LAREDO, Texas – This border area is one of the least publicized international crisis zones. More Americans have been kidnapped just in this area than in all of Iraq by Islamic terrorists.

Twenty-six Americans are now officially listed as missing in the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo region of the U.S.-Mexico border—in addition to the more than 400 Mexicans re ported to be suffering a similar fate.

The number of American civilians missing or kidnapped in Iraq since the beginning of the war is 23 as of last September, the latest figure released by the State Department.

And then there are the executions.

Unlike Muslim jihadists, enforcers from the feuding Gulf and Sinaloa Mexican drug cartels favor off-camera basement executions and oil-drum burials.

“I’ve seen these barrels with bodies stuffed into them,” said a U.S. law enforcement official, who, like most here, spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s horrible, but it is really happening.”

First acid is poured in to break up flesh and bone. Then the drum is filled with diesel fuel.

A match—that’s all it takes to turn a life into a heap of ashes.

How many of those unaccounted for have already been “processed” this way? Nobody here knows—or is eager to find out.

“The Mexican government has lost control along the border,” fumes Rick Flores, the youthful Webb County sheriff.

“They had 176 murders in Nuevo Laredo last year, and none of them have been solved. In the first less than six weeks of this year, there were another 27 murders. Again, none solved. At the rate they are going, the death toll will be over 300 by year’s end.”

If anything, Mr. Flores said, the cartels have become more brazen, more willing to reach for their guns.

On Jan. 3 there was a harrowing standoff with heavily armed suspected cartel paramilitaries in the hamlet of El Cenizo, about 15 miles south of here.

An alleged smuggler drove a van pursued by sheriff’s deputies into the Rio Grande and used his cell phone to call in reinforcements.

“They arrived within minutes—all clad in black, all with AK-47s—and took up positions on the Mexican bank,” recalls Mr. Flores. “They shouted to us in English—and I convey these words literally—‘Yo u wanna play, mother f…rs? Let’s play!’ Unfortunately, we could not engage them across an international boundary.”

Are you *LISTENING*, Washington?

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