Mexican border drug war mayhem instills a new fear
Drug war mayhem instills a new fear - Los Angeles Times
CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO — Scooped up by gunmen as she walked near her home, 12-year-old Alexia Moreno hardly had a chance. The gangsters were driving straight into a shootout. Within minutes, she was dead, shot in the head as she cowered in the back seat.It was two weeks before her sixth-grade graduation.
Alexia’s death in a city so accustomed to death struck a nerve because she was, in this city tortured by killings, broad-daylight gun battles and rampant kidnappings, an innocent victim.
In the last few days, the neighboring state of Sinaloa has been shocked by a wave of violence that has taken the lives of many innocents, including another 12-year-old girl. Authorities said Tuesday that more than 1,200 additional federal police were deployed to Sinaloa as part of a nationwide government offensive involving about 40,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police officers.
Gun battles interrupt traffic in the middle of the day along Triumph of the Republic Boulevard and the city’s other main drags; corpses, sometimes mutilated or headless, turn up at shopping centers and fast-food joints; hospitals come under machine-gun fire. Ominous voices break into emergency-frequency radio traffic, warning paramedics not to pick up bodies, journalists not to approach the scene.
Nearly a third of Mexico’s drug-related killings in this record year have been registered in Juarez and its surroundings.
Take last month, for example: In one not particularly unusual weekend, 17 people, including a journalist, were killed; the sister-in-law of a U.S. congressman was kidnapped; and a dozen businesses were set ablaze after receiving threats.
The month before that, Juarez’s top police commander resigned and fled after his second- and third-in-command were assassinated along with a dozen or so other officers, some named on a hit list.
Last year’s police commander was arrested in February on charges of attempting to smuggle a ton of marijuana into the U.S. through El Paso. He pleaded guilty in a U.S. court. Reyes said the police are being overhauled and screened in an effort to remove the corrupt and the drug users among them.
Up to 20% of the police force is corrupt and will be fired, said a senior official who requested anonymity because the purge is ongoing.
Innocent Mexicans are dying daily and law enforcement is crumbling all along the Mexican border as the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels fight it out for control over the trafficking of mostly marijuana into the United States. Mostly low-grade marijuana that any cannabis connoisseur would turn down even if it were free. The kind of marijuana that would never be able to compete against the top domestically-grown marijuana in the US.
You know what you never read about, at least in the past eighty years? 12-year-old girls shot to death in a turf war between rival bootleggers. Marijuana never killed anybody, but marijuana prohibition is a serial killer.
Tags: Ciudad Juarez, Juarez, Mexico, Sinaloa
