Obama Mulls Troops on Mexico Border

Washington – President Barack Obama is considering deploying troops along the US-Mexico border to stop any spillover of the carnage from the drug wars in its southern neighbor, US newspapers said Thursday.

"We’re going to examine whether and if National Guard deployments would make sense, and under what circumstances they would make sense," Obama told 14 regional US newspapers in an interview.

For the moment however, the US leader said the spiraling border violence does not warrant "militarizing" the region.

"We’ve got a very big border with Mexico," Obama said. "I’m not interested in militarizing the border."

Last month, Texas Governor Rick Perry called on Obama to send 1,000 troops to the southern US border to prevent drug cartel violence seeping northwards into the United States.

Obama told the Dallas Morning News and 13 other dailies that he is keeping a close eye on running gun battles, assassinations, beheadings and other violence which have become an everyday occurrence in northern Mexico.

And while he is leaving the door open to deploying troops, "I don’t have a particular tipping point in mind," the president said.

Expanding on those remarks, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters the Obama believes "that our long-term challenges relating to many policy decisions around the border are not going to be solved through the militarization of the border."

He added Obama was taking requests that troops be dispatched to the frontier "under advisement."

The violence flared after Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug cartels nearly two years ago, prompting armed resistance from the country’s drug barons and setting off a pitched turf warfare between rival gangs.

Obama said in his newspaper interview that within "a few months" he would offer a comprehensive policy to curtail US demand for drugs and curb the southbound flow of cash and guns that give the cartels "extraordinary power."

"It’s really a two-way situation," the US president said, promising a combination of border security, law enforcement, prevention and treatment.

More than 1,000 people have been killed so far this year alone in suspected drug attacks amid the government’s crackdown on warring cartels, while last year saw more than 5,300 killed in drug violence.

Calderon has deployed some 40,000 troops across the country to stem the violence, including reinforcements last month to the volatile northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, the locale of some of the most flagrant acts of violence.

Meanwhile, border violence as well as America’s lax weapons laws and the flow of US firearms into Mexico, was the subject of a hearing held by the House of Representatives Homeland Security subcommittee.

"I think it’s time that we make a comprehensive plan to figure out not just what do we do about the violence at the border," California lawmaker Loretta Sanchez told CNN ahead of the hearing.

"It’s all tied together with the economy down there, with our economy, people moving back and forth, commerce routes between the two countries," she said.

Fellow Democratic lawmaker, Zoe Lofgren said during the hearing that Washington had a moral obligation to stop the traffic of weapons south of the border.

"They have people dying, and we haven’t done what we need to do, stop the guns from flowing," she said.