Mexican Drug War Thread; 100,000 dead and counting

[HisMajestyBOB]

Now the Mexican government should declare open season on the families of drug barons and gang leaders.

"You wanna know how you do it? Here's how: they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Mexico way."

[DontSayBanana]

Hmm... this could make an interesting social experiment.  Perhaps Timmy-taint could end the Mexican Drug War by making it passe...

Wonder if this would work for peace in the Middle East.

[jimmy olsen]

Even if this wasn't random, not a good sign when gunmen feel confident enough to kill that many people so publicly.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35170527/ns/world_news-americas/

Death toll in Mexican party massacre rises to 16
Mayor of Ciudad Juarez believes the killings may have been random
updated 4:41 p.m. ET Feb. 1, 2010

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - The mayor of a violent Mexican border city said Monday he fears a shooting that killed 16 students at a party may have been random because the victims were "good kids" with no apparent ties to drug gangs.

The death toll of the weekend massacre in Ciudad Juarez, one of the deadliest cities in the world, rose to 16 after three more victims died at hospitals, according to the Chihuahua state attorney general's office.

The young people were gathered to watch a boxing match Saturday night when two trucks drove up loaded with armed men who opened fire. Some people were shot as they tried to flee and their bodies were found near neighboring homes.

The victims' ages ranged from 15 to 20.

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said police were still trying to determine the motive and had not ruled out that any of the victims were involved with drugs. However, he said they seemed to be "good kids, students, athletes."

'No logical explanation'
Witnesses and relatives insisted the young people were targeted by mistake or randomly. If that's the case, Reyes said it would be unprecedented even for the violent Ciudad Juarez, where rampant drug warfare is common.

"There is no logical explanation, a concrete reason for this event. This is something that worries us, gratuitous or random criminal acts," Reyes told MVS Radio. "It goes way beyond what had been happening and puts Ciudad Juarez in even greater danger."

Authorities have offered a reward of 1 million pesos ($76,200) for information leading to the capture of the gunmen. Reyes said police have received five calls with tips that could be useful, but he did not elaborate.

"The people of Juarez must demand that this is investigated thoroughly and we must demand justice for such deplorable crimes," he said at a news conference later Monday.

A large crowd gathered at the scene of the attack in Villas de Salvarcar, a working class neighborhood of cinderblock homes partly surrounded by a fence topped by barbed wire. Some people had set down candles.

One woman, who identified herself only as Martha out of fear for her safety, said both of her sons died in the attack. She said they both played on their high school football team.

"Who took my two boys?" she said. "What harm could they have done to anyone?"

A girl who gave only her first name, Linda, said her cousin, 17-year-old Jose Adrian Encina, was killed. She described him as a good student who aspired to be a doctor and had received an academic recognition award from Chihuahua Gov. Jose Reyes Baez.

Battling for turf
In another attack in Ciudad Juarez on Monday, armed men burst into a bar around dawn and killed four men and a woman, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the regional prosecutors' office.

Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people which faces El Paso, Texas, is home to several drug cartel bosses who are battling for turf.

More than 2,600 people were killed last year alone. Authorities say most of the dead have ties to drug gangs but civilians have been caught in the cross fire in increasing numbers. Last year, among the dead were university professors and an honor student.

Elsewhere, gunmen killed 10 people and wounded 15 in a bar in Torreon, a city in the northern state of Coahuila.

Drug violence has surged in many parts of Mexico since President Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of troops in 2006 to crush powerful cartels. More than 15,000 people have been killed in gang violence since.

[Caliga]

So how soon till some Noriega type strongman is running Mexico?

[Ed Anger]

So how soon till some Noriega type strongman is running Mexico?

And then III Corps ass rapes the country? 

[KRonn]

What a mess, a low grade insurgency in Mexico. Nearly open warfare with criminal gangs fighting the government.

And also, these gangs are in dozens or more of US cities, so easy to get across the border and find cover, then do their business in the US.

[Tonitrus]

Makes one miss the good 'ol days, when all you had down there were the El Guapo-types.

[jimmy olsen]

This thread was gutted by the latest forum collapse.
Anyways, more bad news from Mexico.

http://www.pro8news.com/news/local/Nuevo-Laredo-is-Under-Martial-Law-124397509.html

Nuevo Laredo is Under Martial Law
By KGNS News

Story Created: Jun 22, 2011

Story Updated: Jun 23, 2011
No major media outlets are reporting it, but several hundreds soldiers and marines are en route to Nuevo Laredo, Tamps. (MX) to try and get a grip on a violent few months in our Sister City. Several websites report that Nuevo Laredo, Tamps. (MX) is essentially under martial law as the military moves in and relieves city police officers. Soldiers were seen at police headquarters seizing guns.
It comes as the federal and state government move into a new phase of security efforts in an attempt to turn up the heat on local drug cartels.
More troops are expected to move into the city to beef up security, and it's not just in Nuevo Laredo but the whole state of Tamaulipas.
Last week demonstrators took to the bridges to protest military presence. Many claim those holding signs and chanting "no more military" were paid as much as a $100 a day by cartel members to protest at the bridges.
Drug cartels don't want that information out; therefore, the Mexican media is not reporting it.

[Gups]

More drugs need to be legalized, regulated, and taxed.

Ah yes, the magic bullet that will cure all our woes.  Of course, if we tax them, we'll have a problem with bootlegging.

Yep, look at the terrible problems caused by bootlegging of alcohol since prohibition ended. Will we never learn?

[jimmy olsen]

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/14/11698166-mexicos-drug-war-no-sign-of-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel?lite

Mexico's drug war: No sign of 'light at the end of the tunnel'

Q: An estimated 50,000 people have been killed in Mexico since 2006, the country is one of the most dangerous in which to be a journalist, and kidnapping and extortion are rife. Is Mexico teetering over into chaos?

A: It is not true, but it's less inaccurate that it was three or four years ago. It's not teetering on the verge of chaos because violence remains concentrated in a few places. But those places have been changing over the past five years. The violence and killings move from one state or one region to another depending on where the army is, where the national police is, what the economic circumstances are in in a given region.

Another factor is that violence now seems to be stabilizing at very high levels.  It has pretty much leveled off at about 1,000 drug-linked executions a month –- about 12,000 per year. All very high levels, but it is no longer growing.

The problem is that this has been going on for almost six years. It is much more difficult to claim now that this is a temporary problem that will soon be resolved once the cartels are destroyed or weakened or thrown out or whatever.

At six years on, it is beginning to look more difficult to see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel.

Q: What is the alternative to the war on drugs?

A: I'm against the war. I thought it was a mistake from the very beginning. That said, I can see how many well-intentioned people would for one year, for two years, for three years believe that with a little more time the violence would begin to decline, supply routes of drugs from Mexico to the United States would begin to shut down, the kingpins would be caught and all of this would sort of go away.

None of these things have happened.

A few kingpins have been caught, but many others, the biggest ones, have not. There is no indication that there has been any decrease in overall drug consumption in the U.S. The Americans point to some decline in powder cocaine but an increase in marijuana, methamphetamines, etc. Those come from Mexico also.

If you put it all together, you see very meager results given the exorbitant costs for Mexico.

Q: What are the costs to Mexico of fighting this war?
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A: I mean 50,000 dead, about 50 billion in expenditures ...  kidnappings, extortions, etc. Plus the terrible deterioration of Mexico's image in the world, and for a country that thrives on tourism, that's a big problem. And the human-rights violations that have increased exponentially over the past six years.

Q: So what are the realistic solutions? Deal with the cartels? Legalization? More military involvement? Just live with it?

A: I think it's a combination of all of those. More military involvement -- we don't have, we just don't have the troops, we don't have the money, we don't have the equipment.  We don't have any of the things that are necessary to significantly increase the military involvement.

Q: A lot of American troops are coming back from Afghanistan ...

A: Yes, well, they could be sent to Mexico, or they could be sent to the U.S. and the United States could do this job from its side of the border. The point being that  ... there is a reasonable case to be made for dramatically increasing the size of the national police force, from 25,000 to 30,000 now to 100,000 or 150,000.  That would be the minimum that would be necessary given that ... there is a great consensus in Mexico that municipal and state police are useless.

Q: Indeed, Mexican states have had to fire their entire police forces.

A: Exactly, just redo the whole thing. So there's a good case to be made for increasing the number of national police troops to 100,000 or 150,000. The National Action Party (known by its Spanish acronym PAN) candidate for president has said 150,000 troops. That makes sense, but that takes time, and that costs a lot of money. Now you still are not ever going to ever have enough police to really patrol the whole country.  So then the question is, since you're going to have scarce resources, where do you want to concentrate those scarce resources and on what do you want to concentrate them?

And that is where the real disagreement exists between the government and people like myself. The government has basically concentrated all its resources these past five-and-a-half years on fighting drug trafficking. I think those resources should be concentrated on fighting the effects of violence and crime that hurt people –- kidnapping, extortion, holdups, automobile thefts, etc. –- and basically not concentrated on drug trafficking

You don't have to make a deal with the cartels, you don't sit down and talk with them, you don't shake hands with them. You just concentrate your resources on what matters to you; you don't concentrate them on what matters to the U.S.

Q: But in terms of lobbying, isn't legalization a bit of a radioactive subject in the United States? Politicians hardly mention it in public.

A: Yes and no.  Just this past weekend a state legislature in Connecticut approved medical marijuana, which for all practical purposes is legalization. This is the 17th state, together with the District of Columbia, and it is moving forward on the ballot in two states for full legalization in November.

So politicians don't touch it, but there's a real movement in American society, which is being reflected in medical marijuana, which is being reflected in a decline in incarceration rates, which is being reflected in more money being spent on prevention and less on punitive policies now in Obama's budgets.  You have a lot of changes that are going on, (but) people don't want to talk about them. But there's nothing wrong with hypocrisy. Honesty is overrated in these matters.

Q: "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States" has been a popular saying in Mexico.  Do you think most people feel that way?

A: Perhaps it summed up what many Mexicans believed until the 1980s and '90s. But I think that from 1982 onwards it became clear that were it not for recurrent American bailouts and were it not for closer economic ties with the U.S., whether it was tourism or immigration then NAFTA, then investment ... that all of this is an opportunity, it is not a misfortune.

Now most Mexicans believe that by being close to the United States geographically and close economically, socially, etc., is not a misfortune but rather an opportunity.

Q: On the subject of the war on drugs, what can Mexico legitimately ask of the U.S.?

A: It can ask what President Felipe Calderon has been asking and what every president has been asking for the past 40 years, which is, stop consuming so many drugs and repeal the Second Amendment -- stop allowing people to buy guns in the United States and then export them to Mexico.

The usefulness and effectiveness of asking those two things is very much open to question in my mind. I don't see what we gain by whining about this when we know it's not going to happen. It is very similar to how the Americans whine, "Why don't the Mexicans get their house in order, stop sending all these people to the U.S.?"

It's not going to happen.  All the whining in the world is not going to stop Mexicans from going to the U.S. They've been doing it for over a century.  And all the Mexican whining in the world is not going to stop Americans from smoking pot.

Q: Do you feel optimistic about the future of Mexico?

A: I'm very optimistic. I think if Mexico gets three or four things straight over the next year or two, it can finally take off and become a middle class, poor-rich country within 10-15 years.

And I think it will. We have to put this war behind us. It just can't go on. We have to change some fundamental policies, mainly on the ant-trust fron. We have to find a way to distribute the fruits of growth better, but in a rational, modern, effective way. And we have to improve the educational system rather dramatically and soon.

But these are not impossible to do.

[Syt]

News from Sunday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-18052540

Mexico violence: Monterrey police find 49 bodies

Forty-nine mutilated bodies have been found dumped by a roadside near the city of Monterrey in northern Mexico.

Security officials said the 43 men and six women had been decapitated and had their hands cut off, making identification difficult.

They blamed the killings on a conflict between rival drugs gangs - a note left with the bodies said they had been killed by the Zetas cartel.

It is the latest in a series of recent massacres in northern Mexico.

The Zetas have been fighting the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels for control of smuggling routes into the US.
Unidentified

The bodies were found at 04:00 local time (09:00 GMT) in Cadereyta municipality on the road from Monterrey to Reynosa on the US border.

Security officials said the bodies. some of which were in plastic bags, appeared to have been killed at another location up to two days ago and dumped from a truck.

"We know from the characteristics that this is the result of violence between criminal gangs, it is not an attack on the civilian population," Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said.

Nuevo Leon's prosecutor, Adrian de la Garza, said the fact that hands and heads had been cut off made it difficult to identify the victims, but he said it was possible they were Central American migrants.

The grim find comes just days after police discovered the dismembered, decapitated bodies of 18 people in two abandoned vehicles in western Mexico.

Earlier this month 23 dead bodies - 14 of them decapitated - were found in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, also in Nuevo Leon state.

Around 50,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed the army to combat the cartels.

The BBC's Will Grant, in Mexico City says the latest killings show that, although many Mexicans felt the drug violence had been easing this year, the conflict is still claiming many lives, often in the most brutal circumstances.

The three main candidates to succeed Mr Calderon in July's presidential election have all said they would work to end the violence, but have not offered any concrete plans.

[Ed Anger]

Dead Mexican Storage.

[jimmy olsen]

And the war grinds on

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/07/americas/mexico-violence/index.html

Fifteen Mexican police officers killed in deadly ambush in Jalisco state

Highest death toll in single attack on country's police since 2010
Prosecutors would not say if Jalisco New Generation cartel was behind attack


Jo Tuckman in Mexico City

Tuesday 7 April 2015 23.13 BST  Last modified on Tuesday 7 April 2015 23.16 BST 

Fifteen Mexican police officers have been killed and five seriously wounded in the deadliest single attack on the country's security forces in recent memory.

The officers' convoy was ambushed as it drove along a winding mountain road in the western state of Jalisco on Monday afternoon.

The gunmen, believed to belong to the New Generation Jalisco cartel, reportedly used burning vehicles to block the road while they openend fire with machine guns and grenade launchers from the mountainsides.

Large-scale attacks on Mexican police and armed forces have been unusual in Mexico's drug wars, which have killed an estimated 100,000 people over the last eight years.

"Shootouts with criminal groups are common," said security expert Alejandro Hope, pointing to the raging battles often sparked by operations to capture cartel bosses. "What is rare is for government forces to come off worse than the criminal groups."

Monday's ambush produced the biggest death toll since 2010, when 12 federal officers were killed in the neighbouring state of Michoacán in an attack blamed on the La Familia cartel.

It has also drawn attention to the security crisis in Jalisco, in which orchestrated attacks on the security forces and public officials have been escalating in recent months, mostly blamed on the New Generation Jalisco cartel.

Over 70 public officials, including police, have reportedly been killed in Jalisco since 2013.

The state's public security commissioner said Monday's ambush was retaliation for recent law enforcement successes. "It was a reaction to the detentions and actions that we have carried out against organized crime," Alejandro Solorio told Radio Fórmula.

Solorio pointed to the detention of 15 people allegedly linked to a failed attempt to kill him on 30 March. In that attack large trucks were used to block the road while the assassins opened at Solorio with a 50 calibre rifle.

That attack, he said, was itself a retaliation for a the death of a local cartel boss called Heriberto Acevedo, alias 'El Gringo', who was killed in a shootout with police on 23 March.

The New Generation Jalisco Cartel was also blamed for an attack on 19 March that killed five Federal Police.

The cartel emerged in 2010, when an offshoot of the Sinaloa cartel combined with existing local groups. It is currently said to have an important role in the production and trafficking of methamphetamines, and appears to be one of the few Mexican trafficking groups that, along with the Sinaloa cartel, is bucking a trend towards fragmentation of criminal structures.

While primarily focused in Jalisco, the group took on the Zetas cartel in a vicious turf war to control the port city of Veracruz on the Gulf coast in 2011. During that conflict, the New Generation was blamed for dumping 35 bodies on a busy street in Veracruz.

The group is currently said to be seeking to expand its presence in Michoacán, taking advantage of the recent collapse of the Knights Templar cartel which previously controlled the state.

"The New Generation Jalisco cartel does appear to be getting stronger," Hope said.

Hope insisted that it was premature to interpret Monday's ambush as a gauntlet thrown down to the Mexican authorities in general. He said it was more likely to be related to specific local dynamics, perhaps related to recent detentions or deals with members of the police that went wrong.