Mexico.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Every single day on the radio I hear another new horror story to come out of Mexico. Here's three from the past week alone:

First successful C4 car bomb against Mexican security officials (http://wtop.com/?nid=105&sid=1646540)
17 killed in attack on party (http://www.rttnews.com/Content/MarketSensitiveNews.aspx?Id=1362438&SM=1)
Three bodies found hanging from bridge in Cuernavaca (http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11158567)

So far about 25,000 people have been killed in Mexico since December 2006. There was a report on the news here that people are flooding into Texas from Ciudad Juarez on a level unseen since the Mexican Civil War 100 years ago.

[Bad Grrrl Agro]

You're making me worry about my relatives who live in Mexico.

[R_P_A_S]

You are right. I hear about this all the time. Things have gotten really bad the last 4 or so year. I mean when or how does this stop? Is Mexico a failed state? The president is violating the constitution by using the military to police the drug trade. Mexican military can only be summoned only if there's a declaration of war.

[R_P_A_S]

I know the war on drugs will never be won. But wouldn't we say that Colombia is winning it? I also know that it has been at the expense of many innocent people and the Colombian government's attrocities against indigenous people, farmers and union leaders.

[Os Cangaceiros]

You're making me worry about my relatives who live in Mexico.

I think that most of Mexico is relatively peaceful...the border is practically a warzone, though. The cartels have turned into organizations that seem almost paramilitary in nature.

http://i2.esmas.com/2008/11/07/19860/capturan-al-lider-de-los-zetas-en-reynosa370x270.jpg

[Nolan]

I think that most of Mexico is relatively peaceful...the border is practically a warzone, though. The cartels have turned into organizations that seem almost paramilitary in nature.

http://i2.esmas.com/2008/11/07/19860/capturan-al-lider-de-los-zetas-en-reynosa370x270.jpg

The Mexican cartels are some of the most violent, sadistic killers in the world. They regularly dismember people and leave the remains in public areas to intimidate their enemies and workers. The EPR and Zapatistas should step up to them.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I know the war on drugs will never be won. But wouldn't we say that Colombia is winning it?

No, not at all. What possible incentive would they have to win it? Cocaine is a significant part of their national economy, and they're going to continue to get funding from the U.S. whether they make significant gains against the cartels or not. In addition, the right-wing paramilitaries that are involved in the drug trade there have connections to the government.

Only just recently has one of the largest cartels in history (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/colombia/7838143/Worlds-biggest-drugs-super-cartel-smashed-by-US-authorities-in-Colombia.html) been busted in Colombia, but don't take that as any sort of significant victory; the vacuum will be filled very quickly. It's reminiscent of the disintegration of the Medellin Cartel and the death of Pablo Escobar: the destruction of that mighty cartel was accompanied by certain elements in the Colombian government aiding the rival Cali Cartel.

[Blackscare]

The EPR and Zapatistas should step up to them.

I think they have enough on their plate. And you want the Zapatistas to go from the southernmost end of the country to the northern border? To bloody the noses of some paramilitary drug dealers?

[Os Cangaceiros]

The Zapatistas probably aren't up for it, but the EPR has launched some impressive attacks against the Mexican government/military in the past...I don't know what the status of their organization is at this point, though.

It's a daunting task, though, any way you look at it. As CC said, those motherfuckers are ruthless as hell, and extremely well armed/well connected. The military wing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Zetas) of the Gulf Cartel is essentially a highly trained death squad made up of former members of the Mexican military and police who were specifically trained to fight drug gangs. Someone in the DEA compared it to American SWAT teams suddenly deciding to work for the Mafia. Supposedly the Sinaloa Cartel has been training MS-13 members in military tactics in order to counter them.

[The Vegan Marxist]

I think that most of Mexico is relatively peaceful.

If you mean peaceful as in a lot of crime being committed by the Government or Police Force & the people doing absolutely nothing about it, then yes, you're right. I have a lot of friends from Mexico that go there a lot for visiting purposes, all in different areas, & it's hell over there according to them. Just because there's not car explosions or gun fire being rocked on Mexican soil doesn't necessarily mean nothing's happening. Mexico is in a huge hole & until some kind of organized stand off emerges, I fear of what comes next for our Mexican brothers & sisters.

[M-26-7]

I think they have enough on their plate. And you want the Zapatistas to go from the southernmost end of the country to the northern border? To bloody the noses of some paramilitary drug dealers?

And the EPR mostly operate in the second-most-southern state of Oaxaca, right next to Chiapas.

I think it's OK to let the Mexican state duke it out with the cartels, considering they are the ones that are actively helping to create the cartels by joining in Washington's "war on drugs".

[Nolan]

They're not all on the Northern border, people.

Los Zetas operate in Chiapas and Oaxaca, and the Sinaloa cartel has interests in Chiapas. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126890893)

[Chimurenga.]

Zapatistas should step up to them.

:lol:

Yeah. That won't happen.

[GPDP]

This conflict is very close to me, considering A. I live right on the border on the Texas side, and B. Most of my family lives in Sinaloa (in fact, that's where I was born and raised).

Thing is, I'm stumped as to what could be done to end it. I hear about all the grizzly murders and mutilations done by the cartels and their psychopathic goons, and I wish nothing but death on these soulless demons. Yet at the same time, I realize this conflict didn't start out of nowhere. I know the Mexican government, in cooperation with the racist American war on drugs, basically stirred the hornet's nest, and decided to go to war with the cartels. And for that, I cannot say I want the government to keep this war going.

All I see is, two powerful factions vying for control of Mexico: the "legitimate" bourgeois government of Mexico, backed by the US, and the illegitimate lumpen-bourgeois cartels. And where is the Mexican working class in all this? Caught up in the hail of bullets, lying on the floor in a puddle of their own blood.

I have to say, I'm utterly lost. It's easy enough to say "the answer is obviously a working class revolution," but that is nowhere in the horizon. So what can be done to end the current bloodshed now?

[Lyev]

Can anyone explain briefly the situation? Are we just basically seeing a civil war of sorts with those in the drug trade against the government? How did it become so bad? Thanks.

[Os Cangaceiros]

The situation really kicked into high gear after Felipe Calderon (the president of Mexico) "declared war" on the cartels, in December of 2006. Prior to that time the government's stance towards the cartels was more passive...that's my impression, anyway.

I've been to Mexico a few times, mostly in the Guerrero/Oaxaca area, and I started to hear new stories about drug related violence that I hadn't heard in years prior to 2006...stuff about severed heads being found in ditches, grenades being thrown at cops/army, etc. Even in the southern states.

[Barry Lyndon]

I remember reading somewhere that Cuidad Juarez, the center of most of this drug violence, is now considered the most violent city in the world that is not in an actual war zone(at least it was until the massive deployment of the Mexican military, I'm not sure what it is now).

Also, does anyone know any updates regarding hundreds of women that have been sexually assaulted and murdered in Cuidad Juarez over the last decade or so? I've become aware of this case since I worked in Amnesty International, and the most interesting angle on this whole story as a leftist is that there is widespread suspicion that the murderer is politically well-connected and that is why these killings are allowed to continue year after year, in addition to the fact that the young women targeted are invariably poor migrant workers who are recent arrivals in Cuidad Juarezs' sweatshops. They are cut off from family and friends and also have no political clout.

[theAnarch]

I think this might be the reason the us government is reluctant to push out the immigrants like they did in the thirties;

imagine a under developed nation, one of whose major industries, tourism is having major problems, the country is rocked by gangsterism and corruption, the major source of stability the flow of us dollars is drying up, social services are failing, and there are two areas of the nation were radical movements have already taken hold.

Now imagine a population thats been radicalized by struggle and exposed to revolutionary idea in the US and then pretend the US gov. pushed this population into the above imagined country.....what would be the end result.

[this is an invasion]

If you mean peaceful as in a lot of crime being committed by the Government or Police Force & the people doing absolutely nothing about it, then yes, you're right. I have a lot of friends from Mexico that go there a lot for visiting purposes, all in different areas, & it's hell over there according to them. Just because there's not car explosions or gun fire being rocked on Mexican soil doesn't necessarily mean nothing's happening. Mexico is in a huge hole & until some kind of organized stand off emerges, I fear of what comes next for our Mexican brothers & sisters.

Yeah thats what "relatively peaceful" means.

Relative to the border, it's more peaceful.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I remember reading somewhere that Cuidad Juarez, the center of most of this drug violence, is now considered the most violent city in the world that is not in an actual war zone(at least it was until the massive deployment of the Mexican military, I'm not sure what it is now).

That doesn't really suprise me. Supposedly it's more violent than more infamously violent cities like Baghdad and Mogadishu...in some parts of Juarez on the outskirts, the murder rate is 1,600 for every 100,000 people, which is the kill rate for an actual war*.

*According to this (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/14/charles_bowden_murder_city_ciudad_jurez) interview, which is very informative about the horrific state of Ciudad Juarez.




What you have to ask yourself is, why is this going on? Why are we talking about a war on drugs? Why are we giving a half-a-billion dollars a year for this thing, when this war has been going on forty years now? Every drug is more available in this country than it was forty years ago. Every drug has higher quality. Every drug is cheaper. This is a war that benefits prison guards, federal agents, the drug cartels. I mean, the drug organizations who produce it slaughters poor people who consume drugs, and in Mexico, slaughters poor people that want to sell drugs.

What the Mexican government won’t tell Michelle Obama is the addict rate in Mexico has exploded. In Ciudad Juárez in 1995, it was not easy to buy cocaine, because the cartels kept a lid on it. Now the city has up to 200,000 addicts, according to local clinics. This is happening all over Mexico. Part of the killing is there’s a huge domestic market.

What we’ve created, with a foreign policy, meaning our free trade treaty, is, one, slave factories all over the country, where nobody can live on the wages, two generations at least of feral kids on the street. Fifty percent of the kids you call high school kids in Juárez neither go to school nor have jobs. They did a recent university study there, and they found out 40 percent of the kids in Chihuahua, young males, wanted to become sicarios, professional killers. We’re looking at a Detroit, Baltimore, etc., where we’ve created something so bleak that crime is actually, and murder, is a rational way to live. And we’re not going to put a lid on it by “just say no,” by presidential visits, and by—what was it? We’re now going to teach them how to run a court system, you know, send our experts.



Also, does anyone know any updates regarding hundreds of women that have been sexually assaulted and murdered in Cuidad Juarez over the last decade or so?

I read a blurb about that in a book I read called Homage to Chiapas...I don't think that they ever got any leads into that case?

[Ligeia]

Crime rates have also risen all over Mexico, though most of the violence roots in its north.
And it's been clearly something that has happened in the last years. I've never seen assaults,robbery and murder out of the night-time but now it can happen in any time of the day (at least in D.F. and Edo. Mexico, and surely in Guerrero and the northern states)..Kidnapping is also much more common now. I think even paramilitary groups have gained in numbers, as if drug cartels and corrupt police and military aren't enough.

There's been a recent survey which asked about which institution is the most trustworthy (first place for the church and second for the military, police and political parties, as well as the judiciary were the most suspicious). Another question asked what kind of method would solve drug related crime, the number one answer was more military operations.
I don't know why sentiments seem to be such, it's also believed that Colombia knows how to handle this situation ....and the U.S. which is really weird to believe.

So there are a lot of different problems here....all is a huge disaster. Poverty has also risen.
So to speak, these are all just the struggles of the rich classes sending the poor working people into war, or squeezing their lifes out through other means.

How can this be stopped, reversed,...? I don't know.

I also wonder how elections will turn out in 2012.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Mass grave found outside Monterrey. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38395027/ns/world_news-americas/)

[black magick hustla]

lol at the people who talk about tiny leftist guerillas fighting off the cartels

anyway i wrote a piece for internationalism about drug cartels and their relationship to rotting capitalism

http://en.internationalism.org/inter/151/drug-violence

[Theoneontheleft]

Every single day on the radio I hear another new horror story to come out of Mexico.

I have heard first hand stories of similar accounts from the Mexican immigrants, who I work with, for the past ten years.

[Magón]

Having family in Mexico, and living there for many years myself, Mexico has always been a corrupted and violent place. And hearing on the news about Mexican Drug Cartels killing, always makes me worry. But this is not a situation where any Leftist Guerrilla group could be of use I'm afraid to say. Really, to those who just think the Drug Cartels are Paramilitary, they are Paramilitary. They've got fully automatic assault rifles, machine-guns, and many other deadly weapons that a nation's military would have. Plus, the Mexican Government has been so full of holes that if it was a ship, it would have sunk long ago.

These Cartels are bad, no doubt, but they don't operate like the various drug cartels you see in movies or t.v. shows. They operate like Paramilitary groups during the collapse of Yugoslavia or even worse. Los Zetas itself is a Paramilitary group, and my friend living in Mexico says they're probably the worst because from what he's heard, Los Zetas has moved into the drug cartel business. Or is wanting to. This fighting in Mexico is very matriculate and like a fine woven blanket or something. You thin you have it figured out, and next thing you know, those who you thought to be possible allies are really on the take of the enemy you just knocked off, so now they've got more power and are making things worse. It's a terrible thing, and I wish it wasn't so complicated so Calderón could just get it over with... Because then it really could become a Leftist Revolution, and we could bring down Calderón who doesn't make it easy on the poor Mexican farm workers, etc.

[CHEGUAVARA]

I think the entire upper Latin America are violent places. Just look at El Salvador and Guatemala.

[hatzel]

I won't pretend to be an expert on the situation, but my half-Mexican girlfriend, who has spent a lot of time in Mexico, might be said to half-agree with the sentiment here. On the one hand, she doesn't feel the nation itself is particularly dangerous, though she does point out various problems with the state of life in the country (though often getting distracted and talking about Mexican animals rather than people. Nyah, what else can I expect from an animal liberation activist? :laugh:), but in general, Mexico seems no better or no worse than Eastern Europe, for instance, in terms of everyday life. Of course there are problems with the drug cartels in the north, but this is really just economics. Supply and demand, maximising profits from American junkies...in such a business, and with such strong (though probably American-imposed) actions being taken by the Mexican law-enforcement authorities, how can we expect the cartels to react in a different way? Take out the competition (i.e. other cartels), take out the hindrance (i.e. the Mexican law enforcement) and you can make a lot of money from contraband, didn't you know?

[28350]

I think the best thing to do in this situation is to legalize the drugs they're peddling.

[Magón]

I think the entire upper Latin America are violent places. Just look at El Salvador and Guatemala.

That's what usually happens in places, when there's low incomes, hardly any work, and stress is through the roof.

[nip]

If this keeps up America is going to end up invading Mexico too.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Mexican paper implores drug lords: stop the violence (http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/mexican-paper-implores-drug-lords-stop-the-violence/)

[CHEGUAVARA]

I think the best thing to do in this situation is to legalize the drugs they're peddling.

Yep! I agree.

[CHEGUAVARA]

That's what usually happens in places, when there's low incomes, hardly any work, and stress is through the roof.

And as usual a work of the good ol' imperalism :thumbdown:.

[hatzel]

I wonder if anybody else would back the idea of a dedicated subforum here for the situation in Mexico? Given the recent events in Oaxaca, particularly San Juan Copala, and the ongoing drug problems, which will probably only be intensified if America decides to exert more and more energy in enforcement in the border provinces. Anybody else want to second this proposal, or am I flying that flag alone?

[Ligeia]

I wonder if anybody else would back the idea of a dedicated subforum here for the situation in Mexico? Given the recent events in Oaxaca, particularly San Juan Copala, and the ongoing drug problems, which will probably only be intensified if America decides to exert more and more energy in enforcement in the border provinces. Anybody else want to second this proposal, or am I flying that flag alone?
I don't think there is enough interest. Even Venezuela has a lot more threads going on than Mexico which has just this one and there's not much discussion nor information.

[hatzel]

...true...I guess I'll just have to embark on a one-man mission to attract attention to Mexican issues! :thumbup1:

[kalu]

First things first, we have to recognize that the "problems" in Mexico are intimately connected with US actors and policies, particularly the global arms industry and the "war on drugs." Since as a US citizen with little background in Mexico I don't feel comfortable talking about how to solve the ethical-political problems of that country, whether the "crisis of legitimacy" of the government or the spectacle of violence, I'll address this to what we can do. With regard to the first problem, where are the cartels getting their weapons from? According to many people I spoke to in Mexico--and sure this is anecdotal so if anyone has any links, please post them--the cartels get their weapons from US markets. Does this mean an effective US response should include militarizing the border and providing more aid to the Mexican military, like Plan Merida, flooding Mexico with more weapons? I don't think so, for pretty obvious reasons.

Second, the problem of legalization. Last I read, even Felipe Calderon himself was considering beginning to legalize some drugs, and lower penalties for others. I think for drugs like marijuana, this is a sensible response, but I'm not sure that full-scale legalization of hard drugs like cocaine is an adequate answer, since they do constitute serious public health risks (you can easily die of a heart attack doing coke and heroin together your first time, you can't smoking a really strong joint). At the same time, the gangs capitalize on prohibition, that's what feeds their illicit strength, so that right there constitutes the tension, in my opinion. But, and again to bring this back to the US, we are the primary market for drugs from Mexico, just like Europe is a new market for Colombian cartels moving through West African states like the Gambia. So again, how do we curtail our own demand? That should be the question. The US answer shouldn't be to increase the stretch of the racist prison industrial complex, however, even through "rehabilitative" paradigms. Ours should be instead the complex ethical task of promoting the strength of working class and poor people of color communities and having an honest national dialogue about what to do about white middle class drug use.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Ours should be instead the complex ethical task of promoting the strength of working class and poor people of color communities and having an honest national dialogue about what to do about white middle class drug use.

I don't think that white middle class drug use is the root of the problem.

[Agnapostate]

Mexico has always been a complex and frequently unstable country. My paternal family is from the El Paso-Juarez-Las Cruces region, and from some research I've done, it seems that my grandmother's family crossed back and forth from Texas and Chihuahua based on the stability or instability. I think they left Texas after the Mexican-American War, and came back after the Revolution...seems to be more of an issue of avoiding violent conflict than any kind of partisan tendency. Anyway:


The Mexican cartels are some of the most violent, sadistic killers in the world. They regularly dismember people and leave the remains in public areas to intimidate their enemies and workers. The EPR and Zapatistas should step up to them.

This isn't completely wrong. Chiapas isn't high on the list of cartel regions, as far as I know, but the EPR are based in the state of Guerrero, where the Beltran Leyva cartel has significant influence. I wouldn't be surprised to see contingencies within the EPR resort to drug trafficking, however; the EPR does not possess the comparably more pacifistic ways of the EZLN.


And the EPR mostly operate in the second-most-southern state of Oaxaca, right next to Chiapas.

I believe you might mean the "Magonistas," or the Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca. It's my understanding that the EPR is primarily based in Guerrero.

[kalu]

I don't think that white middle class drug use is the root of the problem.

Based on my own experiences, I would say that it is a problem (I never said "the root of the problem," strawman), because it's never really talked about. Whenever we hear about the "war on drugs," we only hear about stigmatized poor communities of color. I'm not attempting to demonize another group, but according to statistics this constituency is predominant among drug users, especially for certain kinds of hard drugs like cocaine.* You can quibble with the particulars, but the point I'm trying to make is that we basically need to make a more comprehensive portrait about drug use in America, including issues of privilege, power, and social class, in order to have an effective national dialogue about curtailing demand and use. Interestingly, I think Traffic was one movie that, whatever its aesthetic faults, did at least bring some of these issues to the table.

*I'm not interested in getting to a statistical debate, but here's a relevant quotation: "Table 1: African Americans Make Up Nearly Half the Youth Detained for Drug Offenses, But Use Drugs at the Same Rate as Whites

Source: Crime in the United States, 2001. (2002) Washington, DC: U.S. Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigations. Puzzanchera, C., Finnegan, T. and Kang, W. (2005). "Easy Access to Juvenile Populations" Online. Available: http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/ezapop/; Sickmund, Melissa, Sladky, T.J., and Kang, Wei. (2004) "Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement Databook." Online. Available: http://www.ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/cjrp/"


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-jones/are-blacks-a-criminal-rac_b_8398.html

My point was to highlight the invisibility of this constituency, though I certainly don't want to simply "flip the tables" and say, send them to prison.

[Os Cangaceiros]

There's only one answer to that problem, and that's decriminalization.

[kalu]

There's only one answer to that problem, and that's decriminalization.

I don't think it's that simple, as I point out in my first post (second para):


I think for drugs like marijuana, this is a sensible response, but I'm not sure that full-scale legalization of hard drugs like cocaine is an adequate answer, since they do constitute serious public health risks (you can easily die of a heart attack doing coke and heroin together your first time, you can't smoking a really strong joint). At the same time, the gangs capitalize on prohibition, that's what feeds their illicit strength, so that right there constitutes the tension, in my opinion.

Programs that attempt to address drug use in ethical and community-oriented contexts, intertwining issues of privilege and power, would be at least one decent response (not though the "DARE" stuff, which is the anti-drug equivalent to abstinence advocacy instead of safe sex).

[Os Cangaceiros]

Keeping drugs illegal is what's contributing to the impure nature of illegal narcotics. The fact that cocaine is cut with ether, and heroin can be morphine mixed with, well, pretty much anything is what's killing people, not coca or morphine, which are ingested safely everyday in recreational and medical form, respectively. Decriminalization would go a long way to establishing purity standards, as well as pushing more people into treatment, like what has been happening in Portugal.

[kalu]

Keeping drugs illegal is what's contributing to the impure nature of illegal narcotics. The fact that cocaine is cut with ether, and heroin can be morphine mixed with, well, pretty much anything is what's killing people, not coca or morphine, which are ingested safely everyday in recreational and medical form, respectively. Decriminalization would go a long way to establishing purity standards, as well as pushing more people into treatment, like what has been happening in Portugal.

Well that's an interesting point actually about coca. I didn't mean to simplify policy matters, and perhaps you're right, we should be worrying about purity standards...But, and the question remains, what do you do with the "mixed" stuff? Does that remain illegal? Because it still constitutes a public health risk, and unlike say, huffing glue, which should also be dealt with in special contexts, hard drugs like cocaine are meant solely for consumption.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Well that's an interesting point actually about coca. I didn't mean to simplify policy matters, and perhaps you're right, we should be worrying about purity standards...But, and the question remains, what do you do with the "mixed" stuff? Does that remain illegal? Because it still constitutes a public health risk, and unlike say, huffing glue, which should also be dealt with in special contexts, hard drugs like cocaine are meant solely for consumption.

Well, I would expect that if drugs were not a high priority of law enforcement, and were instead legalized (or at least de-facto legalized through decriminalization), the focus could shift from repression and prosecution to helping address harmful addictions as a health concern, an issue of which purity issues in regards to drugs is certainly a facet. Many people died during Prohibition due to alcohol impurities (some even courtesy of the U.S. government (http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/)), but how many people today do?

[Os Cangaceiros]

This is really interesting. (http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/interactive-map)

[kalu]

This is really interesting. (http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/interactive-map)

I thought it was interesting how one of the more recent articles noted the differences between Colombia and Mexico. The article seemed to be saying that whereas Colombia had to deal with an actual guerrilla force linked to drug trafficking elements that controlled territory (surprising lack of mention of government-supported paramilitaries), the Mexican cartels do not want to take over the state per se; thus, there is a crisis in the institutions themselves. What do you think of the proposal to "clean up" these institutions in an effort to combat the burgeoning parallel narco state? And how exactly is the US intertwined?

[Ligeia]

And how exactly is the US intertwined?

The US weapon's industry provides weapons to the drug cartels and the mexican miltary (like 90% of all firearms and equipment).
There are also U.S. banks that do money laundering for the drug cartels.
Apart from those benefits,...a higher violence rate or criminal infiltration/corruption makes a country more unstable and better to handle in terms of economic policies for foreign investments or general (neoliberal) policies.
And if (illegal) drug supplies are kept high on the consumer side this can be beneficient for simple distraction but also for the prison system.

[kalu]

The US weapon's industry provides weapons to the drug cartels and the mexican miltary (like 90% of all firearms and equipment).
There are also U.S. banks that do money laundering for the drug cartels.
Apart from those benefits,...a higher violence rate or criminal infiltration/corruption makes a country more unstable and better to handle in terms of economic policies for foreign investments or general (neoliberal) policies.
And if (illegal) drug supplies are kept high on the consumer side this can be beneficient for simple distraction but also for the prison system.

Yeah, I was aware of that when I made my first post in this thread, I was actually referring to how the US is intertwined with Mexican legal institutions and their support specifically, based on the discussion in the article.

[Ligeia]

Yeah, I was aware of that when I made my first post in this thread, I was actually referring to how the US is intertwined with Mexican legal institutions and their support specifically, based on the discussion in the article.
Sorry, I forgot your post on page 2.

Well, you surely know about Plan Merida.
Other than that...look at this article. (http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/4060/nntv-al-gores-mexican-adventure)
Then again, this article isn't really overtly about drug policy.

[Os Cangaceiros]

13 killed at Ciudad Juarez party (http://www.lanewsmonitor.com/news/13-Killed-By-Gunmen-At-Ciudad-Juarez-Party-In-Mexico-1287936695/)

Tens of thousands of children orphaned by the drug war since 2008 (http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_16301040?source=rss)

[Sosa]

I don't think decriminalizing hard drugs will do anything to dismantle the cartels...you just legitimize their business. These cartel factions will still be fighting each other for control and try to monopolize the industry.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I don't think decriminalizing hard drugs will do anything to dismantle the cartels...you just legitimize their business. These cartel factions will still be fighting each other for control and try to monopolize the industry.

If their business is truly legitimized, then they can solve their differences in the courts and not in the streets, as all other legitimized businesses do.

[black magick hustla]

If their business is truly legitimized, then they can solve their differences in the courts and not in the streets, as all other legitimized businesses do.

i can only see that happening if "legalization" happens in the US tbh. the money is not really made in mexico but in the US. also, cartels also run all sorts of rackets and extorsions that are not related to drugs (kidnapping). its pretty fckin bad down the border and all my friends are scared shitless down there. this is fuckin capitalist barbarism

[Agnapostate]

Hehe, "Sosa"? What's your interest? Sorry, I just watched Scarface again. :D

[Ligeia]

Anybody here thinks that the mexican or U.S. government will use drones to inflict damage?

The U.S.government already uses them to watch the border.

[scourge007]

The Mexican cartels are some of the most violent, sadistic killers in the world. They regularly dismember people and leave the remains in public areas to intimidate their enemies and workers. The EPR and Zapatistas should step up to them.
I'm familiar with the Zapatistas , but who are the EPR ?

[Das war einmal]

There's only one answer to that problem, and that's decriminalization.


You've got to be kidding. Heroin and Cocaine are pure poison. You only gonna legalize crime, nothing will change. You need to give the people good living standards, so they have no need for going on the bad path.

[Das war einmal]

There's only one answer to that problem, and that's decriminalization.


If their business is truly legitimized, then they can solve their differences in the courts and not in the streets, as all other legitimized businesses do.

Corporate warfare does not end in the courts. Since when do left revolutionaries believe in capitalist court justice anyway?

[Agnapostate]

Also, are users aware of the racially stratified nature of Mexican society? I get the feeling that the popular misconception is that "Mexican" is a racial category rather than a national one, a belief I used to share when I described myself as "half Mexican" in the past.

[Os Cangaceiros]

You've got to be kidding. Heroin and Cocaine are pure poison.


Generally a bad batch of synthetic drugs is discovered only when a customer injects some of it and has an adverse reaction, which is frequently serious and sometimes fatal. There is the story, for example, of a man from Godard, Kansas, a high school dropout who manufactured a synthetic form of heroin called fentanyl. This injectable drug was so strong that it could kill users before they could even withdraw the needle from their arms, and it was so lethal that in it's pure form could kill in dosages as small as three grains of salt. This man, who wanted to be known as a "drug wizard" was finally arrested by federal agents, but only after 126 drug users in New York and other cities along the eastern seaboard had turned up dead with traces of fentanyl in their blood. Similar disasters occured in Howard County, Maryland where a potent synthetic narcotic killed 27 people before the people responsible could be found and arrested.

Don't you realize that incidents like that are commonplace in a legal climate where even simple possession of a small amount of heroin can land you with serious jail time?


You only gonna legalize crime, nothing will change.

Er, no, I suspect that a lot would change if decriminalization was to be coupled with a massive shift in emphasis from prosecution to public awareness and management of drug addict as a public health problem, and not a criminal one.


You need to give the people good living standards, so they have no need for going on the bad path.

I doubt that any plans for giving people "good living standards" is going to be effective as long as parts of the United States resemble occupied zones and the state continues to use stormtrooper tactics in their never-ending crusade to stamp out narcotics.

Boiling down drug use to simply a factor of "good living conditions" is a simplistic analysis, anyway...Japan has a high standard of living, yet they've been awash with a methamphetamine addiction problem for a while now.


Corporate warfare does not end in the courts.

Corporate warfare in the U.S. hasn't resulted in 25,000+ slaughtered in three years and an unknown number of "disappeared", either.


Since when do left revolutionaries believe in capitalist court justice anyway?

LOL no one "believes in the capitalist court justice"...I'm only interested in ways to stem the bloodflow. I don't know what it's like in the Netherlands, but the United States has been pursuing a very vigilant drug policy for a long time now, and it has been an undeniable failure in every way, except for destabilizing foreign countries, ravaging poor areas of our own country and demonizing users who are afflicted with chemical dependency. Legalization might be wishful thinking at this point, but decriminalization would certainly be a refreshing change in the deadend that is the current policy.

[marxistamx]

I'm familiar with the Zapatistas , but who are the EPR ?

A bunch of clowns

[Kiev Communard]

The example of Mexico's sorry state shows full well the deceptions behind the talks of "globalisation" and "integration". Under the PRI regime of 1930s - 1980s, even if it was generally corrupt and authoritarian, the levels of destitution and criminal violence were far less than under "free trade democracy" of Salinases, Foxes and Calderons.

[Amphictyonis]

You are right. I hear about this all the time. Things have gotten really bad the last 4 or so year. I mean when or how does this stop?

Legalize drugs in the US and end the NAFTA agreement.

[ellipsis]

The Mexican cartels are some of the most violent, sadistic killers in the world. They regularly dismember people and leave the remains in public areas to intimidate their enemies and workers. The EPR and Zapatistas should step up to them.

Interestingly los Zetas were originally mex spec ops trained in counter insurgency for chiapas, then retrained in drug interdiction, then they became criminals. talk about blow back for the US and mexico.


The US weapon's industry provides weapons to the drug cartels and the mexican miltary (like 90% of all firearms and equipment).

The original statistic, that 90 percent of all guns seized and traced in mexico came from the US, is misleading, and u mangled that. 90 percent of all guns sent to the US to be traced were brought legally in the US, but they dont send guns which clearly weren't purchased in the US, its easy to sort them out. people use this statistic out of context.

[Ligeia]

Here's an intresting interview with a professor of the university of California:

Mexico (http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2811-interview-dr-william-i-robinson-on-power-domination-and-conflicts-in-mexico)

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

I'd really appreciate a serious discussion of this. Mexico's a big country, Chiapas is not Ciudad Juarez, in fact Northern Mexico is as different from Southern Mexico as Detroit is from rural Appalachia. I was in So. Mexico a few years back, went down the Usumacinta River which separates Mexico from Guatemala, it was as relaxed as you get.

What's not being addressed is the way the drug wars relate to the dominance or loss of control by the Central Government (especially the weakening of the PRI): it used to be a simple situation, the Gov't controlled the drug trade, for instance in Guerrero Province where the PRI Governor had his own private fleet of drug planes and there were Government roadblocks on the highways (sixteen-year olds with machine guns) just to make sure El Jefe kept his monopoly. What breaks my heart is the dominance of the narcos in Michoacan, traditionally a bastion of reform and independence,and one of the most beautiful places on earth.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

I think they have enough on their plate. And you want the Zapatistas to go from the southernmost end of the country to the northern border? To bloody the noses of some paramilitary drug dealers?

A few months back there was an attempt to form an anti-drug militia in Michoacan, patterned after the Zapatistas, I forget the name of its head, subcommandante Arturo or something. Haven't heard from them since.

[Across The Street]

I feel the exact opposite of a previous poster who said something about the US invading Mexico. The US is going to have to protect itself from all other countries who want to invade, not just Mexico. Democracy is a concept the whole has to reclaim.

[Amphictyonis]

Legalize drugs and repeal NAFTA. Too common sense though, we can't do that. No, no way.

[redz]

I'd really appreciate a serious discussion of this. ... What's not being addressed is the way the drug wars relate to the dominance or loss of control by the Central Government (especially the weakening of the PRI): it used to be a simple situation, the Gov't controlled the drug trade, for instance in Guerrero Province where the PRI Governor had his own private fleet of drug planes and there were Government roadblocks on the highways (sixteen-year olds with machine guns) just to make sure El Jefe kept his monopoly.


By far the best analysis I've seen is the one from Workers Vanguard (Spartacists), from last February, appended below...

Redz

Workers Vanguard No. 953
26 February 2010
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/953/mexico.html


U.S. Beefs Up Racist Border Controls

Mexico: Down With “Drug Wars” Militarization!

For Workers Revolution on Both Sides of the Border!


The massacre last month of 16 people, mostly teenagers, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, was just the latest bloody evidence of the “drug wars” that have claimed nearly 20,000 lives in that country since 2001. Last year, some 2,700 people were killed in Juárez alone, making this one of the most violent cities on the planet. Shootouts happen frequently in Mexican cities, many carried out in broad daylight, as drug cartels and their police adjuncts battle over control of the booming trade, which mainly supplies the U.S. market. The cartels often torture and decapitate rivals in the trade, placing their heads next to posters with threatening messages. Videos of such sadistic handiwork are regularly posted on YouTube. One man, nicknamed “El Pozolero” (the Stewmaker), admitted he had dissolved some 300 bodies in acid over ten years to dispose of them for the Tijuana Cartel.

The gruesome reality of narcoviolencia has provided President Felipe Calderón of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) a pretext to systematically reinforce the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state. Calderón has deployed some 45,000 army troops throughout the country, along with thousands of federal police. In many cities, including northern industrial centers like Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, the army assumed police powers.

If anything, the deployment of the military has led to an increase in the bloodletting along with intensified repression of the working class and the urban and rural poor. At stake in the drug wars is control of what is up to a $25 billion a year business (about the same as remittances from the U.S.) that plays a central role in the capitalist economy, directly involving an estimated 150,000 people and linked to some 78 percent of legal business activities, according to Proceso magazine (15 March 2009). Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, has even made the Forbes magazine list of billionaires. And from the government ministries on down to the cops, Mexico’s capitalist state apparatus is thoroughly interpenetrated with the drug cartels.

From the beginning of his regime, Calderón has moved to bolster the bourgeois state, including through increasing reliance on the military. As he took office in 2006, Calderón was faced with social upheaval as millions protested his fraudulent electoral victory against Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the bourgeois-populist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Miners as well as teachers and indigenous communities in Oaxaca and peasants in the State of Mexico protested government repression and attacks on their livelihoods. One of the Calderón government’s first measures was to hike military pay by 45 percent in February 2007 in order to assure the army’s allegiance. Backed by massive U.S. military aid, the regime has relied on the increasing militarization of the country to push through attacks on trade unions and yet more austerity measures.

While social unrest has subsided over the last couple of years, Mexico remains a deeply unstable society, with the working class and the poor further ravaged by the world economic recession. In describing the militarization that has been reinforced under the “war on drugs,” our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México noted in Espartaco No. 31 (Spring 2009) that “the massive mobilization of the bourgeois state—a machine of repression that serves the purpose of protecting private property and the regime of the capitalists—has nothing to do with ‘protecting’ the population; it is a deployment of force to warn the impoverished masses in the face of the brutal economic crisis.” This was clearly seen on 10 October 2009 when thousands of federal police and soldiers occupied Mexico City’s main electricity plant in order to smash the union, which was an obstacle to the attempt to privatize the electrical industry (see the GEM leaflet reprinted in “Defend SME Electrical Workers Union!” WV No. 945, 23 October 2009).

The labor movement on both sides of the border must oppose the “war on drugs,” “war on terror” and other campaigns that aim to bolster the capitalist state’s repressive powers. In Mexico, even though it is the raids against the big-name traffickers in their mansions that grab the headlines, the drug wars have meant the sowing of murderous terror in poor neighborhoods throughout the country, like Tepito in downtown Mexico City, a favorite target for police raids. In the United States, the “war on drugs” has for decades served the racist capitalist rulers in carrying out the mass incarceration of black people and, increasingly, Latinos and immigrants.

The Spartacist League/U.S. and the GEM, sections of the International Communist League, call for the decriminalization of drugs. We oppose all laws against “crimes without victims”—from drug use to prostitution, gambling and pornography—which at bottom serve to maintain social order on behalf of the capitalist ruling class. By removing the superprofits that come with the illegal, underground nature of the drug trade, decriminalization would also reduce the crime and other social pathology associated with it.

As Marxists, we also oppose measures by the bourgeois state that restrict or prevent the population from bearing arms. In the U.S., the Democratic Party in particular has for years sought to restrict this right, which is supposed to be guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Hysteria about Mexican drug violence is now being wielded to go after gun dealerships in Arizona and Texas that purportedly arm the cartels, despite the fact that these mom-and-pop operations are hardly the places where the narcotraficantes are getting the grenade launchers, antitank rockets and other military-grade hardware they use! In Mexico, where gun control is much more stringent, the drug wars serve as a pretext to further clamp down on the population’s rights. Gun control laws are meant to ensure that the army, police and criminals—often one and the same—have a monopoly on arms. No to gun control!

“Drug Wars”: Made in U.S.A.

Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, U.S. imperialism has used the “war on drugs” as a means to increase its grip on its Latin American “backyard.” “Plan Colombia,” begun in 2000, funneled billions of dollars to the blood-drenched Colombian government, whose murderous campaign against leftist guerrillas was long wrapped in the “anti-drugs” banner. With both the Pentagon and CIA railing that the drug trade threatens to turn Mexico into a “failed state,” the U.S. has increased military aid to Mexico by a factor of seven through the $1.4 billion “Plan Mérida.” Initiated under George W. Bush, the program has been continued and supplemented under Barack Obama, who made a point of traveling to Mexico last spring, as did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to lecture Calderón about his handling of the crisis. Down with Plan Mérida and all U.S. military aid to Mexico!

The Obama administration has also seized upon the hysteria over drugs to further tighten the border with Mexico. The economic recession that has thrown millions of both native- and foreign-born workers out of their jobs in the U.S. has also resulted in a sharp decrease in both legal and undocumented immigration. Meanwhile, the administration has boosted the number of Border Patrol agents and is stepping up the deportation of imprisoned “illegal” aliens. Along with anti-black racism, anti-immigrant chauvinism has long been wielded by the capitalist rulers to divide the working class and weaken its struggles against exploitation. We demand: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!

While Washington spokesmen decry the chaos wrought by the drug wars, it is the imperialist economic domination of Mexico that laid the basis for the spiraling violence. Beginning in the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund and other imperialist agencies dictated “debt restructuring” programs to Mexico and throughout the Third World that axed agricultural subsidies as well as social welfare programs. The effect was to wreck small agricultural production, touching off a massive influx of ruined peasants to the cities, creating a fertile ground for the rise of the drug trade and other sectors of the “informal economy.”

This trend qualitatively accelerated with the imposition of the NAFTA “free trade” agreement. In the 16 years since NAFTA was signed, the Mexican countryside has been devastated, including through the removal of protection against U.S.-produced corn and beans, the mainstays of the diet of the poor and the key staples grown by poor peasants. In Ciudad Juárez and other areas along the border, many peasants sought work in “free trade” maquiladora plants, where U.S. and other manufacturers pay miserable wages. But for most of those who came into the cities, finding work was hopeless. Furthermore, the current recession has severely restricted the traditional safety valve of migration to the U.S., and remittances from Mexicans living in el Norte—a major source of foreign currency and a lifeline for millions, especially in the countryside—have plummeted.

Under these circumstances, in much of rural Mexico, and especially for indigenous communities in the most remote and arid regions, drug cultivation provides the only source of livelihood. As an article in the Nation (3 August 2009) put it, “Today, with remittances, oil prices and tourism depressed, the narco trade is probably Mexico’s largest single earner of hard currency.”

As the NAFTA “free trade” rape of Mexico was being negotiated nearly 20 years ago, the SL/U.S. issued a joint statement with the GEM and the Trotskyist League of Canada that declared: “There is a burning need for an internationalist proletarian opposition which stands with the working class and impoverished peasantry of Mexico against the imperialist assault. The Canadian, U.S. and Mexican sections of the International Communist League are dedicated to building a revolutionary vanguard that can unite the working masses of the continent in common class struggle” (WV No. 530, 5 July 1991).

This proletarian internationalist perspective stands in sharp contrast to the pro-imperialist U.S. and Canadian labor bureaucracies, whose opposition to NAFTA was based on chauvinist protectionism. It also stands in opposition to the nationalist populism pushed by the Mexican trade-union misleaders, which ties the workers to the Mexican bourgeoisie. Mexico’s small reformist left follows suit, mainly through its support to the bourgeois PRD. Key to the emancipation of the proletariat on both sides of the Río Bravo (Rio Grande) is the fight for its political independence from all bourgeois parties.

The only road to the liberation of Mexico’s impoverished urban and rural masses is that of permanent revolution—the perspective laid out by Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the Bolshevik Party that led the October 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia. To solve the tasks of agrarian revolution and all-around social and economic modernization requires the seizure of power by Mexico’s proletariat at the head of all the exploited and oppressed. Expropriating the agricultural and industrial capitalists, a Mexican workers and peasants government would lay the basis for building a planned economy and would immediately face the need to extend socialist revolution to the U.S. imperialist colossus.

The emancipation of the working class and the oppressed in Mexico is indissolubly linked to that of workers in the U.S., where the millions of immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere are a key component of the multiracial proletariat. This underscores the crucial need to build Leninist-Trotskyist parties throughout the Americas, as part of the fight to reforge the Fourth International.

Narcoviolencia and State Terror

While brutally enforcing the imperialists’ economic dictates, Mexico’s capitalist rulers became increasingly tied into the booming drug trade. The regime of Carlos Salinas (1988-94), the second-to-last presidency of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was marked by corruption that was blatant even by Mexican standards and a shift from the traditional populism that marked decades of PRI rule. Along with the privatization of key sectors of the economy, Mexico was swept by drug-related corruption. During Salinas’s first year in office, his national police chief was found with $2.4 million in drug money in the trunk of his car. Beginning with the Salinas family itself, politicians moved closer to the drug lords, who were becoming more powerful as Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel in Colombia was being destroyed.

The institutionalization of drug-related corruption under the PRI actually served to control the kind of violence that has swept through Mexico in recent years. But the situation changed after the right-wing clerical PAN under Vicente Fox came to power in 2000 and Washington began to put intense pressure on the Mexican government to crack down on the drug trade. In his term of office, nearly 80,000 people were arrested on drug trafficking charges, most of them low-level dealers but also 15 cartel leaders, scores of “lieutenants” and 428 sicarios (hit men). In going after the cartels, Fox began extraditing Mexican citizens to the U.S., something that had been anathema to the PRI nationalists. The campaign destroyed the equilibrium between the different cartels and also between them and the government, touching off increasingly violent clashes.

Many of those killed in the drug violence have been agents of the government—policemen, soldiers, etc.—who hired themselves out to one or another cartel. Even before the current drug wars, Mexican police commonly moonlighted as criminal enforcers or kidnappers. Now each cartel boasts its own paramilitary force with sophisticated weaponry and professionally trained leadership. Like the infamous Los Zetas, these forces are recruited from elite soldiers and police squads. (The cartels pay much more than the government.)

Mexico’s rulers have marshaled the fears and outrage among the population over the drug wars into support for increased repression, including further cracking down on democratic rights. For Calderón, the “war” against the drug trade has also provided a chance to purge the government apparatus by installing PAN cronies in place of PRI leftovers.

It is the bourgeois state that is the biggest force for violence. While the cops in Mexico—and not only in Mexico—are plenty corrupt, the brutal violence they employ stems from the role they play, along with the military, courts and prisons, as a core component of the capitalist state. This murderous apparatus of repression cannot be reformed to act in the interest of the workers and the poor. It must be smashed through socialist revolution and replaced with a new state to impose working-class rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat—to expropriate and suppress the capitalist exploiters.

Ciudad Juárez: City Under Siege

The key staging ground for Calderón’s drug war is Ciudad Juárez, an important industrial city of 1.5 million people whose scores of maquiladoras have attracted thousands of migrants from the interior of Mexico. Long infamous for the unsolved brutal murders of hundreds of young women workers (see “Capitalism and Anti-Woman Terror,” WV No. 812, 24 October 2003), Juárez is also a key locus of the drug trade due to its proximity to the U.S.—across the border from El Paso. Narco News Bulletin online (17 April 2009) described the army’s “Joint Operation Juárez” as a “situation of de facto martial law” in which the planned deployment of 8,500 soldiers and 2,300 militarized police amounted to one officer for every 130 residents, and about 92 troops per square mile. The article reported:

“Soldiers have disarmed 380 transit police and will accompany them as they carry out their duties. Thirteen current and retired military officers have taken control of Juarez’s police force: Ret. Gen. Julian David Rivera Breton, who made a name for himself in Chiapas when he was one of the military officials in charge of anti-Zapatista operations there, is the new police commissioner.”

The troops are scheduled to stay until at least December. The new police officers, replacing those purged, were trained in urban combat at an army base and will carry military-issue German-made assault rifles.

The workers and poor of Juárez are direct targets of the military deployment. As of last June, the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission was looking into 2,500 reported torture cases involving military personnel and federal police. Longtime activist Géminis Ochoa, leader of the Che Guevara Street Vendors Union, was killed in the midst of organizing a demonstration against the army’s abuse of vendors. At least seven university professors have been murdered; all were involved in labor or social activism. Last May, Dr. Manuel Arroyo Galván, a professor of sociology at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez active around the rights of maquiladora workers, was shot six times in the head in downtown Juárez.

Mexico, like other Latin American countries dependent on U.S. imperialism, has never been a stable bourgeois democracy. Its military (the third-largest in Latin America) is not primarily designed for foreign combat but to repress the population, as the 15-year-long campaign against the Zapatistas in Chiapas makes clear. However, unlike in much of Latin America, the Mexican army has done the bidding of the civilian government since the end of the Mexican Revolution. Under the PRI, the state’s bloody arm was seen in the killing or disappearance of thousands of leftists, militant workers and peasants. In the Tlatelolco massacre of 2 October 1968, government forces killed some 1,000 student protesters in Mexico City. In the broader guerra sucia (dirty war) against the left from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, at least 2,000 people were disappeared or killed. Today the Mexican ruling class faces little threat from the left, which mainly operates under the PRD’s umbrella.

The dramatically increased role the military is now playing will only expand the numbers of victims of state terror. Army officers have been put in charge of several local or state police forces. Troops man checkpoints on the streets and highways while soldiers patrol cities in trucks with automatic weapons pointed at all and sundry. Many cities under occupation are industrial centers with histories of militant workers struggles. Army abuses—including illegal searches and arrest without cause, rape, sexual abuse, torture and death—reported to the National Human Rights Commission have surged from 182 in 2006, when Calderón deployed the military, to 1,230 in 2008. When residents of Monterrey, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Veracruz protested against the military last year, they were denounced in the bourgeois media as being tools of the cartels.

Frontera NorteSur (4 September 2009), an Internet journal published by New Mexico State University at Las Cruces, noted, “As the body count mounts, the violence increasingly resembles the ‘social cleansing’ carried out by death squads in Honduras, Brazil and other Latin American nations.” Critics of the government and social activists have been among those targeted. Journalists in the north of Mexico are regularly intimidated and threatened for exposing government corruption. In southern Mexico, supporters of the Zapatistas have been tortured under the pretext of the drug war, as have indigenous activists in Guerrero, a state long known for murderous state repression against leftists. Proceso magazine (22 March 2009) called the permanently militarized areas in that state a “counterinsurgency strategy camouflaged as federal action against the cultivation of drugs.” Elsewhere in Mexico, rumors have circulated about vigilante groups linked to the police, an ominous echo of the guerra sucia.

No Illusions in PRD Populism!

The “war on drugs” has been endorsed by politicians across the spectrum of bourgeois politics in Mexico. Harking back to when the country’s rulers offered some social programs and populist rhetoric along with brute force, leading PRDers like López Obrador blame the violence and chaos on Mexican neoliberal regimes, especially those of the PAN, for their corruption and gutting of state institutions. But when a rumor circulated that traffickers were planning to kill Calderón, the PRD closed ranks behind the Commander-in-Chief, with Senate PRD leader Carlos Navarrette declaring that “the Mexican state must make use of all its resources and strength” (El Imparcial, Hermosillo, 11 August 2009). The PRD has for a number of years carried out the “war on drugs” in Mexico City—for example, the raids in Tepito.

Echoing the reactionary anti-drug hysteria is the reformist Militante group, co-thinkers of the International Marxist Tendency of the late Ted Grant. When the government was planning to lessen penalties for possession of small portions of drugs—a supportable if minimal reform—Militante denounced Calderón from the right, claiming in a 2 May 2009 article on its Web site that “the PAN governments have tried to legalize drugs with the objective of undermining the political and organizational capacity of the Mexican youth.” This is of a piece with the Grantites’ long history of retrograde social positions internationally, including hailing anti-drug vigilantism in France, where black African and North African youth are specially targeted by the cops (see the 1994 Spartacist pamphlet, Militant Labour’s Touching Faith in the Capitalist State).

In the U.S., International Socialist Review (July/August 2009), published by the International Socialist Organization (ISO), opined that through decriminalization, “The billions of dollars wasted on the war on drugs in Mexico could go to rebuild the Mexican economy in order to provide the education and jobs that the Mexican people so desperately need. In the United States, the money could be put toward drug treatment instead of incarceration.” One might think that the ISO was smoking some peculiar stuff here. But the dream that the imperialists who ruthlessly exploit workers at home and abroad and their bagmen south of the border would open jail-cell doors and “rebuild” an economy they systematically loot is illustrative of reformism’s entire framework: the notion that the bourgeois state can be pressured to serve the interests of the exploited and the oppressed.

The ISO’s reformist plea was a faint echo of the plan offered by the PRD’s López Obrador, who appealed last March in an open letter to Hillary Clinton: “We think that it is a mistake to confront the problem of the lack of safety and of violence with an iron hand, with the military, with jails, with more severe laws and longer prison terms. The solution to the scourge of criminal behavior must come by retaking control of the state, by changing the current economic model and by guaranteeing better living and working conditions to the population.”

Bourgeois-populist parties like the PRD cannot fundamentally better the living and working conditions of the workers and peasants. When in power, their job is to administer the capitalist profit system and enforce its needs against the working people, occasionally adding some social programs to try to maintain class peace. And when faced with workers, students and others fighting for their rights and livelihoods, the PRD no less than the PRI and PAN uses organized state violence.

Offered as an alternative to neoliberalism, populist appeals serve to reinforce the chains binding the combative Mexican proletariat to the capitalist order. By preaching the common interests of “the people,” populist nationalism obscures the irreconcilable class divide between the working class and the bourgeoisie that exploits its labor for profit. As the GEM wrote in defending the SME electrical workers union:

“The proletariat has unique class interests and enormous social power based on its role in the productive process; this means it is called upon to play the leading role in championing the aspirations of all the poor and oppressed through its own emancipation and the establishment of a workers and peasants government. The working class does not lack the will to fight; but as long as it remains dominated by the politics of bourgeois nationalist populism, it will be derailed towards illusions in the democratic reform of capitalism.”

The GEM fights to break militant workers and radical youth from the PRD and all forms of bourgeois nationalism. As the North American sections of the ICL, the GEM, SL/U.S. and TLC are dedicated to the struggle to forge Trotskyist workers parties that will lead the fight for socialist revolution from the Yukon to the Yucatán.

[ellipsis]

Worker's Vanguard, what tripe! I had a subscription and I hated it.

[Os Cangaceiros]

A few months back there was an attempt to form an anti-drug militia in Michoacan, patterned after the Zapatistas, I forget the name of its head, subcommandante Arturo or something. Haven't heard from them since.

Their fowarding address is probably under a few feet of soil at this point, if they were serious.

Saw this (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12085405) story posted on anarchistnews earlier.

[Os Cangaceiros]

US renews travel advisory regarding Mexico as drug violence increases (http://www.rttnews.com/Content/Policy.aspx?Id=1604342&SM=1)

Drug violence has been rising in tourist areas like Acapulco, where I heard they've had almost 140 drug-related murders in the last few months.

[Ligeia]

Not only the US has their travel advisory also :
• France
• Spain
• UK
• Germany
• Australia
• Switzerland
• El Salvador
• Guatemala
• Honduras

(Then again it's all about 9 of 31 states. So there are still plenty of tourist destinations.)

Not only has drug-related violence risen this year (like all the past years since 2006), they suddenly find mass graves like every week.
I only hope that the drug cartels don't get officialy labeled as "terrorist" by the U.S.government and ...because of all that could follow afterwards. As if the situation isn't abysmal already.

[Dunk]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032600/ns/dateline_nbc-dateline_nbc

Dateline has a good six-part series on the drug war in Mexico.

After you open the above URL, find "Inside Mexico's Drug War" under the Video section.

[CHEtheLIBERATOR]

SUPPORT EL ZAPATISTAS in there fight against drugs and poverty!!! Join my group

[Aspiring Humanist]

Its the governments fault for being so corrupt and collaborating with the drug cartels and right wing paramilitaries like Peace and Justice

[Reznov]

Anyone keep tabs on The Zapatista movement?

Been wondering how their struggle is going

[Lunatic Concept]

Well this is the EPR in case anyone was wondering. Seem to be much more militaristic and aggressive than the Zapatistas. Seem more like the FARC tbh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ej%C3%A9rcito_Popular_Revolucionario

[black magick hustla]

the epr are a joke and i would doubt they have more than a hundred militants. anyway, as i said, anybody who talks about leftist guerrillas doing front to 15k well armed standing paramilitary armies roleplays too much and has no idea about the gravity of the situation. fuck the cartels, those murderous vermin and fuck the mexican state fuck decomposing capitalism. in some places like chihuahua buisnessmen are funding their own paramilitaries to make front to the cartels. what do people expect when the average paramilitary is a teenager looking for some girls and some dope


fuckkkkkkkkkkk colombian auc all over again

[RedSunRising]

When it comes to the crunch malador you will side with the cartels and the US forces over a popular rebellion, especially if it is a disciplined one led by a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vanguard.

[black magick hustla]

When it comes to the crunch malador you will side with the cartels and the US forces over a popular rebellion, especially if it is a disciplined one led by a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vanguard.

whatever dawg some of my friends died because of that shit in that area you can go fuck yourself with your leftist fantasies of a bunch of 100 college dropouts doing front to 15k children of misery with guns. go type about the zapatistas leading commandos against people with bazookas granades and 15k people

[RedSunRising]

whatever dawg some of my friends died because of that shit in that area you can go fuck yourself with your leftist fantasies of a bunch of 100 college dropouts doing front to 15k children of misery with guns. go type about the zapatistas leading commandos against people with bazookas granades and 15k people

So we dont even like the Zapatistas now.

If the ICC actual had a mass following with all the crap that comes with it would certain people being supporting them? :rolleyes:

[Magón]

When it comes to the crunch malador you will side with the cartels and the US forces over a popular rebellion, especially if it is a disciplined one led by a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist vanguard.

Yeah . . . no, the likelihood of an MLM Vanguard picking up in Mexico is slim to none.

Sorry RedSunRising.

[RedSunRising]

. no, the likelihood of an MLM Vanguard picking up in Mexico is slim to none.

Not true, as I understand the People's war has already begun there.

[Magón]

Not true, as I understand the People's war has already begun there.

I've lived there, worked there, vacationed all around the damn place, and known/know people there still. A people's war is not underway, and it's not going to be under any of your MLM leadership.


Example being the end result of the Zapatista's.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Besides the Zapatistas, the EPR and a couple really small, scattered groups in southern Mexico, there isn't much at all in the way of left-oriented resistance groups. Mexico has had a number of resistance groups over the course of it's history, buuuut...they tend to not amount to much, going from my recollection of them in a book I read a long time ago called Homage to Chiapas. An example being some Maoist group way back when that detonated a few bombs and then vanished forever.

The history of the indigenous/Mayan resistance in southern Mexico (which has been going on for centuries) is pretty impressive, though. That really is a "protracted people's war". Not really a left-wing movement, though, just a movement of a bunch of people who were getting rammed by the Spaniards, who then handed the reigns off to the racist Mexican state, who continued the ramming.

[Os Cangaceiros]

eleven more mass graves found in southern mexico (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/06/20116322323281581.html)

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

eleven more mass graves found in southern mexico (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/06/20116322323281581.html)


Eleven mass graves have been found in the southern state of Coahuila, according to officials.

...

The cache, found at a ranch near the industrial city of Monclova in the northern state of Coahuila, included four mortar shells, two rocket-propelled grenades, dozens of assault rifles, sniper rifles and two bows, the defence department said.

um... what? But yeah, Coahuila borders Texas.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Bad form, Al Jazeera.

[Os Cangaceiros]

third deadliest day since Calderon took office (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/06/201169194345552228.html)

[Os Cangaceiros]

feds intentionally allowed thousands of weapons to enter Mexico (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/10/earlyshow/main20070475.shtml)

cartels shoot down mexican military helicopter (http://deadlinelive.info/2011/06/09/mexican-military-helicopter-shot-down-with-batf-50-caliber-rifle-sold-to-drug-cartels/)

[Os Cangaceiros]

From AP:


MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican marines say they seized more than 4 tons of marijuana, arrested 36 cartel members and killed 11 others during five days of raids through the violent border state of Tamaulipas.

Those arrested include the alleged head of the Gulf Cartel in the town of Miguel Aleman, who was captured after a gunfight in which 10 cartel members died. The marijuana was found in two locations.

Marine spokesman Jose Luis Vergara said in a press conference in Matamoros that marines also seized 251 hand grenades and 35 grenade launchers.

The Gulf Cartel was once the dominant trafficking network in the area but is now in a war with the surging Zetas cartel for control.

[the last donut of the night]

this is fucking terrifying

[Os Cangaceiros]

(AP)Hundreds of people cowered for about two hours inside a shopping mall in the resort town of Cabo San Lucas Saturday while security forces traded sporadic gunfire with armed men in the parking lot and then searched stores for suspects.

No one was injured in the gunbattle, but some cars and entrance doors to the shopping center were damaged, authorities said.

Police said they arrested two men who were also suspected of being involved in an overnight attack near the mall that killed a Mexican marine.

Authorities said the shooting at the Plaza Sendero shopping center erupted when marines and police found armed men in the parking lot about 1 p.m. Police ordered shoppers and employees to stay inside during the battle and the later search of the mall.

The military said army troops arrived to help secure the area and caught one suspect, who was turned over to city officials. The soldiers also provided security for the shoppers and employees inside the mall, who were allowed to leave around 3 p.m.

.

[Os Cangaceiros]

cartels target Mexico's oil supply (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/open-veins-of-mexico)



By late 2010, threats and violence by drug gangs are preventing government oil workers from reaching installations in northern Mexico and costing PEMEX $350,000 a day in lost production; shutting down the equivalent of about 100 million cubic feet of natural gas production per day or about $10.5 million per month in natural gas revenues.[5] (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/open-veins-of-mexico#_ftn5) PEMEX reported 40,000 incidents–including accidents, criminal acts and attacks– between 2000 and 2010, according to Milenio. Last year’s incidents (2010) included 300 instances of criminals siphoning fuel from pipelines.[6] (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/open-veins-of-mexico#_ftn6) This far in 2011, PEMEX is reported to have lost between 7-12 Billion Pesos to tomas clandestinas.[7] (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/open-veins-of-mexico#_ftn7) By August 2001 a total of 769 tomas clandestinas had been identified, with the states of Sinaloa, Veracruz and Tamaulipas impacted (suggesting resource extraction is practiced by cartels other than Los Zetas since criminal enterprise in Sinaloa is controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel/Federation).[8] (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/open-veins-of-mexico#_ftn8)

Bold thefts and chronic resource extraction challenge and embarrass the state and strengthen organized crime. One significant conspiracy netting $1 billion in siphoned oil, resold in U.S., has dealt a major blow to the Mexican treasury and public confidence. As the Washington Post reported, Mexican drug gangs are pilfering large quantities of oil from PEMEX to fund their enterprises, "Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico's pipelines over the past two years."[9] (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/open-veins-of-mexico#_ftn9)

According to a recent Wall Street Journal feature, "Mexican crime groups have virtually taken over the pipeline system of Mexico's state oil monopoly, stealing growing amounts of fuel and gaining an important source of new revenue as they fight other gangs and Mexico's government, according to the oil company."[10] (http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/open-veins-of-mexico#_ftn10) The narco/petro-gangsters exploit cross-border black and grey markets for oil and derivatives to gain direct profit and revenue, but perhaps more importantly as a vehicle for money laundering to cleanse proceeds from other illicit businesses such as drug and human trafficking. Conveniently, they can exploit many of the pre-existing illicit networks and smuggling circuits, drug trafficking routes, and facilitating gangs.

holy shit

[Os Cangaceiros]

REYNOSA, MEXICO - Technology used to transmit your voice over a cell phone or the programming to your TV is in the hands of the cartel. The Mexican government busted a narco-communications system just across the border in Reynosa.

Pictures taken by Mexican soldiers detail the level of sophistication. They're narco-towers, communication equipment set up by the cartel and busted by the Mexican government in Reynosa.

"It's obviously been done by professionals," says Claude Copeland, a communications expert.

Copeland and his staff at Tri-County Communications work with these kinds of towers all the time. He recognizes much of the technology in the photos.

"There's some microwaves that are obviously sending data to some distant points, and then there's some two-way antennas that would be used similar to what police would use for car to car voice traffic," says Copeland.

The same types of microwave transmitters are fitted on TV stations.

"Obviously there's a lot of money to be made in the drug business, and I think a site built this well is an indication of the type of money that they have backing up this kind of organization," says Copeland.

It's proof that the cartels’ pockets run deep. A total of nine antennas were busted by Mexican officials during last week's operation. Experts believe the cartel is having to create its own network because the government controls much of Mexico’s infrastructure.


http://www.krgv.com/news/local/story/Mexican-Authorities-Bust-Communication-Tower-Used/zIFfUUYWO06Xf5YPd1eyrw.cspx

[Os Cangaceiros]

MEXICO CITY — Mexican Interior Minister Francisco Blake was killed in a helicopter crash on Friday in a huge blow to the government as it fights powerful drug cartels.

Blake, who for many Mexicans embodied the government’s crackdown on the drug trade, is the second Mexican interior minister in President Felipe Calderon’s presidency to be killed in an aviation accident in three years.

Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard said bad weather may have been responsible for the crash. Speculation could arise that foul play was involved but there has been no indication of this so far.

Television images showed the scattered wreckage of the helicopter on a hillside south of the capital, and the government confirmed that Blake and all others on board were killed. It did not say what caused the crash.

Mexico is locked in a brutal conflict against drug gangs that has killed 45,000 people in the last five years and Blake was a key member of Calderon’s security team.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/11/second-mexican-interior-minister-killed-in-air-accident/

[Os Cangaceiros]

LAREDO — The high walls of Alexander Estates, an affluent development nestled near this border city’s country club and golf course, were supposed to keep the narcotics world at bay. But when federal agents raided the stately home of a downtown perfume salesman in January, it reinforced a notion that is feared by Texas leaders: the drug war (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/mexico/drug_trafficking/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) spillover from Mexico (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/mexico/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) is much broader than shootouts and kidnappings — it is cloaked in the seemingly routine business transactions of the border economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/us/a-money-laundering-case-in-laredo-speaks-to-the-fears-of-texas-leaders.html

[OhYesIdid]

this is fucking terrifying

the wort part? the federal government and the army are in on it, The US has already picked a side (Sinaloa) and we Mexicans live in fear of both the ruthless gangsters and the rapacious army-police, as they both impose a reign of terror over the unprepared populous.
there are many leftist publications down her that agree with me, but some of you may consider this as more "legit": *http://m.npr.org/story/126890838?storyId=126890838&from=mobile

[Urban Rubble]

If anyone wants to discuss the situation in Mexico in further detail I'd love to provide some information. I spent the summer working with the Movement for Peace participating in Caravans throughout the country. It's quite exciting as it's the first real mobilization against the drug violence coming from below. On the Caravans we went from Mexico City north through San Luis Potosi, Durango, Monterrey, Torreon, Saltillo, Chihuahua, Juarez, etc. Later we did another from Mexico City through Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco Veracruz and Puebla. We had electricians from the SME on board, farmers from San Salvador Atenco, Triqui Indians from San Juan Copala, victims of drug violence as well as the public face of the movement, the poet Javier Sicilia. The trip through the north was focused on drug violence, while the southern route we visited Zapatista and other indigenous communities as well as aid shelters for Central American migrants making the journey north.

I'm back in Seattle now but I continue to follow the situation down there closely. Someone posted link to an article from the ICL which does a decent job at describing the situation, though their claim that "mom and pop" gunstores in the U.S. Southwest are being unfairly blamed for arming the cartels is, well, bullshit. The majority of the violence is committed with assault rifles and small arms, which are being bought in bulk from these stores and driven over the border. They're being sold outright, with many more being listed as stolen or missing and being sold in backroom deals. Gun store owners in the south are getting rich of the blood in Mexico and the Spartacus' dogmatic stance on guns has no connection to reality.

I'd reccomend John Gibler's recent book "To Die in Mexico" for a quick introduction as well, it's really great.

[Prometeo liberado]

This conflict is very close to me, considering A. I live right on the border on the Texas side, and B. Most of my family lives in Sinaloa (in fact, that's where I was born and raised).

Thing is, I'm stumped as to what could be done to end it. I hear about all the grizzly murders and mutilations done by the cartels and their psychopathic goons, and I wish nothing but death on these soulless demons. Yet at the same time, I realize this conflict didn't start out of nowhere. I know the Mexican government, in cooperation with the racist American war on drugs, basically stirred the hornet's nest, and decided to go to war with the cartels. And for that, I cannot say I want the government to keep this war going.

All I see is, two powerful factions vying for control of Mexico: the "legitimate" bourgeois government of Mexico, backed by the US, and the illegitimate lumpen-bourgeois cartels. And where is the Mexican working class in all this? Caught up in the hail of bullets, lying on the floor in a puddle of their own blood.

I have to say, I'm utterly lost. It's easy enough to say "the answer is obviously a working class revolution," but that is nowhere in the horizon. So what can be done to end the current bloodshed now?

I wish that I could say that there is a simple solution. This violence and the greed that spawned it is a by-product of many factors. Without the help of countries such as Israel, Czech Republic, Germany, France and i'm sure others, there wouldn't be such a stockpile of arms throught the region. But sadly it's got more to do with consumption, and until society recognizes the disease and those who suffer in it and why, then those who profit from misery will keep killing to sell it to you. The governments of the U.S., Central and South America are in a sense reaping what they've sown.They can not deal with, what they see as merely renegade capitalism. If they could find a way to regulate, tax and market these drugs to seem "safe" the way that Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline or Johnson and Johnson does to sell their garbage then they would. Its just not their top priority.

[Os Cangaceiros]

If anyone wants to discuss the situation in Mexico in further detail I'd love to provide some information. I spent the summer working with the Movement for Peace participating in Caravans throughout the country. It's quite exciting as it's the first real mobilization against the drug violence coming from below. On the Caravans we went from Mexico City north through San Luis Potosi, Durango, Monterrey, Torreon, Saltillo, Chihuahua, Juarez, etc. Later we did another from Mexico City through Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco Veracruz and Puebla. We had electricians from the SME on board, farmers from San Salvador Atenco, Triqui Indians from San Juan Copala, victims of drug violence as well as the public face of the movement, the poet Javier Sicilia. The trip through the north was focused on drug violence, while the southern route we visited Zapatista and other indigenous communities as well as aid shelters for Central American migrants making the journey north.

I'm back in Seattle now but I continue to follow the situation down there closely. Someone posted link to an article from the ICL which does a decent job at describing the situation, though their claim that "mom and pop" gunstores in the U.S. Southwest are being unfairly blamed for arming the cartels is, well, bullshit. The majority of the violence is committed with assault rifles and small arms, which are being bought in bulk from these stores and driven over the border. They're being sold outright, with many more being listed as stolen or missing and being sold in backroom deals. Gun store owners in the south are getting rich of the blood in Mexico and the Spartacus' dogmatic stance on guns has no connection to reality.

I'd reccomend John Gibler's recent book "To Die in Mexico" for a quick introduction as well, it's really great.

A lot of the weapons the cartels have also come from central American stockpiles, from places like Guatemala etc. You cant buy grenades in a mom and pop gunstore.

[Urban Rubble]

A lot of the weapons the cartels have also come from central American stockpiles, from places like Guatemala etc. You cant buy grenades in a mom and pop gunstore.

Again, the vast majority of violence isn't being committed with grenades or RPG's. Those are not great weapons for assassinations. The weapons of choice are assault rifles and pistols.

Those weapons do exist, they mainly come from corrupt officers within the Mexican military as well as Guatemala. But they're not really a contributing factor in the violence.

[Os Cangaceiros]

The majority of weapons are never traced, though. Out of about 30,000 weapons seized, weren't only about 4,000 traceable? The Mexican government doesn't even submit the majority of weapons seized for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to look at, either...guns that clearly originated at one time in Mexico (which has a firearm registry system), guns that obviously came from a place that wasn't either Mexico OR the USA, and guns with unreadable serial numbers.

Ultimately the illegal organizations in Mexico have a lot of resources and capital, it would be weird to assume that they depend totally on the USA for their guns (like some in the media here claim). Although maybe a glock just suits their purposes better than something more extravagent.

[Urban Rubble]

The majority of weapons are never traced, though. Out of about 30,000 weapons seized, weren't only about 4,000 traceable? The Mexican government doesn't even submit the majority of weapons seized for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to look at, either...guns that clearly originated at one time in Mexico (which has a firearm registry system), guns that obviously came from a place that wasn't either Mexico OR the USA, and guns with unreadable serial numbers.

Ultimately the illegal organizations in Mexico have a lot of resources and capital, it would be weird to assume that they depend totally on the USA for their guns (like some in the media here claim). Although maybe a glock just suits their purposes better than something more extravagent.

I don't know where you're getting those numbers.

Senator Feinstein released a report earlier in the year that claimed roughly 29,000 weapons were seized in Mexico in 2009 and 2010. Of those, 20,000 came from the U.S., 15,000 being actually produced and sold in the U.S., 5,000 just moving "through" the country. The remaining 9,000 weapons were EITHER from outside sources OR were unable to be traced.

Why would that be "weird" to assume that cartels get their weapons in the U.S.? Do you really think it's easier and/or cheaper to depend on the black market for weapons when you can simply drive over the border and buy them in a shop? Yes, the cartels have resources, and they don't attain them by making ridiculous business decisions.

So far there has been little to no evidence produced to show that Mexican drug cartels are buying arms from Eastern European dealers, Russians or Iranians or any other overseas suppliers as has often been hinted at in the media. Although weapons coming from Central and South America have turned up in Mexico (usually from the Guatemalan military, which has long been infiltrated by the Zetas), the numbers are nothing compared to the amount of U.S. made guns circulating in Mexico.

What HAS been proven is that the cartels are paying off gun store owners in the U.S., building arms depots along the border and paying off individuals in American border towns to smuggle small arms into Mexico. That we know for a fact.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I don't know where you're getting those numbers.





It was the "90 percent myth" that galvanized some gun-rights advocates, who felt the Obama administration was manipulating statistics to justify a crackdown. Some administration officials, especially in 2009, misstated ATF statistics by saying they showed that 90 percent of all firearms seized by the Mexican government in 2008 came from the United States.

The truth was, Mexico seized about 30,000 firearms that year, and of those, the ATF successfully traced about 4,000. Of that subset, 87 percent came from the United States. Mexico asks U.S. officials to trace only those guns likely to have a U.S. nexus.

The 90 percent figure was misleading, said Scott Stewart, a vice president at Stratfor Global Intelligence, who wrote a report this year titled "Mexico's Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth."

Still, Stewart said in an interview, the U.S. is a key supplier - especially of the assault rifles often used in drug-war battles.

"Clearly, there are certain classes of guns that it's probably true for," said Stewart, a former special agent for the State Department. "If you have an AK-47 variant that was semiautomatic then converted (to fully automatic), or an AR-15 that was semiauto and converted, it probably did come from the U.S."

You shouldn't imagine truckloads of guns moving south, though, Stewart said. A July 2010 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City described it this way: Rather than an "iron river" of weapons flowing south, the flow is more like "thousands of small streams."


Read more: http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/mexico-gun-stats-spark-backlash/article_ace91460-0d8e-594b-8477-d6490b69edac.html#ixzz1iDVNhvCx

I'm not saying that eastern european arms dealers are giving them guns, or even that small arms from the USA arent involved, but Mexico's proximity to a less than incorruptable area of the world shouldn't be discounted as a source of weapons.

[Urban Rubble]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/08/us-gun-smugglers-mexico-cartel

This article discusses an ATF operation which discovered that 23 individuals in Texas alone were making legal purchases of assault rifles, pistols and sniper rifles to arm Mexico's most violent cartel, Los Zetas. That's just what they found in one state, and one cartel (there are at least 18 cartels operating in Mexico right now). This is simply the easiest and most cost effective way of arming themselves. It makes no sense to deal with underground trafficking networks when you have such an easily accessible source in the U.S. I've yet to see much credible evidence of cartels making large scale arms purchases in any other way (this of course excludes the "contributions" from Guatemalan and Mexican military elements, that is certainly a reality).

[Os Cangaceiros]

It's been a gruesome day for Mexican drug-gang violence in Nuevo Laredo, where nine tortured corpses were hung from a highway bridge and 14 decapitated bodies were stuffed into a van, according to news reports from across the Texas border.

Motorists encountered the dangling bodies of five men and four women early this morning next to a profane message alluding to drug gang disputes, police said. (If you dare, Borderland Beat (http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2012/05/nine-bodies-found-hanging-off-nuevo.html) has photos.) Hours later, police found the bodies and 14 severed heads in coolers outside city hall, the AFP news agency reports (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jYZQDjfn3I2IItb5LcJRL7muj2PQ?docId=CNG.dc1c0 d03f9f7b4d37ef6ff6590404bcc.271).

.

[Os Cangaceiros]

49 headless corpses found in northern mexico (http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/05/14/mexico-4-headless-bodies-is-third-massacre-in-ten-days-in-triangle-death/?test=latestnews)

[Os Cangaceiros]

The struggle in Mexico that began in 2006 continues unabated. The Mexican government has won victories in the sense that over a dozen major figures in the crime cartels have been captured or killed. Note that I use the term, "Crime Cartels", instead of the usual "Drug Cartel" term. This is because the very cartels that grew to power behind the smuggling of drugs into Mexico and then into the USA, have branched out into full-blown Mafia style organized crime syndicates. Drug smuggling is still a major part of business amongst the cartels, but people smuggling, kidnapping, extortion, auto theft/chop shops, receiving stolen property, plus murder for hire, have become huge sources of income.

Insurgency, Crime Cartels, Mafia Or Drug Smuggling Rings: Nomenclature Doesn't Matter - WHAT MATTERS IS THAT MEXICANS ARE DYING IN RECORD NUMBERS.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the problem in Mexico an "insurgency." President Felipe Calderon has claimed the cartels are behind acts of terrorism. President Barack Obama says the cartels are not terrorist organizations, nor is there an insurgency in Mexico. I guess the definitions are really with the person with a gun in their face! With now over 40,000 Mexicans killed since 2006, in addition to a smaller number of Americans, I fall on the side of calling the matter a criminal "insurgency" as opposed to a politically motivated one. Yet, one must also consider that President Calderon is battling the cartels not to keep violence, drugs and other criminal activity from ravaging Mexico, but to keep Mexico from being turned into, as some have called it, a narco-state, or as I see it, a state controlled by very powerful organized crime syndicates. You decide.

In this past few weeks alone, within the time it took me to write this article, according to the M3 Report published by the Border Patrol Association, just one of several sources of my Intel on cartel violence, the crime cartels have killed:

2-soldiers
3-Marines
1- State prison director and 4 prison guards
1- Mayor and 2 bodyguards
1-state Governor and 3 bodyguards
38- Executions of civilians

Most of these events occurred in Mexican states along our border. If one forges deeper into Mexico proper, the number of those killed by the cartels, including the Mexican police, government officials and military, jump dramatically. From Acapulco to Cancun, from the state of Guerrero to Quintana Roo, the battle for cartel turf continues.

Add to this the fact that the cartels have learned for expansion purposes the value of imposing fear upon a community or nation, and you now have routine decapitations, hanging victims from highway overpasses, and last but not least, adopting symbolic mutilations. It should be noted that according to some captured cartel leaders, the idea of decapitating opponents came from watching the TV media display Al Qaeda execution videos.

http://www.iacsp.com/latest_article.php

[Os Cangaceiros]

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Armed gunmen burst into a drug rehabilitation clinic in northern Mexico late on Sunday, leaving 11 people dead and at least 8 wounded almost a year to the day after a similar fatal attack nearby.

State police said the assault, part of a drug war widely estimated to have claimed more than 55,000 lives in less than six years, took place in the outskirts of Torreon, an industrial city in the border state of Coahuila. They could not immediately give more details.

In June last year, 13 people were killed at a rehab center in the same city.
One worker at a drug recovery center in the border town of Ciudad Juarez said recently that traffickers sometimes seek shelter at the centers, endangering other patients when their rivals seek them out.

Mexico's drug cartels have mainly focused on U.S. narcotics consumers but numbers of home-grown users are increasing, creating new turf wars that threaten to further stretch the country's security forces.

Similar attacks have happened in other violent border cities.

In a 2010, two dozen men armed with automatic weapons stormed the "Faith and Life" drug clinic in the city of Chihuahua and killed 19 patients all under the age of 25.
With a presidential election less than a month away, a spate of gruesome drug-related murders - including the dumping last month of 49 decapitated bodies on a highway outside the major city of Monterrey - is shining an unwelcome spotlight on the country's security situation.

President Felipe Calderon is barred by law from running for another term, and his conservative party looks unlikely to win endorsement from an electorate increasingly disenchanted with his failure to get to grips with the spiraling violence.

The party's candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota, is lagging in third place in the polls.

Opposition frontrunner Enrique Pena Nieto, from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, says Calderon' army-backed drug war has failed and promises to change the country's course if he wins the July 1 vote.

Pena Nieto is not offering a radical departure from Calderon's policies but polls show voters believe he will do a better job of curbing violence.

He proposes creating a military police force to fight drug gangs and wants to carry forward reforms to the justice system that aim to professionalize criminal investigators and courts.

.

[Thelonious]

I wish that I could say that there is a simple solution. This violence and the greed that spawned it is a by-product of many factors. Without the help of countries such as Israel, Czech Republic, Germany, France and i'm sure others, there wouldn't be such a stockpile of arms throught the region. But sadly it's got more to do with consumption, and until society recognizes the disease and those who suffer in it and why, then those who profit from misery will keep killing to sell it to you. The governments of the U.S., Central and South America are in a sense reaping what they've sown.They can not deal with, what they see as merely renegade capitalism. If they could find a way to regulate, tax and market these drugs to seem "safe" the way that Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline or Johnson and Johnson does to sell their garbage then they would. Its just not their top priority.

Thank you for your very intelligent post. I agree with you 100%.

I had a discussion with a co-worker of mine. He stated that the legalization of all drugs on the North American continent would immediately put a stop to all the violence associated with the drug trade. I explained to him that legalizing drugs does nothing to deal with the causes of the problem, which is, as you stated, consumption by individuals who suffer from the disease of addiction. And legalizing drugs would only put the billions of dollars associated with it's trade into the hands of the big drug manufacturers and insurance companies. They are doing enough damage on their own already.
I posed to him this question: "Has legalizing alcohol stopped alcohol related crimes?" To which he replied with a laundry list of problems that prohibition caused.

My in-laws live in the state of Oaxaca in a very peaceful area seemingly untouched by drug violence. Last July a severed head was found along highway 125 about 20 minutes in from the Pacific coast; just outside the boundaries of my father-in-law's farm. This highway has become an alternative shipment route to the heavily patrolled highway along the coast. There are no areas in Mexico that are completely insulated from this violence.

[Red Banana]

And legalizing drugs would only put the billions of dollars associated with it's trade into the hands of the big drug manufacturers and insurance companies.

While keeping drugs illegal only puts the billions of dollars associated with it's trade into the hands of organized crime.


I posed to him this question: "Has legalizing alcohol stopped alcohol related crimes?"

Stopped? No, of course not.
Massively reduced? Undeniably.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Drug legalization in the USA will be a slow process with respect to marijuana. With respect to cocaine and heroin I would be astonished if it happened even twenty years in the future. The plain fact is that alcohol consumption definitely increased after the re-legalization of alcohol and the prospect of increased heroin and cocaine use will prevent any serious moves toward legalization.

My best advice to the Mexican people is to convince the Mexican government to discontinue the Calderon war on drug policy. Why should Mexicans bleed and die in a war to prevent the transportation of a product that gringos crave. Por gue morir por los Estados Unidos?:confused:

[Os Cangaceiros]

I wouldn't be suprised if marijuana becomes legalized on the entire US west coast within the next 5-10 years. With legalizations elsewhere as well, esp. in the northeast. The prohibitionists are losing the debate on marijuana, they're losing the "long game".


I posed to him this question: "Has legalizing alcohol stopped alcohol related crimes?" To which he replied with a laundry list of problems that prohibition caused.

It did largely stop the crimes associated with alcohol manufacture and sale in the USA.

[Thelonious]

[QUOTE]I wouldn't be suprised if marijuana becomes legalized on the entire US west coast within the next 5-10 years. With legalizations elsewhere as well, esp. in the northeast. The prohibitionists are losing the debate on marijuana, they're losing the "long game".
I agree that we will see legalization of marijuana in many more states in the coming years. The question is: How will the legalization of marijuana in the US effect the Mexican cartels? And what if cocaine was legalized in the US?