Diana Washington Valdez, a reporter at the El Paso Times, has been pursuing the story of the horrific serial murders of hundreds of women in Juarez Mexico for years. She has written a book, Harvest of Women, that has angered a lot of Mexicans, who don’t want the truth about their culture’s corruption and violence to become better known. And of course the killers are particularly unhappy.

After years of investigation, Valdez believes the women are tortured and murdered “for sport” by men with powerful political connections who get off on sadism and killing with impunity. Her book names names, and she has gotten death threats.

Since 1993, more than 500 girls and young women have been murdered in Juarez. Washington Valdez says about a third of them were sex-murders.

“But the important thing here for me — they were not murders committed with the motive of some kind of rape or sexual assault. The objective for many of these murders, the systematic murders as we call them, is really to kill the women. The objective always is to kill the women.”
["Women Being Murdered for Sport" - Texas Author Getting Death Threats, WOAI 2/23/07]

The good news is that this human rights travesty is getting overdue attention. The bad news is that Hollyweird has gotten into the act, with leftist do-gooders creating a feature film Bordertown, with the fearless reporter played by Jennifer Lopez (who also “starred” in a memorable South Park episode in which diversity was explored). J-Lo was recently honored with the Artists for Amnesty prize at the film’s Berlin premiere. (Hey, why didn’t Mexico City host the film’s roll-out? Wasn’t el Presidente Calderon interested in the spotlight on his lovely country?)

The crew who did venture into Juarez were harassed by police and locals. On the first day of filming, a production assistant was arrested and questioned, their hotel rooms were ransacked, and a camera truck was stripped of £100,000-worth of equipment.

The mayor’s response was to tell them that they weren’t welcome in town, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. “This is a city out of control,” says Bordertown’s director Gregory Nava. There’s an enormous clash of cultures. It’s the only place where the First World and the Third World meet, and that point is radioactive.” [J-Lo's Crusade for the City of Lost Girls, Sunday Mirror 2/18/07]

Does this country sound like the sort of place with which we should have closer relations? Build that fence, and soon!

Bryanna Bevens’s recent article on College Republicans playing a game that involves catching pretend “illegal immigrants” is especially timely considering this recent article in the Christian Science Monitor by Sara Miller Llana on a Mexican theme park that has a game in which the object is to cross the US border.

Welcome to Mexico’s take on adventure tourism, a five-hour trek that goes well past midnight. Residents pay to walk in mud past their ankles, balance on ledges – in pitch black – that drop steeply, and sprint across corn fields, kicking up dirt and rocks as they run from fake US border patrol officers dressed in camouflage.
The park was begun by the Hñahñu, an indigenous community in El Alberto that has been decimated by immigration to the US. Bernardino Martin, El Alberto’s municipal leader, says the attraction has been criticized by some people as a training ground for would-be illegal immigrants.

Now, if that exclusive country-club in DC could just pretend to be a government. Just for a few days.

Has NRO’s Thomas E. Nugent been reading VDare.com? If so, bully for him and good start. But he needs to read more…

In this column, Mr. Nugent talks tough about how to solve America’s illegal alien crisis. He puts a lot of the blame right where it belongs: (i) on the criminally negligent, lazy and corrupt Mexican establishment that does nothing to address the many social problems of what should be a fairly prosperous country, and (ii) on the timid or (although Nugent doesn’t say this) bought-off American politicians who will not criticize the aforementioned Mexicans for their misdeeds. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, though, while Tom Nugent has a reasonable - although incomplete - diagnosis, he proposes to solve the problem by acting like … well, Mexicans. Nugent says America needs to give Mexico an incentive to clean up its shabby national act:

[W]e should … be willing to offer some financial incentives that will get the Mexican government to take action. Whether that action is the creation of more job opportunities in Mexico, the establishment of new educational facilities for younger Mexicans who are trying to make a life for their families, or simply the implementation of a larger social safety net that squelches the impulse toward exodus, U.S. politicians should make every effort to give the Mexican government a good reason to act. .[ Our Illegal-Immigrant Problem Isn't Terminal | A recent film instructs on how to fix it. By Thomas E. Nugent February 22, 2007]

Sounds like Mr. Nugent proposes to get the Mexicans’ minds right by bribing them. But isn’t that just how Mexico’s very own mordida works in practice, with results with which we are all drearily familiar?

America cannot solve America’s Mexico problem by acting like Mexico. America can only solve America’s Mexico problem by having a border between the United States and Mexico, for starters.

As is usual when establishment conservatives address immigration, they cannot or will not look at the whole problem. Mr. Nugent writes as if the illegal alien invasion of America were only a Mexican problem. Ah, if only that were true… Buying the Mexicans a welfare state is not going to keep the next Mohammed Atta out of the United States.

And, of course, Tom Nugent [send him mail] says not a word about the flood tide of legal immigration, our national transformation through federal policy that has only increased under NRO’s beloved Bush administration despite the blindingly obvious dangers (see reference to “Atta” above). Unless we sharply restrict and strictly control legal immigration - including the huge portion of it from Mexico - all the bribes in the world to keep Mexicans from coming to America illegally will be beside the point.

Perhaps, though, Tom Nugent cannot bring himself to think about restricting legal immigration. If this line is any indication, Mr. Nugent is a paid-up subscriber to the “Nation of Immigrants” fable:

We are, in a way, a country of Victor Navorskys. If we want Victor to go back home, or not be forced to come here in the first place, we must do all we can to get his homeland in order.

Victor Navorsky is the fictional protagonist of Stephen Spielberg’s movie Terminal, about a foreigner stuck in stateless no-man’s-land at Kennedy Airport. So, is America nothing more than a catchpool for the economically discontented of all the world? Also, just how are Mexicans being forced to come to America illegally?

Mr. Nugent really does need to keep reading VDare.com…