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.
Reyes, D-Texas, declined to comment. The kidnapping was first reported on the Narcosphere Web site, which attributed the report and knowledge of the victim’s relationship to Reyes to a DEA official in El Paso.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement was the lead U.S. agency in the incident, but the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration were also involved. However, neither agency would release any details, including when the incident took place.
The incident comes as kidnappings have become more common in Juárez possibly due to drug trafficking gangs snatching victims targeted for death or marks held for ransom to raise funds for the ongoing war for control of the region’s smuggling corridor.
Fears of kidnappings, extortion and violence that has claimed nearly 500 lives this year have caused some Juarenses to move to El Paso and even seek asylum in the United States.
The killings have continued daily. Monday, an unidentified man’s dismembered body was found in Rancho Anapra, state police said. The head, arms and legs were found in separate backpacks about 50 meters away from the torso, which was wrapped in a blanket. At least four deaths occurred Tuesday.
A group of about 300 owners of junk yards, mechanic shops, used-car lots and other auto-related businesses have closed down because of kidnappings and robberies, the Norte de Ciudad Juárez newspaper reported Tuesday.
Last week, four members of the union of yonkeros (junk yard owners) were kidnapped and released after paying thousands of dollars, the Norte reported.
A current U.S. State Department travel alert for Mexico mentions that dozens of U.S. citizens were kidnapped or murdered in Tijuana in 2007.
As the US has strengthened its efforts to interdict cocaine and marijuana smuggled in boats through the Caribbean, smugglers have now switched to land routes through Mexico to move the drugs we Americans demand. This has turned the northern border of Mexico into a war zone, with the Mexican police, army, bureaucrats, and judges often targeted by vicious Mexican drug gangs for kidnapping and assassination.
Just like the brutal criminal gangs of the ’20s and ’30s that terrorized our citizens the last time we enacted a prohibition against a popular drug. Prohibition creates profit, potency, and violence - always has, always will.
Did you see the one about how marijuana is twice as potent now as it was then? Every year, the ONDCP likes to trumpet the results of the Potency Monitoring Project to try and scare uneducated parents about marijuana’s potency. NORML’s Paul Armentano joins us to thoroughly debunk those rumors and explain marijuana’s relative safety.
We also look to our borders today: to Canada, where researchers in Vancouver are concerned that medical marijuana users may suffer non-serious adverse effects from using pot, like being high. Then down to Mexico, where an under-reported drug war has killed 10,000 with mostly American guns.
Our musical break today features some experimental ragga from Kush Arora. This is definitely not music for an unsupervised acid trip. Grab yourself some wacky tobaccy and enjoy!
Examining the US-Mexico Gun Trade - International Business News - Portfolio.com
When Americans think about the border, they tend to picture undocumented workers or clandestine river crossings. They don’t think about war. But what’s happening in Mexico now is a war—no other word seems suitable—and the most gruesome battles are taking place within miles of the U.S.?So far this year, more than 1,350 people have been murdered in drug-trafficking-related crimes in Mexico. Last year, according to tallies kept by Mexican newspapers, 2,500 people died; since 2001, the number is close to 10,000—twice the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These killings have become such an everyday part of life that there’s a special word for them: narcoejecuciones, or narcoexecutions. The murdered include police, judges, prosecutors, soldiers, reporters, politicians, and innocent bystanders. Shootouts in broad daylight, mass executions, and public assassinations have become routine.
There are, in fact, two drug wars raging in Mexico. One is between drug-trafficking organizations—in particular, the Sinaloa cartel and its main rival, the Gulf cartel—over control of smuggling routes to the U.S.?The belligerence is easily understood, given the stakes. The U.S. government estimates that the cross-border drug trade was worth as much as $25 billion last year. According to Mexico’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, $10 billion worth of drug proceeds crosses from the U.S. into Mexico each year in the form of bulk cash.
The other war is between the government and the cartels. Mexican presidents have pledged to end trafficking before, but [President] Calderón, who took office in 2006, seems, in contrast to his predecessors, to be sincere, and his policies are having some effect. He has dispatched tens of thousands of troops, locked up hundreds of traffickers, and undertaken sweeping reforms of the police and judiciary. With each salvo, however, the violence intensifies. The wars aren’t just Mexico’s problem, either. The U.S., with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes more than half of the world’s drugs; most of the marijuana and methamphetamine, much of the heroin, and 90 percent of the cocaine comes from or through Mexico. “U.S. consumers are already financing this war,” Medina Mora tells me, “only it’s on the wrong side.”
In late 2007, the Bush administration, which counts Calderón as one of its few friends in Latin America, announced the Mérida Initiative. If passed by Congress, it will provide Mexico with $1.4 billion in equipment and training over three years. But the initiative, with its unprecedented outlay of funds, is fraught with contradictions, since it would go to fight the flow of weapons coming in illegally from the U.S. More than 90 percent of the A.T.F.’s traces of guns seized in Mexico lead to the States. The Mexican ambassador recently estimated that 2,000 guns cross the border every day. Even if that figure is halved, it’s a trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
So prohibition of cannabis fuels the profit in trafficking marijuana across the border. With those profits, traffickers finance the flow of easily-purchased guns over the border. Our prohibitionary policies are funding the execution of innocent Mexicans and arming the executioners. Were it legal, Americans would buy, sell, and grow domestically and completely undercut the profits of these murderers as well as destroy much of their business. If Mexico followed suit their poor farmers could grow vast fields of industrial hemp or fine connoisseur cannabis, and some of those trafficking in the border drug war could turn into legit import/exporters.
But a prohibitionist will tell you the blood is on the hands of the US recreational marijuana smoker. Why, if only nobody smoked cannabis, nobody in Mexico would have to die! Because the prohibitionist sees the world in black and white and “Just say no” makes sense to him or her. The fact that humans used cannabis for thousands of years and will continue to use it despite all prohibitions doesn’t come up. It’s evil and it must be eliminated, they think, and any idea of accepting evil in the name of harm reduction is unthinkable.
Besides, from a business point-of-view, unlimited funding for a project whose goal is to eliminate something that cannot be eliminated sounds like a pretty good profit-making venture for law enforcement, private prisons, and gun manufacturers.
American nonchalance about drug use stands in sharp contrast to what is happening across the border in Mexico. There lawmen are taking heavy casualties in a showdown with drug-running crime syndicates. On Thursday the chief of the Mexican federal police, Edgar Millán Gómez, was assassinated by men waiting for him when he came home, becoming the latest and most prominent victim of the syndicates.
It’s no secret that the narcotics trade is like a roach infestation. If you see one shipment or dealer, you can be sure that there are many others that go undetected. The signs of an infestation are everywhere, making a joke of their 40-year claim that any day now they will wipe out American drug use.
Yet if prohibitionists should find this lack of results troubling, imagine how Mexico must view it. That country doesn’t even produce cocaine, but it became a transit route to the U.S. when enforcers had some success in curtailing supplies coming through the Caribbean in the late 1990s.
That success didn’t change the U.S. appetite for the mind-altering substances. Instead, drugs started flowing over land routes and Mexican cartels took charge. Now they are rumored to be in control of most of the traffic from the Andes northward. A U.S.-Mexican joint assessment estimates that more than $10 billion in cash from drug sales flow from the U.S. to Mexico every year.
The upshot: Americans underwrite Mexico’s vicious organized crime syndicates. The gringos get their drugs and the Mexican mafia gets weapons, technology and the means to buy off or intimidate anyone who gets in their way. Caught in the middle is a poor country striving to develop sound institutions for law enforcement.
Most of the drug-related killings since [Mexican President Felipe] Calderón took office seem to be a result of battles between rival cartels. Still, the escalating violence is troubling. The official death toll attributable to organized crime since the Calderón crackdown began now stands at 3,995. Of that, 1,170 have died this year.
Especially alarming are the number of assassinations among military personnel and municipal, state and federal police officers. The total is 439 for the 17 months and 109 so far this year. Many of these victims have been ordinary police officers whose refusal to be bought off or back off cost them their lives.
But as the murder of police chief Millan makes clear, high rank offers no safety. Two weeks before he was gunned down, Roberto Velasco, the head of the organized crime division of the federal police, was shot in the head. Eleven federal law enforcement agents have been killed in ambushes and executions in the last four weeks alone.
If U.S. law enforcement agencies were losing their finest at such a rate, you can bet Americans would give greater thought to the violence generated by high demand and prohibition. Our friends in Mexico deserve equal consideration.
Here in America, one of the saddest consequences of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs is the erosion of support for law enforcement in the eyes of the young. Older folks tell me of a day when they knew the beat cop who patrolled their neighborhood and young people would turn to that officer in times of trouble. Now, people my age and younger have a distrust for police, especially in minority neighborhoods, seeing law enforcement officers as “them” against “us”.
No responsible cannabis consumer with any sense hates police. In fact, most of us would prefer to be able to call police in times of crisis and not fear being caught with the so-called “controlled” substance that would land us prison time. It is unknown how many burglaries or assaults go unreported because the victim is a marijuana user afraid of punishment, but anecdotally I can relate many such occurrences from my friends and family.
Also, we want police and the public to be safe as well. We see no reason why a peace officer needs to put his or her life on the line busting marijuana growers who must protect their crops with guns, since growers can’t turn to police or courts to handle marijuana thefts. We see no reason why the public should face the danger of serious crimes not being responded to because an officer is too busy busting a young person with a baggie of pot.
All marijuana prohibition does is takes a popular activity and adds in violence, profit, and corruption, while not decreasing the popular activity one iota.
It was printed on a 16-foot-wide banner and strung above one of the busiest roads here, calling out to any “soldier or ex-soldier.”
“We’re offering you a good salary, food and medical care for your families,” it said in block letters.
But there was a catch: The employer was Los Zetas, a notorious Gulf cartel hit squad formed by elite Mexican army deserters. The group even included a phone number for job seekers that linked to a voice mailbox.
Outrageous as they seem, drug cartel messages such as the banner hung here late last month are becoming increasingly common along the violence-savaged U.S.-Mexico border and in other parts of the region. As soldiers wage a massive campaign against drug trafficking across Mexico, they are encountering an information war managed by criminal networks that operate with near impunity.
“The cartels are very good at this — they’ve had songs written about them, they put up these signs, they make themselves out to be Robin Hoods,” Carlos Martínez, a Nuevo Laredo elementary school principal and community activist, said in an interview.
The banners also appeal to many poorer Mexicans who respect the brashness of the cartels, which provide food, clothing and toys to win civilians’ loyalty.
Marcelino, a 74-year-old pensioner who did not provide his last name for fear of retribution, said that he had been wronged plenty of times by police but that drug traffickers had given him a sturdy mountain bike.
Marcelino said police had harassed his neighbors, trumping up phony criminal violations and extracting bribes to avoid incarceration. Previous local governments tried to throw him and other squatters off government land. Drug traffickers, however, sided with the squatters, earning their enduring gratitude by paying to build cinder-block shacks and distributing clothing.
“I trust the Zetas more than the thieving police and soldiers,” Marcelino said. “The police are rats.”
Once they join drug gangs, the deserters seem “cool” to many people, according to Martínez. Children in his neighborhood see banners advertising jobs in drug gangs and connect those images with the suddenly prosperous deserters, and other cartel recruits, they meet on the streets. With few opportunities for employment in Mexico’s weak economy, the prospect of joining a gang is appealing, he said.
And of course, what is fueling the massive profits for murderous Mexican drug cartels more than anything is the prohibition of drugs in the United States and failure to provide treatment and rehabilitation rather than arrest and incarceration for drug addicts. Without countering demand, we will never affect supply.
However, we will never eliminate demand for drugs in this country or any other; it is human nature for some to seek altered states of consciousness. Therefore, it behooves us to take the production, marketing, merchandising and distribution of drugs out of the hands of black market criminals. All we accomplish by prohibiting drugs is more violence, corrupt cops, and wealthy drug gangs.
BBC NEWS | Americas | Mexico gang had ‘James Bond’ car
Police in Mexico have come across a new weapon being used by the country’s drug cartels - a James Bond-style vehicle complete with gadgets designed to deter arrest.
The car was abandoned by the gang members after a shoot-out.
The police and army sent to fight Mexico’s drug cartels have seen most things - sophisticated rocket launchers, powerful assault rifles and gold-plated pistols.
But in the northern state of Tamaulipas even they were shocked to come across a Jeep Grande Cherokee kitted out with its own anti-police gadgets.
Inside was a smoke machine and a device to spray spikes onto the road behind - the purpose to make a getaway easier and stop the car from being followed.
Those in the Jeep threw a hand grenade before making their escape.
What’s not funny is that prohibition forces these renegades to dangerous situations on our roadways. It’s not just the pursuing police car that can be driven off the road by a smoke screen and road spikes. I don’t recall any beer trucks being outfitted in this manner.
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO (AP) — Marijuana is now the biggest source of income for Mexico’s drug cartels and the U.S. is committed to cracking down harder on traffickers, U.S. drug czar John Walters said Thursday.
Walters made the comments following a meeting with Mexican officials who want the U.S. to prosecute marijuana cases more zealously to reduce the amount of cash gangs can spend on guns.Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora discussed the subject with Walters and U.S. federal prosecutors from the border region Thursday during a meeting in the Baja California resort of Los Cabos.
Walters said the U.S. government is seeking additional resources to prosecute traffickers of marijuana, which now earns cartels about $8.5 billion or about 61 percent of their annual estimated income of $13.8 billion. Cocaine sales earn the cartels about $3.9 billion, and methamphetamine about $1 billion, he said.
“While the criminal organizations that are a threat to both of our countries make a lot of money off of heroin and cocaine and methamphetamine, the vast majority of their money to buy guns, bribe, corrupt and destroy lives is from marijuana,” said Walters, head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
$8.5 billion!?! How long will it take our government to realize that many millions of Americans love to smoke marijuana, and that rather than try to eliminate it and see all that $8.5 billion amassed by criminal cartels, we could be pumping that money into our economy and taxing the sales of marijuana similar to how we tax alcohol. Have you heard of any Mexican alcohol gangs lately?
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John Wesley Hall, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, describes the case precendent in roadside traffic stops and search and seizure.
Seattle, Washington attorney Doug Hiatt explains the latest medical use issues in Washington State, including denial of transplant organs for medmj patients.
