Fuck Yeah Drug Policy
by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the
government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be
enforced. - Albert Einstein
$90 billion hasn’t secured the border | The Columbus Dispatch
As Congress debates border funding and as governors demand more assistance, the Associated Press has investigated what taxpayers spend securing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Using White House budgets, reports obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and congressional transcripts, the AP has tallied it up: $90 billion in 10 years.
For taxpayers footing this bill, the returns have been mixed: fewer illegal immigrants, but little impact on the terrorism issue, and certainly no stoppage of the drug supply. +
The Next Step in the War On Drugs: Narco-Tanks
Mexican and Central American drug gangs have gotten pretty big in the past several years, and for while it was common to find homemade jungle submarines. But now it appears that drug cartels have begun building tanks by armoring trucks with steel plating and big fucking guns.
Thank you, prohibition.
“Peace caravan” crossing Mexico to protest drug war | Reuters
Hundreds of Mexicans began a weeklong caravan on Saturday to protest the country’s bloody drug war, led by a crusading poet whose son was murdered by suspected cartel hitmen. +
Mexican student police chief will live in fear for the rest of her life
A Mexican student who became the police chief of a lawless border town has admitted she will live in fear for the rest of her life after fleeing to the US following threats from drug traffickers. +
A kindergarten teacher in Mexico led her class in a singalong during a shootout that occurred outside the school. Daniel Hernandez reports:
In the video, the frightened but determined voice of a schoolteacher is heard as she attempts to maintain calm among a group of kindergartners lying on the floor before her, asking them to join her in a singalong as gunfire shatters the air outside.
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
Grassley is pressing the Department of Justice (DOJ) on who initiated the “Gun Runner” program that authorized the sale of guns to people acting as straw purchasers for drug cartels in Mexico. Gun Runner might have contributed to the death of at least one federal agent.
Gun Runner and another operation called Fast and Furious were designed to dismantle the gun-smuggling routes that drug cartels use to ferry high-powered assault rifles from the U.S. into Mexico. By allowing people to illegally purchase large quantities of the weapons from gun dealers, officials hoped to trace the firearms to the drug cartel members and prosecute them. But ATF whistleblowers allege that officials lost track of the guns. +
Guatemala: 27 massacred, decapitated in Petén by paramilitary drug gang Los Zetas
A spokesman for Guatemala’s police described what they found on Sunday morning: “One whole body, 26 bodies without heads, and 23 heads.” This is the worst single incident of violence since the country’s 36-year civil war ended in 1996, and is seen by many in the country as a symbolic act of political terror, while the nation prepares for presidential elections. Messages at the scene written on a wall in the victims’ blood (various reports say they were scrawled with a severed leg) make clear who is responsible: Los Zetas, a paramilitary Mexican drug gang that in recent years has expanded throughout Central America and operates with particular impunity and freedom within Guatemala. The organization has long recruited from the ranks of kaibiles, the elite special forces division of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare who carried out massacres of indigenous peasants during the civil war. The brutality evidenced in this massacre, even the killing techniques, brings to mind the worst of the death squad attacks in the 1980s. The leader of the armed group that carried out this massacre is reported to have identified himself to the workers as “kaibil.”
Daily chart: bribery in Mexico In some regions traffic police receive bribes almost every time they stop a motorist, according to Transparency International, an anti-corruption outfit.
Mexican drug war capital renames itself “heroic”
Mexico’s most violent city, Ciudad Juarez, where more than 9,000 people have died in a horrifying drug war since 2008, is renaming itself Heroica Ciudad Juarez, or Heroic City of Juarez.
Without even a hint of irony, the Chihuahua state Congress, which legislates for Ciudad Juarez, has voted in the name change to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the border city’s role in the downfall of a Mexican dictator and the revolution it fueled.
“La revolución no vive en las armas, si no en el amor por las ideas”
Foto de Warner
Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua
(via geromyswaifu)
“The blood represents all of the victims that the violence and the war have left us with during this administration. It is also a way to protest the authorities and their inability to stop the operations of criminal groups in this country,” explained a member of the [Movement for Peace].
This was the first action on the itinerary of a protest that is being lead by three motives: to remember the seven people murdered a month ago along with all of the others who have lost their lives in the same way, to protest a proposal for a national public security law that would give the executive branch of the government the power to use the army at its beck and call against demonstrators, and to promote the National Forum of Young People in the National Emergency.
full story…
Police, bus companies failed to act as graves filled in Tamaulipas
At least 177 corpses have been recovered in the last few weeks, most of them passengers snatched from interstate buses, tortured and slaughtered. Women were raped before being killed, and some victims were burned alive, according to accounts from survivors who eventually overcame their fears and came forward.
…
The motives behind the bus kidnappings remain unclear. Gangs may seize the passengers hoping to extort money from them, to forcibly recruit them or because they are searching for rivals.
The killings have galvanized an unusual if belated consensus, even among conservative commentators and politicians, that parts of Mexico have indeed been lost to criminal gangs such as the Zetas and the Gulf cartel that control (and are battling each other to dominate) the northeast. What does it mean, they ask, when the federal government cannot keep the nation’s highways safe from brazen predators?
Even worse is the near-certainty that the police who are meant to be protectors have been involved. Among the more than 50 people arrested in connection with the latest killings are 17 local police officers accused of providing protection to the cartel gunmen believed responsible.
