FROM MEXICO, DRUG VIOLENCE SPILLS INTO U.S.

Brutality Gives Rise to Formidable New Problems for Both Countries

PUERTO PALOMAS, Mexico -- Javier Emilio Perez Ortega, a workaholic
Mexican police chief, showed up at the sleepy, two-lane border
crossing here last month and asked U.S. authorities for political asylum.

Behind him, law and order was vanishing fast. In the four months he
had served as Puerto Palomas police chief, drug traffickers had
threatened to kill him and his officers if they tried to block the
flow of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines into the United
States, his former colleagues said on condition of anonymity.

After a particularly menacing telephone call, his 10-man force
resigned en masse. His bodyguards quit, too. Abandoned by his men and
unable to trust the notoriously corrupt Mexican authorities, Perez
Ortega turned to the only place he believed he could find refuge --
the United States, the former colleagues said.

As President Bush meets this week with Mexican President Felipe
Calderon in New Orleans, the repercussions of Mexico's battle with
drug cartels are increasingly gushing into the United States, giving
rise to thorny new problems for Mexican and U.S. officials, as well
as the millions of people who live along the border.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent was killed in January while chasing
suspected traffickers fleeing back to Mexico, AK-47 bullets have been
found a half-mile inside U.S. territory after shootouts in Mexican
border towns, and wounded Mexican police have been taken to the
United States for treatment at heavily guarded hospitals.

Here in Puerto Palomas, a wind-swept desert town south of Columbus,
N.M., spillover from Mexico's drug war is measured in bullet-pocked
bodies. In the past year, at least 10 gunshot victims have been
dumped at the border checkpoint -- taken there by friends or
colleagues who believed their only hope of survival lay across the border.

In the calculus of U.S.-Mexican border relations, the living were
rushed to medical treatment -- sometimes with law enforcement escorts
- -- but the dead were not allowed across. Either way, the fallout from
Mexico's drug war was being dropped at the doorstep of the United States.

"Mexico's problem is Sheriff Cobos's problem," Sheriff Raymond Cobos,
whose jurisdiction in Luna County, N.M., stretches to the border with
Puerto Palomas, said in an interview. "No doubt about it."

Cobos ordered a major state highway closed after shootouts in Puerto
Palomas and recently sent deputies to monitor the funeral in Columbus
of a Mexican man killed in Puerto Palomas. His force goes on alert
when drug gangs start shooting in Puerto Palomas, deploying with
semiautomatic weapons to the lonely roads and cactus-dotted expanses
on the U.S. side of the border. Gunfire is often heard by residents
of Columbus, as well as by Border Patrol agents, who have
significantly increased their vigilance.

More than 130 miles of rough driving from Ciudad Juarez, Puerto
Palomas was once known as a placid outpost marred only occasionally
by violence. But since the beginning of the year, more than 30 people
have been killed in the town, Puerto Palomas Mayor Estanislao Garcia
said in an interview.

Puerto Palomas became strategically important because Ciudad Juarez,
the traditional drug-trafficking hub, has been inundated with Mexican
army troops sent to contain a war between the rival Juarez and
Sinaloa cartels blamed for more than 200 deaths this year.

The cartels probably knew that the Mexican military was coming months
before its arrival in late March and saw Puerto Palomas as an
acceptable alternative, a high-ranking Mexican federal government
official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was
not authorized to discuss the campaign against cartels.

"They have their own intelligence operations," the official said of
the cartels. "For them, it's like a chess game."

The cartels quickly brought daylight gunfights to the streets and
dumped victims around town. In March, Eddie Espinoza, the Columbus
mayor, was in a dentist's chair in Puerto Palomas when armed gunmen
stormed the office, making off with $2,000.

"They're getting brazen down there," Espinoza, who was unhurt, told reporters.

In the past two years, as cartels spread terror, the population
dropped from 12,000 to 7,500, Garcia said. Row after row of abandoned
houses line eerily quiet neighborhoods. Tourists, the town's
lifeblood, have stopped coming.

"When people stay here, they don't go down to Mexico anymore," Martha
Skinner, a former Columbus mayor who owns a bed-and-breakfast three
miles from the Mexican border, said in an interview. "They're afraid."

On March 17, several Puerto Palomas police officers quit after being
threatened by drug traffickers. Garcia said the officers believed
that they were targeted because of an inaccurate Mexican newspaper
article that implied they would confront drug gangs.

Within several hours, the entire police force had resigned, rendering
the town lawless. Even Perez Ortega, the stern police chief, left to
seek asylum. He awaits a decision in a federal detention center and
could not be reached for comment.

Palomas recently recruited a new police chief and nine officers, but
they have only two revolvers and two assault rifles for the entire
force. The drug traffickers tote automatic weapons and grenades.

"Trying to fight the drug traffickers would be like a race in which I
was on foot and they were in a car," Salomon Baca, Puerto Palomas's
new police chief, said in an interview.

Baca, like his officers, has refused to move his family to Puerto
Palomas. The officers all sleep on cots crammed into a backroom of
the police station.

Baca, who hopes to move to the United States, is hopeful that his old
friend Perez Ortega will get asylum. For many here, especially as
border towns have become shooting galleries, flight to the United
States is an ever more pressing dream. But moving north sometimes
creates as many problems as it solves.

In 2000, Mauricio Rubio, then a Puerto Palomas police officer, sought
asylum. He had been arrested by Mexican state police after helping a
New Mexico sheriff's official arrest two men outside Puerto Palomas.
The men were suspected of killing a woman in Deming, N.M., and
presumably were being protected by corrupt Mexican police.

Rubio and the New Mexico sheriff's official, who also was detained,
were released after U.S. diplomats intervened. Afraid that corrupt
police would kill him, Rubio and his family asked for, and were
granted, permission to live in the United States. But within days,
his family was falling apart.

"My daughters were crying all the time, yelling at me and saying,
'Why did you have to get involved in things you shouldn't have been
getting involved in?' " Rubio, who now lives in New Mexico, said in
an interview.

His wife left him six months later. Since then, he has pined for the
cozy feel of his Mexican neighborhood, where everyone knew him. But
he is afraid to return -- in the months before he fled, 11 friends in
the Ciudad Juarez police force were murdered.

Cobos, the Luna County sheriff, said it is likely that more Mexican
police will seek asylum in coming months and years, as the war
between drug cartels that has cost more than 5,000 lives in the past
two years shows no sign of abating. Asylum requests are long shots at
best -- of the 2,611 requests from Mexicans in 2006, the most recent
year for which figures are available, 48 were granted.

Cobos considers Mexican police officers, especially those who assist
U.S. law enforcement in drug cases, perfectly suitable candidates for
asylum. But he also worries that increasingly brazen drug cartels
will simply slip across the border in pursuit of Mexican police given
refuge there and that he is not equipped to combat them.

For that reason, Cobos has a blunt message to any Mexican policeman
who wants to live in his county: "I don't want you around."