War on the U.S.-Mexican Border

I have not noted coverage of this in our local papers in the Washington DC area.

"US ups border gun checks as Mexico drug deaths jump", Reuters, 1/16/08:

U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Wednesday promised tougher controls on guns flowing illegally over the U.S. border to Mexico, where drug cartels have murdered 115 people already this month.

"Violence Spikes in Mexico" By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press, 1/18/08:

(F)ighting erupted as federal agents raided a house near the U.S. border Thursday that authorities say sheltered gunmen linked to drug traffickers. Soldiers and police joined skirmishing that became a chaotic three-hour battle. A federal agent and a gunman died and four officers were wounded in the latest outbreak of violence across the border from San Diego. Inside the house, authorities later found six slain kidnap victims......

A day earlier less than two block down the street, police rushed children from a school vulnerable to gunfire from men holed up on the roof and top floors of the besieged safehouse......

Thursday's violence was only the latest in a rash of recent killings.

On Jan. 10, gunmen shot and killed two federal agents and a civilian in the central state of Michoacan.

Two days earlier, two other federal agents were killed and three were injured during a shootout in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas.

A day before the Reynosa shootout, three suspected criminals were killed and 10 federal agents and soldiers wounded in a shootout in the town of Rio Bravo, across the border from Donna, Texas. Ten people, including three U.S. residents, suspected of having ties to the powerful Gulf cartel were arrested the next day.

"Texas' Rio Grande Valley worries Mexico's drug battles may harm tourism: Border cities worry recent gun battles may harm industry" Dallas News, January 14, 2008:

Deadly gun battles in two Mexican border cities last week left their sister communities in the Rio Grande Valley hoping that the brutal cross-border violence plaguing Nuevo Laredo for years has not spread downstream permanently.

Five people died in fierce firefights between suspected Gulf Cartel gunmen and Mexican troops and federal agents in Rio Bravo and Reynosa.

Those cities sit just across the Rio Grande from lucrative havens for so-called Winter Texans, setting the multibillion dollar drug trade on a collision course with a growing tourism industry.

The Spanish language television is covering these events nationally, but they seem to be getting little attention in the print media of this nation's capital.