentagon was struck and the jetliner crashed into the ground in rural Pennsylvania – special government agents actively pursue leads to thwart more terror attacks on American soil. So far, they've done a hell of a job. Operatives within the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, your state, local police and other agencies know things about plots against our country that would curl your hair. They invisibly investigate countless cases we will never hear about, many times acting on tips from observant citizens.

This week in Illinois, an American ex-con who converted to Islam in prison was arrested on charges he tried to blow up the federal building in Springfield. Michael Finton, also known as Talib Islam, was unknowingly working with local and federal law enforcement agents as he chose his target. He faces life in prison.

Fountain Place: The Dallas Target

A day later, in Dallas, a Jordanian citizen was charged with trying to blow up a 60-story building with what he thought was an active car bomb. Actually, an FBI undercover agent posing as a fellow terrorist led 19-year-old Hosam Maher Husein Smadi to believe he had genuine explosives. The suspect reportedly idolized Osama bin Laden.

In May, New York authorities and the FBI arrested three U.S. citizens and a Haitian man on charges that they planned to bomb multiple synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down airplanes using surface-to-air missiles. In a meeting with a government informant, one of the suspects revealed his parents lived in Afghanistan, and he was angry about the U.S. war there. He said he an interest in “doing something to America.”

All this talk about suspected terror plots in New York, Dallas and Springfield, Ill., might seem far removed from where you live. But as we were all reminded on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism that touches one American city touches us all.

All these years later, our leaders are still trying to figure out how to stop the terror at its source – Al Qaeda-sponsored training centers that pockmark the landscape in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We've spent billions of dollars, yet they survive. Why is that – are they smarter than us, or do we lack conviction and a definitive plan for their eradication?

I'll go with the latter. Our leaders can't seem to get it together to stop this monster of all crimes.

Generals on the front line say they need another 30,000 troops to mortally cripple Al Qaeda and install some sort of democracy in the region. The President has said he’s prepared to allocate about 17,000 more soldiers, although he’s now considering some alternatives. Many members of Congress seem focused only on blaming the past for the quagmire and offer no suggestions on going forward. Others on Capitol Hill support pulling out of the region right now, abandoning the mission altogether.

Democrats vs. Republicans, military leaders vs. civilian experts, soldier warriors vs. pacifists. America is strong enough and smart enough to figure it out. All we need is the right leadership.

So after an eight-year war, when do we begin to demand that?

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Flights of Fancy at the Airport Baggage Claim

by Pat Brown

On the way home today, I was stuck in airport hell in Philadelphia which led to my purchase of a new book by Alan Alda called Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself. Alda, after suffering a near fatal life threatening emergency while traveling in Chile, thinks back over his life and the meaning of it all, recapping speeches he gave to college students on their graduation day. He reviews the thoughts he shared with each group of students from decade to decade, the issues the young people faced as they went out into the world, and how they would make their mark on society and the future. Alda shared how he had studied existentialism and found it oddly comforting. He discerned that life is basically meaningless and that for life to have any meaning at all, one must create that meaning for oneself, take paint to the canvas of life and express oneself. I totally agree with him. Unfortunatelly, such a conclusion also has a down side. If one can and must express oneself in life, one can do so negatively as well as positively.

I read Alda's thoughts as I was waiting for my luggage to find its way to the baggage claim at the airport in Baltimore, Maryland. Looking up, I noticed a number of forlorn suitcases waiting patiently for someone to come for them. There were about twenty in all, big and small, strewn about, unattended. Over the loudspeaker came the familiar warning to notify airport authorities if there were any unattended items left about. I looked over at the unclaimed suitcases and I thought, well, yes, there are twenty of them. Being a criminal profiler, I often evaluate a situation from from a criminal's point of view and I found it rather ironic that when we arrive at the airport we watch carefully for suspicious people - at the ticket counter, in the security line, or shopping in the stores - and we become immediately concerned if they suddenly walk away from their luggage, yet when we go down a level to the baggage claim, we don't pay a bit of attention to anyone or what they do with their stuff. How easy it would be for someone to stroll into that area with a bag, casually add it to the twenty-suitcases-in-waiting, and walk away. The question then came to my mind, how could someone walk into such a place - see wives kissing their husbands goodbye, honeymooners holding hands excited about their vacations, little children toddling about, and mothers embracing their sons arriving safely from their tour of duty in Iraq - and then leave a bomb to blow all those innocent people to bits?

Since 9/11, I have been in four locations in the world that have been bombed six months to a year after I visited them. I don't mean I was just in the country or a city that was attacked; I mean I was physically present at the exact spot where the bombs exploded. I was in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt walking along the Red Sea boardwalk six months before bombs exploded there. I was in London before the tube attacks, I was in Hyderabad, India nine months before explosions rocked the very place I had visited, and, just recently, bomb blasts killed dozens in Delhi, India, striking a number of sites in the city including Connaught Place, a shopping area which I had visited the night before I left the country. My son, who was with me, went on to Jaipur where, three days later, seven bombs exploded in the downtown area. Luckily, my son was unhurt but too many others were not so fortunate.

These bombings hit home for me because I had been there, seen the beauty of those places, seen the faces of the people who worked in the shops, watched the comings and goings and the interactions of the locals and tourists. I had been a part of that landscape. 9/11 no doubt was similar for those in New York City and Washington DC. We ask how anyone could destroy these beautiful places and the people in them?

I sat at BWI airport and stared at those suitcases and thought about Alda's statement. The bomber is doing just what Alan Alda said we need to do to make life meaningful. We must create meaning. We must paint a picture or destroy a picture. We must do something.

The terrorist, the bomber, and the school shooter do what we all do, but they do it as the antihero. A child gets a kick out of building a tower of blocks but he may also get a kick out of smashing it. One can paint a picture or one can douse a canvas in kerosene and light it on fire. Either way, there is a result. If one cannot build or cannot think of a reason to build, then destroying what others build is expressing oneself and effecting change in the world. The school shooter who can't fit in, who sees no future, and feels he cannot "paint a picture" that won't be laughed at, can, on the other hand, shoot down ten classmates and know that the depth of horror over his actions will win him "best in show." The Delhi bombers who don't see themselves as future businessmen can visit Connaught Place after the blasts and feel the thrill of having "beaten their competition."

My luggage finally came toward me on the conveyor belt. I grabbed my two bags and walked out into the fresh air. I looked back at the crowd inside and hoped that I wouldn't read a headline about that location half a year from now. Unless we find a way for young people to believe they can make a positive impact in the world or at least their small part of it, we will continue to see a number of them become the kind of artists whose work we would prefer to never experience.

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