Posted on 06/30/2006 10:37:09 AM PDT by Ben Mugged
Hitmen strafe two women with machine guns, severed heads are dumped in garbage bags near the U.S. border and outside public offices in Acapulco, a police chief is gunned town in a Caribbean tourist resort.
The grisly murders, all in the past week, are among the latest in an increasingly savage and spectacular wave of drug gang violence sweeping across Mexico as the country heads to the polls in a presidential vote on Sunday.
The dead are victims of an all-out war between rival gangs for control of the multibillion-dollar cocaine, marijuana and amphetamine trade to the United States which has killed more than 1,000 people in the past year.
~snip~ Mexicans are appalled by the violence but most of the deaths appear to be a settling of scores between rival gangs and corrupt police officers linked to them. That reduces the immediate pressure on politicians to fix the crisis, and the cartels are so powerful it is unclear how they can beaten.
Nowhere is spared. The butchers struck in the swank coastal resort of Acapulco on Friday, where two severed heads were dumped outside state offices, and in the tin-roofed shanty towns ringing gritty cities on the U.S. border.
This week, two women were killed in burst of assault rifle fire in Tijuana, south of San Diego, while days earlier 70 heavily armed enforcers lured three policemen and a civilian into an ambush and chopped off their heads.
~snip~
Leftist front runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and ruling party rival Felipe Calderon have sparred over job creation, graft and the economy, while plans to crack down on Mexico's rampaging drug outlaws have been left until later.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
/for the sarcasm impaired!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the War on Some Drugs helps fund terrorism, because the War on Some Drugs is what makes drug trafficking so lucrative.
American alcohol prohibition was a documented failure.
Gun prohibition has led to skyrocketing violent crime rates in Great Britain, and in particular Scotland, which now has the distinction of being the most violent country in the West, despite the fact that handguns have been all but completely outlawed.
Bu the War on Some Drugs will never end, because it is highly lucrative for the law enforcement side as well.
It hasn't already?
Not to the degree it is being fought in Mexico. News reporters and police chiefs who are openly against the drug gangs are slaughtered and their bodies dumped in public. Much of the violence is reportedly perpetrated by corrupt military and police. Mexico is a morass of corruption with gang warlords greasing the palms of politicians. Their war on drugs really is a war.
They are every bit as much (or more) of a failed state as Iraq.
It's not clear that democracy is doing much to fix this, in Mexico, either.
Look for this violence to spill across the border
It's here for sure. Look at all the murders that are DR. (drug related) Just because we don't see fighting in the streets to a large extent, doesn't mean there's not a war going on within our borders.
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