Global News Journal

In Mexico’s richest city, drug violence grows and candles burn in protest

The thousands of flickering candles run on and on along Monterrey’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, a spontaneous tribute to a 21-year-old university arts student shot dead by a drug hitmen who was chasing after an off-duty prison guard last week.

Even as busy shoppers bustle past, people are coming to Plaza Morelos to place the candles one after the other in the downtown of Mexico’s wealthy northern city in a rare public showing of anger, sadness and frustration at Lucila Quintanilla’s death and the spiraling drug violence across the city.

It was a Wednesday night like any other when hundreds of workers, shoppers, families and street vendors were wandering up and down Plaza Morelos in the warm autumn evening when a gunman pulled up in a black SUV and shot six times into the crowd. He missed his target, a guard at a Monterrey prison, and instead shot dead Quintanilla, who was chatting to her boyfriend on her cellular phone as she was out shopping. The boyfriend heard her die.

The hitman escaped, but the city, once lauded as a Latin American success story for its safe streets and growing middle class, cannot escape the trauma of the growing drug violence. Alongside many of the candles on the Plaza Morelos lie hand-written messages. “My son was kidnapped on June 23, 2010. We’ve been through three months of pain and desperation and the authorities don’t do anything,” read one. “How many more innocents have to die?” reads another.

Quintanilla’s blood stained the street for days before water from a nearby building’s dripping airconditioning unit washed it away. Monterrey seems determined not to forget this time, and mourners on the Plaza Morelos say they want the line of candles to reach the city’s cathedral and run on and on. “Silence is complicity with organized crime,” said one woman holding up a sign in protest.

A costly U.S.-Mexico border wall, in both dollars and deaths

By Robin Emmott

Securing the United States’s border from illegal immigrants, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction “continues to be a major challenge,” says the United States Government Accountability Office in a new report. It is also proving to be expensive in both lives and money.

In dollar terms, the outlay is substantial. Every time someone breaks a hole in the U.S.-Mexico border wall, it costs about $1,300 to repair. The estimated cost of maintaining the 661-mile (1,058 km) double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile (3,000 km) border with Mexico over the next 20 years is $6.5 billion, the GAO report says. 

That is on top of the $3.7 billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative since 2005 to build a system of fencing, lighting, sensors, cameras and radars to keep out job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers.

While border agents say the wall is a tool that helps them protect the United States, the GAO report found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection cannot accurately determine the fence’s impact on improving border security, suggesting the money might not be well spent.

“What a waste in resources and creativity ,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera Valladares of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). “Our tax dollars are being wasted on an ineffective, old strategy instead of urgently working on serious, long term, workable immigration reform,” he said.

from UK News:

Is Britain paying too high a price in Afghanistan?

The death toll among British troops in Afghanistan is rising fast.  The soldier who died on Tuesday was the seventh to die in the last week and the 176th since the war began.

Last Wednesday, Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe became the highest ranking British soldier to die in the conflict in Afghanistan when he was killed in Helmand. British commanders are quoted as saying things are going to get worse before they get better.

Not surprisingly, doubts are being raised about the price being paid in Afghanistan, about the nature of the mission itself and whether security can ever be made effective enough to rebuild the country after 30 years of war.

Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth concedes there is gloom about the rising death toll but rejects comparisons with the Vietnam war that lasted over 15 years and says there is a "real sense of momentum" in Afghanistan.

Do you believe Britain should stay in Afghanistan?