Via Friends of Ours who summed up this story this way:

The Mexican drug cartels employ so-called “spotters” with high tech surveillance equipment such as night vision goggles who provide counter-intelligence on law enforcement movements along the smuggling corridor running through Pinal County, AZ, and yesterday Sheriff Paul Babeu announced the arrest of one such spotter who was discovered living in a cave atop Wild Cat Peak which is located 70 miles north of the border.

Watch this video report to see how desperate things are in Arizona:

The “drug cartels” in Mexico seem more and more like a insurgency everyday:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican police carried out the controlled detonation of a car bomb Saturday in the troubled border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from Texas.

A phone tip around midnight led authorities to a dead body in a car in a shopping center parking lot, the federal Public Safety Department said in a statement. In a second car, police found the bomb.

Agents deactivated the device and removed most of the explosive material to analyze it before safely detonating the vehicle, the department said. There were no injuries.

Juarez is the same city where drug traffickers staged the first successful car bombing in Mexico, killing three people in July.

Meanwhile police in Jalisco have caught cartel paramilitary members with four kilos of c-4 explosives.

But, you know, if we just legalize pot they’ll all go work at a supermarket or something.

And the way the Mexican government is playing coy with this story indicates that this shooting was not up to snuff. From CNN:

Mexico City, Mexico (CNN) — A U.S. citizen was shot to death Sunday in a confrontation with the Mexican military at a checkpoint in Guerrero state, U.S. and Mexican officials said Monday.

U.S. officials said they have received conflicting reports as to whether Joseph Steven Proctor, 32, fired at the Mexican military first.

Proctor died, the U.S. State Department said, when he either tried to drive through the roadblock and the military shot at him or he opened fire as he drove through the checkpoint and soldiers shot back.

Here’s where the story starts to fall apart. He either shot at them or tried to run a roadblock? How about he didn’t bother paying a bribe and got shot. I’m no Sherlock Holmes but when people are telling two different versions of events that lead up to someone getting shot to death, I get suspicious. But there’s more:

A spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said local officials were investigating the circumstances of Proctor’s death, “which are still unclear.”

Rodolfo Gomez Fernandez, an official with the Guerrero state prosecutor’s office, said “it appeared to be true” that Proctor had been shot by the Mexican military.

This is the real tell. Mexican officials are non-committal about what happened and U.S. Embassy officials are still not sure what happened, but if the military was acting appropriately and professionally they would have detailed reports of the incident. Obviously since there’s still a question of whether this guy even shot at them they do not. That, my dear CNN “reporters” means there’s more to this story.

Proctor’s body was found around 2 a.m. Sunday inside a red pickup truck on the federal Acapulco-Zihuatanejo highway near the town of Cerrito de Oro, the government-run Notimex news agency reported.

The state of Guerrero, on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, is home to Acapulco, a popular tourist destination.

Proctor’s body should have been right where the military left it when they ventilated him. But this could be bad writing. The fact that this is near Acapulco makes me think Procter was partying, maybe drunk, ran into some bad seeds who wanted something from him and when he got belligerent with them he got killed.

When will Americans learn to stay out of Mexico? People are willing to break the law to get out of there, which should tell you something.

h/t N.T.A.

Now they’re just rubbing it in:

Around 30 women aged between 18 and 30 years have learned in recent months to carry out killings accompanied by hit men, and most have killed people, said Rogelio Amaya.

“They’re pretty, good-looking, to help mislead opponents,” said the suspected member of a gang of enforcers for the Juarez cartel in the country’s most violent city of Ciudad Juarez.

The women operate in the same way as men and carry both light and heavy weapons, the suspect said.

So the cartels are fielding hot female assassins and we can’t even decide if we’re at war. Who’s in this game to win it?