File this Under “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
Published on November 23rd, 2012
According to Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, the two countries are within days of announcing a new initiative that will allow Mexican trucks bound for the U.S. to circumvent inspection at ports of entry. Under the plan, U.S. officials stationed south of the border will conduct the inspections.
At the NAFTA20 conference in San Antonio November 15 and 16, Sarukhan told a panel that:
“Whatever is sent over the border does not have to stop. And this is going to be huge.”
Sarukhan is thrilled that truckers will no longer have to wait endless hour in line at the port cities of Nuevo Laredo or Ciudad Juarez, which border Laredo in Texas, and El Paso. Instead U.S. Customs and Border Inspection officers will be on the Mexican side conducting their searches.
Hundreds of government and trade officials attending the 20-year anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement applauded the announcement. Sarukhan defended the new practice and said that the post-9/11 environment has led to the gridlock witnessed at most land ports because cargo inspections are not “intelligence-based” but instead indiscriminate.
Sarukhan may be right about indiscriminate inspections but only if you assume that border checks, no matter how inconvenient they may be for drivers, serve no purpose. The opposite is true. In the name of security, every vehicle the crosses the U.S./Mexico border must be checked. The “post-9/11 environment,” as Sarukhan described it, mandates maximum security.
Customs officials have been bribed before. According to a CNN report, Mexican drug cartels who along with sex and alien traffickers stand to gain the most from the new south of the border inspections use money and sex to bribe agents. Since October 2004, nearly 150 Customs and Border Protection employees have been arrested or indicted for acts of corruption. [Official: Mexican Cartels Use Money, Sex to Bribe U.S. Border Agents, June 10, 2011]
To reduce risk and to ensure that only the most trustworthy agents are hired, former Commissioner of U.S. Border and Protection Agency Alan Bersin touted the passage of the Anti-Border Corruption Act of 2010 which requires that by 2013, all the agency's law enforcement applicants must receive a polygraph test before being hired and also periodically re-investigated.
Nevertheless, the new system presents more opportunities than ever for corruption. With U.S. drug, human and alien trafficking net approximately $100 billion, $30 billion and $20 billion each year, there’s enough money for the nefarious to make large cash offers in exchange for agents looking the other way.
The money in international trade is huge, too. The U.S. ranks as Mexico's third-largest trading partner, behind Canada and China. According to U.S. Census data analyzed World City, through the first three quarters of 2012, about $172.5 billion in goods passed through the Laredo port and another $65 billion through El Paso. World City tracks global trade patterns.
As troubling as it is to think so, commerce and crime trump safety; to globalists, 9/11 is nothing more than a history book chapter.