In yet another hit sure to be blamed on drug cartels, agubernatorial candidate was gunned down:
Rodolfo Torre Cantu, a gubernatorial candidate for the major Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) party, was killed by gunmen on Monday morning, police said.
Local officials said an armed group, believed to be drug hitmen, attacked Cantu approximately 9 kilometers (5.5 miles) from the Soto la Marina highway as he was on his way to an airport in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
And another high-ranking official found out that you can't trust your own security in Mexico....
The article doesn't say why the cartels would attack this candidate. Conservative President Calderon has continued to insist that the 'war on drugs' is a valid one, and must be escalated even further.
Earlier this month, Mexican president Felipe Calderon said the 'war on drugs' is justified and warned it will "take time, more resources and more human lives."
More time. More resources. More money. More lives. Check, check, check, and check: it's officially a war when a conservative politician asks for those 4 things. Never less, always more is the answer.
Frankly, even those in the US that have a detailed understanding of drug cartels and politics in Mexico don't know the half of the changing dynamics down there. No one really knows all the moves made by cartels because, after all, there are an insurgency group, not a standing army. Mexican cartels surely rank among the world's fiercest insurgency groups, given their free access to drug cash and ties to Mexican military. (We do know that some of the cartels have former Mexican military along with hitmen who were trained in the USA at the "School of The Americas", which many of you have perhaps heard of)
A person who is often stereotyped and caricatured- Bob Marley- asked in his song 'Natural Mystic' just how "many more have to suffer, how many more have to die? ". That's the best question to ask ourselves about this drug war. If we tried, for the first time in American history, to put together a comprehensive drug policy together that meshed foreign policy with domestic policy WITH sanity, then we'd begin addressing our problems in Afghanistan, Mexico, and Jamaica. Or even Drug addiction in America.
Just over a week ago, a group of armed gunmen shot and killed Guadalupe Mayor Jesus Manuel Lara Rodriguez, the mayor of the Mexican town of Guadalupe. The murder happened as his wife and child watched from nearby, at a time that violence in the country appeared to be on the rise.
What's interesting is that I don't see ANY other issue in politics with so much consensus, yet so much schizophrenic policy-making. On the left, I think many have given up hope that the WH will lead on this issue. On the right, we see even Sarah Palin arguing for decrim. of marijuana. The California Prison Guard union, which for years was responsible for helping worsen the state's sentencing guidelines, has now launched a fake-looking campaign to "reform" our prisons and "change" our sentencing laws(but not to the point of releasing non-violent drug inmates, of course).
The California NAACP just endorsed the marijuana re-legalization ballot initiative.
And Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is re-enacting the same type of Reefer madness that got marijuana banned 100 years ago, saying that brown people are invading Amerka for the sole purpose of drug smuggling. Despite drug statistics that tell us that white people do drugs as well (so blaming minorities for a 'drug problem' is more wingnuttery)
Failure of the California ballot initiative will not be the end of the world, as Arizona, South Dakota, and other states have their own medical mj initiatives. My feeling is that if CA passes the ballot, the Supreme Court will possibly do the right thing, as they did last year in refusing to hear an objection to CA's state law from San Diego county Republicans.
By the way, many people say that Americans are too ignorant or numb to comprehend or address their own domestic issues, much less foreign ones, even if we are part of the problem. Can you imagine if armed hitmen were killing American politicians? In front of their families? To many Americans, Mexico and the Middle East seem like "twilight" zones, full of violence and barbarism, and lacking the light of freedom that the USA has....and blithely unaware of the USA's involvement in so many of these other countries' problems.