Posted on 05/06/2011 9:26:29 PM PDT by george76
Mexico sent hundreds of soldiers and federal police to a drug-violence plagued northern region Friday, the same day cartel gunmen fired on a military convoy with a grenade launcher and hit a bus carrying employees of a U.S.-owned assembly plant. The attack on the army convoy underscored the growing boldness of Mexico's drug cartels.
The army said attackers believed to be working for the Zetas cartel opened fire on the army vehicles with guns and a grenade launcher from a highway overpass on the outskirts of the northern city of Monterrey. One soldier and five people in passing vehicles were wounded, and one attacker was killed, the Defense Department said.
The statement said the bus hit in the attack was transporting employees of the Montoi company, a branch of U.S.-based toy maker Mattel Inc.
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The army said it found grenades, guns and hats with the letter "Z"—the Zetas symbol—at the scene as well as people who had apparently been kidnapped by the gang.
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On Friday, the federal Attorney General's Office announced the arrest of four municipal police for allegedly participating in the kidnapping of 68 migrants who were rescued by federal police last month from a house in Reynosa, a city across the border from McAllen, Texas.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
This is not the solution that is seems to be. Often times the “armed forces” are in the pay of the cartels, and the cartels acquire their weapons and personnel from the Mexican Army. One way around this was for the current president to send Naval and Marine forces into the interior states to deal with drug cartels, as the Army was too co-opted by the cartels to do any good. A country with so much potential but run by theives and gangsters. My guess is the cartels will simply buy off the Navy and Marines next.
Those forces should have been stationed there already, we need some as well. The simmering civil War in Mexico affects everyone.
The drug cartel wars have killed more than 35,000 lives, just in Mexico, in the last four years ?
When you attack the army with a grenade launcher, you are way beyond ‘drug violence’. Most people call that war. Serious escalation here.
Hussein and Janet are giving our border agents bean bags.
...and letting tens of thousands of caught criminal illegals stay here, on our dime.
The vigiliante stuff comes next on our side, I can feel people ending their “compassionate” eras and heading into survival mode.
I live in CA and there are no-go zones all over this state.
Here is a glimpse of what lies ahead if we fail to end our second attempt to control the personal habits of private citizens. Listen to Enrique Gomez Hurtado, a former high court judge from Colombia who still has shrapnel in his leg from a bomb sent to kill him by the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar. In 1993, his country was a free-fire zone not unlike Mexico today, and Gomez issued this chilling — and prescient — warning to an international drug policy conference in Baltimore:
“The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the State, and if the State resists . . . they can purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages.”
Profits from the Mexican drug trade are estimated at about $35 billion a year. And since the cartels spend half to two-thirds of their income on bribery, that would be around $20 billion going into the pockets of police officers, army generals, judges, prosecutors and politicians. Last fall, Mexico’s attorney general announced that his former top drug enforcer, chief prosecutor Noe Ramirez Mandujano, was getting $450,000 a month under the table from the Sinaloa cartel. The cartel can of course afford to be generous — Sinaloa chief Joaquin Joaquin Guzman recently made the Forbes List of Billionaires.
The depth of Joaquin Guzman’s penetration into the United States was revealed a few weeks ago, when the DEA proudly announced hundreds of arrests all over the country in a major operation against the “dangerously powerful” Sinaloa cartel. One jarring detail was the admission that Mexican cartels are now operating in 230 cities inside the United States.
This disaster has been slowly unfolding since the early 1980s, when Vice President George H.W. Bush shut down the Caribbean cocaine pipeline between Colombia and Miami. The Colombians switched to the land route and began hiring Mexicans to deliver the goods across the U.S. border. But when the Mexicans got a glimpse of the truckloads of cash headed south, they decided that they didn’t need the Colombians at all. Today the Mexican cartels are full-service commercial organizations with their own suppliers, refineries and a distribution network that covers all of North America.
As we awaken to the threat spilling over our southern border, the reactions are predictable. In addition to walling off the border, Congress wants to send helicopters, military hardware and unmanned reconnaissance drones into the fray — and it wants the Pentagon to train Mexican troops in counterinsurgency tactics.
Our anti-drug warriors have apparently learned nothing from the past two decades. A few years ago we trained several units of the Mexican army in counterinsurgency warfare. They studied their lessons, then promptly deserted to form the Zetas, a thoroughly professional narco hit squad for the Gulf cartel, which offered considerably better pay. Over the past eight years, the Mexican army has had more than 100,000 deserters.
The president of Mexico rightly points out that U.S. policy is at the root of this nightmare. Not only did we invent the war on drugs, but we are the primary consumers.
The obvious solution is cutting the demand for drugs in the United States. Clearly, it would be the death of the cartels if we could simply dry up the market. Unfortunately, every effort to do this has met with resounding failure. But now that the Roaring ‘00s have hit the Crash of ‘09, the money has vanished once again, and we can no longer ignore the collateral damage of Prohibition II
That estimate includes the cartel dead but not thousands missing in Mexico!
Ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
The problem is not simply drugs.
Drugs are the scapegoat to avoid facing issues in Mexico.
Every death and criminal act is blamed upon the cartels, sealed up in investigation and never publicized.
If one is laying all blame at the economics of drug cartels, take it one step further and look at the economics of Mexico.
Try to find one manufacturer, one tradesman, one artist, one salesman in Mexico today who doesn’t have to rely upon multiple middlemen from outside their region in order to earn their wage.
The problem isn’t the cartels, it’s the destruction of their native economy at the grass roots level.
Ping!
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