It seems there is a little trouble down Mexico way.

Touted as one of the safest cities of its size in the nation, El Paso is awakening to its southern neighbor's bloody nightmare.

City officials say that drug-related violence across the border in Ciudad Juárez is having a growing impact in El Paso. And the situation across Mexico is deteriorating so fast that retired five-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey warned in a new assessment of a refugee catastrophe that could devastate border cities.

"Mexico is on the edge of abyss," he said in a Dec. 28 report. "It could become a narco-state in the coming decade," and the result could be a "surge of millions of refugees crossing the U.S. border to escape the domestic misery of violence, failed economic policy, poverty, hunger, joblessness, and the mindless cruelty and injustice of a criminal state."

The report helped ignite what has already been a sense of urgency among city leaders. Last week, the City Council unanimously passed a resolution that called for solidarity with Juárez. The resolution ignited local and national controversy after City Councilman Beto O'Rourke added a line calling for a once unthinkable strategy to neutralize Mexico's powerful cartels: legalizing drugs.

"We've reached such a level of crisis here along the border that all solutions now have to be on the table, including lifting the prohibition of narcotics," O'Rourke said. "Our national security is at stake."

One U.S. law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that each year "dozens" of El Pasoans are kidnapped by gangs working for Mexican cartels in Juárez.

"I've never seen it this way, and going into Juárez, and we go daily, it's like a war zone," said Jay J. Armes, a private investigator and former city councilman. "You don't know who's who and you don't know who's next,"

Armes said he worked on 70 kidnapping cases last year, seven of them involving El Pasoans kidnapped on the U.S. side and taken to Juárez, he said.

Armes said some of his Mexican clients are fleeing to cities in New Mexico and even "Dallas, if they can afford it."

"They're running as far away from the border as they can. And I mean they're running," he said.

The El Paso Police Department has said it knows of no kidnapping cases, and County Attorney José Rodríguez also said he knew of no cases.

"That doesn't mean it's not happening." he said. "We're just not getting people to come forward and file kidnapping reports."

El Paso is the first. It won't be the last. As the violence and kidnappings escalate more and more people will begin doing openly what they have normally been doing in private. Questioning drug prohibition.

Cross Posted at Power and Control