Much fanfare has greeted steps by the Obama administration to make the U.S.-Mexico border more secure, but a local official who’s dealt firsthand with related drug-trafficking problems believes they don’t go far enough.

“What they did, I think, is a decent first step,” Surry County Sheriff Graham Atkinson said of federal officials’ plans to send hundreds of agents, high-tech surveillance gear and drug-sniffing dogs to the border.

However, Atkinson added, the measures announced this past week are “not anything near what they’re going to need to control the border.”

Obama’s border-security initiative is a response to growing violence among Mexican drug cartels which has created chaos in their country and also spilled over into nearby American communities.

Closer to home, law enforcement officers in Surry County, Mount Airy and neighboring Carroll County, Va., have made several high-profile drug seizures recently that were identified as part of the supply line from Mexican trafficking networks.

The administration is dispatching 350 additional personnel from the Homeland Security Department to double border-enforcement security teams, along with adding 16 Drug Enforcement Administration positions in the southwestern region, according to Associated Press reports.

Other plans include boosting the FBI’s intelligence and analysis work on Mexican drug cartel crime, increasing inspections of rail cargo heading from the U.S. into Mexico and using X-ray units to try to detect weapons being smuggled into Mexico.

“A Much Bigger Task”

Though the Surry County sheriff applauds such measures, he believes they are insufficient to deal with what he called “a multibillion-dollar business.”

“It’s going to be a much bigger task than the resources they’re throwing at it at this point,” Atkinson said.

One problem is what is required to secure the border itself, while another surrounds what the local sheriff believes are the larger issues surrounding the operation of sophisticated drug enterprises.

For example, Atkinson pointed out that even with plans for sending more federal personnel to the Southwest — which include doubling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — many areas along the 1,969-mile border still will be unguarded.

A second problem is the size and power of the Mexican drug cartels, which have the financial means to buy influence on both sides of the border to ensure their movements back and forth. While the U.S. plans to beef up its intelligence operations, the drug dealers are doing the same thing.

“They’re collecting intelligence on us just like we collect it on them,” the local sheriff said of the well-organized cartels. “They’ve got their own accountants. They’ve got their own security forces.”

The ultimate solution, Atkinson believes, will involve not only targeting the drug trafficking itself but going after traffickers’ finances. Seizing drugs is not a problem for them, he said. “Seizing money is.”

“That’s how you get them — in the pocketbook,” added Atkinson, who handled narcotics investigations in his earlier years with the Surry Sheriff’s Office.

“You really have to look at the whole thing — the big scope of the problem.”

A lack of resources to battle traffickers is just as much a difficulty for local law enforcement as it is for the federal government, according to the sheriff. He cited a statistic that indicates 20 percent of the population is engaged in the illegal drug trade in some manner, which includes about 15,000 residents in a county the size of Surry.

“We’ve got three people (investigating) drugs,” Atkinson said of his department. “The resources are just not there.”

Mexican drug cartels are said to have distribution networks in at least 230 American cities, prompting the U.S. Department of Justice to call them “the greatest organized crime threat to the United States.”

Bright Spots

But everything surrounding the trafficking problem isn’t all bad, according to the Surry sheriff. He said through recent arrests, local officers have been able to have success in reaching some of those higher up on the trafficking chain, which should have an impact on their operations.

Another positive element is that Surry County hasn’t been caught up in the drug-related violence gripping Mexico as part of the cartels’ turf war, which also is spilling over into Southwest states in the form of kidnappings and home invasions.

“I don’t see that as being a big issue for us,” Atkinson said of rival drug gangs jockeying for position in an ever-expanding enterprise affecting this region.

“These guys pretty well have their own territories carved out.”

Contact Tom Joyce at tjoyce@mtairynews.com or at 719-1924.