“Sketchy” border incident

Four Mexican army soldiers entered southern Arizona and pointed their rifles at a U.S. Border Patrol agent early this week, the Border Patrol said.

The incident Sunday was the Mexican military’s 43rd incursion across the U.S. border since October, the agency said. However, it was unusual because firearms were involved. The Border Patrol and the Mexican government are investigating, Border Patrol spokesman Mike Scioli said.

Details remain sketchy…

Sean Holstege of the Arizona Republic is the first reporter I’ve seen in a long time who admits “I don’t know wtf happened”.

I don’t either, but even Fox News is reporting that this appears pretty innocuous.  Armed troops?  Well, of course… unless they were on a beer run (which used to be a fairly common reason Mexican soldiers entered the U.S. informally before the border became a political issue), you sort of expect soldiers on patrol to carry weapons.  And, since “The Mexican government has sent soldiers north along sections of the border in efforts to tamp down drug-related violence” the soldiers have a legitimate reason for being along their own border.  As did the armed Border Patrol agent.

This particular stretch of the border, which is the Tohono O’odham Reservation on the U.S. side, isn’t well marked (Tohono O’odham live on both sides of the boundry line — a Reservation on the U.S. side, and communal land in Mexico, which is pretty much the same thing) and often, not marked at all.  I suppose there is an argument for saying the border should be clearly marked, but how you do that, and not destroy the landscape… or the property of the Tohono O’odham peoples is beyond me.

Spending four minutes to determine if the other armed guys were friend or foe… and then discover you’re a few meters from where you should be, isn’t that sinister sounding.

Fox News mostly got it right, but they might need a little fact checking.  Quoting  T.J. Bonner of the National Border Patrol Council, who has been known to make inflamatory and factually-inaccurate remarks before (and does so regularly), errs when he says “we have no incursions with Canada”.  Not recently, true, but then, the Border Patrol doesn’t do a very good job on the Canadian border,  and there aren’t a lot of Mexican soldiers in Canada that I know of.