HispanicVista Columnists

No Mexican Gangsters!

By Raoul Lowery Contreras

           The drug runners are running wild along the border. Cops are being slaughtered, four in one day. Airplanes, helicopters, cars, trucks and backpacks are being used to transport millions of dollars in marijuana across the border. Formerly low-crime and stable communities are racked by vicious crimes of violence and murder. Mexico, the Mexican border and Mexican drug runners -- is that what is happening here? No.

          No, our dear Canadian neighbors to the north are the ones involved. Even a huge and long story in the New York Times hasn’t shaken the anti-Mexicans, the haters of anything Mexican, from their deep-rooted beliefs that it is Mexico and Mexicans that are destroying America with drugs and violence.

          It is an article of faith among Mexican haters that there is a Mexican—read illegal—crime wave engulfing us. They exaggerate the number of Mexicans who commit crimes and go to prison. They exaggerate the number of Mexicans in prison. They do so intentionally and not out of ignorance but out of hate.

          Let’s see—violent crimes are way down in California and throughout the country in direct contradiction to the fact and phenomenon of a growing illegal population. The number of illegals from Mexico in California prisons is less than 10-percent, even as the haters declare that 25 percent of our California prison inmates are illegals from Mexico. That is simply untrue.

          Most of what these people declare about Mexicans is untrue or exaggerated.

          While they are making up untruths about Mexicans, Canadian marijuana gangsters are killing four Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the national police of Canada, in one day and running amok along the unprotected Canadian-USA border. They’re shooting each other in drug turf wars.

          "In British Columbia, a once-quiet province in a country that has long enjoyed a low crime rate, the murder rate has soared in the past two years, Canadian officials say, because of killings linked to warring drug gangs," reports the New York Times.

          The drug gangsters are getting rich smuggling top-notch British Canadian marijuana (B.C. Bud) into the U.S.A. for our weed smokers to pay top dollar for. It should be remembered that the American dollar is worth a lot more than the Canadian dollar. Thus, the gangsters pay their minions in semi-worthless Canadian currency and reap substantial profits of American dollars.

B.C. Bud brings $3,000 a pound in Seattle, according to the Times, and more in California, while Mexican marijuana brings $400 to $1,000 a pound, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

          Neither Canadian authorities nor the New York Times mentions any Mexican involvement in this growing enterprise. Despite this lack of Mexican involvement, Mexican haters seize on the following words as proof that immigrants (read Mexicans) are involved in the Canadian marijuana industry.

          The Times: "…prosecutors were aggressively pursuing the larger organizations smuggling both the B.C. Bud south and cocaine and guns north." Further, "The major criminal organizations moving the drugs and guns, law enforcement officials say, are outlaw motorcycle gangs, particularly the Hells Angels, who have denied involvement but who law enforcement officials say do everything from growing to smuggling drugs. Vietnamese and other Asian groups tend to specialize in growing, and Indo-Canadians (Indians) have a niche in transporting the drugs, according to…the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency."

          Not a Mexican in sight…Lots of white guys, Hells Angels, some Asians and Native Americans, but not a Mexican in sight.

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Contreras’ newest book –THE ILLEGAL ALIEN: A DAGGER INTO THE HEART OF AMERICA?? – is available at www.floricantopress.com, www.amazon.com and through any new book store. Email -- sdraoul@att.net,

This article appeared in HispanicVista.com on March 7, 2005