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Border & Immigration

State Department Now Requires Armored Cars Along Mexican Border

By Michel Marizco / Senior Field Correspondent
Published November 18, 2010 at 10:20 AM PST

The U.S. State Department has ordered its consular employees to use only armored cars when driving in the Mexican state of Sonora.

KJZZ'S Michel Marizco reports.

State Department employees working along 600 miles of Sonora's border with Arizona must now use armored cars and if they have to head any further south, they must stick to the highway and travel only during daylight hours.

The U.S. Consulate in Hermosillo issued the new advisory last week and also told its staff not to drive south into the state of Sinaloa, long regarded the hub of organized crime in Mexico.

Consular officials say the new orders were handed down due to violence in Nogales and along the Arizona-Sonora border. Two State Department employees were murdered in Cd. Juárez last spring but no consular staff have been killed in Sonora.

In Tucson, I'm Michel Marizco.

Border & Immigration
Michel Marizco
Senior Field Correspondent Michel Marizco (Tucson) has reported along the Southwest border for the past decade, most of that in Arizona and Sonora. Before joining the Fronteras Desk, he produced stories in the field for CNN Madrid, the BBC, 60 Minutes Australia, and the CBC. His work now focuses on transnational trafficking syndicates, immigration, federal law enforcement and those weird, wild stories that make the U.S.-Mexico border such an inherently fascinating region. He is a contributing author on Shared Responsibility: U.S.-Mexico Policy Options for Confronting Organized Crime and an occasional writer at High Country News. In his spare time, he works with Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, assisting in the ongoing investigations of journalist killings in Mexico.
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