February 18, 2004
California Coastal Commission
45 Fremont, Suite 2000
San Francisco, CA 94105-2219
Ladies and Gentlemen,
They’re coming.
The new border fence has its origins eight thousand miles from San Diego … It is those people who are creating our future.
Those people are the drug lords and war lords of Afghanistan. Under the Taliban the drug lords were restrained and their trade in heroin was ostensibly cut to zero.
Today, the Afghan drug lords have been unleashed. INTERPOL states that more than 90% of all the heroin sold in Europe now comes from Afghanistan. In the United States the heroin flood has dropped prices from $30 to $4 and yet purity has gone from “adulterated” to pure. The Afghan’s efforts have opened the heroin market to America’s high schoolers. Yes, the Afghans are targeting our children and making them heroin addicts.
It gets worse. These Afghan drug lords are now teamed with the drug cartels of Mexico. And the drug cartels of Mexico have expanded to trafficking in illegal aliens. The groups have unified to provide America not only with heroin and cocaine but also to send us not the “Tired and poor yearning to be free” but even criminals and terrorists wanting us all dead.
When one combines Afghan drug lord with Mexican drug cartel and then sends this combination to the United States of America – we get violence not seen in this country since the Civil War. Southern Arizona is now awash in blood. America’s Highway of Death is called Interstate 10. Innocent American families are now being machine gunned by those thugs because they are profiled as driving vehicles which might contain another drug lord’s load of human — or drug — profit.
They’re coming.
In Ciudad Juarez four hundred teenage women have been murdered – for sport. At least 400 have been raped, murdered, dismembered and their bodies buried in shallow graves. And the numbers increase.
Your patriot – Jane Fonda – is out there today along the Mexican border in Texas protesting this wanton evil.
They’re coming.
Just south of here is the city of Tijuana. Not only is it the home of the Margarita but of a major drug cartel.
Certainly, the Tijuana police department is a poster child for clean living. Not only have two of Tijuana’s Chiefs of Police recently been machine gunned dead, but their underlings are now embroiled in certain issues surrounding the raping of American women inside their very own police stations.
They’re coming.
While we are here – in a hotel that less than 2% of the entire population of the United States can afford to buy lunch in let alone rent a room – thousands of Mexican males are planning their break across our border tonight – along that border of interest to us today.
Who are these people?
According to the CIA, Mexico has three times the murder rate of the United States and they have no guns.
In Mexico and here in the U.S. … who are responsible for the vast majority of all murders?
Adult males between the age of 15 and 35.
There are about 16 million of these adult males in Mexico. These 16 million cause about 16,000 murders in Mexico each year …
Exactly who is clambering over our border defenses?
According to the United States Border Patrol 99 out of every hundred they capture are of this “Adult Mexican Male” group.
Now let’s look at the border area in question.
It is essentially a quagmire of untreated effluent frothing and oozing a shallow channel from Tijuana to the Pacific Ocean and carpeted in trash left by thousands of illegal aliens on their way north.
And the bird nests of such great interest to you are being robbed of their eggs by these illegal aliens as a snack.
The “park” you are so urgently wanting to “preserve” is little more than a settling pond for the excretions of hundreds of thousands of Tijuana citizens who’s homes are not as yet connected to a sewer line.
A quick check of the contents of these effluents – public data available from any sewer plant – shows that the frothy beige liquid contains everything from gonorrhea, syphilis, TB, hepatitis (all five kinds), cholera, and — in the case of Tijuana — polio and leprosy.
While you are sitting right here enjoying a “reality” that only a Martha Stewart can afford, we who live in San Diego must face a far different reality.
When you go home, we stay here.
When the first portion of our border triple fence went up … Burglaries in San Diego dropped by about 30% and auto thefts dropped by about 30%.
The fence works.
But you must understand …
Soon … very soon … Tom Ridge will stop the flood of terrorists and drug smugglers and other psychopathic entrepreneurs now operating along the Arizona / Mexican frontier.
And when that happens, when he does that, the flood, the focus of the violence, will return to this part of the border … and we better be ready.
They are coming.
And if we do not seal the border, the violence and barbarity of Douglas, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez will pale in comparison to that which we will soon see here in San Diego.
In summation, there is the apocryphal report of General Douglas MacArthur visiting FDR at the White House — discussing the very survival of our country; In 1934.
Yes, in 1934 General MacArthur is said to have warned the president that when an American boy was lying screaming in the mud with a Japanese bayonet in his stomach it would be FDR he was cursing.
May I now paraphrase that great general and say … When the flood of violence shifts from Texas and Arizona back to San Diego and these terrorists clamber over that fence and slaughter untold thousands – even killing our school children with pure heroin — I hope the victim’s families remember that it was you here today — for the sake of some sewage-sodden weed – who let them die.
Robert Beken, San Diego