"I think we're in a methamphetamine epidemic here," Galax police Chief R.C. Clark said. "This is a distribution point. There is cultural support. There are other people who speak Spanish." "I still desperately need someone who speaks the language and is also adept in the culture of diversity," Clark said.
Right now, Galax has no officers fluent in Spanish and cannot hire any because larger departments are willing to offer much higher pay, Clark said. Some officers are taking language lessons.
Last year, two Mexican men were found shot to death along a logging road in Grayson County. Both were illegal immigrants, authorities said, and their deaths are thought to have been connected to drug dealing. The man suspected of shooting the two also is Mexican, and is thought to have returned to that country, Grayson County Sheriff Richard Vaughan said.
"Cartels tend to swim in the ocean of illegal aliens," said George Grayson, a professor of government at the College of William and Mary who has written extensively about U.S.-Mexico relations.
He did not find it surprising that Galax and other small towns across the country with high concentrations of Hispanic residents would become beachheads in the cartels' push to expand their trafficking northward.
"Often the cartels will use smaller towns ... as an area of operations because typically the law enforcement agencies don't have the resources to deal with the underworld characters," Grayson said.
These and other "inferences" are repeated at the website - http://bitterqueen.typepad.com - dedicated to the "History of Gay Bars in New York City" "Get the Mafia out of Gay Bars".
In an article at http://roanoke.com/ featuring Megan Brown, "Her own suppliers and, from what she could tell, their suppliers, had not been Latino."
Alison Flinchum in a
response
to the Roanoke Times article said "This article could have been greater, but chose to cater to the fear of a region."
In the face of this sort of logic, I recommend a tamale from "La Tapatia" on East Grayson St. in Galax.
