Border

The University of Texas-Brownsville/Texas Southmost College is planning an emergency text messaging system as part of its strategy to alert students and faculty to dangers amid the drug prohibition war raging across the Rio Grande. One recent intelligence alert had campus police knocking on dorm doors in the middle of the night to warn students to stay indoors.

According to the U.S. Department of State, 92 Americans have been reported as victims of homicide in Mexico from June 2009 to June 2010. On September 10, the agency issued a travel warning for Americans planning to head to Mexico. It warned against taking unnecessary trips to Michoacán, Tamaulipas, parts of Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango and Coahuila because of the ongoing drug prohibition violence.

Police in Tijuana, Mexico, said 13 people were lined up and shot to death at a drug rehabilitation center.

Pfc. Jose Gil Hernandez, a Texas National Guard soldier, was gunned down in violent Ciudad Juarez. He crossed the border despite the Guard urging soldiers not on active duty to stay out of Mexico. Hernandez is at least the third American serviceman killed in Juarez since the drug prohibition war began.

A Mexican police commander investigating the reported shooting of an American tourist on a border lake was decapitated and his head was found in a suitcase outside a Mexican Army base.

The search continues for the body of a tourist, David Hartley, believed to have been killed on a Texas lake, which separates the United Stated from Mexico. Friends and family of Hartley held a memorial service for him, without his remains.

A search for a missing American tourist presumably shot and killed by Mexican pirates on a border lake has been thwarted by threats of an ambush from drug prohibition gangs.