Crime booms as Central Americans fear police switched sides
Posted on Friday, January 20, 2012 Modified Friday, January 20, 2012
Crime booms as Central Americans fear police switched sides
[font size=1]
A peculiar feature of the high-end neighborhoods of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, is that many
walled compounds have turrets for private guards to fire at any attackers. Few Hondurans
trust their own police. | Tim Johnson/MCT[/font]
By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers
Tim Johnson McClatchy Newspapers
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — In a city that's just earned the title of the most dangerous in the Americas, few people dare go to the police with complaints. Rather, they view police officers with fear, scorn and disgust.
"Society has completely lost confidence in the police. The citizenry is more afraid of the police than the criminals," said Jhon Cesar Mejia, a federal prosecutor assigned to look into abuses by the state.
In recent months in Honduras, evidence has turned up of police units involved in murder-for-hire plots, drug trafficking, extortion, auto theft and kidnapping. Distress over police corruption has grown only more intense in the three months since the dean of Honduras' national university fingered police in the murder of her son and the widow of a slain national drug czar blamed police for his assassination.
Deep-rooted police corruption is just one reason for the deterioration of public security that's shredding the social fabric of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, a region known as the "Northern Triangle" of Central America.
More:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/20/136474/crime-booms-as-central-americans.html
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...and for more Pentagon bases in Central America to "control crime" and for more "School of the Americas" 'training' of Central American police and military forces, and blah, blah, blah...
I think we need to realize that the massive carnage instigated by the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" and the massive corruption that characterizes it are INTENTIONAL. They are meant to, a) destroy these societies and turn them into compliant slave labor camps and bastions against the growing independence movement in South America, and b) (in the Bush Junta's hands) to consolidate the cocaine trade and to better direct its trillion+ dollar illicit revenue stream to the Bush Cartel, the CIA, U.S. banksters and other beneficiaries (and in the Obama administration's hands, to protect and cover up this Bush Junta crime).
Massive murderousness had been fostered by U.S. policy and money. It is not random, not accidental, not endemic. In Colombia, for instance, where the impacts of U.S. "war on drugs" policy/funding have gone furthest along this destructive U.S. path, leftists became the targets--trade unionists, labor leaders in the mines and in the fields, teachers, community activists, human rights workers and other advocates of the poor--and have included FIVE MILLION peasant farmers brutally displaced from their lands by state terror. These are small farmers who grew food and maybe a few coca leaves on the side, for local use or for a small boost in poverty incomes. FIVE MILLION of them driven from their lands--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth--and the land goes to whom? To the bigger, protected drug lords; to fascist cronies of the Bush Junta's mafia boss in Colombia, (former president) Alvaro Uribe, and of course to Monsanto, Drummond Coal, Chiquita, Exxon Mobil and other transglobal monsters.
The violence starts with the phony, failed U.S. "war on drugs" and then gets directed at democratic society itself. The same bloody process is now happening in Honduras--and is beginning in Mexico and Guatemala. The infusion of U.S. billions supports militaristic/fascist forces in society. It is a war profiteer boondoggle and is extremely corrupting. Whatever failures or weaknesses already exist in military and police forces are made worse by orders of magnitude--and the targets become not just the smaller or non-cooperating drug cartels but also anyone who dares to oppose fascist rule--both political and apolitical organizers, members of social movements, labor leaders and so on.
And the cocaine just keeps on flowing.
This is a superficial article by McClatchy which gives an impression of the inevitability of massive murder in these countries--as if it just sort of happens. Bullshit! I don't believe that they are that dumb. So it is willful disinformation that they are purveying here, which is contrived by leaving things out--such as the U.S. support for the fascist coupsters in Honduras and the Bush Junta parting shot at Mexico of billions of U.S. "war on drugs" dollars to so bloody Mexican society that democracy collapses (and their oil can then be privatized). It leaves out the various genocides that the U.S. supported in Guatemala in the past. It leaves out the glaring reality that the cocaine just keeps on flowing, no matter how many billions of dollars the U.S. pours into this failed "war." And it leaves out the overriding reality in Latin America--the rise of the Left in South America and the increasing popularity of its goals in Central America and the Caribbean--goals which include establishing Latin American sovereignty and independence, social justice, use of Latin American resources to benefit Latin Americans, "south-south" trade and cooperation--and rejection of U.S. "free trade for the rich."
Central America/the Caribbean is the Pentagon's "circle the wagons" region. The U.S. "war on drugs" is the major tool being used to PREVENT the Left from gaining power in this region. Its GOAL is social mayhem. And we know from Rumsfeld that social mayhem is ripe ground for massive war profiteer looting and is ideal for the "big players" in international crime.
