Sunday, January 16, 2011

The Murderers of Mexico

Atentamente, El Chapo (Sincerely, El Chapo)
by Héctor de Mauleón
Nexos, August 1, 2010 (available at www.nexos.com.mx)

La Ruta de Sangre de Beltrán Leyva (The Path of Blood of Beltrán Leyva)
by Héctor de Mauleón
Nexos, January 1, 2001 (available at www.nexos.com.mx)

Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez
by Howard Campbell
University of Texas Press, 310 pp., $24.95 (paper)

Mafia & Co.: The Criminal Networks in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia
by Juan Carlos Garzón, translated from the Spanish by Kathy Ogle
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 187 pp., available at www.wilsoncenter.org

How to write about Mexico’s drug war? There are only a limited number of ways that readers can be reminded of the desperate acts of human sacrifice that go on every day in this country, or of the by now calamitous statistics: the nearly 28,000 people who have been killed in drug-related battles or assassinations since President Felipe Calderón took power almost four years ago, the thousands of kidnappings, the wanton acts of rape and torture, the growing number of orphaned children. For reasons they themselves probably do not completely understand, the various Mexican drug clans and organizations responsible for so much bloodshed have acquired a liking for public attention, and to hold it they have developed a grisly theatrical performance of death, a roving display of grotesque mutilations and executions...more

2 comments:

Border Watcher said...

This is an excellent overview. The despair that the common border Mexicans are enduring should be the focus of every human rights group in the world, but has anybody read any such outcry? The Human and Drug Smuggling Corridors of Arizona will be judged historically to be the genesis of the expansion of that drug war. The problem is, though, is that the enviro nuts that have influenced the expansion of the legal voids allowing the smuggling corridors are the same social progressives that advocate for human rights. Change the names and the same, dangerous fools exist in both camps. The system that they forever rape and pillage allows their existence to continue. Needed changes will not take place on our side of the border with debate. It will come only with funding eliminations for the existence of those progressives.

Anonymous said...

We will make the changes by sitting together, holding hands and singing Cumbya!