Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
“Collateral damage” grows in Mexico’s army-led drug war
I heard the bursts of gunfire near my house in Monterrey as I was showering this morning. Then the ambulance sirens started wailing, and as I drove my kids to school about 20 minutes later, a convoy of green-clad soldiers, their assault rifles at the ready, sped by us. In northern Mexico, where I cover the drug war, it has become a part of life to read about, hear and even witness shootouts, but today I shuddered at the thought: what if those soldiers accidentally ever shot at me?
It was in February 2007 that Amnesty International raised concerns over Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s decision, two months earlier, to send thousands of troops across the country to control Mexico’s spiraling drug violence. Echoing worries voiced by the United Nations, the rights group warned that sending the army onto Mexican streets to do the job of the police was a bad idea. Even individual soldiers have commented to Reuters, off the record of course, that they feel very uncomfortable about their new role.
Back then, when there was still plenty of optimism about winning the war against drug cartels, many Mexicans brushed off concerns of rights abuses and the possible deaths of innocent bystanders. Washington praised Calderon for his bold move.
But almost four years on, it would seem Amnesty, the U.N. and a host of other rights groups were right. For the family of slain architect Fernando Osorio, who was shot dead by soldiers who mistook him for a hitman late last month, they were certainly right. Fernando, 34, was killed on the outskirts of Monterrey, Mexico’s richest city, as he worked on a piece of land soon due to become a housing development. “The army is committing atrocities, they destroyed my family today,” Fernando’s father Oswaldo Osorio told reporters on Oct. 28.
In another tragedy a month before, four soldiers opened fire on a family traveling in their SUV along a highway outside of Monterrey, killing a 15-year-old boy and his father. Two students at Monterrey’s prestigious Tecnologico university were killed just outside the campus by soldiers earlier this year. Sadly, the list goes on.
The army occasionally apologizes. But for the Osorio family, little has been made clear. The army at first tried to justify their actions by saying Fernando was a drug hitman. The family found out what was going on from local media and from those working with Fernando on site. “It made the whole thing so much more painful,” his brother David told Reuters at the family home in suburban Monterrey. “If the army had come to us and said they were sorry and clarified things, well we might be able to understand that they are fighting a difficult battle. But right now, we don’t even know how to get Fernando’s belongings back (from the crime scene),” he said.
Numbed by Ciudad Juarez’s endless killings, Mexico shrugs off teen party deaths
The people of Ciudad Juarez are starting to lose all hope. When gunmen burst into a birthday party on Friday and killed 14 people, the horrific act should have at least shocked Mexican authorities into action. But even the sight of blood running out of a suburban patio, the broken chairs and the party-goers’ bodies slumped on the concrete have become all too familiar in the desert city across from El Paso, Texas.
It was at the start of 2010 that another, gruesomely similar shooting was warning enough that the city was spiraling toward criminal anarchy.
In January in a working class neighborhood just blocks away from Friday’s shooting, gunmen killed 15 people, again mainly teenagers, at a party. Back then, just like on Friday, a nearby federal police checkpoint seemed to turn a blind eye to what was going on and did nothing to stop the killers.
At the very least in January, the mother of one of the slain teenagers had the chance to vent her anger in person at Felipe Calderon, the conservative president who launched Mexico’s drug war four years ago. The Mexican leader was sufficiently moved by the January killings to fly to Ciudad Juarez and there, amid national outrage, he announced a plan to rebuild the broken, dirty mess of the city that was once lauded as a poster child for free trade, with its factories producing fridges and television for U.S. consumers.
Poverty, joblessness and a lack of a future for the young, it was rightly said, were the sources of much of the drug gang warfare that has broken out in Ciudad Juarez since 2008.
That reconstruction has included thousands of education grants, parks and community centers, hospital beds and giving almost 140,000 more people access to free medical care. There is even a sports field dedicated to the teenagers killed in January. But most of the streets of Ciudad Juarez are still folorn and many in the downtown that once catered to free-wheeling American tourists are filled with crumbling buildings. Childrens’ playgrounds lie abandoned, covered with graffiti. Killers are still at large.
Residents say that after eight months, a new federal police operation to fight drug gangs, and hundreds more murders, Calderon’s plan has failed. It’s hard to disagree.
The Mexican Government will never stop the drug business in their country; it contributes an estimated 40 billion dollars to their GDP. The number one contribution over their Pemex oil, tourism and agriculture. The Mexican Government knew drugs were passing through their country for over 45 years and did nothing to stop it because there was no violence associated with the trafficking and politicians were the recipients of the kick backs from the Cartels. I have traveled through Mexico for a number of years, when I first started my excursions, my very first impression was that it is a lawless country and now it is even worse. When this violence started between the Cartels, they blamed the U.S. for its demand for the drugs. As is now they are the recipients of kidnappings, extortion to businesses, corruption within their own government, police and armed services. What does this have to do with the U.S. demand? Absolutely nothing, this is the total result of a lawless 3rd world country blaming someone else for their own creation of violence within. This will never subside enough to call it under control. It is now the stigma image Mexico will have for a number of years. Although the above is a personal view point, the following is a stat that was published in April, 2010. Mexico prosecutes approximately 26% of the crimes committed in their country and only convicts 2%.
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.
In Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, new police are charged with stopping the violence
It is difficult to imagine things getting much worse in Ciudad Juarez, the manufacturing city across from El Paso that has become one of the world’s most dangerous places. Extortions, beheadings, bombs in cars, daylight shootouts and kidnappings are all daily fare in the border town once better known as a NAFTA powerhouse and party zone for fun seeking Americans. Even the Mexican army stands accused of abusing the trust citizens once placed in it, carrying out possibly hundreds of wrongful arrests and illegal house raids.
Things are so bad that business leaders are calling for a state of emergency to be called in the city on the Rio Grande with nighttime curfews in a bid to control the violence. Around 10,000 businesses have closed in Ciudad Juarez over the past two years. A military-enforced curfew doesn’t resound much with residents who want the thousands of troops sent in by President Felipe Calderon to leave town for good. More than 6,700 people have died in drug killings since the army arrived in early 2008 and locals say the army-led crackdown on gangs has only provoked more violence across the city and its surrounding Chihuahua state. (Click here for full Mexico drug war coverage)
The latest initiative implemented by Chihuahua state Governor Cesar Duarte, who took office for a six-year term this week, is to create a new, state-wide police force dissolving notoriously corrupt local cops. It fits in with Calderon’s plan to send a constitutional reform to Congress soon to give governors more power over the police in cities and towns where local mayors run the municipal police. The thousands of disparate municipal police forces across Mexico are the most ineffective and corrupt, seen as an outdated model unfit to fight drug gangs.
But things don’t look promising. Many mayors across Mexico are against the reforms and in Chihuahua, where the reform is going ahead, many of the same corrupt officers are being absorbed into the new force, despite promises of tough checks on dishonest police. Several officers accused of allowing criminals to steal 69 weapons from Chihuahua police headquarters last week were included in the new Chihuahua force.
The federal police are hardly setting an example either. In August, some 450 federal agents held a public protest to denounce their superiors that they say force them on pain of death into the drug trade. “They sell as foot soldiers to the drug gangs. Why isn’t the violence stopping? Just take a look at our bosses,” an agent told Reuters who declined to be named.
Colombia kills a top rebel leader, any chance for peace?
Colombia has killed a top rebel leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym FARC. The aerial bombardment of Mono Jojoy’s jungle camp – which was complete with tunnels and a concrete bunker – was one of the hardest blows to the guerrillas in their more than four-decade-old insurgency. Since the launch of a U.S.-backed offensive in 2002, the rebels have been on the run, pushed back to remote hideouts and forced to use ambushes and other hit-and-run tactics. The new government of Juan Manuel Santos says that there can be no talks until the FARC stop attacks and release security forces held by the rebels. The Marxist insurgents have called for talks before and used discussions to regroup. Colombia had dealt significant blows to the group before, but has been unable to completely defeat the guerrillas. Can the insurgents be defeated militarily? What should Colombia do to end its conflict?
The party’s over in Ciudad Juarez
Rubble lines the forlorn streets of Ciudad Juarez’s historic center just across the Rio Grande and the sleek glass towers of El Paso, Texas in the distance. Huge piles of grey debris lie on the roadsides as dogs sniff in the ruins of the destroyed Vampiro nightclub, its pink concrete walls nothing but a mountain of steel and dust.
The desolate remains of buildings in the Mexican border city look like the place has been bombed. This is a war zone, the bloodiest front in Mexico’s drug war where a staggering 5,500 people have died over the past 2-1/2 years. But there are no bombers flying over head.
In a desperate attempt to curb the killings, the local authorities, armed with menacing yellow bulldozers, are gradually demolishing the bars, hotels and brothels of the once famous Calle Mariscal and Avenida Juarez that officials say breed the drug crime that is terrorizing the city. The once elegant husk of a building where Frank Sinatra sang in the 1950s is slumped and dirty like an old cigarette end, but locals say it might still be saved, although no one can be sure. Ciudad Juarez was once a fairly glamorous place, a kind of Las Vegas that boomed in the U.S. Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s as it lured American film stars and singers to its famous Kentucky Club bar. Named after Benito Juarez, a 19th-century reformist president, the city is scattered with historic buildings and monuments that recall the intense fighting here during the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920. Even as recently as three years ago, the city was packed with U.S. party goers and tourists looking for cheap tequila, prescription medicines and sex.
Ciudad Juarez was always a dangerous place, infamous for the unsolved killings of hundreds of young women in the 1990s. But now residents morbidly recount the drug murders on almost every corner. U.S. college students, off-duty national guard troops and day-trippers looking for a pair of leather cowboy boots do not dare step foot in the city. The Avenida Juarez is lined with abandoned pool saloons and boarded up windows, shuttered pawnshops and dentists and the padlocked gates of luxury strip bars.
Across town in an wealthy, American-style district of the manufacturing city that has mushroomed since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the pyramid-shaped Sphinx nightclub seems to sum up of Ciudad Juarez’s demise.
A grand palace of pleasure with a golden pharaoh on its roof and kitsch hieroglyphic paintings in its entrance hall, the parking lot for 400 vehicles is filled with rubble and rubbish. Pigeons have nested above the door and sully the marble steps. A big sign hangs over its balcony: “For sale, hire or partnership, ideal for casino or other business.” Ciudad Juarez is a gamble few investors are willing to take right now.
Tireguy, I see where you are coming from with the grim prognosis, but brute force is not the only answer, nor do I think it is the answer at all.
Regardless of what you think of the Mexican armed forces, federal police, and local law enforcement, the MANY THOUSANDS of men they have deployed in Juarez are certainly collectively better armed, often (though not always) better trained, and clearly the superior force. Attempts to up the manpower have in the long run done nothing, and I doubt the problem is that Mexico isn’t fighting the drug war hard enough- there seems to be at least one massive shootout most days, so the problem is neither the number of boots kicking down doors nor those boots kicking hard enough.
The problem seems to be that the cartels have information access superiority over the forces of order- they not only have better intelligence, but through members of the community, corrupt officials and officers, and their own clever system of moles and lookouts, can access information better and faster. You can’t kill what you can’t find or arrest who you can’t convict. We explore this concept here: http://insurgentconsciousness.typepad.co m/insurgent_consciousness/information_ac cess_superiority-1/
As for how Juarez specifically can deal with criminality, I see something like John Robb’s Resilient Communities springing up if the government cannot take care of business (http://www.typepad.com/services/trackba ck/6a00d83451576d69e200e55011db6f8834). Here, the community will begin providing for defense and social services independently of the government. That is how things have been getting done in unstable areas from Somalia to Jamaican slums.
Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, the world’s most violent city?
By Julian CardonaCiudad Juarez, a Mexican town on the U.S. border where daylight murders and beheaded bodies have become the norm, could be the world’s most violent city.
With 130 murders for every 100,000 residents per year on average last year, the city of 1.6 million people is more violent than the Venezuelan capital Caracas, the U.S. city of New Orleans and Colombia’s Medellin. That is according to a study by the Mexican non-profit Citizen Council for Public Security and Justice, which presented its report to Mexico’s security minister at a conference this week.
The fight between rival drug cartels over Ciudad Juarez’s local drug market and smuggling routes into the United States broke out at the start of last year and continues to intensify.Reliable global crime statistics are hard to pin down and a study last year by Foreign Policy Magazine placed Caracas as the world’s top murder capital, also with 130 murders per 100,000 residents. (The Mexican study disputes that and puts the Caracas figure at 96).But Ciudad Juarez’s rising murder rate, currently at about 250 per month, appears to put it well ahead of other notorious world crime capitals such as South Africa’s Cape Town, Moscow, Baghdad, and Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby, according to the Mexican and Foreign Policy studies.In fact, in Ciudad Juarez during the first day of the conference where the Mexican study was presented, eight people were murdered in the city’s streets, including a prosecutor, a lawyer, two policewomen, a clown performer and a gardener.Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing city across from El Paso, Texas, already has a stained history with the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in the 1990s.Perhaps most worryingly is not that 10,000 troops and elite police stationed there have failed to stop the drug violence, but that local officials say they have everything under control.Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz says the city’s fight against drug violence is “a successful process that the world can learn from.” Chihuahua state Governor Jose Reyes Baez, who has long bemoaned the media focus on drug violence in Ciudad Juarez, says that troops can gradually leave as newly-trained police take over. The army denies any scaling back in its deployment.
If the US really wanted to stop the drug violence in Mexico, the US should legalize drugs all together
U.S. border agents under fire as Mexican smugglers fight back
Gunmen shot and killed U.S. Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas in California near the U.S.-Mexico border fence on July 23, the first such fatal shooting in more than a decade. In rugged desert where people smugglers and drug traffickers roam, Rosas was tracking a suspicious group of people near the rural town of Campo, about 60 miles (97 kms) east of San Diego.
After radioing for backup, he got out of his vehicle and started to follow members of the group as it split up. He was attacked, robbed of his weapon and shot several times in the head and abdomen.
Mexican police have rounded up five suspects believed to be coyotes, or people smugglers, and drug gang members, although the FBI, which is heading the investigation, considers the case unsolved.
While it unfolds, the probe into the murder of 30 year-old Rosas, father of two small children and whose memorial service is on Friday, is a test for U.S.-Mexican cooperation. Both countries are at pains to show a unified alliance in the drug war, underscored again by U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s visit to Mexico this week.
But Rosas’ murder is also a warning that Mexican organized crime is increasingly undaunted by U.S. law enforcement. In Mexico, well-armed drug cartels take on the army at will. Mexico’s escalating drug war has killed some 12,800 people since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his army-backed crackdown on cartels.
It’s funny that “Automatic Weapons” freely available in US gun Shops shows up in this article. First a foreign national cannot lawfully purchase a fire arm at a licenced gun shop. Second the only “automatic Weapons” that a Us Citizen can lawfully buy without a very expensive and highly restricted license, are semi automatic fire arms. Ie, fire one round with each pull of the trigger. Let’s put the blame were it belongs, how about the f-ed up Justice Department that put two BP agents in federal prison for doing their job? maybe that’s why the BP is such a push over for these corupt Mexican Federali Drug dealers? You want to know where they get their weapons? US governnt sells them to Mexico and the Mexican government IS A DRUG CARTEL! Their drug war is not to stamp out drugs, just competition. Screw Iraq and Afghanistan, lets watch our own borders for a change.
Oil’s run-up outpaces most price targets… more upside?
The recent run-up in oil prices could have further to go as most analysts are likely to begin raising their year-end oil price targets, according to market research firm Birinyi Associates in Stamford, Connecticut. “Given several considerably lower expectations, we think it is reasonable to expect upgrades,” they said in a research commentary, noting that crude oil prices were already above most firms’ year-end targets. U.S. front-month crude hit an intraday high of $73.23 on Thursday, the highest intraday level since prices hit $75.69 on Oct. 21. A year-end oil price target of note recently came from Goldman Sachs, which raised its end-of-2009 oil price forecast on June 4 to $85 a barrel from $65. Oil’s climb partly reflects weakness of the U.S. dollar and expectations that demand may be picking up as the global recession abates.— Graphic courtesy of Birinyi Associates, Inc.
It’s here again. The price of oil will be driven up by speculators. They couldn’t care less about the destruction ehich it brings upon the real economy. BTW, the biggest owner of crude oil supplies in the US is not Exxon, as one would expect, but Goldman Sachs! It is time for the government to declare oil a strategic commodity and restrict purchases of oil only to its actual users.
EU stumbles over UN racism conference
The Czech Republic issued a statement on Tuesday condemning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at a U.N. conference on racism in which he called Israel a “cruel and repressive racist regime”.
The statement by the country holding the EU presidency was meant to underline the bloc’s unity but highlighted divisions on the issue.
Although 22 member states said they would stay to the end of the Geneva conference, four others have not attended from the start and the Czech Republic has decided to play no further role in the meeting.
The failure of member states to agree on a joint position shows how hard it is for the bloc to reach agreement on a common foreign and security policy now that it comprises 27 countries.
Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger said the decision of some EU member states to boycott the Geneva conference was “no sign of strength in the EU at this time”.
The EU stance has also opened the bloc to criticism from U.N. officials and human rights campaigners over a walkout by 23 EU delegations over Ahmadinejad’s remarks, and also left the EU at odds with the United States, which is not attending. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner criticised the U.S. decision not to attend — something that is unlikely to go down well in all EU capitals at a time when the EU and Washington are trying to improve ties under President Barack Obama. How can the EU avoid such problems in the future? Many EU leaders say the answer is the Lisbon treaty setting out reforms of the Union’s unwieldy institutions. The treaty is intended to provide stronger leadership and make foreign policy more effective, creating the post of EU foreign minister.
Those who do not thing that Israel is a valid nation should question whether Mohammed was a valid prophet. Why are those Islamic nations that oppress other religions and ethnic groups such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, Egypt, Indonesia, Sudan, etc not be condemned as racist nations?
Correction….
The “collateral deaths” of civilians will continue WHETHER OR NOT the army is back in their barracks.
The army is not the sole source of “collateral deaths”. To bring collateral deaths of civilians to zero (with regards to the “drug war”), the “war” will need to end.
It doesn’t matter who is enforcing the prohibitionist laws, whether the army, federal, state or local police, civilians will always be caught in the crossfire because they cannot be 100% distinguished from the narcos and mistakes always happen.