Those oft-quoted words of the late Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz came to mind today. That was after I read still one more horrific report about how ruthless, terrifying gangs of Mexican narcotics traffickers, competing for which of their products end up on American streets, and battling their government's efforts to stop them, have turned huge swaths of their own country into killing grounds. The gangs murder, decapitate, kidnap and threaten innocent people every day, especially targeting two groups of individuals that American gangsters don't dare mess with -- police officers and reporters.
Today's story is another tale of terror from Ciudad Juarez, the Mexican city of 1.5 million people just across the border from El Paso, Texas. It's about how narco-gangsters forced the police chief - a retired army major - to flee the city to avoid being killed. He left town a week ago after the gangs threatened to kill a police officer every 48 hours until he quit. They made their threat good by killing his deputy, three other officers, and then another cop and a prison guard.
According to the New York Times, Juarez and its surrounding state of Chihuahua suffered almost half the 6,000 drug-related killings in all of Mexico last year, despite the presence of 2,500 soldiers and federal police. Following the police chief's flight, the Mexican government ordered an additional 5,000 soldiers to take over Juarez's notoriously corrupt police department.
If, like me, you're one of the millions of Americans who've come to love Mexico over the years, its current catastrophic crime wave can only fill you with sadness - and fear that it will spread across our porous border. Ciudad Juarez is special for me. In 1955, when I was in the army, I spent almost every weekend there for the six months I was stationed only about an hour away at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. We spent Friday and Saturday nights in cheap hotels, ate three-course, hard-to-chew steak dinners for $1.10, and downed bottles of good Mexican beer for a few cents more.
In those days, Juarez was a safe place for Americans - and its residents, too, as far as I know. We walked the streets without fear, day and night, buying an occasional camisa (shirt) or a pair of botas that inevitably hurt my feet, awkwardly trying out the few Spanish phrases we managed to learn from Maestro Hernandez, who gave weekly lessons on-base.
We had no problems making ourselves understood to cab drivers only too happy to take us "to see the girls," and I spent many an evening on a bar stool in a whorehouse, being "good" while sipping Carta Blanca beer and holding the wallets of two army buddies who were upstairs enjoying the pleasures of some very pretty senoritas. Sometimes I even went upstairs myself. Juarez was fun, it was different, it was cheap and, in those days, not at all dangerous.
Back in civilian life, I next visited Mexico in 1962. I was still young and innocent, one of my heroes, John F. Kennedy, was president, and as far as I was concerned, my country could do no wrong. Until a tour guide named George Lugo drove me around Mexico City and took me to Chapultepec Palace. There, he told me, six teen-age Mexican military cadets made a heroic, fatal last stand against an overwhelming force of U.S. marines in 1847, during the Mexican War. In that war and, earlier, by annexing Texas, he reminded me, the U.S. snatched away half of his country. He later took me to the rundown cemetery where, he said, Santa Anna, the Mexican leader who lost Texas, was buried.
Walking among the weathered old tombstones, I came upon a large bone. It looked to be a human leg bone. It was not the kind of thing you'd find in an American cemetery. But in Mexico, it was right out there, as is so much of the ugliness of life and death that is usually hidden in the United States. In this and a dozen future visits--including the courtship of my wife-to-be in Mexico City and our honeymoon in Yucatan-- I found the streets of Mexico full of the lame, the halt and the blind; including scarred, one-armed or one-legged youths and old women wearing tatters, hawking lottery tickets on busy street corners, ignored by passersby.
In Mexico, everyone's ills, and the country's overwhelming poverty, were much worse and far more visible than anything at home. "Probably nowhere in the world do two countries as different as Mexico and the United States live side by side," wrote New York Times reporter Alan Riding in 1984. That is even truer today. America, someone in Hollywood once said, is a land of happy endings. Mexico, certainly, is not.
Our Founding Fathers died in bed, many on their huge plantations, full of age and honor. The leaders of Mexico's 1810 revolution from Spain were executed by firing squads, then most of their heads were cut off, and and put on public display. While democracy and growth, in territory and wealth, increased steadily in the U.S., Mexico faced the loss of that territory, unending turbulence, frequent dictatorship, church-state battles, class warfare, decades of one-party government, and continuing economic crisis. And now, as Mexico's government for the first time presses a determined fight against its powerful drug gangs, they have retaliated by driving crime completely out of control, making a mockery of the rule of law and threatening the stability of the entire country.
The dangerous situation there was well summed up by a young gang member, deported from the United States and interviewed just after he crossed into Tijuana. "One day you might be safe," he said. "The next day you might not wake up." More frightening for Americans is the prospect of this uncontrolled violence crossing the border.
The mayor of Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, has so far stood up to the drug gangs. For his courageous stand, he - and his family - have been threatened with decapitation. Like many Juarez residents, Mayor Reyes has homes on both sides of the border and divides his time between them. According to The New York Times a threatening note "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." The El Paso police department says it's taking the threat seriously.
Defense Secretary Gates said on Meet The Press today that he, too, is concerned about Mexico's drug war and means to provide its government with American resources, training, reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities and intelligence. "It clearly is a serious problem," Gates said. And, I would add, not just for Mexico.
You could say that I literally love Mexico, as my wife is from Mexico City. We try to go back for a few weeks every year. Her family are hard working middle class people. They own small businesses, and live in normal residential neighborhoods in Mexico City. Their only link to Mexican drug violence is what they see on TV or read in the papers. I think they would be both hurt and insulted if my perception of their country was as a great place for cheap food and hookers.
Mexico is a beautiful, wonderful place, with extraordinary people. I have literally travelled hundreds and hundreds of miles, stayed in all sorts of hotels and places, including Mexico City, which many Americans perceive as some sort of black hole of crime. I have never experienced rudeness, or been the victim of a criminal act. Obviously these things take place. With a little common sense, you are no more likely to be a victim of crime in Mexico, and certainly not drug crime, than any other vacation spot. You can enjoy an affordable vacation and see and do very unique things, eat some of the best food in the world, enjoy world class arts and architecture, and do it all among very warm, outgoing people.
One thing you omitted was the fact that evey 100 years or so, Mexico faces and experiences both internal and external political and social crises: To wit:
1910-1920: The Mexican Revolution
1810-1921: The Mexican Independence
1709 The Bourbon Reforms establishing Colonial Wars of Succession in Spain loosening power to England and re-enforced in New Spain (Mexico)
The Narco Wars are another historical process based on external force (First World Drug usage) and internal Mexican periphery resource and distribution. Wallerstein cited examples of the core/periphery in international trade. The drug trade is the basis of a larger macro economic capital movement of labor, drugs, and petroleum from the develping to the developed.
Sandy, Mexico's not that bad, it's just become a "working girl to the big, bad US pimp." Just don't drink the water.
Many factors have led to the increase in violence:
Americans demanding something be done about the border
More of America's weed being home-grown or coming in from Canada and thus more competition with Mexican growers
America clamping down on the flow of chemicals used in making meth across the border
And the fact that Calderon was put into office because he promised to do something about the cartels, kidnapping and corruption.
This is why the violence is exploding. It is not because America has a lot of people in prison or because we are more self-righteous etc., all of which is just blather.
Finally, as any and many cultural anthropologists have written about, corruption is endemic to Mexico and developed during the days of Spanish colonization. It was a way to work around the Spanish authorities and has become the way business is done in Mexico to this day.
"The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the biggest prison population of any country in the world, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Justice."
http://uk.reuters.com/article/marketsNewsUS/idUKN0240756920090302
With the economy influencing the release of non-violent offenders from America's prison system (i.e., drug offenders), the market for drugs is going to prove ever more lucrative. An increase in drug related violence is par for the course.
But, this all ends so easily! By diverting cash flow from the black market into the open market with a repeal of prohibition in favor of a regulated drug economy, the drug violence ends. Without money, the drug cartels vaporize like a bank gone solvent, and so ends the related crime.
Check your self righteousness at the door - it is violence and a flaw in human nature. Prohibition is born of self righteousness, and is the deadliest and most expensive drug habit of all. Just look at what it is doing to Mexico.
Mexico's drug war is like the US drug war--a waste of time and resources. And Gates knows very well that US posturing about Mexico's drug policies and our recent more in-depth involvement in their drug war efforts is the very core reason we are seeing the explosion in violence.
Sadly this drug war absurdity will continue, but only complete morons believe that anything good will ever come from it.
And apparently its not going well. We need to do everything we can to help Mexico get a handle on this situation, because if he fails, we might as well just start the countdown till the start of the Second Mexican American War, because thats what will happen if we lose control of the border.
I think not, and the notion that there will be war due to this [other than the absurd drug wars], is just plain silly.
If you ever want to look at your own country let me know. I've got some REAL GOOD stats for you.
I don't understand why you would put that tidbit forward for public consumption.
But the discussion can not be limited to drugs, hit men, kidnapping, etc. Fingers have to point directly at NAFTA. This economic chaos and resultant criminality is the logical result of an economic policy that has let the U.S destroy small ag in Mexico, previously a land of small farmers. When they are flooded with our products and we buy theirs for very little and operate U.S. companies there for peanuts, what was bound to happen? We wrecked their economy. Now everyone pays, Mexicans in blood.
I lived and worked in Mexico City during the 1970s. That city back then was generally safer than most U.S. cities were at that time. My wife and I would take a walk after supper most evenings, without any sense of fear. Back then it was like Tokyo still is, remarkable for how small the chance of personal attacks on city streets. It wasn't about law enforcement either, just a matter of social conventions and a civilized society.
I've had reasons to visit once a year for each of the last three years. The change is terrible. Everybody feels it. Everybody seems to know somebody who was kidnapped or assaulted. My in-laws warn me constantly that I should be afraid: "it's not like the old days, not like when you lived here."
We were there last just three months ago. Many people are now saying the crackdown on drugs has left a criminal element that is completely ruthless and has turned to kidnappings and assaults now because it's easier to make money with that than with drugs. They wish the authorities would let them get back to their own business again, so they would leave normal people alone. Again.
For several generations now, Mexico has been holding steady at about six months away from chaos. Sounds like chaos is coming a lot closer lately.
I do ask that the pro legalization crowd begin to tell the truth. They always say that pot does no harm but if they look to Mexico then how can they say that. Drugs do kill, but not from inhaling, it's from the bullets bought with your money.
Jeez, get clue....