There have been more than 2000 killings in Juárez so far this year.
On 24 August, the day the city announced the cancellation, 12 people were killed in violence allegedly related to organised crime: more than a quarter of that day’s national total (if you don’t count the 72 Central and South American migrants found dead in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas, executed en masse by their kidnappers).
Nationwide, in a single three-week period, the mayor of the Tamaulipas town of Santiago was found dead, his body showing signs of torture (six police officers including the mayor’s bodyguard were subsequently arrested); four decapitated corpses were hung from a bridge in Cuernavaca; 27 unidentified men said to be members of a cartel known as the Zetas were killed in a shoot-out with the army in Ciudad Mier, also in Tamaulipas; eight ‘presumed sicarios’, or hitmen, were killed in a 13-hour gun battle with the army in northern Veracruz; eight people died after Molotov cocktails were thrown into a bar in Cancún; soldiers at a checkpoint in the northern city of Monterrey opened fire on a carload of civilians, killing a 52-year-old man and his teenage son and injuring five others; two headless and limbless corpses were found outside a children’s museum in the capital of the south-eastern state of Guerrero; and another mayor was assassinated when gunmen interrupted a meeting in the town hall of El Naranjo, San Luis Potosí. Hundreds more died less spectacularly.
And so it goes on and on and on.
Mexico is slipping into anarchy.
Little light has been shed on it by the press, either in Mexico or abroad. Most accounts stick to the official narrative: the bloodshed is simply the result of heightened competition between drug cartels for control of profitable smuggling routes, and of the military battling it out with the bad guys. The dead are generally identified only as ‘pistoleros’ or ‘sicarios’; their killers as ‘armed commandos’. The most basic facts are left unspecified: body counts, names, places, dates.
A lot of different people making a profit:
Whatever shape it takes in the future, the war on drugs continues to be even more profitable than the drug trade itself. All the killing keeps prices per gram high, so the cartels do fine, as do the legions of sicarios and the funeral directors they help to feed. The bankers who launder the money also win, as do the businessmen into whose enterprises the newly laundered funds are funnelled. The American weapons manufacturers stand to do nicely, as do the US security consultants and military contractors who will deposit almost all of the Merida funds into their own accounts, and who can expect to make billions more from the militarisation of the border on the American side: someone has to make the helicopters, the cameras, the night-vision goggles, the motion sensors, the unmanned drones, as well as build the private prisons that hold the migrants. Finally politicians too stand to gain, not only Calderón and the PRIistas who are likely to profit from his failure in 2012, but the Americans who have sponsored him: the agile ones who can leverage campaign contributions from the contractors, the populists who win votes by shouting about the barbarian hordes advancing through the Arizona desert, the moderates who get re-elected term after term by expounding in even tones about the need for something called ‘comprehensive border security’.
The killing is therefore unlikely to stop.
Source: Ben Ehrenreich
On 24 August, the day the city announced the cancellation, 12 people were killed in violence allegedly related to organised crime: more than a quarter of that day’s national total (if you don’t count the 72 Central and South American migrants found dead in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas, executed en masse by their kidnappers).
Nationwide, in a single three-week period, the mayor of the Tamaulipas town of Santiago was found dead, his body showing signs of torture (six police officers including the mayor’s bodyguard were subsequently arrested); four decapitated corpses were hung from a bridge in Cuernavaca; 27 unidentified men said to be members of a cartel known as the Zetas were killed in a shoot-out with the army in Ciudad Mier, also in Tamaulipas; eight ‘presumed sicarios’, or hitmen, were killed in a 13-hour gun battle with the army in northern Veracruz; eight people died after Molotov cocktails were thrown into a bar in Cancún; soldiers at a checkpoint in the northern city of Monterrey opened fire on a carload of civilians, killing a 52-year-old man and his teenage son and injuring five others; two headless and limbless corpses were found outside a children’s museum in the capital of the south-eastern state of Guerrero; and another mayor was assassinated when gunmen interrupted a meeting in the town hall of El Naranjo, San Luis Potosí. Hundreds more died less spectacularly.
And so it goes on and on and on.
Mexico is slipping into anarchy.
Little light has been shed on it by the press, either in Mexico or abroad. Most accounts stick to the official narrative: the bloodshed is simply the result of heightened competition between drug cartels for control of profitable smuggling routes, and of the military battling it out with the bad guys. The dead are generally identified only as ‘pistoleros’ or ‘sicarios’; their killers as ‘armed commandos’. The most basic facts are left unspecified: body counts, names, places, dates.
A lot of different people making a profit:
Whatever shape it takes in the future, the war on drugs continues to be even more profitable than the drug trade itself. All the killing keeps prices per gram high, so the cartels do fine, as do the legions of sicarios and the funeral directors they help to feed. The bankers who launder the money also win, as do the businessmen into whose enterprises the newly laundered funds are funnelled. The American weapons manufacturers stand to do nicely, as do the US security consultants and military contractors who will deposit almost all of the Merida funds into their own accounts, and who can expect to make billions more from the militarisation of the border on the American side: someone has to make the helicopters, the cameras, the night-vision goggles, the motion sensors, the unmanned drones, as well as build the private prisons that hold the migrants. Finally politicians too stand to gain, not only Calderón and the PRIistas who are likely to profit from his failure in 2012, but the Americans who have sponsored him: the agile ones who can leverage campaign contributions from the contractors, the populists who win votes by shouting about the barbarian hordes advancing through the Arizona desert, the moderates who get re-elected term after term by expounding in even tones about the need for something called ‘comprehensive border security’.
The killing is therefore unlikely to stop.
Source: Ben Ehrenreich
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