The Mexico drugs war thread

[seafoid]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/mexico-war/

With its terrible brutality and its death toll of nearly 60,000 lives in four years, the current Mexican drug war recalls two other periods of violence across the past two centuries of Mexican history: the War of Independence of 1810–1821 (and its long aftermath in the nineteenth century) and the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth, with their greater death tolls but equivalent ferocity.

The murder rate is statistically higher in Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil, but in Mexico we are enduring a continual escalation of nearly unbelievable cruelty, with murder and torture a constant marked by decapitations, mutilations, kidnappings for profit, and mass executions. In the most afflicted areas, the criminal groups threaten to supplant local power with their displays of terror and volleys of bullets. In the era of YouTube and instant Internet news, it is a return to the past.

[seafoid]

Does the fact the Mexicans are not Muslim make the drugs war easier ?

[Puckoon]

Does it seem like the war on drugs is easy to you?

[seafoid]

Does it seem like the war on drugs is easy to you?

No. It's just some thing Eamonn said.
I actually think this drugs war in Mexico is going to get a lot worse and it's going to be hard to keep it out of the neighbouring countries including the US.
The business is worth $60bn to the gangs per year. 

[Puckoon]

It is going to be nigh on impossible. The $ is so huge that there will always be a degree of protection afforded to it, and with such high stakes the cruelty, swiftness and strength of response isn't going to scale back any. It's a very very bad situation.

The demand will always be there, and a fair portion of the $60 bn lines the pockets of some of those paid stem the tide.

[tyssam5]

Was on the train this morning listening to two young lads straight out of Breaking Bad, perfect Jesse dialog and everything. One of them still loves the meth, the other is supposedly now at college and trying to get back his kids from foster care were they have been since Tiffany got 28 months for identity theft while himself was in re-hab. Sad shit, but it was better entertainment than reading my book. Kept a close eye on my bag.

[Tony Baloney]

It is going to be nigh on impossible. The $ is so huge that there will always be a degree of protection afforded to it, and with such high stakes the cruelty, swiftness and strength of response isn't going to scale back any. It's a very very bad situation.

The demand will always be there, and a fair portion of the $60 bn lines the pockets of some of those paid stem the tide.

That is why it is an impossible situation. There is huge demand therefore the supply needs to get through at any cost - financial or otherwise. The sums of money sloshing around mean there will be thousands of people on the books on both sides of the border ensuring the supply gets to market, minus a few vanity busts for the authorities.

The big question is should the US give up as there will always be a supply?

[Puckoon]

They can't be seen to give up, especially at state and county level politics along the border states.

[seafoid]

The Mexican police are overwhelmed as well. And there is a corruption problem.

[stew]

The Mexican police are overwhelmed as well. And there is a corruption problem.

The drug lords have a significant portion of the policing body bought and paid for, same goes for Judges and politicians.

It is horrendous what is happening in Mexico............... the only areas not being targeted are the tourist area's, all these scumbags need to do is blow the feck out of a tourist town and the economy, that is already very weak, will fall and all hell will break loose.

At some point the yanks are going to be asked for help in Mexico, they have already been working on taking out the scum with special force troops.

Mexico is in appalling shape and I hope that somethign gets done to protect it's people from the animals that are involved in the drug trade.

[seafoid]

http://www.monthlyreview.org/101101cockcroft.php
A social volcano is bubbling in Mexico. Nearly half the country's eligible voters showed their disgust with the country's political parties by staying away from the polls in the off-year elections of July 2010. All the major political parties have become neoliberal and corrupt. Broad-based social movements are resisting a right-wing offensive, which, building on twenty-eight years of neoliberal economic policies, has led to the country's increasing militarization. Following the 2006 fraudulent election of Felipe Calderón,1 a reign of terror was unleashed by means of his unconstitutional, self-declared "war" ostensibly against drug cartels involved in bloody internecine strife.2

Neoliberalism's gradual economic genocide has caused countless premature deaths and generated humiliating poverty for three-fourths of the population. Many in the intermediate classes have been pushed down into the ranks of the poor; hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs, as "flex labor" and union-busting become the norm; and millions have been emigrating.3 State enterprises have been privatized, and almost everything, including humanity itself, has been converted into marketable commodities for the profits of big business. The economic agony of the masses has generated a growing resistance: guerrilla wars and local nonviolent uprisings.

Washington looks on these events with baleful eyes and oils its guns. After all, Mexico is the second trading partner of the United States and the third largest provider of the black gold to the northern giant.



http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/murderers-mexico/

Campbell's central contention, stated in the title of his book, is that the whole idea of a Mexican drug smuggling enterprise, or problem, is untenable: a land so thoroughly bilingual, bicultural, miscegenated, and porous—despite the arbitrary demarcation of a border and the increasingly weird and futile efforts to seal it—can really only be studied and understood as a united territory and a single problem. This is an idea so breathtakingly sensible as to amount to genius,2 and one wonders how many deaths could be avoided if policymakers on both sides of the Rio Grande shared this vision and coordinated not only their law enforcement efforts but their education, development, and immigration policies accordingly.


What we have in the place of collaboration is the shattering loneliness of Juárez. In the 1990s, when young women began to disappear from the poorest shantytowns in the city, and then turned up like so much waste matter, bruised, raped, mutilated, and dead, police officers laughed in the faces of the distraught parents who appealed to them for help. Reporting on the story, I stood one afternoon on a gray hill covered in gray dust above a gray squatter settlement and looked across the river at the faux-adobe office buildings of El Paso. Around me the tumbleweed jittered in the breeze, and plastic supermarket bags and odds and ends of clothing fluttered everywhere, as if all the trash in all of Mexico had beached itself at this spot. A few hundred yards downhill lived the sister of one of the disappeared girls, and for all the outreach by NGOs and solidarity groups concerned with the murders, she seemed as isolated and vulnerable as it was possible for a young woman to be.

Speculation has been never-ending about who was responsible for the murder of those girls—there were several dozen of them, tangled among the statistics for hundreds of other, more random female homicides. It was always clear that the police were somehow involved—the grotesque laughter at the police station, the switched clothing on a couple of bodies eventually returned by police to the bereaved families, the systematic destruction of evidence, all pointed in their direction. But it seemed unlikely that lowly police officers would have the political backing to engage on their own in sick serial murders and remain unpunished, even as a worldwide campaign mounted to protest the killings.

I remember asking back then if a likely culprit might not be the lord of Juárez, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who was the most powerful trafficker of his day. Who else, in the course of doing regular business, could buy off enough politicians, police commanders, and justice officials to guarantee himself immunity under any circumstances? Conceivably, Carrillo Fuentes or his minions had developed a fascination with death that went beyond the strictly professional. Several of the girls had one breast sliced off, and in a shack in the desert some weird graffiti seemed also to have ritual meaning.

None of us reporters understood much then about the new religious cults mushrooming in the drug world—notably the Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, a Halloweenish figure identical to the hooded skeleton who makes frequent appearances in biker art. Her cult has spread well beyond the jailhouses where she is revered, and now that altars to the gloomy skeleton are everywhere in the country and we have heard of young migrant girls from Central America being killed and offered to the Santa Muerte by the particular branch of the drug mafia devoted to human trafficking, there is more reason to wonder if the current traffickers' obsession with nauseating forms of murder did not start back then.

[Minder]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238577/Maria-Santos-Gorrostieta-executed-surviving-assassination-attempts.html

Grizzly end for her.

[Maurice Moss]

She is a very brave woman but what a gruesome way to go!

[LeoMc]

It will be interesting how the US legislation changes to legalize Marijuana in some states will affect the demand and Mexican authorities attitude to it?
Will the cartels start to be seen as legitimate export businesses?