'It's a Crisis of Civilization in Mexico.' 250,000 Dead. 37,400 Missing.
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Some 37,000 people in Mexico are categorized as “missing” by the government. The vast majority are believed to be dead, victims of the country’s spiraling violence that has claimed more than 250,000 lives since 2006. The country’s murder rate has more than doubled to 26 per 100,000 residents, five times the U.S. figure. Because the missing aren’t counted as part of the country’s official murder tally, it is likely Mexico’s rate itself is higher. The killing and the number of missing grow each year. Last year, 5,500 people disappeared, up from 3,400 in 2015. Mexico’s murders are up another 18% through September this year.
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The Disappeared, or Desaparecidos, became a chilling part of Latin America’s vocabulary during the Cold War, when security forces kidnapped, killed and disposed of the bodies of tens of thousands of leftist guerrillas as well as civilian sympathizers. The most infamous case is Argentina’s “Dirty War,” where at least 10,000 people vanished from 1976 to 1983. In Buenos Aires, mothers of the missing organized weekly vigils in front of Argentina’s presidential palace, gaining world-wide prominence.
Mexico fought its own far-smaller war against Marxist guerrillas during the 1970s. According to the government human-rights commission, 532 people went missing, and at least 275 people were summarily executed by security forces.
This time around, the horror in Mexico is bigger and its causes more complex. Many of the disappeared in recent years are believed to be the victims of violence unleashed by criminal gangs fighting to control drug routes and other lucrative businesses such as extortion, kidnapping and the theft of gasoline from pipelines, often with the complicity of police forces, government officials say.
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The main reason for not reporting is fear of reprisals by judicial authorities, criminals, and police, especially municipal police, who in many parts of Mexico collude with criminal gangs. The entire municipal police force in Acapulco was recently suspended on suspicion of cooperating with local gangs. Mexico’s navy now patrols the port city.
More..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-crisis-of-civilization-in-mexico-250-000-dead-37-400-missing-1542213374 (paid subscription)
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Would like to add this information:
The U.S. Re-militarization of Central America and Mexico
Alexander Main
June 17, 2014
Honduran paratroopers with U.S. Special Forces soldiers during a “static line jump”
(UNASOC News Service / Creative Commons)
During his brief visit to Costa Rica in May 2013, President Obama appeared eager to downplay the U.S. regional security agenda, emphasizing instead trade relations, energy cooperation, and youth programs. “So much of the focus ends up being on security,” he complained during a joint press conference with his Costa Rican counterpart Laura Chinchilla. “But we also have to recognize that problems like narco-trafficking arise in part when a country is vulnerable because of poverty, because of institutions that are not working for the people, because young people don’t see a brighter future ahead.” Asked by a journalist about the potential use of U.S. warships to counter drug-trafficking, Obama was adamant: “I’m not interested in militarizing the struggle against drug trafficking.”
Human rights organizations from Central America, Mexico, and the United States see the administration’s regional security policy very differently. In a letter sent to Obama and the region’s other presidents last year, over 145 civil society organizations called out U.S. policies that “promote militarization to address organized crime.” These policies, the letter states, have only resulted in a “dramatic surge in violent crime, often reportedly perpetrated by security forces themselves. Human rights abuses against our families and communities are, in many cases, directly attributable to failed and counterproductive security policies that have militarized our societies in the name of the ‘war on drugs.’”
The latest round in the ramping up of U.S. security assistance to Mexico and Central America began during President George W. Bush’s second term in office. Funding allocated to the region’s police and military forces climbed steadily upward to levels unseen since the U.S.-backed “dirty wars” of the 1980s. As narco-trafficking operations shifted increasingly from the Caribbean to the Central American corridor, the United States worked with regional governments to stage a heavily militarized war on drugs in an area that had yet to fully recover from nearly two decades of war.
In 2008 the Bush Administration launched the Mérida Initiative, a cooperation agreement that provides training, equipment, and intelligence to Mexican and Central American security forces. A key model for these agreements is Plan Colombia, an $8 billion program launched in 1999 that saw the mass deployment of military troops and militarized police forces to both interdict illegal drugs and counter left-wing guerrilla groups. Plan Colombia is frequently touted as a glowing success by U.S. officials who point to statistics indicating that drug production and violence has dropped while rebel groups’ size and territorial reach have significantly receded. Human rights groups, however, have documented the program’s widespread “collateral damage,” which includes the forced displacement of an estimated 5.7 million Colombians, thousands of extrajudicial killings, and continued attacks and killings targeting community activists, labor leaders, and journalists.
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https://nacla.org/article/us-re-militarization-central-america-and-mexico
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Mexico's war on drugs: what has it achieved and how is the US involved?
Felipe Calderón launched the war after being elected in 2006, and since then the US has donated at least $1.5bn – but the biggest costs have been human
Nina Lakhani and Erubiel Tirado in Mexico City
Thu 8 Dec 2016 07.52 EST
What has the war cost so far?
The US has donated at least $1.5bn through the Merida Initiative since 2008 (another $1bn has been agreed by Congress – ), while Mexico has spent at least $54bn on security and defence since 2007. Critics say that this influx of cash has helped create an opaque security industry open to corruption at every level.
But the biggest costs have been human: since 2007, almost 200,000 people have been murdered and more than 28,000 reported as disappeared. In September 2014, after they were attacked by corrupt police officers and handed over to drug gang members. The case – in which the Mexican army as well as corrupt politicians were implicated – has become emblematic of the violence perpetrated in heavily militarized zones.
Human rights groups have detailed a vast rise in human rights abuses by security forces who are under pressure to make arrests, obtain confessions and justify the war. Reports of torture by security forces increased by 600% between 2003 and 2013, according to Amnesty International.
As the cartels have fractured and diversified, other violent crimes such as kidnapping and extortion have also surged. In 2010, the Los Zetas cartel – founded by a group of Special Forces deserters – massacred 72 migrants who were kidnapped while trying to reach the US.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by violence, and self-defence or vigilante groups have emerged in several states including Guerrero, Oaxaca and Michoacán, as communities have taken up arms in an attempt to protect themselves. Some of those militias have in turn been targeted by state forces or co-opted by organized crime.
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What role has the US played?
The “war on drugs” doctrine is largely credited to President Richard Nixon, who created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973 to declare “an all-out global war on the drug menace”. Since then, the US has spent more than $2.5tn battling this indeterminate enemy through prohibition and militarization. Over the past four decades, the US model has been exported to Latin America – most notably Colombia and Mexico.
Mexico’s decade-long war on drugs would never have been possible without the huge injection of American cash and military cooperation under the Merida Initiative. The funds have continued to flow despite growing evidence of serious human rights violations.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/dec/08/mexico-war-on-drugs-cost-achievements-us-billions
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Thank you for this WSJ article, question everything. I'm surprised to see they covered it at all! This could be a good sign.