Yeah, like that's a good idea

iloveparks has the good news, by Mark Glover of the Big Bend Sentinel:

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Congressman Ciro Rodriguez today highlighted more than $10.4 million in projects that are creating jobs at Big Bend National Park under President Obama’s economic recovery plan. During a tour of the park, Salazar and Rodriguez also strongly supported expanded international cooperation between Mexico and the United States in conserving and managing the unique natural areas on both sides of the border, including the potential establishment of a Big Bend/Rio Bravo International Park.
“The investments at Big Bend under the President’s economic recovery plan are paying off both in terms of getting Americans back to work and upgrading the facilities at one of our great national parks,” Salazar said. “Thanks to the work being done here, visitors will enjoy a better park and a more enjoyable experience.”
“I am honored to host Secretary Salazar during his visit to one of the greatest natural treasures in the 23rd Congressional District,” said Congressman Rodriguez. “I’m proud to represent this area and look forward to having a dialogue with the Secretary about how best to preserve and enhance the Park using stimulus funding and other resources.”
Salazar and his Mexican counterpart Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada also are considering a proposal first put forward by Franklin Roosevelt and then-Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho more than seventy years ago to establish an international park along the U.S.—Mexican border. In the decades since, the National Park Service and its Mexican counterpart, the National Commission for Natural Protected Areas, have worked closely to coordinate management of the area.
Added to the Santa Elena and Maderas del Carmen Protected Areas, the recent designation of the Ocampo Protected Area and the Monumento Natural del Rio Bravo form a Mexican complex that, together with. Big Bend National Park and the designation of the Rio Grande as a Wild and Scenic River, comprise one of North America's largest and most important conservation areas.
"The United States and Mexico are neighbors sharing a beautiful treasure,” Salazar said. “Our two nations could and should engage in an even higher level of cooperation to conserve this remarkable area and its wildlife while providing more opportunities for visitors to enjoy it. In particular, this would help us better address key issues to the area such protection water and air quality, control of invasive species, and management of wildland fire,” he said. Salazar noted that each country would maintain management responsibility for their side of the border, similar to the relationship between the United States and Canada at the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. 
Linking private and public lands on both sides of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande to create an international park at the big bend of our border with Mexico has vexed politicians for seventy five years. But last summer those efforts got new life when U.S. Department of Interior Chief Ken Salazar and his Mexican counterpart Juan Elvira discussed the project during the North American Leaders Summit held in Guadalajara.
Although an agreement was not reached, a letter of intent was signed to pursue the matter and perhaps negate President Franklin D Roosevelt’s angst depicted in a letter he wrote to Mexican President Manual Avila Camancho in 1944: “I do not believe that this undertaking in the Big Bend (referring to the establishment of Big Bend National Park) will be complete until the entire park area in this region on both sides of the Rio Grande forms one great international park."
In today’s arena of cartel wars, drug smuggling, and a closed border, the international park idea seems improbable, but Salazar’s determination may make the difference. “The deciding factor may be whether Secretary Salazar wants to take a personal interest in the negotiations,” said Big Bend National Park Superintendent Bill Wellman.
Salazar, who grew up in the San Luis Valley, the headwaters of the Rio Grande in southern Colorado, knows the river and the desert. He was raised in an adobe home without electricity or plumbing, and his family relied on the high dry terrain for food. Salazar mentions his love for the desert in almost all of his speeches.
He’s not alone in support of the international park. Congressman Ciro Rodriguez energized the act by initiating House Resolution 695 last year, calling for discussions on the international park at high levels. According to the Congressman’s Press Secretary Rebeca Chapa, “Congressman Rodriguez is actively pursuing way to make this unique park a reality.”
In the post 9.11 age of increased US border security, the Department of Homeland Security headed by Secretary Janet Napolitano will be a significant factor in the negotiations. “In principle, the DHS doesn’t have a problem with it,” Wellman said. “We have to come up with a reasonable proposal that works.”
“Secretary Salazar is reaching out to Secretary Napolitano to push this plan forward,” Courtney Lyons-Garcia, Executive Director of the Friends of the Big Bend, said after returning from a trip from Washington, DC, where she met with members of the National Park Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Interior on the matter.
"They’re looking to get a practical plan moving forward, get it on the table, a plan that is sustainable over the next ten to fifteen years, that not only encompasses an international park but also works as a conservation effort to control invasive species, protect native species and to work out flood control,” Lyons-Garcia said.
Should the International Park with Mexico succeed, it would be the second such arrangement the US has with another country. Waterton Glacier International Peace Park lies on the border with Canada straddling the states of Montana and Alberta. “The big difference there is that on both sides of the border the land is government owned,” Wellman said. “In Mexico we’re dealing with both government and private landowners.”
To facilitate nearly three million contiguous acres of public access, three areas, privately owned but federally protected, are part of the Mexican side of the international park plan: Sierra del Carmen (owned by CEMEX – one of the world’s largest cement producers, Canon de Santa Helena, and the Maderas del Carmen. The Big Bend reach of the Rio Bravo was recently acquired by the Mexican government.
“The way we manage and the way they manage protected lands is quite different,” Wellman said. On the US side of the proposed international park, the Big Bend National Park, the Wild & Scenic River reach of the Rio Grande, the Texas-owned 103,000 acre Black Gap Wildlife Management Area, and the near-by but not contiguous 314,000 acre Big Bend Ranch State Park may all be part of the plan.
Boquillas, across from Big Bend National Park’s Rio Grande Village is likely to be the access point to the Mexican side of the park. Prior to 9.11, before the border with Mexico was closed, Boquillas served as an unofficial international aside for visitors to the Big Bend National Park. “If they’re going to allow tour access, Mexico will have to provide some infrastructure, probably at Boquillas,” Lyons-Garcia said.
Amid almost daily headlines of drug-smuggling, murder, and corruption, the border region could use some good news.“Both countries would like to have a success,” Wellman said.

The Washington Post has the bad news, in an article by William Booth:

An explosion of drug violence in Mexico has killed hundreds of people in the past five days and prompted the country's president to issue a 5,000-word manifesto warning that the fight against organized crime must continue "or we will always live in fear".
As the latest spasm of killing has spread across the country, cartel assassins, local thugs, and federal troops have died in running gun battles, highway ambushes, and prison melees. Recently, shooting broke out in the popular tourist town of Taxco, south of the Mexican capital. Mexican army troops, acting on a tip, raided a house and a firefight ensued, leaving fourteen gunmen dead.
The string of grisly attacks has included the execution-style killing of nineteen drug addicts in a rehabilitation clinic and several assaults targeting police, including an ambush this week that killed twelve federal officers.
In an editorial printed in newspapers nationwide, President Felipe Calderón defended his drug war as vital to the country's security. More than 23,000 people have died in drug-related violence since December of 2006, when Calderón first sent the Mexican military into the streets, according to a government report.
The president directly blamed the United States. "The origin of our violence problem begins with the fact that Mexico is located next to the country that has the highest levels of drug consumption in the world," Calderón wrote. "It is as if our neighbor were the biggest drug addict in the world."
The cartels, he said, have grown rich and bold, fed with billions of dollars from the United States. Experts estimate that $10 billion to $25 billion in drug profits flow to Mexico each year from the north. About ninety percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States passes through Mexico, which also smuggles at least half of the marijuana and methamphetamine sold in U.S. cities. Meanwhile, many of the weapons the cartels use, including grenades and military-style assault rifles, are smuggled into Mexico from the United States.
Calderón told his country that Mexico would be in a much worse state if his administration had not taken on the criminal gangs. It is a battle that is supported by the Obama administration and Congress, which has dedicated $1.3 billion in aid to train police, reform the courts, and supply drug-sniffing dogs, armored cars, night-vision goggles, and Blackhawk military helicopters.
Several hundred Mexicans have been killed in recent confrontations, in some of the worst violence since the U.S.-backed drug war began.
The Mexican newspapers, that keep running tallies of drug-related violence, reported last week that a record was set when 85 people died in a single day, topping the previous record from November of 2008, when 58 were killed over a similar period.
But the pace of killing quickened, and El Universal newspaper reported that 96 people in seven states died, setting another record. The attacks began when two dozen gunmen stormed into the Faith and Life drug rehabilitation center in the northern state of Chihuahua, forced the patients onto the floor or against the wall, and killed nineteen of them. The dead ranged in age from 16 to 63. One of the teenagers managed to make a cellphone call to his home, shouting: Mommy, they've come to kill us! Calderón later issued a statement from Johannesburg, where he was attending the opening of the World Cup, decrying "these barbaric acts".
Recently, gunmen killed fifteen federal police officers in separate attacks in two states known for heavy narcotics trafficking. In the mountainous state of Michoacan, west of Mexico City, assassins used burning buses to block a major highway and ambush a convoy of police returning to the capital, killing twelve officers and wounding at least eight others.
Also recently, 29 prisoners from rival gangs attacked one another with pistols, an assault rifle, and knives in the Mazatlan jail in the western state of Sinaloa, home to Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán. The billionaire cartel boss, whom Forbes magazine has named one of the richest men in Mexico, is among the most wanted fugitives, both in Mexico and the United States.
Prison officials said that eighteen inmates were killed in initial assaults and that eleven others died of stab wounds and beatings when fighting spread to other cell blocks.
In Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, seven or eight people are killed in drug-related violence every day, often garnering only a few paragraphs in the local newspapers. Almost 1,200 people have died in Juarez this year.

Rico says no, the 'big difference there' is that one's with Canada and one's with Mexico. Anyone see any differences (and not just in topography) between the Canadian border (top photo) and the Mexican border (bottom photo)? He doesn't recall a huge influx of illegal Canadians, eh, nor Canadians (or anyone else, for that matter) trying to smuggle tons of maple syrup across the border...