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http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-ed-mexico18-2010mar18,0,1529244.story
Countering the cartels
The war on Mexico’s drug traffickers has produced little but more violence. Will increased spending on social problems help?
3:32 PM PDT, March 17, 2010
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The decomposing bodies of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent and his pilot are discovered wrapped in plastic bags at a ranch about 60 miles from the Guadalajara streets where they were kidnapped by the cartel controlling drug trafficking in central Mexico. The agent’s corpse bears traces of the drugs a doctor administered to keep him alive during some 30 hours of interrogation, as his torturers crushed his jaw, ribs and windpipe, and drilled a hole into his skull. “We are in a war and cannot accept that Enrique Camarena died in vain,” the U.S. ambassador says.
That was 25 years ago. Last weekend, a U.S. consular official, her husband and the husband of another consulate employee were fatally shot after attending a children’s birthday party in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called the killings “brutal, unconscionable and unforgivable.” This was another crime in a different city controlled by a different cartel. But it is all part of the same war of attrition that has been underway for more than a quarter of a century. What progress do the United States and Mexico have to show for it? Drug consumption in the U.S. has continued unabated, and the violence has only increased.