Blood money on the border.

Mexican drug cartels, which are supported and protected by that nation's extravagantly corrupt government, have lavished bribes on Customs and Border Patrol agents to transform "the Texas-Mexico border into one of the major transport corridors for marijuana, cocaine, and heroin," reported columnist James Pinkerton in the May 29 Houston Chronicle.

Border Patrol agent Juan Alfredo Alvarez, for example, was paid $1.5 million "to wave trucks loaded with a ton or more of marijuana through checkpoints outside Hebbronville, according to a plea bargain Alvarez agreed to earlier this month." Gerardo Diaz, a Customs and Border Protection inspector, had pleaded guilty to accepting a $15,000 bribe to allow five kilos of cocaine to pass through the Ysleta port of entry. In one pending case, a Customs inspector--who lives in a $500,000 home, "complete with a basement movie theater"--has been charged with accepting $10,000 for each drug-laden vehicle he waved through his checkpoint. The FBI claims that this official was on the payroll of two Mexican drug syndicates.

"It's the money and weakness," one anonymous "longtime U.S. agent" reportedly told Pinkerton. "It doesn't take a whole lot to approach an officer at a Port of Entry and ask, 'How would you like to make $5,000 a car?'"

Of course, things aren't helped when the Bush administration treats our border like a temporary fiction, slated to be rendered obsolete through illegal alien amnesty and eventual convergence with Mexico.