NDAA's Southwest Border Crime Program.

MEXICAN DRUG TRAFFICKING organizations have come to dominate the illegal drug supply chain, taking ownership of drug shipments after they depart South America and overseeing their transportation to market and distribution throughout the United States. (1)

Drug trafficking across the Southwest border presents an acute threat to our national security and is a top priority at NDAA. The office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that 90 percent of the cocaine destined for U.S. markets travels through the Mexico/Central America corridor. Mexico is also the primary foreign source of marijuana and methamphetamine entering U.S. markets and is a source and transit country for heroin as well. Cash and guns flowing from the U.S. southbound are financing the operations of violent drug cartels, arming them and keeping them dangerous.

More than 15,000 people have been killed in Mexico by drug violence since 2006, over 7,000 since the start of last year. (2) The January 2010 slaughter of at least 15 young people with no apparent criminal ties, in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, on the periphery of El Paso, grabbed international headlines and displayed the human toll of the multibillion dollar-a-year drug trafficking industry crossing our border.

This surge in violence is traced to the end of 2006, when President Felipe Calderon aggressively assaulted the cartels by deploying tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police, prompting a furious backlash. Although the level of drug-related violence in Mexico has not surfaced in the U.S., the unrelenting spread of Mexican drug trafficking organizations is one of the greatest organized crime threats to U.S. national security. In a recent visit to Mexico, President Obama observed that drug-related crime emanating from the Mexican drug industry, is "sowing chaos in our communities"--American and Mexican.

In 2009, NDAA received a grant from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance to develop a curriculum and corresponding multi-day training for state and local prosecutors and allied professionals to raise their knowledge and capacity to tackle cross-border crime. To spearhead this initiative, in December 2009, NDAA hosted a summit in San Diego, California. Over a hundred invited prosecutors, members of law enforcement, probation and parole professionals and victim/witness advocates from Arizona, California, Texas and New Mexico, met with Mexican law enforcement officials. For over two days these...