Do you ever feel like you're losing your country?

Robert Krentz might have, before he was brutally murdered on his own land. This is outrageous.

DOUGLAS, Arizona (Reuters) – The murder of a prominent Arizona rancher near the Mexican border is spurring charges that Washington is doing too little to stop Mexico's raging drug war from spilling over into the United States.

Robert Krentz was shot last Saturday while working at his remote cattle ranch some 30 miles northeast of this city on the Arizona-Mexico border.

Investigators tracked the footprints of the suspected gunman about 20 miles south to the border with Mexico, prompting some authorities to blame smugglers or illegal immigrants for the killing.

"The ranchers have feared for their lives for a long time and they've told the people from Washington, but they don't pay attention to us," Michael Gomez, the mayor of Douglas, told Reuters.

"This continues to be a hot area for illegal crossings and they have to do something to stop it."

Krentz, 58, was well liked and respected in southeastern Arizona, where his family's ranch sprawled over 35,000 acres.

No arrests have been made and there is no clear motive or any named suspect, the Cochise County Sheriff's Office said.

The killing comes amid ever-more brazen and brutal attacks by cartels in northern Mexico that are fighting for control of lucrative drug smuggling routes into the United States.

Last month, gunmen killed two Americans in Ciudad Juarez, south of El Paso, Texas, renewing fears in the United States that escalating violence may spill north over the border.

More from a column by Lionel Waxman.

Rancher Robert Krentz didn't deserve to die on his own land in the USA

By Lionel Waxman, Inside Tucson Business

Published on Friday, April 02, 2010

Robert Krentz was a good man. People who knew him say he was a humanitarian and a Good Samaritan. He didn’t deserve to die in the dirt - on his own land - at what law enforcement investigators believe was the gunpoint of an illegal border crosser. His family didn’t deserve to lose him. The nearby Cochise County communities of Douglas and Portal didn’t deserve to lose him. But all did some time on March 27. And why?

There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Let’s allocate some of that blame. Maybe it will become obvious what we have to do to make sure we don’t lose more good people in this fashion.

Most of the blame falls on the Mexican drug cartels. They are willing to do anything for money. The Mexican government has been unsuccessful in curbing their reign of terror. It is almost as though the cartels are fighting it out to prove one or more of them is the government.

Next, blame goes to the United States government. Notwithstanding many requests, federal officials have failed and refused to militarize the border which desperately needs military control. When Janet Napolitano was governor of Arizona, she seemed to understand the problem, not that she ever did anything about it. Now that she is in Washington, she serves only her beltway masters. No Army troops for the border. Not even National Guard troops are allowed.

One way the feds ensure that Arizona will not put National Guard troops on the border is by calling them up for deployment to Afghanistan. And that’s where members of the Arizona National Guard are headed this month to Afghanistan when they are needed in Douglas.

But President Obama has bigger plans for the border. Heap blame on him. He wants illegals to flood across the border because he has plans to grant them amnesty so they can vote. They will vote Democratic, and that’s more important to him than the lives of a few Americans living on the border.

To be fair, we ought to assign some small amount of blame to the farmers and ranchers who refuse to get out while the gettin’s good. They are living in a war zone. That’s not a good idea.

What can we do about it? There isn’t much we can do about the Mexican government or even the Mexican drug cartels. But there is something we can do about the U.S. government. We have to make it clear to the bozos in Washington that we will no longer tolerate being deprived of the services of our National Guard. If the feds want to fight a war in Afghanistan, that is what the regular Army is for. We must demand that the Arizona National Guard be released for service in Arizona. And we must demand they be adequately armed to meet the challenge.

And we must make certain the Washington politicians understand that we will not permit illegal aliens to vote. We’ll do this by denying them entry.

This is the only way we will ever get our state back. Otherwise, we’ll wake up one day and find ourselves living in Aztlán with bandits running wild in the streets.

And if we don’t do that, then the bulk of the blame must fall on ourselves. This is still the United States of America. This is our country. We make the rules. We must enforce them.