EL PASO IS MAJOR HUB FOR DRUGS SENT TO U.S.

The extensive drug-related violence that has turned Juarez and other
Chihuahua state communities into war zones has largely stopped at the
border, but the effects of the drug trade stretch far beyond the banks
of the Rio Grande.

El Paso, though spared the brazen killings taking place in Mexico, has
felt the power of the multibillion-dollar illicit drug trade and has
become a major hub for the distribution of drugs headed to markets
throughout the United States, officials said.

Stash houses, corruption, money-laundering, bulk-cash smuggling,
gun-running and gang activity in El Paso are all linked to some degree
to the drug war in Mexico.

The recently released National Drug Threat Assessment 2009 by the U.S.
Department of Justice stated that Mexican drug-trafficking
organizations "represent the greatest organized crime threat to the
United States."

The organizations are fighting over lucrative smuggler territories,
referred to as plazas, leading to the markets in the United States.

Mexican narcos now supply the vast majority of cocaine to U.S.
consumers and are believed to have gained control of drug distribution
in most U.S. cities. They also are gaining strength in markets they do
not yet control, according to the assessment.

The El Paso-Juarez area, like other spots on the border, is a vital
point in the transnational illegal drug industry.

Last fiscal year, more than 84 tons of marijuana and 774 pounds of
cocaine were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers,
who also dealt with more than 17 million legal international crossings
in El Paso, CBP officials said.

Once contraband crosses the border, drug loads are hidden in hundreds
of "stash houses" throughout El Paso before being shipped to cities
such as Denver, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta, law enforcement officials
said.

"We need to step it up. I don't just mean law enforcement," said
Robert Almonte, executive director of the Texas Narcotics Officers
Association. While heading the narcotics section of the El Paso Police
Department, Almonte helped create the stash house unit.

The National Drug Threat Assessment reported that Mexican and
Colombian drug traffickers make between $18 billion and $39 billion in
wholesale drug proceeds annually.

And as drugs flow north, cash flows south through El
Paso.

Last fiscal year, Customs and Border Protection officers in El Paso
seized $2.8 million in undeclared cash -- most in a single seizure of
$1.9 million hidden in door panels of an SUV traveling from Kansas
City, Mo.

To distribute drugs in the United States, Mexican cartels have
increased working relationships with American street gangs, the drug
threat report stated. Cartels also have formed links to outlaw biker
gangs and are increasingly working with the Mafia in the New York
region, the report stated.

In El Paso, the gang-cartel link is highlighted by the ties between La
Linea, or the Juarez drug cartel, and the Barrio Azteca gang.

Testimony during the recent Barrio Azteca federal trial revealed that
killings, kidnappings and drug smuggling were some of the assignments
gang members carried out for the cartel.

The Barrio Azteca in El Paso and its Juarez counterparts, the Aztecas,
are "an unknown factor" in the current Juarez upheaval, said FBI
spokeswoman Special Agent Andrea Simmons.

The Barrio Azteca has an estimated 3,000 members in the Southwest
after being formed in the 1980s by El Pasoans in prison. On the
streets of El Paso, gangsters collect "taxes" from local drug dealers.

Despite the rampant violence in Juarez, El Paso crime did not
increased this year, police said. El Paso is ranked the third-safest
large city in the U.S. and as has had only 16 homicides this year. But
law enforcement remains on alert.

In Juarez, 1,500 people have been slain, part of the 5,000 homicides
in all of Mexico this year. "Everybody is more on guard, of course,"
said Robert "Bobby" Holguin, president of the El Paso Municipal Police
Officers' Association.

Law enforcement officials say the biggest potential for the violence
in Mexico to spill into the U.S. comes from assassins chasing targets
who flee across the border.

If the past bloodshed in the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo area is any
indication, the violence will strike U.S. citizens.

In 2005, congressional testimony by an FBI assistant director revealed
that 35 abductions of U.S. citizens were reported in the Nuevo Laredo
region between May 2004 and May 2005.

Many more kidnappings probably went unreported because of fear of
reprisals and because relatives of victims involved in drug
trafficking may be reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement, the
FBI official told Congress.

This year, the FBI has had no reported cases of people kidnapped in El
Paso and taken to Mexico.

In the fluid cross-border community, it is hard to know how many
people fled Juarez and other parts of the state of Chihuahua this year.

"It seems to me that even small hamlets and villages can't escape the
violence of these drug cartels," said Luna County Sheriff Raymond
Cobos, whose county sits on the border west of El Paso in Southern New
Mexico.

The small town of Palomas, Mexico, across the border from Columbus,
N.M., has had roughly 40 homicides in the past 14 months, but street
shootings have slowed in recent months, Cobos said.

"Now they switched tactics," Cobos said. "Kidnappings in the middle of
the night. These people just simply disappear.

"On our side of the border is the disturbing trend -- the people
leaving the Palomas area and relocated in Luna County," Cobos said.

"We believe those people that have been targeted (moved). We are kind
of waiting for the other shoe to drop," he said.

Cobos said it is difficult to know how many families -- estimates say
up to 200 -- have fled Palomas.

"For us, on a personal level, it really hurts because many of us in
law enforcement have families on both sides of the border," Cobos said.

"To watch families uproot and leave because they can't live in
Palomas, to me, it's not a far leap to what happens in places like
Darfur, where you have refugees that put everything they own in a sack
and leave, fearing for their lives."