Mexico's Drug War

Mexico vs. drug gangs: A deadly clash for control

President Felipe Calderon says the violence is one measure of success: It shows that the cartels have been hurt badly and are now lashing out at the government and one another.

By Ken Ellingwood

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Mexico is at war.

Helmeted army troops steer Humvees past strip malls in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, some of the 40,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police officers President Felipe Calderon has deployed to secure large swaths of the country against entrenched drug traffickers.

The No. 2 police officer from Ciudad Juarez dies in a hail of bullets, and his boss resigns after receiving threats over the police force's own radio frequency.

Criminals unleash machine guns and grenades in urban battles that the State Department describes as "equivalent to military small-unit combat."

In the year and a half since Calderon launched a crackdown against drug gangs, about 4,100 people have died, the government says. At least 1,400 have been killed so far this year, including 170 in Tijuana, about 400 in Ciudad Juarez and 270 more in the western state of Sinaloa.

Many of the dead were gang members killed by rivals or by the government. Others have been bystanders. But at least 450 police officers and soldiers also have been killed.

"It is a real fight," Calderon told reporters recently. "It is a war."

The president asserts that the level of violence is one measure of success. He says the cartels have been hurt badly, and that they are now lashing out at the government and battling one another for control of territory.

In addition to using military force, Calderon is seeking to strengthen and clean up Mexico's police. Judicial reforms, such as expanded use of plea-bargaining, are aimed at inducing low-ranking suspects to testify against their superiors. And Calderon has agreed to extradite more than 70 jailed drug suspects to the United States.

But for now, the bulwark of his strategy is the army, which says it has made more than 5,800 arrests and intercepted 2,900 tons of marijuana and 24 tons of cocaine. One commentator calculated that overall, drug seizures have cost traffickers as much as $20 billion. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reported in November that street prices of cocaine and methamphetamine had risen, and purity levels had fallen � signs interdiction was working.

Despite the effort, many doubt that Calderon is winning the war. A poll in the Reforma daily on Sunday said 53% of Mexicans believe drug gangs have the upper hand. The killing of Mexico's top drug cop in his Mexico City home last month by traffickers with keys to the house shows infiltration at the highest level, they note.

In Sinaloa state, traffickers have hung posters mocking the 3,600 troops there as "little lead soldiers." In Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, another border city, recent banners advertised jobs in the Zetas, one of the country's most feared crime groups, to soldiers and former soldiers. They offered "good wages, food and help for your family."

Drug traffickers use severed heads as a tool of terror, leaving them with notes to taunt police and one another.

Political analysts say the campaign has succeeded mainly in pushing violence from one region to another, without uprooting the mafias that are challenging the power of the Mexican state. Federal troops often are introduced only after particularly violent outbreaks. They have helped bring calm to Nuevo Laredo, in Tamaulipas state, for example, only to see the killing increase in Baja California and Chihuahua, or farther south in Guerrero state.

"It's a strategy of temporary occupation that achieves just moments of relative quiet, only to return to worsening violence," said Eduardo Valle, a writer and commentator who once worked as an advisor in the federal attorney general's office.

Many also doubt the Mexican government can do much more as long as demand in the United States remains high.

Calderon is relying too heavily on the military and ignoring other fronts such as money laundering, arms trafficking and intelligence gathering, said newspaper columnist Jorge Zepeda Patterson. In fact, drug traffickers often have better intelligence from corrupt police than the army has.

Mexico has long had problems with the drug trade. What's new is the scale and ferocity of the violence. Atty. Gen. Eduardo Medina Mora says deaths are up 47% this year compared with last year.

Largely concentrated along Mexico's 2,000-mile border with the United States and the Gulf of California state Sinaloa, the violence stems from the government crackdown, clashes between the cartels and internal fighting within the crime groups.

shit is getting pretty crazy down there

mexico has been crazy for the past few years.

the sinaloa cartel works for the goverment. so that's the strongest cartel out there in mexico.

I have been following this somewhat over the last year or so. Shit is

defiantly out of control. Dumping body's in the middle of the streets

shootouts everyday. More people are dieing there than any other

conflict in the world right now. This subject needs way more media

coverage. Legalize all drugs, tax it like alcohal and monitor them like prescriptions

and the killings will stop. Will this ever happen in my life time? Probably not.

tl-dr

I lost faith in humanity in 2012.

The whole thing seems to boil down to basic supply and demand.

There is so much money in the drug trade that conventional words like nation, state, government, police, law, war/peace, friend/enemy etc etc lose their meaning.

It's not about ideas or moral anymore, it's logistics, production and opportunism. Perversion of the scenario probably lies somewhere between the idea of criminalization

of drug trafficking and uncontrollable reality, on a logistical level.

It's gold rush down there.

words like nation, state, government, police, law, war/peace, friend/enemy etc etc lose their meaning.

This is something US should realize about Mexico when handing out weapons, money, supplies etc.

If unstable Mexico actually is a problem for US. Rest assured if government supplies Mexico with ARs, it's not like Armalite gave those rifles for free.

Its kind of fucked up but, this makes me appreciate the things i have more and being here in the states. I don't think you can go anywhere in the world and not find corruption one way or another. just that some places are more corrupt than others. It would be great if we can live in a world without corruption

im sure they got territory in the states too but more low profile.

this right here is crazy

http://kaotic.com/10002_Other-Shit-Sinaloa-Cartel-Members-Beheaded-By-Chainsaw.html

they are they real terrorist we should be fighting^^^

Mexico is fighting a "WAR" against things that are legal in Mexico.

Think about it.

I have friends that still live in El Paso. They tell me horror stories about the awful things going on in Juarez all the time. I used to party there when I was a girl. Now my friends tell me they won't go over there at all. It is sad because Mexico is our neighbor and like it or not this is spilling into our country. Another friend told me about The Plaza, a Juarez resident wrote it and I read it and had nightmares for a week. I can't believe all those awful things happen!

Spilling into our country?

How do you fight a war against drugs?

Every country that had any success in reducing drug related crime has utilized decriminilization and legalization. That doesn't mean that the numbers were artificially boosted by legalized criminality, rather the rate of all crime fell.

Admittedly that has been happening for about a decade in most all of the world, so maybe we're just a more honest generation.

Its more than just spilling into our country. THey buy their guns here. They buy their trucks here. They traffic people and sell stolen freight here. Im not talking about just drugs. Zetas and other mexican gangs are a little more organized and involved in higher rackets than the title "Mexican Drug War" implies. These guys hijack entire freight trucks of oil, drive them back into the states and sell them back to us for millions of dollars. Wachovia Bank's been sued by the United States for laundering billions of dollars for mexican cartels.

The ole "Just legalize it." solution no longer applies.

How so?

If you take away the black market for drug's, yes I'm sure criminals would fine other ways to make money, but you can't deny the black market for narcotics is a goldmine, and with out it, where is the motivation?

it will help a a bit, but the drug cartels are doing everything now in days. even scams in cyber space.if you take out the drugs, sure they will lose lots of money, but theres other ways they will b making money. trafficking guns is big business for them too. it's illegal to have a gun in mexico.

How so?

 

If you take away the black market for drug's, yes I'm sure criminals would fine other ways to make money, but you can't deny the black market for narcotics is a goldmine, and with out it, where is the motivation?

Because most of their money doesn't come from selling drugs. These are people who hijack oil tankers and sell them.

How did they get to that level?

Why did they defect from the Mexican army?

When you have captured Drug Lords thanking the United States government for their drug policy, you have a problem.

They've been at it for a while. You just don't read.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/23/137362363/foreign-policy-legalization-wont-make-it-better

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

On that second one, that amount of moneys not coming from drugs.

I think we need to pull out of these other countries, move into mexico and declare war on the cartels. Just end it all.

I would totally agree with you. And afterwards make Mexico a state of America for no other reason than to watch Ron Paul and everyone else backpedal on border control. It would be like politicians wanting to create a border around California to keep them from coming into Arizona. Actually it's already like that.

They've been at it for a while. You just don't read.

 

 

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/23/137362363/foreign-policy-legalization-wont-make-it-better

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

On that second one, that amount of moneys not coming from drugs.

Hilarious.

I don't read?

Read this...

http://www2.hernandotoday.com/news/hernando-news/2010/may/23/la-reconquista-politics-ethnic-conflict-ar-294619/

I bought El Narco and I am currently reading it. Trying to grab a better perspective on the issue, like I do with all issue's I come across that interest me, perhaps I just arrive at different conclusions.

Believe what you want, I honestly don't care, but to think that views held by people who oppose your views are ignorant, you are mistaken, or rather you should look into the mirror.

The narcotics trade has an estimated worth of 30billion dollars...

That's a lot of money.

That article is hilarious. You can say the same things about Chinese immigrants in the early 1900's trying got assimilate the rest of the world into china by creating chinatowns in every city in the world. Those poor towns that those dirty mexicans are living in... THEY'RE NOT ASSIMILATED, THEY'RE SEGREGATED. And even if they were SO THE FUCK WHAT? And guess what, there's HUGE number of indians now coming into every country in the world and they'll be doing the exact same thing. I'm sure you'll be reading about the exact same fucking thing..."All these dirty smelly Indians think just because we thought it was INdia, now they want America to actually BE part of india. How DARE they hold onto their vegegarianism and arranged marriages."

And technically California, arizona, nevada, and texas were once parts of mexico, so if they think that they should be a part of mexico, they're absolutely right. That's not exactly ancient history. This is 1823.

Most of California knows it too and respects that fact. We now teach poor areas in California bilingually, which is great. What's so great about english anyway? You realize America was a coin-toss away from all speaking dutch right? And why wouldn't you want a spanish-mexican influence? Most Mexicans are a tiny, hard working catholics that would kill themselves before they would steal. It's only the areas in America where there has NEVER been another cultural influence that actually gives a shit.

I mean if you think America was going to stay white forever you're out of your gord. OH and also, MEXICO is a fucking melting pot you idiots... for those that think it's just one shade of brown people immigrating northward.

And back to your retort to my post. THat's great that you want a greater perspective on the issue. Maybe you just suck at it. In 1995 the cocaine trade was estimated at 165 BILLION. Now it's 88 Billion and the annual number of drug-related murders has increased by tens of thousands. So lets think about that for a second: Drugs are making less money, are becoming a higher risk, and yet the drug cartels are spending more than ever, putting ENTIRE CITIES on the take... There has been a shift to other forms of crime. Plain and simple.

Yes because that is my dream, to keep America "white".

It's funny to see the message that I try to portray and to see how it is turned around and not received even close to what my intention was.

Debating issue's such as these over the internet is truly a waste of time.

Why are you so butt hurt all of a sudden? Did you write that article? No? Then I wasn't referring to you, although you did post that article for some reason.

Mexico has to deal with immigrants from south America that are trying to get into the US. and some cartels tax these people.

And now the cartels took over the smuggling people business into the US. before it was the mexican coyotes that did that. now cartels are doing it and charging 1g per person.

Los Zetas have been working with the MS13 in salvador and guatemala, to take over the drug game over there.

Hilarious.

 

I don't read?

 

Read this...

 

http://www2.hernandotoday.com/news/hernando-news/2010/may/23/la-reconquista-politics-ethnic-conflict-ar-294619/

 

I bought El Narco and I am currently reading it. Trying to grab a better perspective on the issue, like I do with all issue's I come across that interest me, perhaps I just arrive at different conclusions.

 

Believe what you want, I honestly don't care, but to think that views held by people who oppose your views are ignorant, you are mistaken, or rather you should look into the mirror.

 

The narcotics trade has an estimated worth of 30billion dollars...

 

That's a lot of money.

The value of drugs for the drug smugglers has gone down a lot. it was reported that it wasn't worth as much as it was a 10 years ago. 30 billion is a lot, but theres no many cartels out there once you divide that, it aint much to run a drug organization. So they have been doing other stuff besides drugs now in days. and they have expanded to other places in the world, they have Chinese boats bringing in chemicals for them. That's why they kidnap people or why the took over the smuggling people game.

^ Im guessing the chems are for meth factories?

zetas have total control

i dont think the US will go after them because of fear. The cartels are ruthless and would go after everyones wife and child. many high ranking authorities would be infuriated and disposed of