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newgrowerNY

Mexican drug gangs target military as president tries to regain territory lost to cartels
05-14-07|Sign on San Diego

Mexican drug cartels armed with powerful weapons and angered by a nationwide military crackdown are striking back, killing soldiers in bold, daily attacks that threaten the one force strong enough to take on the gangs.
The daily bloodshed includes an ambush that killed five soldiers this month, a severed head left with a defiant note outside a military barracks on Saturday and the slaying Monday of a top federal intelligence official who was shot in the face in his car outside his office in Mexico City.

Mexicans were particularly shocked last week by televised images of kindergartners fleeing their school during a grenade-and-gun battle between traffickers and soldiers that lasted for nearly two hours in this small town in President Felipe Calderón's home state of Michoacan.

-New Admin note-
The above paragraph is a perfect example of well executed propaganda. Show the kids running. Scare the parents. The real question is why is there a gun battle near kids? To stop people from selling Marijuana ? Other drugs ? Is that worth endangering the lives of these peoples childern ?

The unrelenting bloodshed has forced a change in strategy for Calderón, who sent more than 24,000 federal police and soldiers out in December to reoccupy territory from Michoacan's poppy-dotted mountains to the tourist-packed port of Acapulco.

Now, to supplement the massive presence of soldiers and tanks in small towns, he's ordered the creation of an elite military special operations force capable of surgical strikes.

“We are not going to give in,” Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said. “In the states where there is most violence, we will be right there to confront the phenomenon.”

The drug trade is all-powerful in Mexico. Analysts estimate that cartels here make between $10 billion and $30 billion selling cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. market, rivaling Mexico's revenues from oil exports and tourism. The gangs also make billions through robbery, kidnapping and extortion of businesses and would-be migrants.

The Calderón administration insists the crackdown is working – the government has already detained more than 1,000 gunmen and burned millions of dollars in marijuana plants. Traffickers are being extradited to the U.S. more rapidly than ever before, and police recently made the world's biggest seizure of drug cash, $207 million neatly stacked inside a Mexico City mansion.

-News Admin Note-
This puts me in mind of the early gold rush days. I believe our goverment has started another type of gold rush. I wonder who is supplying the mexican goverment with weapons ? Here is a nice influx of cash. Once again I hope the peoples children are worth this money.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials say it's too early to judge the crackdown's success. Seizures at the U.S. border indicate the flow of drugs north may actually be increasing – 20 percent more cocaine and 28 percent more marijuana has been seized in the past six months, compared with the same period a year earlier.

-News Admin Note-
This is no surprise. Throw more money at it, more gunfights near schools so news teams can catch it on tape, and distribute the propaganda to all who will listen

Violence nationwide in Mexico seems to be increasing. The country's three leading newspapers estimate shootouts, decapitations and execution-style killings have claimed the lives of about 1,000 people this year, on track to soar past last year's count of 2,000. The government doesn't count drug-related killings, and a top federal police official, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, has referred to the newspaper figures as the best numbers available.

This month's death toll for soldiers and sailors is the worst for the military in more than a decade – violence that shows the gangs' desperation, officials say.

On Saturday, drug gangs left the head of a 37-year-old auto mechanic wrapped in a sheet outside an army base near the port city of Veracruz, along with a note that read: “We are going to continue, even if federal forces are here.” The grisly message came shortly after the government said it was sending troops to the city to respond to a shooting attack.

Many Mexicans fear even the army is outgunned.

“Calderón's War on Drugs has been a big disappointment for us,” said Pedro Ortega, a family doctor in Aguililla, a Michoacan farming town at the center of the drug trade. “The reality is that we are scared to go out of houses, scared about what could happen to our children.”

-News Admin Note-
Even they can tell that prohabition does not work

Calderón's overall approval ratings remain high – 68 percent according to a recent Ipsos-BIMSA poll. But 40 percent blame the military presence for the increasing violence, and 36 percent believe the traffickers are winning, according to the nationwide survey of 1,050 adults from April 26 to May 1, which had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

Aguililla was one of the first towns to receive soldiers. Convoys of Humvees rolled down the streets, black helicopters clattered low over the houses and soldiers at checkpoints frisked motorists for guns. But residents say the military presence has been sporadic since then, and most of the time they are left without protection from the traffickers.

“There is no government here. We just pray to God to take care of us,” said 60-year-old Soledad Lombera, sobbing at a cross of candles in her house, an alter she created days after her son Francisco Alvez was found shot and buried on a nearby ranch.

Like many towns in the heart of drug country, Aguililla is strategically difficult to control, approachable by winding roads on which assailants ambushed and killed 11 state police last year. At night, the paved central plaza is taken over by gun-wielding thugs in sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks.

Outsiders are not welcome. A group of Mexican newspaper reporters who tried to cover the killings in Aguililla were blocked by a gang of men bearing automatic rifles who ordered them to leave, said the reporters, who asked that their names not be used for fear of reprisals.

Seven journalists have been killed in Mexico since October, making it the world's second-most dangerous place to report, after Iraq.

Aguililla's mayor, Miguel Avila, said the crackdown won't work unless Mexicans get better jobs as an alternative to growing and smuggling drugs.

“If you don't let people make money in one way, you have to offer them another,” Avila said. “All the people in the United States buying these drugs give people a big incentive to produce them.”

-News Admin Note-
We are the market because of the current war on drugs. It was not a problem in mexico .. how much was it worth there before this silly war on drugs? Why were they forced to sell it to the united states ?

 

Buzzby

Because the cartel gangsters fired on the troops while using the school kids as human shields, figuring that they would be able to murder the troops with impunity?

The article says nothing about news teams. It could have easily been a local resident with a video camera. The article says nothing about who started the fire fight. I think you're voicing a knee-jerk, pro-drug, reaction. The Mexican government didn't initiate this string of atrocities, it was greedy billionaire drug dealers who believe their desire for accumulating even more wealth is more important than human life.

The Mexican people seem to be twice as happy with their president than we are with ours!

I'd say this makes it unlikely that the fire fight was filmed by "news teams".

Nobody "forced" drug gangs to sell drugs to the US. They were impelled by greed. You might as well say that affluent people "force" burglars to invade their homes.

I hate the drug war as much as anyone, but I can't use it to excuse for murder-for-profit.

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lilgrasshoppah

Wars have combatants, and battles. Bullets are exchanged, and people get injured and killed. Granted, unfortunate as it may be, in our war, the combatants resisting the government are generally bellicose, vicious, killers... as vicious and as murderous as any warrior in a combat zone. They can't all be 93 year old grandmas, or middle-aged MS patients, you know. But the immorality, cynicism, or sociopathy (whatever you want to call it) of drug warriors on one side of the war, does not excuse the same such on the other side.

Producing and selling a product people want, is not "greedy" it's capitalism... unless you think capitalism is "greedy"...? Andthe government sets the table stakes. In 1937, you did not need multinational syndicates of organized criminals to get weed. All you needed was "two feet and a heartbeat", and you could get your fill. The government made it into a war.... by imposing outrageous penalties, and by militarizing the police and by intruding into foreign country's domestic affairs set the parameters for the war. They refuse to debate. They refuse to e reasonable, rational, or fair.

The only solution they permit is open, armed, rebellion. Now, while I don't support it, I recognize the inevitablity of it. And I certainly don't applaud the ursurping agents of a foreign power who are explicitly fighting to maintain a dreadful tyranny.

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I got soul, But i'm not a soldier - The Killers

newgrowerNY

Last I checked, people still called their drug dealers .. sounds like there is demand for a product. No drug dealers I ever knew had to steal anything.

That's pretty stereotypical.

I doubt it. Maybe if it happen in US.

Sounds like there are plenty of news teams .. or at least were ..

Oh .. the drug lords started this war on drugs against themselves ?

Again, how many gun fights were there near schools before this war on drugs started?

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Disclaimer: I love to grow

Buzzby

When "capitalism" extends to murdering people to make more money, it is, indeed, greed.

Somehow, in the US, we've managed to avoid that. We do our best to avoid confrontations with law enforcement and don't organize with the intent of murdering police officers

For some reason, the only place on Earth where this kind of thing is going on is Mexico and it's a rather recent development. How does your "inevitability" theory deal with that?

 

lilgrasshoppah

Are you being sarcastic? For the naivete you are showing me can have no other purpose. I know you are quite intelligent, and quite knowlegable... so what can possibly be the point of your latest post?

1. I find it bitterly amusing that drug traffickers that kill military (not even police, not even SWAT) but soldiers, are 'greedy murderers'... but the fascistic thieves who conspired to steal a man's house, and committed fraud to do it... we can't call them evil, because that's 'just not nice'. Or fascistic, arrogant sociopaths who imperiously demand that a government turn over a prominent, peaceable businessman, to punish him for his political activism... we can't call that evil either!
Double-Yew Tee Eff.

2. The drug war has been going on for how many years? And in all that time, drug dealers in the US have never shot at, and killed, drug enforcement agents? Like never?
2b. As for Mexico, drug lords were killing DEA, and military and police in 1985... even earlier. Look up Enrique Camarena, for an early example.

3. It is generally undisputed that, while other countries may have harsher drug laws, the engine that drives prohibition is US foreign policy. Hence when Calderon, or somebody like him, enacts a military crackdown on his own citizens, he is likely doing so at the behest (and, likely, with the aid) of DEA, CIA, or combinations there of.

Again, and finally, this is a drug WAR. This is the war on the people that the founding fathers knew would come, and tried to prevent. This is the tyranny that threatens the ideals of the republic. As such a war, it is understood, and evident, that the tyrants and evildoers will serve the interests of tyranny, and do evil. I make no claim that drug warriors, of any faction, are anything other than what they are: killers, torturers, rapists, racketeers, profiteers and defrauders. But those are the kinds of people attracted to, and created by, war. In Iraq, four sociopaths, (who just happened to be Marines) tortured, raped and murdered a 14 year old girl, and then desecrated her corpse, and then killed her entire family, and then when back to their base for chicken wings and beer. The preceding is not an anti american screed, but actually an antiwar one. Wars are fought by killers. It is a pleasant fiction that young men "die for their country" in war. That is an UNWANTED side effect. The reality is, young men KILL for their country... and, if they are supremely unlucky, other young men, on the other side, will kill THEM.

In closing, I leave you with a quote from one of the greatest warriors from the last civil war, General William Tecumseh Sherman, a man far wiser, and far more prophetic than even he could have possibly realized.

and, another one, by Thomas Jefferson, with Revisions By Ben Franklin and John Adams.

Buzzby

So, it's OK for multi-billion-dollar drug cabals with private armies to have an organized terror campaign to keep themselves from being prosecuted because police have followed the law? Should we organize to murder the people who make the laws? The reason they're murdering soldiers is because they have already murdered enough police officers that the police won't pursue them anymore. The federal government had to send in the military because the police were so totally outgunned.

There has never been a private army supported by US drug dealers sent out with the specific purpose of murdering law enforcement agents in order to scare the government away from prosecuting the cabals.

It's not like he's cracking down on ordinary citizens. He's cracking down on murdering drug cabals. I know you would prefer an end to drug prohibition. So would I. That doesn't give drug lords a free pass to murder people in an armed insurrection against a duly elected democratic government.

It is? I thought that was just a name made up by the Nixon administration to make people think that the government was actually dealing with the "drug problem". It's no more a war than the "War on Poverty". The only place where it approaches being a war is in Mexico, and that's because, instead of allowing the police to do their jobs, the drug lords have formed armies to terrorize the populace and attempt to scare off the government.

lilgrasshoppah

That's right! Because the Nixon Adminstration wasn't fighting a war in Viet Nam... and Laos... and Cambodia...? They had NO idea what a war actually was!

Besides THAT rhetoric is 30 years old! I'm sure the "war on drugs" is simply a meaningless phrase... like, oh I don't know, "the war on terror"...? I mean, it's not like the US is actually fighting that war... both at home and abroad, now, is it?

Does the military perform actions in the War on Drugs? Have military personnel exchanged fire with civilians? Does the military provide free weapons, materiel and training to law enforcement agencies across the country? Do paramilitary squadrons of police perform paramilitary actions against civilians in cities across America? Are there joint task forces of law enforcement an military units performing actions in violation of the spirit of the Posse Comitatus Act? You know, your "meaningless rhetoric" doesn't seem so meaningless, now does it?

As for Mexico being the only place where the govrnment is involved in pitched battles with drug dealers... two words:

Afghanistan.
Colombia.

Afghanistan's history of heroin production is public record. The CIA estimates that Afghani junk makes up a third of their GNP. Afgani warlords have made Afghanistan the leading producer of heroin in the world. I guess they don't count in your paradigm?

What about Colombia? Colombia is, at present, locked in a civil war, with communist rebels on one side, and fascist insurgents on the other, and the government caught in the middle. The communists tax and harvest the coca, the fascists purify the cocaine, and traffick it, and the government makes a play at eradication. I guess you didn't know about that?

lilgrasshoppah

Having the military involved in the drug war creates havoc and human rights abuses! Who knew!? Oh and we discover that, at every stage of the game, the government has incited and excalated? Again... what surprising material! Finally, the drug war has corrupted mexican police to the point that they are unable to enforece the law.

A threat to liberty anywhere is a threat to liberty everywhere. Lucky for us, the drug war IS everywhere anyway.... so the point is moot. But don't think that the US is immune to the abuses we see happening in Mexico. I'd wager that the drug warrior in america look at the crisis down there, and salivate.