Evil Shows its Head.

The population of the Village of Columbus itself was quite small when I took over the law enforcement duties, being less than three thousand in the town itself. It was comprised of about fifty per cent retired people from other parts of the country who had come there for the pleasant winter weather, the romance of the Mexican Border and the cheap prescription drugs available in pharmacias in Palomas.

Twenty five per cent were hard working honest family people, who pretty much were too busy with their lives to be concerned with law enforcement, and twenty five per cent of the people who derived an income directly, or indirectly from the illegal drug trade. You would think that my problems would stem from the twenty five per cent of the population who were involved in the illegal importation of drugs into this country. They created many problems, but the real problem for me came from the retired people who comprised fifty per cent of the population.

Many of this portion of the population were very vocal about how the Village should be run, and took an active role in the Village government. I believe that our weekly Village council meetings were the greatest entertainment in town. The small Village offices were filled to overflowing every council meeting, and I couldn't take a step without it being scrutinized in every coffee shop in town. Their involvement in what I did was all right, but I soon found that the drug importation crowd had spent years previous to my arrival, befriending the retirees in love with Mexico.

This group came into direct oppostion to me in my attempts to put a dent in the drug trafficing taking place all around them. These retired people were not drug users, they had simply been duped into believing that their good friends in Mexico could not be involved in such nefarious enterprises. The Palomas night life was filled with happy retirees blissfully unaware that people were dying all around them, embroiled in an underground drug territory turf war being being fought by the two powerful drug families over who would control drug trafficing in this area of northern Chihuhua.

As I stated earlier most of this part of the population were from somewhere else in the country. In my opinion most of them had never had the opportunity to have a voice in government in the areas from which they originated and so now they believed their voices mattered and they were going to be heard.

The first problem I encountered in my new job came when a citizen's group attended a council meeting and demanded that I lock my guns up in a safe, reasoning that I could then return back to the safe and retrieve them when I needed them in my law enforcement duties. Believe it or not this proposal almost passed the council until I put a stop to it by threatening to quit my job if it passed. Their reasoning was that it worked well in England where the "Bobbies" didn't normally carry guns and they genuinely believed it would work in Columbus on the frontier with Mexico.

This mentality will sound ridiculous to most people of common sense, but I believe that their intentions were good and wouldn't it have been great if I could have implemented such a program, sadly; as long as there are predators on the earth there will be men needed who are willing to wield weapons and risk their lives in the defense of those either unwilling, or unable to defend their peaceful lives.