Drug War Violence Escalates: 'Victim's face was peeled from his skull and sewn onto a soccer ball.'

[BurtWorm]

I'm reading a book due out on April 1 by journalist Charles Bowden called Murder City about this colossal failure of a drug war in Ciudad Juarez. Why is it failing? Because the cops, the narcos and the federales are all criminals, Bowden says. No one has a real interest in stopping the drug trade. It's too lucrative. The real fight is over the riches.

Oh, Mexico!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/12/mexico-suffers-69-murders_n_419791.html




MARTHA MENDOZA | 01/11/10 10:20 PM | AP

MEXICO CITY — Mexico opened the new year with what could be its most dubious distinction yet in the 3-year-old battle against drug trafficking – 69 murders in one day.

The country resembled a grim, statistical dart board Saturday as law enforcement and media reported the deaths from various regions, including 26 in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, 13 in and around Mexico City and 10 in the northern city of Chihuahua.

More than 6,500 drug-related killings made 2009 the bloodiest year since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels in late 2006 and deployed 45,000 soldiers to fight organized crime, according to death tallies by San Diego's Trans-Border Institute.

Two weeks into 2010, gang bloodshed is becoming more grotesque as drug lords ramp up their attempts at intimidation. Last week a victim's face was peeled from his skull and sewn onto a soccer ball. On Monday, prosecutors in Culiacan identified the remains of 41-year-old former police officer divided into two separate ice chests.

"You wonder how this will end, and it seems impossible," said Daniel Vega, an architect in the northern city of Monterrey. "I doubt Mexico can override drug use, especially since demand for the drugs, as well as all the money and weapons, come from the United States."

Using their so-called Narcobarometer, researchers at the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute track and analyze murders in Mexico, hoping to find ways to quell the violence. Their tally? More than 20,000 murders since 2001, more than half in the past two years.

"It does appear that the violence has grown exponentially, but it's not clear that it's necessarily a slippery downward slope from here," institute director David Shirk said, noting that government operations – including a December raid that killed cartel boss Arturo Beltran Leyva – have hit seven of Mexico's eight significant cartels.

[kenny blankenship]

1. Sounds like we need to pour all our resources

into Pakistan and Yemen!

[TheWraith]

2. You can't stop this sort of thing without changing the economic conditions that make it profitable.

Our "war on drugs" has created a massive and hugely profitable black market that will continue to persist no matter what as long as we criminalize it. We could kill every dealer, every runner, and every narco baron, and we would STILL have a problem because there would be someone rising up to replace each of those people, and a replacement for the replacements.

Harsher drug laws, the firearms ban in Mexico, stronger border patrols, are just trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose.

[amborin]

10. +1000

[TheWraith]

17. Alcohol prohibition in the US is a good analogy...

Everyone said that if alcohol were legalized again, the country would explode with violence, addiction, the murder rate would skyrocket...

Actually the murder rate went down by two thirds. Why? Because when the market for something is no longer by definition criminal, then resorting to criminal means to produce and distribute it is no longer profitable.

If we legalized and regulated marijuana and cocaine in this country, we would see not just the collapse of the violence in Mexico but also our own gang problem knocked straight on it's ass, in the form of a massive decrease in inner city violence and deaths as the gangs main profit center and cause for competition is reduced. Doing that combined with a SERIOUS effort to take on poverty in this country would do fucking MIRACLES.

Hell, just working to eradicate poverty would do wonders. Anyone ever wonder why we have a gang problem and Switzerland doesn't? It's not because they don't have drugs, or guns, or money. Hell, they've probably got more drugs per capita than we do, hundreds of thousands of machine guns in people's closets, and money coming out their ears. But Switzerland's poverty level is next to nothing. There isn't the vast recruiting pool of desperate young men with nothing to lose that we have in our cities.

[amborin]

18. completely agree

[alphafemale]

22. I love that quote attributed to Eliott Ness. When prohibition was ended he was asked -

"What are you going to do now?"

And he said, "Have a drink."

[BurtWorm]

3. By the way, when they say 'drug lords' are ramping up the violence

they mean every side in the war. The army Calderon sent in to clean up the mess in Ciudad Juarez is making it worse than it's ever been. Don't think this is good guys vs. bad guys, or clean vs. dirty. This is anarchy.

[amborin]

9. but

limited in geographic scope; just hope people realize most of Mexico is totally safe, to drive around in, in a rental car, or whatever; and 99% of Mexicans are as appalled by the drug violence as we are

[BurtWorm]

11. Interesting that the region it's limited to is the border with the US

Bowden says there are posters on the streets in Nuevo Laredo advertising positions available with the cartels. They tout their benefits packages and good salaries.

[amborin]

13. did you read

the ny times article from about 4 or so wks ago?

about how some traffickers' family members are obtaining 70K a year US gov't anti-drug smuggling jobs in and around the border? incredible!

here it is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/us/18corrupt.html?_r=1&scp=6&sq=drug%20trafficking%20jobs%20mexico%20family%20members&st=cse

[BurtWorm]

15. That's a wise investment for the cartels.

Saves them a lot of hassle if they can get their own people at the border.

[BurtWorm]

23. I'm reading deeper into Bowden's book and beginning to think maybe it's not so limited.

Calderon's regime may be a real turning point in Mexican history. Bowden seems to think so. He says the Mexican army is now deeply entrenched in every state government, and it's beyond corrupt. It's criminal.

Do you have information to the contrary? The level of violence may not be the same below the borderlands, but the corruption is rotting the country, Bowden seems to think. I wonder if anyone reading this thread has knowledge of what's really going on.

[mdmc]

4. Yet we are a political party of drug war warriors

Horray for everything..

[Romulox]

5. Time to bomb Juarez? nt

[Artie Bucco]

6. From the blog The Mex Files.

Patrick Corcoran’s “Ganchoblog” picked up on an op-ed piece by the Mario Vargas Llosa, which appeared Monday in the Madrid daily, El País. Varga Llosa basically supports the Calderón Adminstration’s militarized “war on (U.S. exported) drugs” in principal, but thinks it’s unwinnable. The Peruvian novelist and rightist politician makes the same argument for legalization that everybody else has made. Patrick said it was raising eyebrows here in Mexico, but I saw nothing particularly eyebrow raising in any of what Vargas Llosa wrote… and, while better circulated than most foreign newspapers, I’m not sure the Spanish conservative daily is all that widely read by anyone other than elderly Spaniards and those with bets on European futbol scores.

The only remarkable thing I though was that a Latin American conservative intellectual (almost a contradiction in terms, but there are a few) is making the same observation that every other intellectual came to long ago, but for slightly different reasons. The upshot being — the “war on drugs” is a losing proposition.

I’m not sure how Patrick jumped from Vargas Llosa’s article to his reading of the situation in Colombia:

After all, Colombia is better than it was in Escobar’s heyday, in large part because the gangs operating there are smaller and less powerful, which in turn is in large part due to the government’s having developed the capacity to take down the biggest fish. Similarly, there is no American equivalent to Chapo Guzmán, basically because criminals in the US are arrested long before they gain such notoriety.

Is it? U.N statistics for Mexico now show a murder rate of about 0.10 to 0.11 per thousand. Colombian statistics aren’t listed. The latest available statistics for Colombia are for 2002. By 2002, well into the first phase of “Plan Colombia , the murder rate was three times that (0.63 per thousand) of Mexico’s (which was slightly higher, not lower, in 2002: 0.13 per thousand). After that date, the Colombians stopped publishing statistics, and no wonder. Where most Mexican murders, aside from “normal” ones like domestic disputes, and the under-investigated killings of environmentalists (including environmental reporters) and labor activists, have been “narcotics related” deaths.

In Colombia, the relative number of “narcotics related” killings has gone down, based on anecdotal evidence, but that of environmentalists, labor leaders, ordinary ornery peasants, social and religious workers and the occasional “false positive” (poor boys dressed up as “guerrillas” and murdered to meet military quotas for killing “terrorists”) goes on as usual. In short, nobody is safe in Colombia. Most of us — barring bad luck or deranged family members — who aren’t somehow DIRECTLY involved in the narcotics industry are.

I hope I’m not misreading Patrick when I say there’s a sense that Mexico is expected to “do more” militarily to avoid the risk of becoming a “narco-state”. I’m not sure what a “narco-state” is exactly, or why it’s such a bad thing that a representative of a major agricultural industry reach the Presidency (Evo Morales has done a bang up job in Bolivia).

As Patrick says, Chapo Guzmán, who many have always suspected is the only beneficiary of the Calderón Administrations actions against every narcotics “cartel” except Chapo’s, is not a Pablo Escobar. Guzmán, unlike Escobar, has no political ambitions. But, in 2002 (after Escobar’s death), his relation and former associate, Álvaro Uribe, became president, with the full support of the United States (which had known of his narcotics cartel connections since 1991, according to Joseph Contreras of Newsweek Magazine).

The reason I worry that Mexico could become a “narco-state is that it could end up like Colombia: overrun with U.S. paid mercenaries, numerous DEA and other U.S. government anti-narcotics agents working in the country, and U.S. military personnel not managing to stem the flow of narcotics, but apparently furthering U.S. (not Colombian) military interests in the region.

Otherwise, I don’t worry. Chapo Guzmán for President? I don’t think so, but wouldn’t discount someone’s competence just because they’ve been associated with the guy in some way. At least they know something about rural issues, which might be a better use of limited funding (along with environmental protection and — above all — improved education) than wasting it on what Vargas Llosa and I, two foreign observers, both consider an unwinnable, unnecessary “war” without purpose.

[BurtWorm]

7. Is that your blog?

There's no link. It's an interesting analysis.

[Artie Bucco]

8. Not mine.

The blog is top notch in terms of Mexico and Latin America. I highly recommend it, not bad for a gabacho either.
http://mexfiles.net/

[Hugabear]

12. This is what happens when a "war on drugs" becomes literal

How's that "war on drugs" working out for you, Nancy?

Imagine the ramifications if we were to simply de-criminalize drugs here in the US, and instead focus our money and resources on education and rehabilitation.

[thunder rising]

14. What would we do with all the unemployed gangsters ... and cops?

[ShortnFiery]

16. And here I thought the evil character on "No County for Old Men" was the MOST demented persona

in History. Wow!

Never again will the term "Play Ball" mean anything innocent to me any longer. :scared: :(

[bluedigger]

19. Who fucking does that?

Do they advertise for "Face Sewer" under the Jobs ETC section on Craigslist?

:wtf:

[Odin2005]

20. Good god!

[smoogatz]

21. Maybe the best reason yet to legalize marijuana.

This business in Mexico won't stay confined to Mexico much longer, and the same economic forces that make it impossible to contain there will also be in effect in the US. It's a significant national security concern, IMO. Plus, it's idiotic to keep paying billions every year to keep pot smokers locked up; there's just no way to justify our current incarceration rate in this country.