Spanish subtitled version
BROWNSVILLE — The Zapata County sheriff Thursday was questioning why a Mexican military helicopter was hovering over homes on the Texas side of the Rio Grande.
It was one of the more jarring incidents of the fourth week of border tensions sparked by drug killings, and rumors of such killings, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez said he'd reviewed photos of the chopper flown by armed personnel Tuesday over a residential area known as Falcon Heights-Falcon Village near the bi-national Falcon Lake, just south of the Starr-Zapata county line. He said the helicopter appeared to have the insignia of the Mexican navy.
It's always been said that the Mexican military does in fact ... that there have been incursions, Gonzalez said. But this is not New Mexico or Arizona. Here we've got a river; there's a boundary line. And then of course having Falcon Lake, Falcon Dam, it's a lot wider. It's not just a trickle of a river, it's an actual dam. You know where the boundary's at.
As violence continued Thursday with a highway shootout in Tamaulipas, a Senate subcommittee in Washington heard testimony that drug cartels are trying to infiltrate U.S. agencies along the border, with corruption cases among Homeland Security personnel on the rise.
In the past two years, there have been 400 public corruption cases involving federal, state and local law enforcement agents originating from the Southwest border region, Kevin Perkins, FBI assistant director for criminal investigations, told the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on preparedness.
James Tomsheck, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection assistant commissioner, told the panel the drug cartels operating in Mexico are making a concerted effort to infiltrate CBP, and the agency is responding with more screening of job applicants with polygraph tests and background investigations. Corruption cases were opened last year on 576 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents.
Gonzalez, the Zapata sheriff, said the incursion was about a mile over the border and took place over a neighborhood populated by many U.S. Customs officers who work at area border crossings — and that they knew what they were seeing.
My understanding is the U.S. military were informed, he said. I don't know what action was taken, if any.
3 people associated with U.S. consulate killed in Mexico.
(CNN) -- Three people connected to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, were killed in two drive-by shootings, a senior White House official told CNN Sunday.
Two of the victims were an American employee at the consulate and her U.S. citizen husband. The husband of a Mexican employee of the consulate was also killed. The shootings happened Saturday afternoon, the official said.
"We know that the U.S. citizens were targeted," Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told CNN, saying a police officer witnessed a car shooting at the Americans' car. "We know they were chasing them. We know they wanted to kill them."
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