Courtesy of the publisher, we wanted to give you a peek at “Cartels and Combinations.” Mike McPheters, author of “Agent Bishop,” is back with the harrowing account of a Mexican-American family caught in the crossfire between the Vultures, a dangerous drug cartel, and US Homeland Security. Based on a true story, “Cartels and Combinations” proves the reality of latter-day evil and how we can find protection and peace in heeding the words of ancient and modern prophets and apostles alike.
Below is the foreword from Mike McPheters in “Cartels and Combinations.”
FOREWORD
It was Rosa, my friend from Mexico, who strengthened my commitment to write about the Mexican drug cartels, the porous nature of our borders with Mexico, and the imminent threat these problems pose to our country.
Rosa’s father worked at a gas station in a small Mexican town. He was finishing up work one day when a carload of drug traffickers came in and insisted he sell them gas. He told them the station was closed, that he was not the owner, and that he didn’t have the authority to reactivate the pumps. They shot him in the head and drove away laughing. Rosa’s brother suffered a similar fate.
Rosa explained that her family, like thousands of other Mexican citizens, had migrated to the United States to escape the increasingly violent threat of drug cartels.
The devastating results of these wars being waged by drug cartels are no longer limited to Mexico. According to recent reports, nearly 25,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug traffickers in 2007. That is almost five times the number of US fatalities in the Iraq War. Although President Calderón has deployed 45,000 troops and 5,000 federal police to fight the cartel threat, and most of these murders were perpetrated south of the border, an increasing number of murders are taking place in the United States. Cartel-linked crime is spreading north, while American money for drugsales and guns purchased in the United States flows south. On June 16, 2010, I read an article entitled, “Uptick in Violence Forces Closing of Parkland along Mexican Border to Americans.” Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona, told Fox News that officers were forced to close an eighty-mile stretch of Arizona north of the Mexican border-including part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge-to Americans, due to an increase in recent months of violence against law enforcement officers and US citizens, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and other illegal activity. “It’s literally out of control!” Babeu stated. Babeu and Senator John McCain demanded support troops from the federal government to secure the borders, but adequate help hasn’t been forth- coming. In fact, as of June 2010, President Obama had suspended construction of the border fence. Signs have been posted warning Americans not to cross into the closed-off territory south of Interstate 8. Babeu said he was in desperate need of more resources to help counter the violence from Mexico. “We need action. It’s shameful that we, as the most powerful nation on earth, . . . can’t even secure our own borders and protect our families.”
It seems to me that, in essence, we are being forced to turn back 3,500 acres of American soil to Mexico’s drug cartels.
As a retired FBI agent and as an American, I don’t like it!
The cartels, which now do $40 billion a year in the drug trade with the United States, employ American street gangs, such as Barrio Azteca, MS-13, and the Mexican Mafia to do their bidding as collectors, enforcers, and distributors. The gangsters even entice naïve American teenagers who, when offered a taste of “real money,” tape bundles of marijuana and cocaine to their bodies underneath their clothing and try to walk them across the border. While there are undoubtedly those who make it across, fifteen-year-old kids who wear baggy sweatshirts in sweltering hot weather look far too suspicious not to be apprehended. Not only do these youths lose out on what they think is a quick profit, but they also rack up a criminal record.
On April 20, 2009, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee,and Senator John McCain jointly proclaimed that Mexican drug cartels have displaced the Mafia as the number one organized crime problem in our country. Senator Lieberman stated, referring to the cartels, “This is literally a war: they’re fighting for the turf!” He indicated that the cartels are operating in two hundred thirty United States metropolitan areas.
Recently, Arizona has enacted legislation to address the cartel threat by strictly enforcing existing federal immigration laws as a last-ditch effort to protect their state against the onslaught of violence and property damage from Mexico. Arizona’s efforts have met with resistance both from the federal government, whose laws they are trying to enforce, and from other liberal elements.
Once they are in the United States, many of America’s twelve million illegal immigrants do the bidding of drug cartels by aiding in the transportation and distribution of illegal narcotics while soaking up millions of dollars in taxpayer-provided social services. Unfortunately, there is no sure remedy in sight, considering the average per capita income in the United States is $30,000 annually and in Mexico only $4,000.
Although current law prohibits the disbursement of Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants, many still receive these benefits due to bureaucratic error or deliberate fraud, the full extent of which is unknown. Undocumented workers receive emergency medical care for labor and delivery, short-term emergency disaster relief, immunizations, and the testing and treatment of communicable diseases. They also benefit from community programs such as soup kitchens, crisis counseling, and housing assistance. The cost of these services has brought California and other states to the brink of bankruptcy.
The willingness of the government to cater to illegal immigrants has its basis in vote-gathering. Since the Hispanic vote trends Democrat, courting the vote of the demographic with the highest birth rate is an overt attempt of a liberal administration to perpetuate a one-party system in this country ad infinitum.
This book raises no argument with those immigrants who have jumped through all the hoops to enter the United States legally. It is to them that the beloved lady we call the Statue of Liberty extends the torch of freedom, saying, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
American employers, addicted to cheap labor, have brought much of the current immigration crisis upon us by knowingly hiring illegal immigrants, just as millions of drug-addicted American citizens have created the market for marijuana, methamphetamine, opium, and cocaine, thereby providing drug cartels their existence. Mexican drug traffickers entering our country with their illegal products, supported by a ready-made structure of illegal immigrants to distribute them, are only catering to our growing appetite.
Programs have been established in the past especially during wartime, when there were worker shortages in the United States-to bring in Mexican workers on a temporary basis and then have them return to Mexico when sufficient manpower was reinstated. These programs failed. For undocumented Mexican workers, it has always been worth the risk to stay in America illegally and take whatever wage is offered.
How have the drug cartels gained such power among the people? Elder M. Russell Ballard, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, made the following statement:
The Book of Mormon teaches that secret combinations engaged in crime present a serious challenge, not just to individuals and families, but to entire civilizations. Among today’s secret combinations are gangs, drug cartels, and organized crime families. The secret combinations of our day function much like the gadianton robbers of the Book of Mormon times. They have secret signs and code words. They participate in secret rites and initiation ceremonies. Among their purposes are to “murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness, contrary to the laws of their country and also the laws of their god” [Helaman 6:23]. (In Conference report, Oct. 1997, 51; or Ensign, Nov. 1997, 38).
It is true that cartels, with these secret combinations at their foundation, can challenge and supplant governments.
An interesting approach, touching on how those secret combinations could have been passed on to and implemented by the major drug cartels of Mexico, is discovered in the account of the Maya and the Red Maya. This fictional account in no way implies accepted doctrine of any church.
Ruben and Tito Guzman will introduce the reader to the history and modernization of drug trafficking. Gangster organizations in Mexico currently compare in structure to multi-national corporations in the United States. Their operatives no longer appear only as common gangsters with gold teeth, brightly-colored shirts, and .45 caliber pistols hanging in shoulder holsters. Instead, they utilize high-powered computer technology, some of the best chemists in the country for their methamphetamine operations and other state-of-the-art technology, with brilliant attorneys overlooking their operations.
In spite of all the allegations of impropriety and bribery attributed to the Mexican authorities, the Mexican government deserves credit for its effort in facing monumental challenges with the cartels. With a population of over 100 million people, Mexico has the fourteenth largest economy in the world. Its army is still a patriotic and powerful force, even as the cartels bombard its constituents with bribes and hire away their personnel with higher wages. Mexico City is a strong, stable metropolis with modern innovation and increasing hope for the future. The twenty million people who reside there resent being intimidated by drug runners.
I reiterate that the thousands of murders committed by drug cartels each year have nothing to do with the many legal immigrants in this country who are, by and large, peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Instead, this violence is the diabolic work of profit-crazed drug dealers bent on having their way with victims on both sides of the border.
Characters in this book such as prosecutor Enrique Guzman, FBI chief “Big Bob” Brady,” and Homeland Security coordinator Mark Madden underscore the trend of a younger generation to rely increasingly on the “gray panthers” of the baby boomer generation to unleash their reservoir of experience in confronting the drug menace. These men and women are summoned out of comfortable retirements to lend their strength to resisting the threat at the border. Those of us in our fifties, sixties, and seventies take pride in the commitment of these people and others like them in law enforcement who are ofttimes regarded as “over the hill” who come through when the chips are down.
The last question and probably the most important to be posed in this book is this: What causes people to go from good to proudly indifferent to bad to hopelessly evil to the point of gladly following secret combinations found at the foundation of the drug cartels if granted access? The answer may lie in the shadow of ancient scripture, which I will help you discover.
I will take you back and forth through the course of recent American and Mexican history through Enrique Guzman’s discovery of a leather-bound journal, stained with the blood of his father-a journal that also contains the account of unlikely heroes committed to saving the life of a young woman who has fallen into the grasp of bloodthirsty drug traffickers.
The dialogue you will discover in Miguel Guzman’s journal is no more than a mechanism to convey understanding.
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