Top Mexico City police commander slain

[High Plains]

Source: Houston Chronicle

Top Mexico City police commander slain
Act symbolizes cartels' impunity despite crackdown in last 18 months

Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Mexico City Bureau

MEXICO CITY — Assassins gunned down a top federal police commander in Mexico City on Thursday, the latest in a string of attacks on senior law enforcement officers in the capital. The gunmen killed Igor Labastida, a senior investigator, and a bodyguard as they ate in a restaurant not far from downtown. Three other bodyguards and several civilians were wounded in the spray of bullets. Labastida was among officers in charge of combating contraband. Police offered no explanation Thursday of who might have killed Labastida.

Until last spring, drug-related violence was rare in the capital. But in the past three months, at least three senior police officers have been killed in the city, and their slayings have been linked to the government's fight against the drug cartels that smuggle cocaine and other narcotics into the U.S.

By various government and media tallies, nearly 5,000 people — including some 500 local, state and federal police officers — have been killed in the 18 months since President Felipe Calderon launched the campaign against the drug gangs.

Labastida's death came less than two months after the slaying in the capital of Edgar Millan, the acting chief of the federal police, who was killed as he arrived home in the late evening at one of the Mexico City homes he used. Authorities have accused another police official of involvement in Millan's assassination. And they pointed to the Beltran Leyva family, one of Mexico's most powerful drug trafficking organizations, as being behind the killing. The Beltran Leyvas' war with another Sinaloa drug gang, headed by trafficker Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was blamed for the escalating wave of violence that has rocked Mexico this year.

<snip>




Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/world/5859155.html

---

Mexico pays the price for our war on the drugs we love to hate (or is it hate to love?)

This should be called what it is: prohibition-related violence.

[High Plains]

1. 500 dead cops, 5,000 dead in Mexico's drug war since Jan 2007.

That's a level of violence that is pretty amazing.

What will stop it?

[amandabeech]

2. I think it unlikely that most drugs will ever be legalized.

I see marijuana as a possible exception.

Consequently, as a practical matter, the U.S. has a country on its way to anarchy on its southern border. Obviously, the Mexican people are suffering from the lack of public safety and a totally ineffective government in many places.

Surely, we see some of that in the worst of our cities and neighborhoods already, but I think that it will get much worse here.

I see demand driving this.

You would like to see decriminalization, but absent that, we would do a service to Mexico if we were to refrain from using illegal drugs.

[High Plains]

3. The Mexicans complain about US demand driving this, too.

As well as all the guns flowing south along with all those billions of dollars in drug profits.

But the notion that we will refrain from using drugs is as unlikely as the notion they will be legalized.

But maybe this could start to make the argument for ending drug prohibition. It isn't just Mexico. The news from Afghanistan last week was that the Taliban are making $100 million-plus a year off the prohibited opium trade. Prohibition is killing American soldiers.

[amandabeech]

4. I hadn't seen that story from Afghanistan.

Maybe you're right.

Decriminalization couldn't be much worse, perhaps.

[High Plains]

7. Taliban Earns $100 Million-Plus a Year from Prohibition

Southwest Asia: Taliban Makes $100 Million a Year Off Drug Prohibition
Articlefrom Drug War Chronicle, Issue #541, 6/27/08

The Taliban made about $100 million last year by taxing Afghan farmers involved in growing opium poppies, Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) told BBC Radio. The money came from a 10% tax on farmers in Taliban-controlled areas, Costa said, adding that the Islamic insurgents profited from the illicit drug business in other ways as well.

CAPTION the opium trader's wares (photo by Chronicle editor Phil Smith during September 2005 visit to Afghanistan)

"One is protection to laboratories and the other is that the insurgents offer protection to cargo, moving opium across the border," Costa told the BBC's File on 4 program.

Taliban opium revenues could decline slightly this year, Costa said, suggesting that yields and revenues are likely to decrease due to drought, infestation and a poppy ban enforced in the north and east of Afghanistan. That would lower Taliban revenues, "but not enormously," he said.

But a smaller harvest this year is unlikely to cause any shortages or put a serious dent in Taliban opium trade revenues. For the past three or four years, Afghanistan has produced more than the estimated world annual consumption, Costa noted. "Last year Afghanistan produced about 8,800 tons of opium," he said. "The world in the past few years has consumed about 4,400 tons in opium, this leaves a surplus. It is stored somewhere and not with the farmers," he added.

The Taliban have put the funds to effective use, as evidenced by the insurgency's growing strength, especially in southeast Afghanistan -- precisely the area of most intense opium cultivation. More than 230 US and NATO troops were killed in fighting in Afghanistan last year, and 109 more have been killed so far this year. US Army Major General Jeffrey Schloesser told reporters Tuesday Taliban attacks in the region were up 40% over the same period last year.

British officials interviewed by the BBC said it was incontrovertible that the Taliban was profiting off of the illegal trade created by prohibition. "The closer we look at it, the closer we see the insurgents to the drugs trade," said David Belgrove, head of counter narcotics at the British embassy in Kabul. "We can say that a lot of their arms and ammunition are being funded directly by the drugs trade."

Which leaves NATO and the US stuck with that enduring Afghan dilemma: Leave the poppy trade alone and strengthen the Taliban by allowing it to raise hundreds of millions of dollars; or go after the poppies and the poppy trade and strengthen the Taliban by pushing hundreds of thousands of Afghan farmers into their beckoning arms.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
digg | reddit
Drug War Issues Opium Production
Consequences of Prohibition Drug Trade Funding Terrorists
Politics & Advocacy United Nations - Executive Branch - Congress

[High Plains]

8. Decriminalization and legalization

There's a difference.

Decriminalization typically refers to removing criminal penalties from drug users, but leaves the production and sale of illicit drugs forbidden.

Legalization means removing criminal penalties from drug users and creating a system of regulated, taxed, drug sales and production.

While decrim is nice for drug users, it does not deal with many of the problems associated with drug prohibition, i.e turf war shoot-outs in our inner cities, the fighting in Mexico, the Taliban profits in Afghanistan.

[Nevernose]

5. That's the start of a rational argument

The problem is, too many Americans (maybe most of us) work purely from emotional arguments.

Global warming, gun control, capital punishment, abortion, taxation: on one side there are logical, reasoned arguments with some pathos added for spice, and on the other side there are emotional arguments occasionally dressed up like reason.

[StClone]

9. Guns too

The U.S. is cited as the major gun supplier to the drug lords: they call it a flood. The 2nd Amendment follies is not about carrying guns in the U.S. it's about money and power.

[ohio2007]

6. U.S. helps ransom Silvestre Reyes' (D - Texas) kin

U.S. helps ransom Reyes' kin
Relative of congressman's wife whisked out of Mexico

U.S. law enforcement authorities helped facilitate a $32,000 ransom payment in Mexico for a relative of a U.S. congressman who was kidnapped last week by gunmen in Ciudad Juarez, a border city with rampant drug smuggling, gunfights and corruption.

Erika Posselt, a Mexican national described only as "a relative of the wife" of Rep. Reyes, Texas Democrat and powerful chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was abducted June 19 from an auto glass store she owns in Juarez.

snip

No arrests have been made.

snip

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jun/27/us-helps-ransom-reyes-kin/

Unrelated ? phatt chance

Those people are wanting their own country carved out of Mexico and the US but few sources are reporting on how things are changing for the uglier.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=020_1179752561



DARE

[Blue_Tires]

10. time to legalize?

it could calm some of this madness down in Mexico and Colombia...but no..too many people in power are just fine with the status quo -- everybody cashes in