THAT MEXICAN DRUG WAR
JUAREZ:
JUAREZ:
Santa Muerte, the celebrated Mexican Saint of Death continues to lightcandles for those souls being harvested in Juarez's endless drug war.
Tuesday: Two Mexican state police officers riding in their police truck are shot and killed. Sixty shell casings are found at the site of their ambush. Just bad shot assassins or a sign of improving economic cartel times? (Dada note: Average rounds expended to assassinate someone in the last 2008 Juarez drug war murders was five shells per victim.)
In the same vicinity and time frame: Three bodiless heads are found in an ice box. Elsewhere, nearby, a headless body is found in a canal.
Total homicides this day: Five? Six?
Such are the increased challenges facing forensics specialists in the ongoing drug war in Juarez, just across the border from its sister city, El Paso. (Dada wonders if matching headless bodies and bodiless heads makes the work more interesting for those investigators who enjoy solving puzzles?)
Santa Muerte encouraging a cross-country runner in Juarez to takeup smoking. Due to the short life expectancy of men in the drug war
city, lung cancer among smokers there has been totally eradicated.
Thursday's New York Times ran an article on the El Paso/Juarez border region entitled Two Sides of a Border: One Violent, One Peaceful. In the past year, murders in the El Paso's sister city numbered 1,550. "Worse, other violent crimes — carjacking, extortion, armed robbery — have surged as the beleaguered authorities struggle to respond to daily gun battles."
Sunday's El Paso Times reported the latest number of Juarez murders in the past 20 hours: Eleven.
3 comments:
Sounds like Mexico needs to do a surge of their own in Juarez to shut down the drug lords.
Or they need to rename the city:
Los campos de la muerte de Juárez
The killing fields of Juarez
Truly awful.
Hi Fran: Well, sadly, the Mexican "surge" in Juarez is a bust. They sent in between 2,000-2,500 Mex. Fed'l police and Mexican army members who have done nothing to reduce the violence. The police force has dwindled after several hundred of them were fired due to corruption - connection to cartels, taking bribes, etc. And of those that remained, many left out of fear for their lives. Police are among their favorite targets.
And with the drug war violence and people seeing how ineffective or non-existent is law and order, criminal elements have become emboldened. The genie of anarchy is out of the bottle it would seem.
Last summer/fall when we were in Iowa, people did not have a clue about this situation. There has been more national press recently, so perhaps the word is getting out. I sometimes wonder how NAFTA affected the press silence around this violence. Of course the fact that cartels are murdering journalists does not help either.
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