SPECIAL REPORT: Small Town, Big Fear

By Abe Lubetkin, Anchor/Reporter

A passing car is about the loudest thing you’ll hear in Luna County.

But there’s a growing fear here that the sound of cartel gunfire could ring out any day in this barren stretch of tumbleweed and cacti.

The town of Palomas, Mexico is a hotspot in the Mexican drug cartel turf war.

And it’s right across the border from Luna County.

“We have so much open space – so much area to cover. I have limited resources,” said Raymond Cobos, Luna County Sheriff.

Cobos has thirty deputies to patrol 3000 square miles of Luna County desert.

That’s one deputy for every hundred square miles.

For Cobos, this fight hits a nerve.

“It’s kind of a personal affront to me that someone would come into my jurisdiction and harm somebody here,” he said.

This isn’t the first time violence in Mexico has threatened to spill into the US.

In 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, N.M. in a pre-dawn raid. His forces left the town in ruins.

“The threat back then and the threat now are both now very real,” said Columbus resident Wayne Lee Robinson, Jr.

Cobos gets riled up discussing the cartels.

“It seems to me that the drug cartels are basically insulting every citizen of Mexico,” he said.

“They’re so callous and they say to the world: we’re so arrogant, we’re so powerful, we’re so dominating, we can tell entire populations what to do and when to do it.”

Cobos’s deputies area also in charge of protecting the two-thousand residents who now live in Columbus.

A series of problems with the town’s police force have left Columbus with no police chief, and only one full-time, active police officer.

That means Cobos – whose grandfather fought in Pancho Villa’s army – has to drain his department’s overtime budget by keeping one of his deputies in-town every day.

And that means there is one fewer deputy patrolling stretches of Luna County near Columbus, which are notorious for drug smuggling.

To people who wonder why Cobos is concerned when U.S. Border Patrol agents are lined up along the border, he says this, “The problem with everything you hear is that the Border Patrol doesn’t enforce local and state laws. I do.”

Cobos said that as Border Patrol agents have tightened up checkpoints, drug smugglers have turned to the desert.

And every load of marijuana Luna County Sheriffs find in their jurisdiction remind them the drug trade crosses their desolate state highways, and that the Mexican drug war is not very far.

In Palomas, the concern about drug violence is very real. The town has about 10-thousand people in it, and so far this year, officials say more than 30 people have been killed in cartel-related violence. Parents we spoke to said they’re very concerned about the safety of their children.

“You feel scared for your children,” said one father, who didn’t want to be identified.

Every day, hundreds of schoolchildren from Palomas who are U.S. citizens, but live in Mexico, commute across the border to attend public schools in Deming and Columbus.

Parents who meet their kids at the checkpoint said in the last year, violence in Palomas has gotten worse.

“We heard gunfire,” said one father, who did not want to be identified.

“I just held my babies. I tell my babies don’t worry – it’s not going to happen. I’m here with you.”

Asked if he believed that, he said, “No.”

And it’s that ever-looming sense of fear Sheriff Cobos is trying to keep out of his county.