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Mexico Institute in the News: A New Strategy on the Border

Eric L. Olson

US Border Patrol implements new strategy to secure the border, even though there are critics against it.

March 13, 2012, Homeland Security Today

When US Border Patrol agents go about their duties along the Southwest border this year they won’t just be seeking illegal aliens, stopping transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and enforcing American law. They will be implementing a new strategy along the roughly 2,000 miles of US-Mexico border...

...According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, Observations on the Costs and Benefits of an Increased Department of Defense Role in Helping to Secure the Southwest Land Border, senior Defense Department officials complained that there was a lack of a Southwest border strategy and it was hampering them in identifying, planning and defining [Department of Defense]’s role in providing border assistance...

...The criticism wasn’t just in Congress. The day after the hearing, Eric Olson, a senior associate at the Washington, DC-based Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, wrote that “the US lacks a comprehensive nationwide strategy to disrupt the operations” of TCOs in his essay, “Is the Border Broken?” 

“We lack a complete understanding of where and how TCOs operate and function in this country,”

Olson stated.

“Individual police departments or federal agencies may know how and where the [Los] Zetas or Sinaloa cartel[s] operate in a US city or in a particular area, but an integrated mapping of these organizations and an inter-agency strategy involving both federal and state agencies as partners in efforts to disrupt and dismantle these criminal networks sadly does not exist.”

  Read full article here.

About the Author

Eric L. Olson

Eric L. Olson

Global Fellow;
Director of Policy and Strategic Initiatives, Seattle International Foundation
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Mexico Institute

The Mexico Institute seeks to improve understanding, communication, and cooperation between Mexico and the United States by promoting original research, encouraging public discussion, and proposing policy options for enhancing the bilateral relationship. A binational Advisory Board, chaired by Luis Téllez and Earl Anthony Wayne, oversees the work of the Mexico Institute.   Read more

Latin America Program

The Wilson Center’s prestigious Latin America Program provides non-partisan expertise to a broad community of decision makers in the United States and Latin America on critical policy issues facing the Hemisphere. The Program provides insightful and actionable research for policymakers, private sector leaders, journalists, and public intellectuals in the United States and Latin America. To bridge the gap between scholarship and policy action, it fosters new inquiry, sponsors high-level public and private meetings among multiple stakeholders, and explores policy options to improve outcomes for citizens throughout the Americas. Drawing on the Wilson Center’s strength as the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum, the Program serves as a trusted source of analysis and a vital point of contact between the worlds of scholarship and action.  Read more