Posted on 02/16/2009 9:17:56 AM PST by AuntB
TABASCO, Mexico (AP) — Gunmen have killed a state police officer and 10 members of his family, including five children, authorities said Sunday.
The shooting late Saturday also killed a street vendor in front of the house of state police officer Carlos Reyes, said Tabasco deputy prosecutor Alex Alvarez. Among the five children killed was a 2-year-old boy.
Alvarez said three other people were wounded the attack in the town of Monte Largo, near Mexico's border with Guatemala.
.... Alvarez said Reyes directed a car chase and raids on two homes on Wednesday that led to the death of three suspected gang members and the arrest of seven others.
In Mexico City, authorities on Saturday found the decomposing bodies of two women in the trunk of a car that had been abandoned for at least a week, the Reforma newspaper reported.
A city investigator told the newspaper that the women had been decapitated and the heads left inside a cooler in the back seat of the car.
More than 6,000 people died last year in a wave of drug-related violence.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Top Mexico drug cop charged with working for cartel International Herald Tribune, France -
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2009/02/16/america/OUKWD-UK-MEXICO-DRUGS-CORRUPTION.php
[snip]MEXICO CITY: The former head of Mexico's special organized crime bureau has been charged with selling information to one of the country's most powerful drug cartels, the attorney general's office said on Sunday.
Noe Ramirez, who stepped down as chief of the SIEDO federal investigation unit in July last year, was detained in November for allegedly receiving $450,000 for passing secrets to the Sinaloa cartel, headed by Mexico's top drug fugitive Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.
Mexico's police force is riddled with corruption and the arrest of the country's top drug prosecutor has been the biggest catch so far in a sweeping probe to smoke out cops and government officials working for drug smugglers.
More bad news from Mexico today:
Mexico to lose up to 300000 jobs, minister says
From other articles on that it looks like Noe Ramirez was receiving up to $450,000 per month for giving these people information.
If there was a shooting war between the Mexican government and the drug dealers, it’s not a sure bet who would win.
If you are caught with firearms or ammunition in Mexico... You will go to jail and your vehicle will be seized; You will be separated from your family, friends, and your job, and likely suffer substantial financial hardship; You will pay court costs and other fees ranging into the tens of thousands of dollars defending yourself; You may get up to a 30-year sentence in a Mexican prison if found guilty. If you carry a knife on your person in Mexico, even a pocketknife . . . You may be arrested and charged with possession of a deadly weapon; You may spend weeks in jail waiting for trial, and tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees, court costs, and fines; If convicted, you may be sentenced to up to five years in a Mexican prison. Claiming not to know about the law will not get you leniency from a police officer or the judicial system. Leave your firearms, ammunition, and knives at home. Don’t bring them into Mexico.
Mexico is going to collapse very soon I’m afraid, and it’s going to be very, very bad.
Message to authorities; Don't mess with the drug gangs. You can bet many police will take this to heart. This is why Mexico will lose this war. They don't know how to fight it.
And we need our border seriously protected because of it but it appears that our government wants a refugee crisis to make millions of new citizens.
“Amateurs”
LOL!
But, cripplecreek, Mexico has finally finished first at something.....
Mexicans seal new kissing record
BBC News, UK - 4 hours ago
Mexico claimed a world kissing record on Valentine’s Day as nearly 40000 people in the capital locked lips. The record for simultaneous kissing, ...
80,000 children will result from the kissing contest.
bump
“If there was a shooting war between the Mexican government and the drug dealers, it’s not a sure bet who would win.”
It is a shooting (&beheading) war, and the drug cartels are winning.
Columbia had an interesting solution to their drug cartel problem. Seems to have worked pretty well judging from the state of Columbian society today. Just takes a little decisiveness.
“If you are caught with firearms or ammunition in Mexico...”
It’s pretty much the same for people caught here with firearms or ammunition if they are not citizens of this country or here on an immigrant visa. If you are a citizen or have green card it’s okay, but if not even if you are here legally you are looking at up to 10 years in a federal pen with no possibility of parole, up to a $250,000 fine, and three years supervised release which is pointless because you will be deported and forever barred from the U.S. when you are released from prison. With a clean record the sentencing grid will give a range of punishment of 10 to 16 months in prison for the judge to choose from. So people here on visitor visas, student visas, work visas, and so on better not get caught here with firearms or ammo.
In other words, “don’t go to Mexico.”
Colombia still has drug cartels. They are still the world's biggest supplier of cocaine. All they have done is allowed the Mexicans to handle most of the distribution, especially within the U.S., and the they just focus on production. They have people growing coca in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. They're producing as much as ever. They just stay out of the limelight. Cocaine is as available as ever and over the years on the streets in this country it has gotten cheaper and more pure. The violence just moved to Mexico for the most part, and that wouldn't have happened if the Colombian cartels hadn't figured out that they could still get rich producing and selling cocaine in bulk wholesale while letting the Mexicans fight over distribution and take all the heat invloved.
This won't such an as easy task with Mexico. They have distribution locked up. They had well established distribution networks for marijuana and were already involved with distributing drugs like cocaine and heroin when the Colombians allowed them to take over cocaine distribution. I suppose a lot of the cocaine distribution could move somewhere else but I'm not sure where. The Mexicans are uniquely situated to get drugs produced south of our border into the U.S. and distribute them here. Most likely they'll keep their position as the ones who control most wholesale illegal drug distribution in this country. If our government and the Mexican government can work together to go in and put the hurt on some of these folks in the cartels down there, we probably will see a drop in the violence. All this craziness down there now is bad for business and bringing them all the wrong kind of attention. If we put enough pressure on them the cartels and gangs will probably figure out that they need to knock it off and we will see a reduction in violence. But it won't last. The drugs are going to keep flowing as long as there is demand and big money to be made supplying that demand. Competing organized crime groups are going to be involved to make all the billions to be made. They're going to fight with one another over money and turf. They're going to bribe folks in the government and sometimes things will get out of hand enough that they'll start terrorizing and killing government officials who do not cooperate. That's just the nature of the business.
We're not going to stop this or even really put much of a dent in it until we take the money or a substantial part of it out of the drug business. If we allowed our government to make this country a hardcore totalitarian police state like Chairman Mao's China we probably would see a substantial reduction in demand for illegal drugs and a corresponding decrease in the size of the black market for drugs and its attendant problems. But most of us wouldn't want to live in a country that resembles Chairman Mao's China.
We can keep ratcheting up the drug war a little more here and there and see negligible benefits at great cost, or we can try something entirely different. I say we try something entirely different. I say we legalize and regulate the production and sales of marijuana, which would deprive these organized crime groups in Mexico and here that derive most of their money from illegal drug sales of most of their income. If we deprive them of most of their income they'll be smaller, less powerful, less of a threat, and much easier to contain. And taking the marijuana industry from them would deprive them of most of their income. The Mexican government has known for a long time that marijuana is the cash cow for these organizations and our government has finally admitted that this is the case as well. The ONDCP estimates that Mexican cartels gross about $13.8 billion a year from drug sales to Americans, with about $8.6 billion of that coming from marijuana alone. They only gross about $3.9 billion from cocaine, the second most popular drug, and they are only the middlemen for cocaine. According to the USDOJ’s National Drug Threat assessment Mexicans produced about 15,500 of marijuana in Mexico in 2007 with most of it coming here. Our government estimates that the total amount of marijuana on the market here in a year is between 12,000 and 25,000 metric tons so most of what is consumed here is probably coming from Mexico and the profits are funding these organizations that are causing all these problems we are seeing today.
“Mexicans produced about 15,500 of marijuana...”
That should have said “about 15,500 metric tons of marijuana...”
But users could care less what the dealers do with the money.
What's your point? I agree with you somewhat, although I think that if given the choice users would probably rather buy from sources where they knew the money wouldn't go to support bad people who do bad things, but they don't have that choice. I don't really see your point. Are you saying that users would buy from the black market anyway if we legalized it? I don't think that would be much of a problem. Black market marijuana is not cheap. You don't know what is on it, whether the growers were using toxic pesticides or something like that on it. You don't know what kind of thugs the money will support. And Mexican marijuana is seedy and harsh and people wouldn't buy it if it wasn't so much cheaper than the much higher quality domestic product.
The only reason marijuana costs hundreds of dollars a pound in the case of Mexican and up to thousands of dollars a pound in the case of domestic indoor grown marijuana is that it is illegal. It's not an extremely difficult plant to grow and it is possible to get well over a thousand pounds of usable product per acre. When American farmers start growing it on large farms using modern agricultural methods and mechanizing the process as much as possible they will cut production costs to a fraction of what they are today. More importantly, there will be no more risk of seizure, no more risk of arrest. They'll be able to drive a load of it down the highway in something like a Budweiser truck rather than breaking it down into couple of hundred pound trunk loads and paying mules thousands of dollars per load to transport it. There will be far fewer middlemen, far fewer who want a huge cut of the profits to justify their risks. Wholesale prices will be low and the only way we'll be able to keep consumer prices anywhere close to where they are today is with taxation.
Black market product would have to be much cheaper for anyone to want to buy it, and if it has to be much cheaper than it is today it won't be worth the trouble and the risk involved for people to supply it. Why buy crappy black market pot from shady people that's likely to be moldy and or have toxic chemicals on it when you can go to a nice clean shop and legally pick from a wide range of quality product for reasonable prices? Like the “coffeeshops” in the Netherlands these places would have product in all sorts of prices ranges, with different smell, tastes and potency levels, but it will be coming from a regulated industry and not from the black market. People will go to the “pot shops” just like we go to liquor stores today. We don't have a big problem with black market liquor or beer and we won't have a problem with black market marijuana if we give people the option of going through legal channels to buy it.
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