Originally posted at American Thinker blog

While Americans deflate blowup Santa Clauses and remove Christmas decorations, according to the Baja California state attorney general in Tijuana, the drug cartels are decorating Mexican border bridges with bullet-riddled heads. One ingenious decorator hung a cranium “using a metallic ring and a nylon rope,” shot through with creatively placed “bullet wounds.”

The decapitated head was accompanied by a hostile message and was discovered a few hours after a thirty-ish woman was “found shot to death in another Tijuana neighborhood,” also accompanied by another drug cartel-style ominous note.

The gruesome sight was just miles from downtown San Diego, home of Edgar Jimenez, El Ponchis (“The Cloak”), the 14 year-old hit man who was arrested recently for busily removing “heads and genitalia” for “one of Mexico’s most powerful trafficking cartels.”

Over the past four years, more than “30,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence.”  Some corpses retained their heads, but others weren’t as lucky.  In fact, the day the ornamental head and the dead woman were found, Erasto Ortiz Valencia, Sonora state’s prison director, was shot to death outside his home 10 days after assuming the interim position.  In addition, the assistant police chief of Empalme was cut down by “gunmen who fired an assault rifle from an SUV.” Two boys ages 14 and 17 were shot to death with assault rifles and the bodies of four young men, killed with “guns and knives and….found blindfolded and their hands or feet tied,” were bound and dumped on a “main boulevard.”

But there is no need to fret.  Arizona residents worried about their necks can rest easy because DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano assures America that the border has never been safer.  The Mexico/US border is so secure that, despite headless bodies and random bloodshed, Barack Obama kicked back and extended his Hawaiian vacation to avail himself of multitudinous portions of artificially colored shaved ice and did so while the border conflict raged on.

Truth is, the Obama administration is wise not to worry; it was probably coincidental that on the same day the bridge was adorned with the bullet-riddled head, Mexican police also found an “unfinished tunnel under a house in the city of Nogales, across from Nogales, Arizona.”  While the tunnel does appear nefarious, it is possible Obama might interpret the hidden access into the US as merely an attempt for well-meaning parents to make their way to an Arizona ice cream parlor to purchase a cone for a kid without being harassed or troubled for identification.

According to the Mexican “Army’s 45^th Military Zone command…the tunnel was dug about 5 feet (1.5 meters) beneath the surface and stretched almost 100 feet (30 meters), apparently just far enough to reach US territory.”  If ice cream wasn’t the driving incentive, Arizona residents can breathe a sigh of relief because luckily, the bridge beheading distracted workers mid-project, causing excavators to abandon the effort before it was complete.

No one knows for sure who’s to blame for the uptick in carnage, because “one of Mexico’s biggest and most brutal drug gangs” recently announced a “ceasefire” for the month of January.  A truce could mean that for a season La Familia has decided to forgo contributing to the mountains of dead bodies.

Nevertheless, assault rifles aside and in an effort to retain respectability, Mexico’s “most flamboyant” cartel obviously remains devoted to the act of adorning Tijuana bridges with an eye-catching array of severed heads, in an effort to reaffirm for doubters who actually wields the power over the US/Mexico border.