Archive for February, 2015
Border News: The Cartels have an Air Force.
February 18th, 2015 | 
Author:
The border drone drama was recently highlighted when a quadcopter carrying three kilos of methamphetamine landed in a market parking lot in the border town of Tijuana, Mexico.
Three kilos is 6.6 lbs. The weight was too much for the design, supposedly a prototype. It had been flying on a GPS course to a predetermined landing site.
DEA has estimated that drones have been making one hundred fifty trips a year. The failure of the three-kilo flight just highlighted the phenomenon.
Cartels like drones because they are cheaper to build than submarines. Experts say twenty-four drones can be built for the price of one sub. Some are carried in semi trailers with wings folded like carrier aircraft. One group in South America is experimenting with a cardboard version. All are nearly invisible on radar.
Squadrons of these pilotless aircraft can be flown to various GPS points at the same time. This has created a new distribution term known as the swarm effect. Cartel 
members in the U.S. will know where to look because of the prearranged GPS landing sites. But the DEA indicates that the swarm effect, because of its scattered pattern will probably limit the number of drones that will be recovered by their personnel.
The primary Mexican source for high-end drone aircraft is located in the Santa Fe District of Mexico City. It’s super lux high-rise neighborhood where drone production lines are said to exist. I guess this is how the rich get richer.
My name is Wally Runnels and I write Border Pulp.
Posted in 
Border News: Death Karma, first review.
This is obviously self promotion but it does pertain to the Mexican Border. The story is based on fact. 
Good Storytelling, January 20, 2015The book has an engaging cast of characters … Clyde Stockwell and Cat Boy, Rocky and El Funerario … there’s even a guy named Ford Tough. None of them are good guys in the classical sense. They have issues. At times, they do bad things. And, yet, they grow on you and you find yourself rooting for some of them.
The story is raw and edgy, but I found myself laughing multiple times from the unique & dark wit. In some ways, it reminded me of the movie From Dusk till Dawn, minus the vampires.
No doubt the authenticity I sensed behind the story is due to the author’s experiences along the border.
It’s an easy and good read: 4 of 5 stars.
Rated R for violence and sexual content.
BORDER NEWS: Mexican Government says 43 students are still missing.
But more graves are being discovered. So whom do you believe? The Church, that claims the students were murdered. Or the Government who says they just disappeared?
You mean like alien adduction?
All this happened in the small city of Iguala in the southernmost Mexican state of Guerrero. It’s in one of Mexico’s poorest regions where student dissent has long been practiced. Demonstrations held by faculty and members of the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teacher College of Ayotzinapa had become a convention.
The missing forty-three young people were marching for better teaching opportunities for rural and urban employment. Their families want to know their whereabouts and are getting no answers.
Protest traditions long held by the college have run head-on with cartel controlled local government. Widespread anger has been directed at security failures by the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The Mexican Government is not protecting its people. Leaving them to the violent whims of drug gangs. It’s generally believed that the cartels and the government have been integrated.
“Iguala is just one example of the level of decay in state and municipal security institutions,” said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexican Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
My name is Wally Runnels and I write Border Pulp.