First more from the horrific war going on down in Mexico. this new NY Times article article seems like the cartels are now pulling Joker's tactics and executing cops to flush out the heroes. basically another city falls to drugs in the war on drugs
With Force, Mexican Drug Cartels Get Their Waypor qué tan serio?
Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press
A soldier inspecting the S.U.V. where three police officers were killed last week in Ciudad Juárez. -
Published: February 28, 2009
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Mayor José Reyes Ferriz is supposed to be the one to hire and fire the police chief in this gritty border city that is at the center of Mexico’s drug war. It turns out, though, that real life in Ciudad Juárez does not follow the municipal code.
It was drug traffickers who decided that Chief Roberto Orduña Cruz, a retired army major who had been on the job since May, should go. To make clear their insistence, they vowed to kill a police officer every 48 hours until he resigned.
They first killed Mr. Orduña’s deputy, Operations Director Sacramento Pérez Serrano, together with three of his men. Then another police officer and a prison guard turned up dead. As the body count grew, Mr. Orduña eventually did as the traffickers had demanded, resigning his post on Feb. 20 and fleeing the city.
Roberto Orduña Cruz, left, was escorted by a police officer after resigning on Feb. 20 as police chief of Ciudad Juárez. Drug cartels vowed to kill an officer every 48 hours until he resigned.
Replacing Mr. Orduña will also fall outside the mayor’s purview, although this time the criminals will not have a say. With Ciudad Juárez and the surrounding state of Chihuahua under siege by heavily armed drug lords, the federal government last week ordered the deployment of 5,000 soldiers to take over the Juárez Police Department. With the embattled mayor’s full support, the country’s defense secretary will pick the next chief.
Chihuahua, which already has about 2,500 soldiers and federal police on patrol, had almost half the 6,000 drug-related killings in all of Mexico in 2008 and is on pace for an even bloodier 2009. Juárez’s strategic location at the busy El Paso border crossing and its large population of local drug users have prompted a fierce battle among rival cartels for control of the city.
“Day after day, there are so many horrible things taking place there,” said Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies Mexico’s drug war. “The cartels are trying to control everything.”
Nothing is surprising in Chihuahua anymore. Gunmen recently shot at one of three cars in Gov. José Reyes Baeza’s motorcade, killing a bodyguard and wounding two agents. The drug cartels routinely collect taxes from business owners, shooting those who refuse to pay up. As for the Juárez mayor, who has made cleaning up the notoriously corrupt police department his focal point, the cartel recently threatened to decapitate him and his family unless he backed off.
The handwritten threat that it issued went further than that. Like many people in Juárez, Mayor Reyes has homes on both sides of the border, splitting his time between El Paso and Juárez. The note threatening him made it clear that the assassins going after him would have no qualms about crossing into the United States to finish off the mayor and his family.
“We took the threat seriously,” said Chris Mears, a spokesman for the El Paso Police Department. “I’m not going to tell you what actions were taken, but we’ve taken actions.”
In an interview in his wood-paneled office overlooking the United States, Mr. Reyes, 46, whose father was mayor in the early 1980s, said he was not going to allow criminals to run the city, despite the inroads they are making. He said he initially opposed his police chief’s decision to resign because he did not want the outlaws to feel empowered. He acceded only as a life-saving gesture, he said.
“I’m not going to give in,” he vowed in an interview, welcoming the arrival of soldiers so that the traffickers will feel the heat even more.
Right now, the Juárez police are no match for the outlaws. Last year, the senior uniformed officer was killed, one of 45 local police officers killed since January 2007, and a former police chief pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling a ton of marijuana from Juárez to El Paso. Mr. Orduña, who lived at the police station to avoid being killed, had replaced another chief who fled to El Paso after receiving threats last year. If the army had not come in, the mayor would no doubt have had a difficult time finding somebody to head the department.
Introducing a nationwide police recruitment campaign, the mayor has raised salaries and benefits enough that he is attracting new recruits to replace the many officers being fired for their links to organized crime.
“I know the dangers and I accept them,” said José Martín Jáuregui López, one of the 289 cadets now being trained at Juárez’s police academy. “There are a lot of people afraid for me: my mom, my relatives. But this is what I want to do.”
As a sign to the traffickers that he was not running from them, Mr. Reyes appeared Friday to be like any other mayor, giving a speech at the opening of a shopping center, signing a memorandum of understanding with a developer, reassuring residents that he would keep loiterers from gathering in front of their homes.
But the bodyguards holding assault rifles who clung close to him made it clear that Juárez remained a city under siege.
“There’s no square inch of the city that has been untouched by the violence,” said Lucinda Vargas, an economist who works by day to remake the city as executive director of Juárez Strategic Plan, but retreats to El Paso at night. “There’s a lot of evidence that Juárez, in a micro sense, is becoming a failed state. But I still think we haven’t failed yet and that we could still rescue ourselves.”
and now let's take a look at what's going on in the US as more and more people realize that this war is lost, it's stupid policy, and we can't afford this dumb shit any longer.
quote:
CBS NEWS: "Time For Marijuana Legalization?"
Apparently, it was nothing personal after all. Apparently, it was strictly business all along.
After generations of defending capital punishment and marijuana possession laws on moral, ethical and religious grounds, after years of declaring that the death penalty acted as a deterrent against violent crime and that pot smokers were more dangerous to society than, say, alcohol consumers, all of a sudden thanks to our economic crisis more and more mainstream powerbrokers are considering dramatic changes to our criminal justice system.
The New York Times today has a late-arriving piece by Ian Urbina which posits that lawmakers in several states are considering abandoning the death penalty because it’s just too expensive and cuts into other law enforcement priorities. State officials are beginning to acknowledge that they can more productively spend their budget funds on cracking unsolved cases or ensuring better police protection than on keeping pot smokers in prison or fighting for decades with capital defendants. This, Urbina writes, is forcing a sea-change around the nation.
[continues]
So now the only question is really how long will it take for US policy to catch up with reality? Also, if Mexico legalized drugs, would the now entrenched and powerful cartels just start killing grocery store owners who sold it?
CA is currently considering a proposal to legalize and tax weed sales:
quote:
Fresno Bee: "It's time for state to legalize marijuana"
http://www.fresnobee.com/columnists...ry/1218175.html
and Kellog's just took a massive hit by pissing off pot smokers and phelps fans. apparently firing phelps for the bong photo didn't go over well with the American public:
quote:
Dumping Phelps Over Bong Rip Damages Kellogg's Brand Reputation
Nicholas Carlson|Feb. 23, 2009, 8:47 AM|57
When Kellogg announced it would not renew its endorsement contract with Olympic medalist Michael Phelps after a photo of the athelete smoking pot surfaced, it may have cost the food company its sterling reputation, reports company reputation index Vanno.
Out of the 5,600 company reputations Vanno monitors, Kellogg ranked ninth before it booted Phelps. Now it's ranked 83. Not even an industry-wide peanut scare inflicted as much damage on the food company's reputation. A Vanno representative put together this chart:
The drug wars are killing people, costing money, not paying taxes, pissing out Phelps fans and legalization consensus is almost reached. I guess you can say that's an improvement in our society. Thank you Reagan.
I do wonder how much we'll save if we just legalize it. This is me speaking as a non-felon non-drug using citizen.
But then if it's ever legal it won't be cool to smoke it anymore and pot smokers will be just like alcoholic snobs: Tools of the patriarchy. I guess it can keep getting legalized in states, small countries, etc until about 40 years when it becomes legal on a federal level.
Then again, legalization of weed does shit towards stopping mass carnage in chihuahua. I do wonder what huge criminal organizations would do instead of drug trafficking if it became much less profitable due to wide spread legaization? Trafficking human organs is my guess.
here he is inspecting what appears to be a massive grow operation
look at those eyes. pure evil. Oh, you don't think so? Believe me. These fat cats run the drug world down in Mexico. Why do you think that there's the rumor of street tacos made out of dogs? Cats hate dogs. They're making a point by chopping them up at the taco stands. You don't fuck with the fat cat drug lords.
99 problems and the cat nip aint one!
So you want to know the regions they control, eh? Here's an article that may interest you.
According to the Mexican government there are seven drug cartels1 operating
in Mexico.
In recent years, the major cartels have formed alliances with one another; the
two rival alliances now compete for turf.
Mexico, a major drug producing and transit country, is the main foreign supplier
of marijuana and a major supplier of methamphetamine to the United States.
Although Mexico accounts for only a small share of worldwide heroin production,
it supplies "a large share of the heroin distributed in the United States."8 The State
Department estimates that 90% of cocaine entering the United States transits Mexico.
In the United States, wholesale illicit drug sale earnings estimates range from $13.6
to $48.4 billion annually
Mexico's cartels have existed for some time, but have become increasingly
powerful in recent years with the demise of the Medellín and Cali cartels in
Colombia. Closure of the cocaine trafficking route through Florida also pushed
cocaine traffic to Mexico, increasing the role of Mexican cartels in cocaine
trafficking
Mexican cartels have long grown marijuana in the United States, often on
federal land in California, but they are now expanding production to the Pacific
northwest and, to a lesser extent, the eastern United States.
So there you go knowledge is power. Remember that when you're down there for spring break and you want to get an 8 ball, you damn drugged up college drop outs! Oh wait.. you wont be able to make it to Mexico. Well, Juarez at least. The State Department has been calling for people to NOT go their for Spring Break.
"Recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades," the advisory reads. "Large firefights have taken place in many towns and cities across Mexico but most recently in northern Mexico, including Tijuana, Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez. During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped and temporarily prevented from leaving the area."Then again, that's a little out dated. Gee, thanks State Department.
If you are going down there, I wouldn't worry too much. Popular resort destinations are basically miniature green zones so don't worry about your trip to Cabo San Lucas. There's machine gun bushes just on the outskirts of the visitors centers. But when I think about it, I would unironically be incredibly happy if hundreds of drunk rich frat-boys were slaughtered at the hands of the very drug lords they get their cocaine from.
I mean, with stories like this, who doesn't want to go down there?
Juárez killings plummet after 3,200 troops arrive
Joggers find 3 decapitated bodies in Tijuana
Mexico morgues crowded with mounting drug-war dead
Mexico's economy is going to shit like p.much every country, this could get pretty ugly soon
I honestly believe that most of our politicians would rather see Mexico devolve into all out civil war than admit that our drug laws suck and the war on drugs is a waste of money.
Mexico lost to Australia in the Baseball classic last night. Talk about adding insult to injury.
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