Mexico has evolved into a full blown narco-state. Drug cartels have taken control of local governments, engaged in unimaginable violence, and shown little regard for the value of human life.
The genocide death toll in Mexico approaches 40,000 - though it is difficult to ascertain due to inadequate investigations or records.
The state department has issued travel warnings for almost all border towns.
Violence along the U.S. - Mexico Border
You should be especially aware of safety and security concerns when visiting the northern border states of Northern Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas. Much of the country's narcotics-related violence has occurred in the border region. More than a third of all U.S. citizens killed in Mexico in 2010 whose deaths were reported to the U.S. government were killed in the border cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. Narcotics-related homicide rates in the border states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas have increased dramatically in the past two years.
Carjacking and highway robbery are serious problems in many parts of the border region and U.S. citizens have been murdered in such incidents. Most victims who complied with carjackers at these checkpoints have reported that they were not physically harmed. Incidents have occurred during the day and at night, and carjackers have used a variety of techniques, including bumping moving vehicles to force them to stop and running vehicles off the road at high speed. There are some indications that criminals have particularly targeted newer and larger vehicles with U.S. license plates, especially dark-colored SUVs. However, victims' vehicles have included those with both Mexican and American registration and vary in type from late model SUVs and pick-up trucks to old sedans.
Travel Warning U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Bureau of Consular Affairs
The first one appeared on February 3, 2010, before sunrise. It hung from the statue of José María Morelos that faces the colonial statehouse at the center of Monterrey. Morelos was a priest turned revolutionary leader in Mexico’s war of independence, and the large white sheet bearing a message from a drug cartel spanned the entire length of the hero’s bronze horse. Here Comes the Monster, it read, and was signed “Z.” That same morning, six similar handwritten messages, also signed “Z,” appeared in the municipalities surrounding Monterrey. Soldiers came, removed them and drove off.
The narcomantas, as these public communiqués of the cartels are known, presaged a horrific explosion of violence in Monterrey, a city of 4 million people in northeastern Mexico and the country’s financial capital. In the months that followed, students would be gunned down at the gate of the city’s elite university. A mayor would be abducted, tortured and murdered. City squares, police stations and even the US consulate would be attacked with grenades. Blockades controlled by masked gunmen would paralyze the city for days on end. At the root of this violence was a turf war between the authors of the narcomantas, the Zetas, and their former ally the Gulf Cartel.
The Monster and Monterrey: The Politics and Cartels of Mexico's Drug War by Nik Steinberg
It is not just those involved in drug smuggling or human trafficking that are affected. Cartels generate a great deal of revenue through kidnappings. These are kidnappings and ransom demands of Mexican business owners and middle class who are not involved in drug trafficking in any way. Ransom demands are generally enough to bankrupt families.
The violence is unconscionable.
Suspected drug hitmen dumped six headless bodies outside a school in northern Mexico Monday a day after forensics pulled victims out of a nearby mass grave in a stream of unrelenting violence that is pressuring Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
Assailants left the bloodied, beheaded men outside the secondary school in the colonial city of Durango just before dawn and sprayed threatening messages on a nearby wall, hours before students were due to put on a show to celebrate Mother's Day, Durango state attorney general's office said.
Prosecutors declined to give more details and police quickly painted over the spray-painted threats, but also confirmed the discovery Sunday of 11 bodies in a shallow grave in the back of a mechanic's garage in the city. It was the fourth mass grave to be found in Durango since early April.
Reuters link
By engulfing Monterrey, home to some of Latin America's biggest companies and where annual income per capita is double the Mexican average at $17,000, the violence shows just how serious the security crisis has become in Mexico, the world's seventh-largest oil exporter and a major U.S. trade partner.
Almost 40,000 people have died across the country since late 2006, and in Monterrey, the violence has escalated to a level that questions the government's ability to maintain order and ensure the viability of a region that is at the heart of Mexico's ambitions to become a leading world economy.
Reuters: If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls
2 factors are critical to this explosion of violence.
1. The U.S. provision of illegal arms to the cartels
MEXICO CITY -- About 70 percent of the guns seized in Mexico and submitted to a U.S. gun-tracing program came from the United States, according to a report released by three U.S. senators Monday.
Of the 29,284 firearms recovered by authorities in Mexico in 2009 and 2010, 20,504 came from the United States, according to figures provided to the senators by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Most of those weapons – 15,131 – were U.S. made, while another 5,373 were of foreign manufacture but had moved through the United States into Mexico.
The ATF said the remainder of the weapons total – 8,780 arms – were of "undetermined origin due to insufficient information provided."
Huffington Post: Mexico Drug War: 70 Percent Of Guns Seized Originate In U.S.
An ATF admission during a special hearing.
"We monitored as they purchased handguns, AK-47 variants and .50 caliber rifles, almost daily at times," John Dodson, an ATF special agent in Phoenix, told the committee.
"Rather than conduct any enforcement actions, we took notes, we recorded observations, we tracked movements of these individuals, we wrote reports but nothing more."
Dodson said agents were never given reasonable answers why their activities were limited.
An ATF supervisor in Phoenix, Peter Forcelli, said some tried to raise concerns with supervisors but were rebuffed.
"My concerns were dismissed," he told the committee. "I believe that these firearms will continue to turn up at crime scenes, on both sides of the border, for years to come."
The agents complained they were ordered to break off surveillance of the firearms and instead follow the original gun purchaser rather than track where the weapons went.
Drug violence and the flow of guns over the U.S. border into Mexico has developed into a major sore point between the two countries, straining diplomatic ties and leading Mexican officials to openly criticize the United States.
THOUSANDS OF GUNS TRACED BACK TO U.S.
Of the nearly 30,000 firearms recovered in 2009 and 2010 in Mexico, where gun possession is illegal, some 70 percent were determined to have come from the United States, ATF officials told lawmakers last week.
Reuters : U.S. agents slam gun sting effort on Mexico border
2. The U.S. illicit drug trade. The War on Drugs has failed.
This diary expands that view. As well as Sandy Goodman and Dan Rathers in these articles.
This article tends to blame the victim and lay accountability at the feet of the Mexican people (who FWIW are NOT allowed to own guns for self-defense). Mexican citizens are frustrated and tired of being terrorized and black-mailed. There are peace marches and protests.
The Obama admin wants a war in Libya for human rights violations? Perhaps we should look no farther than our own back yard.
You can also read more on this topic here.