On November 30 2014 05:02 zlefin wrote: Would you be willing to accept a bloodbath if it could defeat the cartels?
No, because I don't think we can realistically win against all the cartels at the same time, and if by some miracle we were to defeat one while fighting them one by one, it would only give more power to one cartel or another, only the government could possibly wage that war using the army, the general public can't possibly fight against the cartels and the government, which are basically the same thing.
And as I said, there are too many people involved with cartels and is hard to tell them apart, they don't all wear uniform, how could we be sure that the people on top leading the charge aren't from another cartel looking for more power.
My question is more of: if the war COULD be won, would a bloodbath be an acceptable price? I'm not interested in going over the details of doing the fight; just willingness.
It is not that simple, I can't answer that blindly, as things are right now I don't think we can win, if the the fight was winnable then that would mean different circumstances and then maybe I would have a different view, but overall I don't think that a bloodbath should be the answer.
I have to say that I haven't lost anyone dear to me to this war with the cartels, so maybe someone who has been more affected by them would have more right to say whether it is worth it or not.
This is a problem withouth an easy solution.In fact, the only solution i see, i know it won't happen, its too late now.
The thing is that all this "Mexico Drug War", its not because or for mexico, is an international thing, that all the goverments refuse to aknoledge.
i mean, its not like the cartels from mexico go, and sell the thousends of tons of drugs directly to the street dealers in the US, they or are already well stablished in the US, or they sell the drug to someone there. Both of those things are concerning, because as far as i know, the US goverment doesn't actively pursue big drug organizations in the US, but they are there, just like they were there in mexico before, but the goverment just didnt put enough attention to them, until they grew too strong and had to make deals with them.
And thats not only in the US, the problem exist in canada, europe, asia, and south america too.
Mexico alone can't fight this, but i doubt the other nations will really do something meaningful (yeah, the us has gave us like 4 helicopters, thanks, really) because it isnt happening in their contry, they think this is not their problem, and they can just get away with helping a little here and there just so we can't say they didn't help us, but if they do not act, some day, the problem will be in their country too.
Made-in-America marijuana is on a roll. More than half the states have now voted to permit pot for recreational or medical use, most recently Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia. As a result, Americans appear to be buying more domestic marijuana, which in turn is undercutting growers and cartels in Mexico.
"Two or three years ago, a kilogram [2.2 pounds] of marijuana was worth $60 to $90," says Nabor, a 24-year-old pot grower in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. "But now they're paying us $30 to $40 a kilo. It's a big difference. If the U.S. continues to legalize pot, they'll run us into the ground."
Nabor declines to give his surname because his crop is illegal. The interview takes place on a hillside outside Culiacan, Sinaloa, located in Mexico's marijuana heartland. We stand next to a field of knee-high cannabis plants, their serrated leaves quivering in a warm Pacific breeze. The plot is on communal land next to rows of edible nopal cactus.
He kneels and proudly shows me the resinous buds on the short, stocky plants. This strain, called Chronic, is a favorite among growers for its easy cultivation, fast flowering and mood-lifting high. Nabor, who says he has grown marijuana since he was 14, says the plants do not belong to him.
To service the U.S. market, police agencies report some Mexican crime groups grow marijuana in public lands in the West.
And there's a new intriguing development.
DEA spokesman Lawrence Payne tells NPR that Sinaloa operatives in the United States are reportedly buying high-potency American marijuana in Colorado and smuggling it back into Mexico for sale to high-paying customers.
"It makes sense," Payne says. "We know the cartels are already smuggling cash into Mexico. If you can buy some really high-quality weed here, why not smuggle it south, too, and sell it at a premium?"
The big question is whether the loss of market share is actually hurting the violent Mexican drug mafias.
"The Sinaloa cartel has demonstrated in many instances that it can adapt. I think it's in a process of redefinition toward marijuana," says Javier Valdez, a respected journalist and author who writes books on the narcoculture in Sinaloa.
Valdez says he's heard through the grapevine that marijuana planting has dropped 30 percent in the mountains of Sinaloa. But he says the Sinaloa cartel is old school — it sticks to drugs, even as other cartels, such as the Zetas of Tamaulipas state, have branched out into kidnapping and extortion.
Federal police and soldiers will take over policing duties in the resort of Acapulco to ensure the safety of tourists amid a wave of violence and protests that has scared away visitors, Mexican authorities said Wednesday.
Troops and federal police will also take over policing in 20 more townships north of Acapulco in a region known as Tierra Caliente, or the Hot Lands, which is plagued by drug cultivation, trafficking and cartels. The region covers parts of the states of Guerrero, Michoacan, Morelos and Mexico State.
A similar federal policing plan had already been implemented in 16 townships, including Iguala, where 43 teachers college students disappeared in September.
National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said the patrols in Acapulco and the 36 townships will be under the command of the army and are aimed at fighting drug cartels and rebuilding municipal police forces plagued by gang infiltration.
"The effect of illegal activities combined with weak institutions has led to the violation of citizens' rights," Rubido said in Iguala. "The effort is restore security and re-establish the rule of law."
Most of Iguala's municipal police force, which purportedly collaborated with a drug gang, has been arrested or sent out of state for training and background checks. More municipal police in the region will be sent to the army-run facility for similar vetting.
What is incredible about the situation in Mexico is how sustained the agitation has been, unceasing for more than two months. The question now is whether the protests can bring about radical change. The current choice is between the plague and cholera — a government that does everything to stay in power or a system of cartels that is brutally repressive in its own way. Protesters are demanding something better.
Yet they will need a coherent political strategy and platform that aims to transform the state. Aside from the well-known Zapatistas, some autonomous left communities in Oaxaca, and some smaller revolutionary groups like the Frente Popular Revolucionario, most of the people on the streets just began to develop structures and are probably still searching for political cogency.
Large parts of the society are tired of the conditions they are living in, and only a radical movement that brings about structural change can end that suffering. But it remains to be seen whether protesters can form a force capable of making such systemic changes. After all, they’re not just fighting the government, but the cartels.
Forensic experts have identified one of 43 missing Mexican students among charred remains found in a landfill, officials said, partly solving a case that has roiled the government for weeks.
"One of the pieces (of bones) belongs to one of the students," a federal official told the AFP news agency on Saturday on condition of anonymity.
Sources close to the families identified the victim as Alexander Mora.
Al Jazeera's Adam Raney, reporting from Mexico City, said a team of forensic specialists from Argentina who were chosen and trusted by the families of the missing students, confirmed that the remains identified were his.
Federal authorities had sent the badly burned remains to an Austrian medical university last month, on the recommendations of the Argentine forensic team, after finding them in a garbage dump and river in the southern state of Guerrero.
That night back in September, three buses loaded with students headed out of the school toward Iguala, Guerrero, about an hour and a half away. Martinez, a junior at the school, says unfortunately they arrived just as the mayor's wife was giving a political speech.
Thinking the students came to disrupt the event, and on orders of the mayor, police chased the students out of downtown and onto the main road, where Martinez says more patrol cars arrived and surrounded the buses.
The police jumped out and started shooting, Martinez says. More would come and start shooting, too. "You just heard shots everywhere," he says.
As the bullets flew, Martinez says he and a group of students ran out of the bus and hid behind it.
"We screamed, 'Stop shooting, stop shooting, we don't have any guns,' " he says. Martinez watched as one of his friends, Aldo, was shot in the head and fell to the ground.
According to authorities, the Iguala police shot and killed three students that night, as well as three bystanders.
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has a launched a proposal to overhaul the police force in Mexico, finally acting in response to the thousands of marchers protesting the deteriorated security system and disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero.
The proposal, which Peña Nieto introduced to Congress on Dec. 2, would radically reshape the structure of policing in Mexico, dismantling municipal police forces and replacing them with 32 state police corps. It’s a move designed to show action against corruption on the local level — tragically illustrated by the Iguala police officers who dutifully handed over the students to organized crime at the command of the mayor.
The plan, however, point blank ignores state and federal collusion, despite their obvious contribution to a growing sense of lawlessness in Mexico, and the overall proposal strikes many as a hodgepodge of old ideas.
“This is an improvised and ill-prepared strategy,” said Alejandro Orozco, a Mexico City–based senior security consultant with FTI Consulting. “The way it has been planned and presented contrasts sharply with the energy reform and other sets of reforms that had been developed since the beginning of Peña Nieto’s term and had involved negotiations with the opposition [parties].”
Pena Nieto’s signature energy reform legislation, which will open up Mexico’s oil and gas reservoirs to private investment for the first time in seven decades, was a landmark achievement, the result of an agreement among the three major political parties to help reform several areas, including energy, fiscal, banking, education and telecommunications.
The current proposal, which needs to be passed by both houses of Congress and a majority of state legislatures, will dismantle more than 1,800 local police agencies throughout Mexico, a move reminiscent of a similar proposal under Felipe Calderón’s administration that was immediately voted down by Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party.
The proposal would give the federal government broad authority to take over municipal governments found corrupt. Peña Nieto, however, has delicately sidestepped any mention of his own brewing corruption scandal over favoritism to a Mexican contractor in exchange for a multimillion dollar house. The Casa Blanca scandal, the latest such evidence of political corruption, threatens to erode his authority, said Dwight Dyer, a senior Mexico City–based security analyst with Control Risks.
“Given the low credibility of federal institutions at this point, who is going to believe the arguments that they might give for an intervention?” Dyer asked.
The proposals have come after two months of near silence from Peña Nieto’s administration as huge protests over the students have roiled the country. Thousands of marchers have demonstrated repeatedly, calling for an end to both the violence and the collusion they say is rampant between politicians and organized crime.
Mexico's Roman Catholic Church is calling on the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto to make changes to its strategies for dealing with the crisis of violence and impunity that is shaking the country.
Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera told reporters on Sunday that such changes "are absolutely necessary" and he emphasized that Pope Francisco is monitoring events in Mexico with concern, and not just the disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in southern Guerrero state.
Mexican church leaders will meet with relatives of the missing students in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero on Monday and will celebrate a Mass, according to church officials.
The case of the missing students has stoked outrage across Mexico and elsewhere because the students disappeared at the hands of a corrupt local government in September and federal authorities took 10 days to intervene. Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets.
Peña Nieto has been under growing pressure from protesters since the group of trainee teachers were abducted by corrupt police and handed over to a local drug gang on Sept. 26. The case has put a spotlight on Mexico's struggle to end corruption amid a drug war that has left 100,000 people dead or missing since 2006.
Carrera said Peña Nieto "will have to know how to confront this, with the same or different people," adding that changes in strategies and attitudes are needed.
The cardinal said impunity has allowed violence to grow in Mexico and that it is "very understandable" that civil society is demanding justice.
Two months after the abduction of 43 missing students made national headlines and created a controversial political storm in the county, a Mexican state governor has confirmed that a second mass disappearance of students had occurred in the rural communities of his state of Guerrero in Jul of 2013.
Twenty-seven students reportedly disappeared after unknown gunmen stormed some of the houses in the rural town of Cocula during a midnight raid on July 2, 2013, Guerrero's governor Rogelio Ortega Martinez told the Mexican TV station Milenio. The entire incident appears to have gone unreported until now.
The bombshell revelation came when Ortega was questioned about Cocula mayor Cesar Miguel Penaloza's recent arrest for his alleged role in the kidnapping and execution of 43 missing students from the town of Ayotzinapa, Breitbart reported. Penaloza, currently in federal police custody, is expected to face questioning.
During the interview, Ortega said that Penaloza would likely be questioned about the 27 unidentified students that had gone missing in 2013. He also claimed that the mass kidnapping incident had recently been reported by the French magazine France 24, but the publication ended up running a retraction.
"A few weeks ago the French press spoke about the disappearance of some teenagers, that didn't happen this year but it did happen on July 2 and July 3, 2013 during the late night and early morning," Ortega said. "The criminal group Guerreros Unidos kidnapped from their homes 27 teenagers that remain missing."
On Sept. 26-27, Iguala city police attacked a group of students rallying to protest against government policies. Six people were killed, more than two dozen injured and more than 50 students vanished. About 15 eventually were found hiding in their homes, but 43 remained missing, the Los Angeles Times reported.
A priest was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head, his diocese said Friday, marking the latest in series of abductions, attacks and highway robberies against Roman Catholic clerics in an area of southern Guerrero state dominated by drug cartels.
Rev. Gregorio Lopez Gorostieta is the third Catholic priest to have been killed in the region this year, and the first to die since the federal government launched a special, stepped-up security operation in the area following the disappearance of 43 teachers' college students three months ago.
The motive in Lopez Gorostieta's killing remains unclear; Bishop Maximino Martinez said a group had been seen lurking around the seminary where the priest taught on the outskirts of Ciudad Altamirano, Guerrero, on Sunday and Monday. Lopez Gorostieta was apparently kidnapped by the gang early Monday; his truck was found abandoned two days later.
"This is another priest added to those who have died for their love of Christ," Bishop Martinez said. "Enough already of so much pain, of so many murders. Enough already of so much crime. Enough extortions."
That was an apparent reference to the "protection payments" that the local drug gang, the Knights Templar, demand from business owners in Ciudad Altamirano. One business owner, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisals, said his family had been forced to pay thousands of pesos (dollars) each year to the gang for the right to operate a pharmacy.
While the Rev. Jesus Mendoza Zaragoza said gangs have also demanded protection payments from parish priests in the nearby resort city of Acapulco, Lopez Gorostieta didn't have a parish or collect tithes.
FBI Helping in Case of Missing Students in Mexico as New Questions Surface
"Nothing was an accident that night," said Anabel Hernandez, an investigative reporter who has previously authored a book on Mexico's drug war. She is now a fellow the University of California-Berkeley's Center for Investigative Reporting. Hernandez said she's uncovered thousands of pages of documents from the state investigation into the students' disappearance on Sept. 26, which had not been publicly available.
Police in Mexico have arrested a member of a criminal gang accused of killing 43 students in Iguala in September.
Felipe Rodriguez ordered Guerreros Unidos gang members to burn the bodies and clothing of the victims to hide evidence, prosecutors say.
They say the students were detained by police after a protest and handed over to the gang.
The students' disappearance sparked weeks of protests across Mexico against corruption and violence.
Felipe Rodriguez - known as "El Cepillo" or "The Brush" - was arrested on Thursday night in the city of Jiutepec, some 90km (55 miles) south of Mexico City.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam identified him in November as the gang member who ordered the bodies and clothes of the victims to be burned in a nearby rubbish dump and thrown into a local stream.
Mexican traffickers are sending a flood of cheap heroin and methamphetamine across the U.S. border, the latest drug seizure statistics show, in a new sign that America’s marijuana decriminalization trend is upending the North American narcotics trade.
The amount of cannabis seized by U.S. federal, state and local officers along the boundary with Mexico has fallen 37 percent since 2011, a period during which American marijuana consumers have increasingly turned to the more potent, higher-grade domestic varieties cultivated under legal and quasi-legal protections in more than two dozen U.S. states.
Made-in-the-USA marijuana is quickly displacing the cheap, seedy, hard-packed version harvested by the bushel in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains. That has prompted Mexican drug farmers to plant more opium poppies, and the sticky brown and black “tar” heroin they produce is channeled by traffickers into the U.S. communities hit hardest by prescription painkiller abuse, offering addicts a $10 alternative to $80-a-pill oxycodone.
“Legalization of marijuana for recreational use has given U.S. consumers access to high-quality marijuana, with genetically improved strains, grown in greenhouses,” said Raul Benitez-Manaut, a drug-war expert at Mexico’s National Autonomous University. “That’s why the Mexican cartels are switching to heroin and meth.”
On November 30 2014 09:53 [SXG]Phantom wrote: This is a problem withouth an easy solution.In fact, the only solution i see, i know it won't happen, its too late now.
The thing is that all this "Mexico Drug War", its not because or for mexico, is an international thing, that all the goverments refuse to aknoledge.
i mean, its not like the cartels from mexico go, and sell the thousends of tons of drugs directly to the street dealers in the US, they or are already well stablished in the US, or they sell the drug to someone there. Both of those things are concerning, because as far as i know, the US goverment doesn't actively pursue big drug organizations in the US, but they are there, just like they were there in mexico before, but the goverment just didnt put enough attention to them, until they grew too strong and had to make deals with them.
And thats not only in the US, the problem exist in canada, europe, asia, and south america too.
Mexico alone can't fight this, but i doubt the other nations will really do something meaningful (yeah, the us has gave us like 4 helicopters, thanks, really) because it isnt happening in their contry, they think this is not their problem, and they can just get away with helping a little here and there just so we can't say they didn't help us, but if they do not act, some day, the problem will be in their country too.
America acknowledges the problem just as we have for decades and decades. We call it the war on drugs. The cocaine cowboys documentary is pretty good for what happened in america when drugs came in and what the police did in response.
The root of the problem is corruption and a lack of equipment/training. The DEA CIA NSA may get a lot of the bad press in america but they are nothing in the scale of enforcement compared to the FBI. They end kidnapping and bank robbing by putting 20 guys on the case until its done. They form teams of men to attack a specific organization and have the RICO laws to roll up everyone involved. They have whats basically considered a masters program (7 or so years of college) in investigation that they offer to international police organizations.
EPT
