Thursday, March 13, 2003

I've got a solution
Mary Jordan of the Washington Post reveals Legacy of Jesse James lives on along Mexico border:
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - The Mexican bandits wait in the darkness for the sound that tells them pay dirt is approaching. And right on schedule, the Union Pacific train whistle cuts the darkness, shrill and clear, and a slow-moving freight train rumbles around the curve.

The FBI says that for years the bandits have been hustling up to the tracks through a hole in the fence at the U.S.-Mexico border. Using techniques passed down from father to son, they climb aboard and trip the emergency brake to stop the train.

Then, the FBI says, they smash open containers, quickly grab as much loot as they can carry - on a good night television sets, on a bad night toilet paper - and scurry back through the fence into Mexico.
OK, I get the picture.
So after nightfall Sept. 12, Crawford put into action a joint sting operation. About 70 FBI and U.S. Border Patrol agents lay hidden, some in container cars of a train, some near the tracks. On the Mexican side, 70 Juarez police and federal customs agents, also hidden, waited as a half-mile-long freight train chugged toward bandit territory.
...
The robbers stopped the train as usual that September night. Gang leader Eduardo "Lalo" Calderon and nearly 20 men smashed open a container, where three FBI agents were waiting. FBI agent Samantha Mikeska managed to handcuff Calderon before someone cracked her over the head with a baseball bat. Despite a shattered bone in her face, she held onto Calderon as his buddies dragged both of them through the fence into Mexico.

FBI agent Sergio Barrio, his own skull fractured in the fight, ran through the fence to try to rescue Mikeska. Calderon, still handcuffed, fled into the night with his gang. As the two bleeding FBI agents scrambled back onto U.S. soil, a third FBI agent fired a shot into the air, bringing dozens of U.S. and Mexican agents running.

There the disagreements begin. The Anapra residents and their attorneys say several armed FBI agents, who have no jurisdiction in Mexico and are not allowed to carry guns here, illegally accompanied Juarez police searching for suspects. These accusations, never backed up by evidence, have been widely reported in Mexican media as an "FBI invasion" of Mexico.
And all the usual whiners have their knickers in a twist.

My clarifying suggestion: Instead of wrestling with thugs armed with baseball bats, it's situations like this for which 00 buckshot was invented.