By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Like the lawbreaker who reputedly shrugged that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is, vicious Latino criminals gather just south of the Southwestern United States because that’s the porous entryway for their booming illicit businesses.
On November 4, the month of Thanksgiving and the month before Christmas, three mothers and six children, including two infants, were slaughtered and other youngsters in a three-vehicle caravan were wounded when their innocent drive through northern Mexico, not far from Arizona, ran afoul of terrorist-like gunmen.
Open borders has been the poisoned holy grail of vote-hungry U.S. Democrats, big-business Republicans, and Catholic Church bureaucrats for far too long. This deadly drink led to still more deaths in violent cartel-land with the brutal attack on the offshoot U.S. Mormon families living in Sonora, which borders the Grand Canyon State.
To enjoy dual citizenship and be bilingual in rural northern Mexico might seem a wonderful life, although subject to the limitations of all earthly existence, except for the lawless gangs of the land whose criminal lusts are worsened by the opportunities abundant near open borders.
And what could be more enticing than a U.S. whose addled leftists dangle sanctuary cities and states before them, where crime can pay even more? Thanks, Dems, GOP bizmen, and the bishops’ bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, some Americans headed to the polls on November 5 after dominant media once again had minimized dangers along the border for month after month.
National Public Radio reported on November 6: “The large Mormon community lives in an area just south of Arizona where rival cartels are currently at war, fighting to secure smuggling routes close to the U.S. border. But citing the intensity of the attack, relatives say the criminals intentionally killed carloads of women and children.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano posted at Fox News on November 5 that “this isn’t just about drugs. The cartels will traffic in anything that makes a buck. Most recently, they have cashed in on the rush to smuggle illegal aliens across the U.S. border. A report by RAND, for example, estimated that in 2017, the cartels made almost $3 billion from human-smuggling….
“These gangs aren’t just smuggling operations; they are diversified enterprises,” Carafano added. “They engage in every manner of criminal activity from murder-for-hire to kidnapping, extortion, fraud, money laundering, car theft, and on and on. Their avarice, braveness, ambition, and unconstrained violence would awe Al Capone.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) told Fox News on November 6 that “I can tell you that opinion inside of Congress is running extremely aggressive towards the cartels because of this latest act of depraved violence.”
In a tweet, Cotton recalled that “U.S. Special Operations Forces took down (Abu Bakr) al-Baghdadi & Osama bin Laden in Syria & Pakistan,” and he was confident “they could impose a world of hurt on these drug cartels slaughtering American citizens a few dozen miles away from the U.S. border.”
Like Carafano and others, Cotton said the “hugs, not bullets” policy toward the cartels of leftist Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is failing signally, with deaths in Mexico surging.
The London-based Daily Mail quoted Cotton: “That may work in a children’s fairy tale, but in the real world when three American women and six American children were gunned down and burned alive, the only thing that can counteract bullets is more and bigger bullets.”
Mexico traditionally looks askance at the idea of U.S. troops on its soil, no matter how well-intentioned, and Lopez Obrador was quick to back away from President Trump’s offer of U.S. help this way.
But the U.S. has its own valid concerns about violent criminals and killers on its doorstep, and crossing through the door. If the U.S. military has gone halfway around the world to defend other nations’ sovereignty and security, how about protection a brief drive from Tucson and Yuma?
Tweeting on November 5 about the cartels’ power, Trump said that “you sometimes need an army to defeat an army,” adding, “This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!”
The Wanderer contacted one of its sources in southern Arizona for comment about this attack. Her habitual request to use a pseudonym because of her security concerns seemed all the more understandable. She has an extended cross-border family “whose family history is from the border area where the event occurred,” she pointed out on November 5.
Mrs. Smith, as we’ll call her, said the tragedy “should be a wake-up call for those inclined to open borders and unfettered immigration. Many people do not realize the viciousness with which the cartels can protect their turfs. Such cold-blooded, vicious behavior played out for the entire world to see on Monday, November 4.” Whatever the reason for the attack, “It must not be tolerated,” she said.
“Everyone should read as much as they can from every source on this problem,” Mrs. Smith added.
“Everyone should cry and pray for those victims. They should lament from the depths of their souls for the children, one of whom was shot in the back trying to run from pure terror. They should recoil from such monstrous perpetrators of such acts. Most of all, they should do everything in their power to stop such horror from happening. In Mexico or anywhere.”
She pointed out that the same day she emailed, voters in Tucson were casting ballots on whether the Old Pueblo, as the city is nicknamed, should become a sanctuary city. “Ponder that possibility and then make every effort to stop what may become the slow, violent suicide of the whole Western Hemisphere,” Mrs. Smith said.
As it turned out, the initiative, which even was opposed by local Democratic leaders, was rejected by more than 70 percent of voters. It was promoted by a group with a typically deceptive name, “Tucson Families Free and Together,” and was backed by left-wingers including the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, the conservative Seeing Red AZ blog said.
Kelli Ward, chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, issued a statement on November 6 saying that Tucson voters “chose to prioritize their city’s safety and economy, rightly recognizing that Prop. 205 — like so many other immigration proposals by the Left — would put citizens at risk and lead to unintended consequences. This vote is a win for the safety of Arizona and the entire nation.”
In another recent instance of leftists backing off their activism to protect alien suspects, Fox News reported that a new sanctuary policy in Montgomery County, Md., “has been partially rolled back following the arrests of several illegal aliens all charged with rape or sexual abuse in a new bid that will force cooperation between county law-enforcement and federal immigration authorities.”
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on November 5 that, whatever the reason for the deadly Sonora attack, “the fact is that Mexico is increasingly a lawless war zone, all a short distance from our own porous border with them, and Americans remain vulnerable to all manners of death and damage coming across that border as a result.”
Querard, based in Phoenix, added, “The crime and corruption in Mexico is nearly to the point where it represents a clear and present danger to the U.S. Given the number and nature of conflicts we find ourselves involved in around the globe, such a unique threat so close to our borders/citizens will almost certainly find itself on the receiving ends of American assets and activities.
“If the Mexican government can’t get the job done, the question of ‘if’ will gradually become a question of ‘when’ and ‘how much’,” he said.
Speaking with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on November 5, Cochise County, Ariz., Sheriff Mark Dannels likened the cartels to ISIS terrorists, while Carlson said the attack on the mothers and children sounded like something out of Syria.
Cochise County is at the southeastern corner of Arizona, north of where the slaughter in Mexico occurred.
“Back in June, we had double-digit homicides by the cartels in the same areas,” Dannels said.
The sheriff said that in the first nine months of this year, more than 1,000 known gang members “tried to enter our country from 20 different countries. We need a secure border.”
On November 5 Art Del Cueto, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Phoenix talk-radio host James T. Harris (KFYI, 550 AM) that the cartel gunmen are “animals and human garbage,” and he would advise that Arizonans not vacation in Mexico now.
Del Cueto pointed out that Mexico has very tight laws against gun ownership.
That’s a familiar story: Law-abiding citizens are disarmed, while lawbreakers laugh at the restriction.
Although he still has family in Mexico, Del Cueto said, he hasn’t crossed the border southward for more than 10 years.
National commentator Bill O’Reilly posted on November 6: “At this point, we don’t know why they were murdered, but we do know they will join approximately 40,000 other Mexican homicide victims this year alone. In fact, Mexico is now ranked the most corrupt country in the Western Hemisphere because of the violence and narcotics traffic. The president of Mexico, Obrador, cannot or will not challenge the cartels.”
As news about the Sonora slaughter began to spread on November 5, voters in Virginia, Mississippi, and Kentucky went to the polls. The result, radio host Hugh Hewitt said on November 6, was that red states got redder and blue states bluer.
Mississippi showed its fealty to Republicans. Virginia showed what happens when the Democrat liberals who make up so much of the federal workforce in Washington, D.C., live in the Old Dominion. With the exception of unpopular Gov. Matt Bevin, Republicans in Kentucky had a strong night. But dominant leftist media tried to cast the states’ results as resounding Dem triumphs.
Had they so soon forgotten that just last year, the hotly contested governorships of both Georgia and Florida, as well as Florida’s U.S. Senate seat, all went to Republicans?
Querard, the GOP campaign consultant, told The Wanderer on November 6, “Nationally, no real surprises. Bevin was the most unpopular governor in the country and may only lose by 3/10 of a percent. Republicans narrowly avoided getting wiped out in Virginia Senate. Still lost the majority, so it’s 21-19 there now, but it easily could have been 25-15.”
Because of the narrowness of his loss, Kentucky’s Bevin requested a recanvass. Democrat Andy Beshear reportedly was ahead of Bevin by about 5,300 votes, out of more than 1.4 million counted. This was a dramatic turnaround after polling showed Bevin behind by 17 points before Trump came to boost him at a November 4 rally in Lexington.
Politico reported on November 6: “‘No one energizes our base like @realDonaldTrump,’ Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel wrote Tuesday night in a message retweeted by the president. ‘In Kentucky, the governor was down 17 points. President Trump helped lift the entire ticket, winning 5 of 6 statewide races so far!’”
Nothing From The Pulpit
Virginia blogger Mary Ann Kreitzer told The Wanderer she was “heartsick” about her state’s results giving Democrats complete majority control, but she pointed to a familiar lack of moral teaching from the pulpit.
“As Catholics we need to double down in prayer and fasting, and we need to be courageous enough to speak up. If more of our priests had the guts to defend the moral issues and warn Catholics about the danger of cooperating with evil, things would be very different,” Kreitzer said, adding:
“How many Catholic voters heard one word from the pulpit about defending babies in the womb and defending the family? How many Catholics would even know there was an election if they depended on their pastor for news about what’s happening in the world?. . .
“How many liberal Catholics who’ve bought into Alinskyite social activism are on the way to Hell without a word of warning,” she said, “because they think killing the children of the poor is how you help them (and the planet) and they hear nary a word of opposition?
“I wonder how many pro-abortion politicians’ bumper stickers filled the parish parking lots in northern Virginia and Richmond, especially parishes with registered Democrats,” Kreitzer said.
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