TEXAS SHERIFF SAYS ARM YOURSELVES

[Startex]

Sheriff To Texas Border Town: ‘Arm Yourselves’

by Andrew Suber on August 8, 2010

Is this a case of over-reaction on the part of our neighbors? In my opinion, yes. I don’t think NPR was sufficiently neutral in covering this in this fashion. According to the Texas Tribune, the last person successfully prosecuted for a wrongful death in Hudspeth was Greg Degrate in 2000. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but he doesn’t sound like a cartel soldier.

Sheriff To Texas Border Town: ‘Arm Yourselves’, NPR, April 9, 2010

Last week, residents held a town-hall meeting in Fort Hancock, Texas — a sleepy agricultural town on the border, about an hour southeast of El Paso, that looks like the bleak set of No Country for Old Men.

A couple hundred people crowded into the grade-school gym to hear a chilling message from Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West.

“You farmers, I’m telling you right now, arm yourselves,” he said. “As they say the old story is, it’s better to be tried by 12 than carried by six. Damn it, I don’t want to see six people carrying you.”

His warning was prompted by the killing of the Arizona rancher, and the spiraling violence a couple of miles away in Mexico in a region known as the Valley of Juarez. The notorious smuggling territory is being fought over by the Sinaloa and the Juarez cartels.

“One of the men that works for me had five people killed in front of his house over there [in Mexico] this past weekend,” says Curtis Carr, who is a farmer and county commissioner. “And he’s moving his family over here this week. It’s serious over there. Whether or not it’s gonna spill over here, I don’t know.”