This year there has been a huge increase in drug related violence south of the border and every now and then somebody writes a diary about it, Nulwee wrote a great diary about the violence last week.
Unfortunately the violence is continuing to spread in Mexico, even hospitals have become part of the drug war, the New York Times reports:
Hit men pursuing rivals into intensive care units and emergency rooms. Shootouts in lobbies and corridors. Doctors kidnapped and held for ransom, or threatened with death if a wounded gunman dies under their care. With alarming speed, Mexico’s violent drug war is finding its way into the seeming sanctuary of the nation’s hospitals, shaking the health care system and leaving workers fearing for their lives while trying to save the lives of others.
As violence continues to spread inside Mexico, The violent Mexican gangs of narco traffickers have also started to move out of Mexico.. More below the fold:
Mexican drug traffickers pose the biggest organised crime threat to the US, a justice department report says.
BBC News
Mexican Gangs have also started to move south into Guatemala as well.
In the latest incident at the end of November, at least 17 people were left dead in the department of Huehuetenango on the border with Mexico in what was widely seen as a clash between Guatemalan and Mexican drug gangs.
BBC News
This has been the third large drug related shootout in Guatemala this year, it also happened about two hours away from the town I'm living in. One of the nurses that I work with at the local government run health clinic lives several houses away from where the shootout occurred. Luckily she wasn't home at the time. Several of the older Guatemalans that I know have said that the situation in Guatemala is getting to be worse than during the civil war. The government has responded with an increased military and police presence on the streets, and I have gotten used to seeing soldiers with assault rifles every time I go to the city to buy groceries.
The main gang from Mexico that has been involved in these killings tends to be a group known as Los Zetas. according to wikipedia, the first Zetas are believed to have received training at the School of Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.
The Zetas were originally members of the Mexican Army’s elite Airborne Special Forces Group (GAFE), trained in locating and apprehending drug cartel members. It is believed that they were originally trained at the military School of the Americas in the United States,[6][7]. Also, they were trained by foreign specialists, including Americans, French, and Israelis, in rapid deployment, aerial assaults, marksmanship, ambushes, small-group tactics, intelligence collection, counter-surveillance techniques, prisoner rescues and sophisticated communications.
In the late 1990s, the Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cardenas Guillen, began to recruit GAFE members to provide protection and perform other vital functions. His top recruit, Lieutenant Arturo Guzmán Decena, brought with him approximately 30 other deserters enticed by salaries substantially higher than those paid by the Mexican government
The Prensa Libre, one of the main newspapers in Guatemala estimates that the Zetas have a presence in 18 of Guatemala's 22 departments.
But, instead of thinking up a new strategy we are continuing to pour money into this fighting this war, (this years Plan Merida alone gives 400 million dollars to fund efforts by Mexico and lesser extent Guatemala to fight against drug trafficking.) How many more people need to die in the US, Mexico and Central America before we realize that there is a better way to win this war?
All this violence isn't happening far away from the US either. Ronald Reagan once said,
"The nations of Central America are among our nearest neighbors. El Salvador, for example, is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Central America is simply too close, and the strategic stakes are too high, for us to ignore the danger of governments seizing power there with ideological and military ties to the Soviet Union"
I would argue that the stakes are just as high now, as our current strategies to fight the war on drugs have left large, very powerful, very violent gangs running rampant just south of our border.