“The presumed slaughter of 20 tourists in Acapulco — apparently has been solved by thugs who captured the alleged killers, posted their confessions on the Internet, then murdered them and directed police to the crime scene.” From the Houston Chronicle.
Tag: Mexico
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War on Drug Continues
It didn’t surprise me that Prop 19 lost. I’m still amazed that it did so well and was taken so seriously. A lot of progress has been made over the past 10 years. I suppose only history will tell if we’ll look back on this as the high point (there was really no pun intended when I first wrote that) or whether it’s just a step down the path toward a better drug policy.
Meanwhile, another secret tunnel was found from Mexico. It included 25 tons of the maryjane. English Aljazeerareports. And that’s on top of the 134 tons the other week.
I say this in my best whiny Mike Bloomberg voice: “People, it’s the tunnels that make us less safe, not the drugs.” I don’t want people building tunnels under the border. But they will as long as we keep building walls on top of them and fighting “wars” against things and people from Mexico.
Here’s a good story in the Christian Science Monitoron the tunneland one on the Latin American leaders and the failure of Prop 19. Here’s a good quote: “The two presidents who have come out strongly against legalization [in Mexico and Columbia] are presidents who have received a combined total of nearly $9 billion from the United States government.”
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Gruesome Pics…
…of the war in the drugs, mostly in Mexico.
While you lose you appetite looking at these, remember the US party line that violence in Mexico is a sign the drug gangs are on the run. War is peace!
(I’ve never seen those evidence cones get to number 71… and we had some pretty big shootings in Baltimore.)
[thanks to Irish Pirate for the tip]
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134 Tons of Marijuana, Up in Smoke
That’s a lot of weed.And yet somehow I don’t feel any safer.
Remember when bringing in weed from Mexico was all fun and laughs? Those were the days.
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The Murderers of Mexico
How to write about Mexico’s drug war? There are only a limited number of ways that readers can be reminded of the desperate acts of human sacrifice that go on every day in this country, or of the by now calamitous statistics: the nearly 28,000 people who have been killed in drug-related battles or assassinations since President Felipe Calderón took power almost four years ago, the thousands of kidnappings, the wanton acts of rape and torture, the growing number of orphaned children.
It may not be easy, but Alma Guillermoprieto does a pretty good job of writing about Mexico’s drug war in The New York Review of Books. I haven’t read any of the books reviewed, but the review itself is well worth reading (as a good review always is).
Guillermoprieto ends with this:There is little doubt that Calderón’s strategy of waging all-out war to solve a criminal problem has not worked. Whether any strategy at all can work, as long as global demand persists for a product that is illegal throughout the world, is a question that has been repeated ad nauseam. But it remains the indispensable question to consider.
There are the books reviewed:
Atentamente, El Chapo (Sincerely, El Chapo) by Héctor de Mauleón
La Ruta de Sangre de Beltrán Leyva (The Path of Blood of Beltrán Leyva) by Héctor de Mauleón
Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez by Howard Campbell
Mafia & Co.: The Criminal Networks in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia by Juan Carlos Garzón, translated from the Spanish by Kathy Ogle
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News Bueno or News Malo?
You want the good news or the bad news?
Good news! “Mexico arrests drug trafficker Edgar ‘Barbie’ Valdez.” Pop the corks! But I wasn’t even going to post on that cause who the f*ck cares? It’s not like it will change anything or win the war on drugs. From the NYT:
Mr. Valdez, who was born in Laredo, Tex., faces an indictment in United States District Court….
The arrest came the same day that the head of the federal police said 3,200 officers had been dismissed this year, about a tenth of the force, because they had failed lie detector and other tests designed to root out corruption.
About an hour after the announcement of Mr. Valdez’s arrest, Mr. Calderón appeared in a campaign-style televised announcement, with scenes of the police on the march, a high-tech war room and families, declaring that the fight against crime “is worth it. You are the reason.”
You tell ’em, Felipe! Or, as Johnny Cash might say, “He was a young cowboy and he said he’d done wrong.”
Bad news: “Mayor in Mexican Border State Killed.”
Hidalgo Mayor Marco Antonio Leal Garcia was the second mayor to be assassinated in the past two weeks in the area.
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“This cowardly crime, and the reprehensible violent acts that occurred recently in this state, strengthen the commitment of the Mexican government to continue fighting the criminal gangs that seek to intimidate the families of Tamaulipas,” Calderon’s office said in a statement.Oh… poor Filipe.
So was this a good or bad day. I’d say bad. The killing of a mayor is worse than any stupid arrest.
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ICE Agent Almost Gets It
The key to combating [Mexican Drug Cartels], said Alonzo R. Pena, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deputy assistant secretary for operations said, is to go after their money — money used to corrupt officials and to buy weapons.
William J. Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said “We have to get to the source of the money.”
That’s all from the El Paso Times.
Gosh. How can we take the criminal profit out of bootlegging… I mean drug dealing?
It’s also worth looking at the comments to the article at PoliceOne to see some of the stupidest police officers who know how to type. “Invade Mexico and smart bomb the terrorists!” “Bring the fight to them.” I really find it tough to believe that some people still think that is the answer. No doubt because after 28,000 deaths there we’ve all been playing this too soft. I guess we just need to go in and take out the Osama Bin Laden of Mexican drug dealing. Problem solved. Man, if only it weren’t for liberals who hate freedom, we’d be winning all our wars.
Effing idiots.
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Meanwhile, Mutiny in Juárez
“A bunch of angry, fed-up federal police in Juárez launched a mini-rebellion against some of their commanders Saturday, accusing them of corruption…. The bottom line is that nothing seems to be able to stop or even lessen the violence in Juárez.” So says the El Paso Times, just across the border, in the peaceful twin city of El Paso.
Probably, at some point in their career, every police officer has wantedto do this. It’s like a pissed-off flight attendant jumping out on the slide of an airplane. But the editorial board of the El Paso Timesfigures:
Perhaps the last straw was the perception of police officers that their commanders’ corruption and links to drugs and the cartels were putting the officers’ lives in danger. That could be quite a motivation.
Indeed.
The caption of these AP photos by Raymundo Ruiz says:Federal police agents beat a fellow officer after a top fellow officer was detained at his hotel room by his subordinates in Ciudad Juarez, northern Mexico, Saturday, Aug. 7, 2010. Around 200 federal police officers protested Saturday demanding the dismissal of fellow police inspector Salomón Alarcón Olvera, aka “El Chaman”, accusing him of being linked to drug cartels and having participated in kidnappings, executions and extortions.
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“Presidente Fox? There are men here to see you”
The crack research-librarian staff here at Copinthehood Incorporated (aka, my wife) reminds me that President Vicente Fox tried to do something about drug legalization as president but then backed down under US pressure.
Indeed, I dug through the basement archives here in at 1 Copinthehood Plaza and dusted this off from the L.A. Times on May 3, 2006:
Mexican President Vicente Fox will sign a bill that would legalize the use of nearly every drug and narcotic.
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The law would be among the most permissive in the world, putting Mexico in the company of the Netherlands.[*]
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Selling drugs or using them in public still would be a crime in Mexico. Anyone possessing drugs still could be held for questioning by police [and fined]. But it includes no imprisonment penalties.
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Presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar said Tuesday that Fox would sign the measure, calling it an important tool in the fight against drug trafficking.
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Fox, whose term ends in December and who is barred by law from seeking reelection, has been considered a strong ally of the U.S. anti-drug effort. He has said the current drug war was triggered when he began arresting top leaders, including Osiel Cardenas, who allegedly runs the Gulf cartel from prison.Apparently that night there was a knock on his door from some burly gringo men with dark sun glasses and briefcases. It wasn’t the Blues Brother. MSNBC reported:
Weighing in, the U.S. government Wednesday expressed a rare public objection to an internal Mexican political development, saying anyone caught with illegal drugs in Mexico should be prosecuted or given mandatory drug treatment.
“U.S. officials … urged Mexican representatives to review the legislation urgently, to avoid the perception that drug use would be tolerated in Mexico, and to prevent drug tourism,” U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Judith Bryan said.
Apparently Fox got an offer he couldn’t refuse. Apparently to the tune of four-hundred-million US dollars a year for at least four years.
At the time, Fox was worried about 650 to 700 drug-war deaths a year. But the bill died and the war on drugs got ramped up. Since 2006 there have been about 7,000 drug-war deaths a year (though nobody knows for sure).
[* If only Mexico could be in the company of the Netherlands. The Netherlands resists US pressure to fight the drug war and partly as a result has a murder rate just a fraction of the US and just a tiny fraction of Mexico’s.]
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Legalize Drugs, Says Former Mexican President
Reuters reports:
“Legalization does not mean that drugs are good … but we have to see (legalization of the production, sale and distribution of drugs) as a strategy to weaken and break the economic system that allows cartels to earn huge profits,” Fox wrote in a posting over the weekend. “Radical prohibition strategies have never worked.”
Newsweek adds:
Fox, a member of the same conservative National Action Party as Calderón, was president between 2000 and 2006 and was a staunch U.S. ally in the war against drugs. But he says he now favors legalizing drugs.
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Fox also backs critics who say it was a bad idea to send the Mexican Army to support police as they battle the cartels that smuggle cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamines, among other substances, across Mexico and into the United States. “They are not prepared for police work,” he said, in apparent response to allegations of Army brutality. “They should return to the barracks.”Too bad Fox didn’t wise up when he was still president. I guess you get wiser when you’re no longer on the DEA’s payroll.