Gunmen Attack Newspaper in Mexican Border City, Wounding Reporter

It was but a few days ago that I posted about the precautions reporters covering drug violence along the border were forced to take.

The latest news today by Jorge Vargas of the AP is that at least four unidentified assailants fired a hail of bullets from assault rifles and tossed a grenade into a building housing a newspaper in the violence-wracked border city of Nuevo Laredo on Monday, wounding one reporter seriously.

Reporter Jaime Orozco Tey of the daily newspaper El Manana was wounded in the attack and was in serious condition at a local hospital.

Nuevo Laredo has been in the front lines of a bloody battle between Mexico's top drug cartels fighting for control of its billion-dollar smuggling routes into the United States.

So far this year, almost one person every day has been murdered in the city of 300,000. All but a few of the killings appear to have been related to drug violence.

I will note that some of us were screaming about the growing drug problems and related violence on the border 5 years ago and predicted this would happen. Maybe if people in authority took action years ago we would not have this problem to the degree we have it today.