NEAR FRONTON, Texas — Dawn was breaking on Monday as a Texas Rangers commander spoke to a heavily armed assembly of state police and Texas military personnel, much like a World War II military commander pep-talking soldiers about to invade an enemy-held Pacific Island.
It so happened that the Texans also were about to invade an enemy-held island, this one being a 170-acre, mile-long land mass in the middle of the Rio Grande. The declared enemy: ultra-violent Mexican cartels that have occupied and used it with impunity to smuggle cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, weapons, and illegal immigrants, all while shooting at American cops, riddling Border Patrol boats with bullets, and intimidating Texas farmers, ranchers, and the 180 residents of the isolated Texas riverfront village of Fronton.
According to local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, the two extraordinarily murderous rival cartels that control or fight for Fronton Island — the Gulf Cartel and Cartel del Noreste (CDN) -- reigned over this part of South partly because the U.S. and Mexico forgot long ago which one owns it.
U.S. and Mexican military and law enforcement alike avoided the diplomatic risk of working on the other’s possible territory without requisite permission.
“Ownership has always been an issue for the State of Texas,” said Mike Salinas, a recently retired Border Patrol agent of 30 years in the immediate region. “And as far as Border Patrol is concerned, it was always a ‘let’s not get on there and find out’ [if Mexico owned the island] because the optics of that whole thing might open up a big old Pandora’s Box of holy moly.”
That ambiguity spiked the island’s real estate value as a haven for operatives fleeing Mexican military crackdowns or American law enforcement chasing them south. In fact, local residents and cops say the whole region became a major drug trafficking corridor because, with police agencies shying away from direct action, the cartels stashed drugs for smuggling northward and brought cash and weapons southbound over it.
Furthermore, the cartel scouts could easily monitor the only paved road that U.S. cops could drive to Fronton to time their load moves. Gunmen became so confident in their immunity from capture on either side that they lost any reluctance to shoot at police. In November 2016, gunmen on the island opened fire on Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers surveilling them, wounding one in an ensuing gun battle. In 2019, someone fired more than 50 rounds at a patrolling Border Patrol boat, riddling it but miraculously wounding no one. Fatal shootings and body discoveries, though, are not uncommon on the Fronton-area stretch of river.
Long before the current mass migration crisis started in 2021, cartel “lead or silver” offers had intimidated almost everyone who lives in the town of Fronton on the Texas mainland, especially property owners whose land fronts the Rio Grande. Cartel gunmen are bold here, showing no compunction about firing on federal and local police officers...
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