As the Violence Soars, Mexico Signals It's Had Enough of America's Stupid War on Drugs

By Silja J.A. Talvi, AlterNet. Posted October 14, 2008.

Even on his most homicidal of days, Al Pacino's character in Scarface couldn't even approach the level of drug trafficking-related brutality bleeding down Mexico's streets. It is no longer unusual for the Mexican news media to report on yet another, freshly decapitated head stuck atop a fencepost or a metal spike, or a garbage bag filled with body parts, usually with a hand-scrawled note or placard attached. That amounts to a cartel's calling card, and it's usually delivered in the form of a warning to a rival cartel, or for the Mexican authorities to stay away and stop seizing their drugs. Other times, it's just a chilling placard intended to strike terror into the hearts of the people who come across the gory scene and the text: "Ha Ha Ha." To be sure that their message is heard, cartels are known to send regular text messages to newspaper reporters, place newspaper advertisements, or to even upload their own killing videos (sometimes accompanied by narco-corridos as background music) to YouTube.

Mexican drug cartels are, rather effectively, fighting the government's War on Drugs with their own War of Terror, often swelling their ranks (and combat/terror tactics) with former members of law enforcement. The Zetas, for instance, are members of former Mexican counter-narcotics squads (some with U.S.-assisted training under their belts), who have become the self-proclaimed and much-feared hit men of the Gulf cartel.

So far this year, roughly 3,500 murders have been directly attributed to the drug war in Mexico, surpassing last year's estimate of 2,500. (These numbers include the murders of at least 500 soldiers, cops, judges, politicians -- and their family members -- in nearly two years. The drug war rages across Mexico's urban and (mostly) rural terrain, and murders are usually targeted toward pronounced rivals, but increasing numbers of victims are innocent bystanders, including women and children who were previously considered off-limits where acts of drug war-related retaliation were concerned.

Reports of attacks are rolling in daily, sometimes several times a day. This Sunday, unidentified gunmen shot up the United States consulate in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. While no injuries were reported there because the consulate was closed, six young adults attending a private celebration were killed on Saturday in the violence-and-drug-plagued Mexican border state of Chihuahua, in Ciudad Juárez. Those murders, as yet unsolved, followed on the heels of 11 homicides in a Chihuahua bar, when a gunman opened fire on unsuspecting patrons, including a prominent journalist who may or may not have been a specific target.

It should be of note that much of the worst drug war violence is happening right at the border: Tijuana, adjacent to San Diego, saw nearly 40 people murdered in the last week of September alone, in addition to nearly 25 deaths of male and female prisoners the previous week due to two major riots at the vastly overcrowded Tijuana State Prison. (Prisoners alleged frequent incidents of torture and sexual violence, sometimes leading to death, at the hands of guards.)

American newspapers located in border cities and states tend to report some of the more gruesome events and mass killings, but the rest of this country seems remarkably in the dark about what's happening to our Mexican neighbors, much less the fact that the violence has increased dramatically since U.S. drug war dollars have increased in the form of support for Mexican President Felipe Calderón's militarily-minded crackdown on trafficking, with the goal of dismantling the cartels' leadership apparatus, as well as breaking apart close alliances between local authorities, cops, and drug traffickers. (Corruption in Mexican law enforcement and military is epidemic; consider that many police officers in Mexico make no more than $5,000 per year.)

Since President Calderón took office in December 2006, he has authorized large-scale troop deployments (roughly 30,000 troops), in an attempt to diminish the power lorded over Mexico and its citizens by rival Gulf and Sinaloa cartels, as well as affiliates like La Familia, which has earned a reputation for particularly memorable and gruesome acts, including the night that five decapitated heads were thrown onto a dance floor packed with people.

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Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It's So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008), and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.

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