Thousands of miles of pipelines sprawling across southwest of US are unmonitored, because they often stretch through private properties. As a result, they become execution sites for business rivals, drug couriers and other people who just appear to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to Bloomberg Business week.
The pipes are generally built underground, but the paths above them can span more than 100 feet wide. The footpaths are too vast for either the pipeline owners or border agents to monitor constantly. Often, these footpaths become easy paths for smugglers, drug traffickers and illegal immigrants to take across the border.
Border Patrol agents find an average of one corpse a day near the US-Mexico border. The total number of deaths in the region in the past 15 years has reached 5,570, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
The Border Patrol expects the situation to worsen now that Mexico opened its energy industry for investment from outside the country for the first time in 75 years.
“Hopefully, some of the US companies will be there. Not just the big ones, but the small ones too. We’d like to have the whole range of companies working with us,” Guillermo Dominguez, a commissioner on Mexico’s National Hydrocarbon Commission, was cited as saying by San Antonio Business Journal.
Mexican state-owned petroleum company Pemex chief Carlos Roa said foreign ventures are expected to pump $30 billion annually into new wells, pipelines and processing plants, the magazine reported.
The Texas-Mexico border is not only extremely dangerous, but is also crossed by thousands of illegal immigrants every year. A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center has found that about 11.7 million illegal immigrants currently reside in the United States, with over 50 percent of immigrants coming from Mexico.
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