"8,150 people had been killed since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006 [and began his crackdown on gangs]" -- LA Times.
"Evidently when they are cornered and weakened, they have to respond with violence" -- Mexico Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, May 2008.
As of January 2009:
"...more than 5,000 people had been killed in drug violence so far this year, more than double the toll for the same period in 2007" -- LA Times.
"I don't think we've reached the top of the curve," -- Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora.
Mexico's in for a bumpy ride.
Since my diary on Mexico on December 10th, the violence in Mexico's most dangerous city flared up again. 80 people have been murdered within 3 weeks in Ciudad Juarez. According to the Houston Chronicle, "kidnappings, extortions, robberies and rapes further bedevil an already rattled population." 500 gangs prowl Ciudad Juarez.
The article then argues my exact point in my previous diary: the violence in Mexico is "generalized". In 2004 you'd hear about Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana as "wild" towns, but a large percentage of the violence previously was directed at rival gangs competing with each other. It was not anything near as bad as it is today. Having known people from Ciudad Juarez, Tijauna and Chihuahua living in the US or commuting from the border, I have not met one Mexican American who can't tell the violence is visibly far worse than ever before. Anyone is now targeted along the border, for the sake of showing how powerless the government really is. People live inside their houses, their towns stand deserted. Back to Hous-Chron's article on Ciudad Juarez:
...Consider Tuesday, alone:
• • Authorities recovered the decapitated head of a police chief from a town just downriver. Three other heads stuffed into a cooler were left on the steps of a city hall in a neighboring village.
• • Two state police detectives were shot to death in their patrol truck in a downtown Juarez parking lot.
• • A Juarez traffic police commander was kidnapped by unknown assailants.
And then consider that 10 people were killed the previous Wednesday, Jan. 14, including a 19-year-old law student who was a varsity baseball pitcher. He had been abducted 30 hours earlier from his family’s townhouse near the border.
The parents of the student, Jaime Irigoyen, said their son’s abductors wore army uniforms and spoke with southern Mexico accents, like many of the 3,000 soldiers patrolling the city’s streets.
A Mexican army statement denied soldiers were involved.
"That whoever deprived him of liberty were dressed in military-style uniforms in no way says they were soldiers," the army said. "We call on the general public not to be fooled by criminal gangs."
But members of the public said they saw men in uniform commit crimes. Witnesses said the eight gunmen who stormed a prayer service at a drug rehabilitation center last August and killed eight people were attired in military garb as well."
Mexico has about 1/3rd the US population but the murder rate was already far higher. The LA Times reports that the already bad national murder rate in 2008 doubled 2007's.
Banana Loca, a popular Tijuana bar, was attacked randomly and 5 patrons gunned down. Local business is drying up as over 300 were killed just last fall. The Telegraph has an already dated article (November 2008) on Tijuana which features a picture of the shootings.
While the border sees the bulk of the violence, that same Houston Chronicle article sees a dark omen for Mexico:
Some U.S. security experts warn that Mexico teeters on meltdown - of being a "failed state." Mexican leaders shrug off the notion, but Juarez's criminal chaos wails like a siren before an approaching storm.
According to wikipedia's article on failed states:
The term is also used in the sense of a state that has been rendered ineffective (i.e., has nominal military/police control over its territory only in the sense of having no armed opposition groups directly challenging state authority; in short, the "no news is good news" approach) and is not able to enforce its laws uniformly because of high crime rates, extreme political corruption, an extensive informal market, impenetrable bureaucracy, judicial ineffectiveness, military interference in politics, cultural situations in which traditional leaders wield more power than the state over a certain area but do not compete with the state, or a number of other factors
Foreign Policy Magazine and Fund For Peace put Mexico under a warning for the risk of becoming a failed state in 2007. The violence in Mexico grew significantly at this time, (over 2000 dead) but did not spiral until 2008, when it climbed 47%, and the start of 2009.
More Mexican civilians have been killed by what's essentially a drug war than American servicemen and women who've died in Iraq. This ignores the fact that in San Diego and Los Angeles and other cities, affiliated gangs are responsible for some of our nation's highest rates of violent deaths, because our situation pales to that of our neighbor. Filmed in 2006, the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's brutal No Country For Old Men now seems prophetic for a system unleashing the extreme worst of human behavior.
Beheadings, injections of acid, every manner of depravity is now known. American forests and their vulnerable, threatened and endangered denizens, already degraded by years of Bushism, are host to Mexican marijuana and fertilizers and pesticides. Sequoia National Park, over 700 sites just in California, with more in Washington and federal land in Appalachia. 5 year old boys are kidnapped and injected with acid.
...Starting to think there's a bit more to the picture than what little information the ratings media's disseminated?
These are the kind of things that the US should be dealing with, since we're so adamant about protecting our borders and our trade. Sixty years after the birth of the United Nations, we don't believe it's in our national security and diplomatic interests to do more for our neighbor than throw money at the problem?