Highlighting the U.S. government's perpetual failure to secure the southern border, a Mexican military helicopter was photographed by a Texas sheriff this week flying over a residential neighborhood at least a mile into the American side of the Rio Grande.
These sorts of invasions by Mexico's corrupt military, long on the drug cartel payroll, have been going on for years but the timing of this incursion is especially alarming since it occurred on the same week that Homeland Security officials revealed Mexican drug cartels are rapidly infiltrating federal law enforcement agencies along the southwest border.
Testifying before a U.S. Senate panel, Homeland Security officials said that more than 400 public corruption cases involving federal, state and local enforcement personnel in the crime-infested Mexican border region have been solved in the last two years alone. Additionally, 576 corruption cases were opened in 2009 involving Border Patrol agents.
This makes the repeated Mexican military incursions all the more abominable, especially since U.S. officials know they're occurring. Last year Judicial Watch obtained Homeland Security records documenting 226 incursions by Mexican government personnel into the United States between 1996 and 2005. Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the annual intelligence summaries of "Mexican Government Incidents" were designated as "limited official use" by the Department of Homeland Security requiring "special protection against unauthorized or inadvertent disclosure."
Simply put, the government doesn't want the public to know about these foreign invasions or that Homeland Security officials are aware that they're occurring. This week's incident was revealed in a San Antonio newspaper that quotes the Zapata County Sheriff who spotted the military chopper hovering over homes in the Rio Grande Plain region south of Laredo.
Armed personnel occupied the helicopter, which flew over a residential area known as Falcon Heights, just south of the Starr-Zapata county line, the sheriff said. He took pictures of the aircraft, which had the insignia of the Mexican Navy, and claims that U.S. military officials were informed of the incursion. This is an area where the U.S.-Mexico boundary is very clear because a major river and a large dam separate the countries, the sheriff points out.
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