"Even with the support of the United States, they cannot stop us, because here the Zetas rule. The government must make a pact with us because if not we will have to overthrow it and take power by force." —A sign hung rom a bridge this past February in the city Monterrey, in Northeast Mexico, where, as Reuters reports, the drug war is really not going well.
OMG everything the right has been telling us about how Mexico wants to reclaim our land is totally true! "On Tuesday, the Mexican Army accidentally 'invaded' the United States when thirty-three of its soldiers mistakenly crossed the border into Texas in Humvees; the soldiers were driving in a convoy consisting of four Humvees when they realized they had started driving on a bridge over the Rio Grande where they could not turn their vehicles around until they entered the United States."
"Texas has 8,000 gun dealers, and in the city of Houston there are 1,500. The pattern we’re seeing is that they’ll go to the shows to buy ammo and supplies, combat gear, and so on, and go to the dealers to get their weapons, using straw buyers for $50 per gun, on up. They come, and they just keep coming back. It’s simple because we make it simple. There’s no black market in the U.S. The guns are not being stolen—it’s all legal.” —Dewey Webb, special agent in charge, Houston division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
We've discussed Edgar "Barbie" Valdez Villarreal here before; today the Times has a brief profile of how the high school football star from Laredo, Texas became a Mexican drug cartel killing machine.
Last week in Ciudad Juarez, the Federal Police received an emergency call from a payphone explaining that a police officer had been shot and was lying wounded on the Avenue 16 de Septiembre, a street named for the day of Mexican independence from the Spanish. Several federal police officers and an emergency team of paramedics arrived to tend to the injured officer. A TV crew arrived on the scene around the same time. As the officers and doctors gathered around the body to assess the damage, nearby members of the Juarez cartel used a cell phone to detonate a bomb hidden in a parked car at the intersection. The blast [...]
Last week Mexican president Felipe Calderon spent two days visiting Barack Obama at the White House. In the weeks leading up to the summit, which was punctuated by a state dinner on Wednesday, there was much in the press about issues the two presidents had to discuss, including the Mexican government's negative reaction to the new Arizona immigration bill and the need to improve trade relations and get more Mexican trucks on the roads in the US. But no issue was expected to be more pressing than the question of security. With over 24,000 dead in the past 3 years and growing international concern that Mexico could be on [...]
Just a few weeks after the AP declared that the Sinaloa cartel had won the drug war in Juarez, the city saw one of its bloodiest days in recent memory. On Wednesday, 20 murders were recorded in a 24-hour span. The first murders of the day set the tone for the brutality to follow, as gunmen burst into a bar in the early morning and dragged eight people out into a nearby lot, lined them up against the wall, and executed them.
"Mexico's state electricity company on Wednesday started supplying electricity to Texas, where cold weather and power shortages forced rolling blackouts across the state. Mexico's Federal Electricity Commission issued a statement saying it 'was determined to support Texas with electrical energy' as its neighbor to the north scrambled to deal with its power woes."
El Diario de Juarez's front-page op-ed yesterday is a frank plea to the real rulers of Mexico: the drug cartels. "The state as protector of the rights of citizens, and thus, of the media, has been absent," they write-so, in light of the murder of reporters in Mexico, and the inability of the government to do anything about it, the paper wonders: would the leaders of the cartels like the paper to cease reporting? "Even in war there are rules. And in any conflagration there protocols or guarantees to the warring sides, to safeguard the integrity of the journalists covering them. So we reiterate, gentlemen of the [...]
So not long ago now, the cosmetics manufacturer M·A·C and fashion label Rodarte teamed up to… no, really. Sell cosmetics, I was going to say. And then I was going to add their own phrase, "inspired by." But then I just had to stop for a second, because it ain't easy to complete this sentence, because what the sisters Mulleavy of Rodarte were allegedly "inspired by" is the border city of Juárez, Mexico. As Style.com's Nicole Phelps explained back in February about the Rodarte Fall/Winter 2010 collection, "[T]hey became interested in the troubled border town of Ciudad Juárez; the hazy, dreamlike quality of the landscape there; [...]
"Frederick Loos was cussing like a sailor the other night, which was surprising given that he is a Roman Catholic priest and his foul-mouthed discourse was delivered from the pulpit to hundreds of faithful gathered before him. He spoke of God, the need to serve him and how he can transform lives. But interspersed in his sermon was the most colorful of street Spanish, which brought smiles to the faces of many of the gang members, addicts and other young people pressed in tight to listen." -In case you were too distracted or disgusted by yesterday's national sports emergency to catch it, you should now read Marc [...]
On Monday, just after the conclusion of a wedding ceremony, a group of armed men burst into a Juarez church and ordered everyone down on the floor. Moving quickly, they collected the groom, his brother and their uncle and led them out. When another man tried to intervene, they shot him dead. The three relatives were then thrown into a truck and disappeared. On Wednesday, state police found their bodies in the bed of an abandoned pickup in the eastern sector of the city. They had been tortured for many hours before they were killed. It was a particularly horrifying example of the fact that violence in Juarez can [...]
Following the Rio Grande southeast out of the Valley of Juarez, past the Big Bend region and across the vast emptiness of the Chihuahuan desert, one eventually comes to the states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas, historic base of the Gulf Cartel and home to the newest outbreak of everyday violence in the Mexican drug war. In February, the Gulf Cartel announced the formation of "La Nueva Federacion", an alliance with their former enemies, the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Michoachan, and publicly declared war on its own former enforcement wing, a group of ex-Mexican special forces soldiers known as the Zetas. The two sides went to [...]
Last week, 50-some people were murdered in the torching of a building in Mexico, in Monterrey. (People were trapped in the casino after gunmen stormed the building; they were ordered out but many panicked and ran to the second floor.) Here's a look at the amount of front-page web real estate given to the event by English-speaking news organizations, as expressed in the formula of pixel-per-victim. (What the analysis doesn't take into account is the depth or complexity of coverage, and also the amount of play, as measured in time, of that coverage.) For instance, the Times gave up 0.27% of its digital "front page," though it should be [...]
Here's where the OMG MEXICAN SPY PLANE ATTACKED THE UNITED STATES. It landed in El Paso—in a backyard a couple thousand feet, at most, from the Cesar E. Chavez Border Highway. INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT!
As the violence in Mexico rages on, with murder totals recently surpassing 28,000 since the start of 2007, it's easy for anyone watching or keeping up with the news to become desensitized. Daily stories of kidnappings and murder scenes, complete with photos of dismembered bodies piled in the backs of pickup trucks or lying bloody in the street, can make the whole scenario overwhelming and extremely hard to wrap your head around. Statistics, death counts, unsolved murders; all with seemingly no end, no beginning, and no point.
In a luxury suburb of Guadalajara last Thursday afternoon, one of the key leaders of the Sinaloa cartel, Ignacio 'Nacho' Coronel, was shot dead during a brief gunfight with Mexican Army special forces. Drawing on intelligence gathered over the past few weeks, the Army staged a raid on a home they believed was linked to drug trafficking; Coronel was inside. Witnesses reported hearing loud explosions and plenty of gunfire as helicopters and more than 150 men closed in on the drug baron. According to reports, Nacho got off enough shots with an assault rifle to kill one soldier before being killed.
In immediate terms, the raid was [...]
With gubernatorial elections coming to twelve Mexican states this Sunday, a definitive test for Mexico is taking place. By most accounts, the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, is riding a big wave of momentum, capitalizing on the public perception that the cataclysmic violence of the past few years is the fault of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's war on the Mexican cartels. But more than for the parties themselves, the elections have become a symbol of whether or not Mexico can still hold its basic institutions together in the face of the threat posed by the rampant and insidious drug cartels.
This Cinco de Mayo, while some are celebrating Mexico's past, most Mexicans are anxious about its uncertain future. Yesterday in Mexico City, national security minister Genero Garcia Luna remarked at the Reuters Latin American Investment Summit that the war against the cartels will in all probability take years before anything is accomplished. Citing other prominent examples of long-lasting wars on organized crime in places like Italy, Colombia and Chicago in the 1920s, Garcia Luna explained that expectations for a quick finish should be tempered against these historical examples that lasted "six years on average."
