If there aren't walls on our borders from sea to acidifying sea, there might as well be. There's a total blackout of information on what's only feet from our roads and homes.
This last year more Mexicans were slaughtered in senseless acts of carnage than all the American armed forces during the entirety of the Iraq War and occupation. So if any situation deserved the label "horrifying", it is the violent spiral downwards that is the United Mexican States.
Some background, I've lived in San Diego and Los Angeles, Western Colorado and Beaverton, OR... all especially latino-populous areas. In San Diego, I knew people who commuted from Tijuana or had moved here, from there at some point in their lives. In Colorado I mostly knew Chihuahans; also a coworker originally from Ciudad Juárez. I am not an expert on Mexico, nor can I speak Spanish. I've simply paid attention and listened, and have been since around the disgraceful presidential elections in 2006.
As my Chihuahan coworkers all had family connections still in Mexico, they sometimes were back in MX. Chihuahua was not really known for crime only a few years ago, not compared to places like CD or TJ. On the most recent vacation, one of my coworkers noticed that her old town's center was virtually abandoned. Lifeless, for fear of getting gunned down as a bystander. Even though her family home was in a walled compound of villas and swimming pools in what was a "safe" area, she was listening to gun shots.
Mexico's drug war has several traits: intensifying, anarchic, brutal. The consequences are distributed randomly.
Over 50 Slain In Random Tijuana Attacks
TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) – Gunmen are deliberately killing innocent people with random shootings at bars, restaurants and shopping malls in the city of Tijuana in a new scare tactic that takes Mexico's drug war to new depths.
Hit squads have killed at least 50 people, including around 10 children, since October in an escalation of violence in public places that security officials say is akin to terrorism.
The indiscriminate attacks, including shootings in cinemas, pool halls and restaurants, appear to be an attempt by the weakened Arellano Felix cartel to show security forces and rival gangs that it is still a force despite setbacks.
In one recent attack, gunmen in body armor and armed with assault rifles stormed into Tijuana's popular Crazy Banana pool hall and opened fire on customers, killing four men and a woman.
"We were playing pool and these masked men came in shouting and started firing at everyone," said day laborer Juan Miguel at the scene, wiping blood from his head after the attack. He declined to give his surname.
"Anyone close to them was immediately killed," he said.
City police say none of the pool hall victims appeared to have links to drug gangs, a marked change from drug killings across Mexico this year when hit squads have gone after specific targets even if they also clumsily killed others.
In the event that someone you love is kidnapped, contacting the police for help is a grave taboo that can get your lost family member or friend killed on-the-spot.
MEXICO CITY - Kidnappers killed a 5-year-old boy by injecting him with acid after his family sought police help — a new low even for Mexico's brutal kidnapping gangs.
Mexico City Attorney General Miguel Mancera said Monday that assailants injected the acid into the boy's heart and buried him on a hill outside the capital — a death that showed the plague of kidnappings for ransom afflicts the working class as well as the wealthy.
...Most kidnappings go unreported for fear of police involvement. The nonprofit Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies estimates the real kidnapping rate to be more than 500 per month.
Latest of 1000 Murders in Ciudad Juarez this year:
BEHEADED and handcuffed man was found hanging from an overpass in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, as violence between rival drug gangs escalates.
The Associated Press reports police found the victim’s head in a black bag in a nearby plaza.
Police spokesman Alejandro Pariente said a banner aimed at rival drug-gang members was hung next to the body.
Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, has one of the highest murder rates in Mexico, with more than 1000 people killed so far this year.
In other violence in Mexico, masked men gunned down two police officers in a convenience store in nearby Chihuahua City. The gunmen left a toy pig next to the bodies.
And on Tuesday, a man wearing a pig mask was found hanging in a house in Ciudad Juarez. A message next to the body threatened to do the same to others.
Decapitations are an increasingly common means of terrifying both the public and punishing rivals.
Typically, a lot of the drug war violence was gang against gang, gang against police--and that's still happening--now the violence is truly random. It's a free-for-all, greater, more brutal displays of carnage are testaments of power. No limits.
And while human rights are always our concern, we are not just talking about brutality, or a failed state like Haiti or Iraq. We are remembering we have a physical neighbor while we're talking about the regional power of Latin America. In truth, Mexico is the twelfth largest national economy, and the 11th most populous at 109 million.
Documented drug war deaths in 2008 so far: 5,400. 1000 in CD, 700 in TJ. A.G. Eduardo Medina Mora thinks 2009 might get worse.
While much of the undocumented immigration over the preceding years was due to a declining economy, reeled in by neoliberalism and gutted by NAFTA, now we have a state that is increasingly powerless to manage itself. Its one thing to be a recently developed community, its another to live under or unemployed in a terrifying place. Mexican people are traditionally known for their optimism and the grace with which they can handle weaker hands, and there were recent suggestions throughout the media that our declining economy would lessen the flow of undocumenteds in this country. But the total failure of the Calderón presidency ("Mexican Bush" as a coworker called him) suggests that might not necessarily case.
But you know, that would be interesting if we were interested in solving problems, in stead of stamping our feet.
Of course, if these drugs were never made illegal by the US in the first place this would never have come to pass. Forgetting the government's idiocy and scheming to sustain a "war" on civilians disguised as a war against illicit substances.
Why are Mexican lives not worth enough to stop this farce? Why are American innocent bystanders not enough of a light to reveal the futility behind the spectacle? And where was Bush during this? His predecessors create this War on Drugs™... does it really not matter to our national security if our neighbor can no longer police itself and citizens fear for their lives?
...But again, that would be interesting if we were interested in solving problems, in stead of stamping our feet.
There are some things worth dying for... throwing thousands of people into the fires of Baal for a claim of moral superiority is not one of them.