rosa
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Post by rosa on Dec 22, 2008 6:29:24 GMT -7
This barbaric act against the government of Mexico may up the ante. Will they do something now?
Soldiers decapitated in new round of Mexico drug war AFP/File – … MEXICO CITY (Reuters)
Mexican police on Sunday found nine decapitated bodies and the army identified eight soldiers who had died fighting powerful drug gangs and whose murders were seen as a brazen challenge to the government.
The bodies showed signs of torture. They were left on the side of a highway about an hour north of the tourist resort of Acapulco in the southern state of Guerrero, state police said.
Their heads were stuffed in a plastic bag and left outside a shopping center.
Mexico's President Feline Calderon has deployed tens of thousands of troops and police since 2006 to take on drug cartels. The defense ministry vowed not to back down despite its latest losses.
"They are trying to scare the military. Regardless, the ministry promises to continue fighting," it said in a statement.
The ministry released the names of eight decapitated soldiers but said one of them was recovered on December 9.
Drug killings throughout Mexico have more than doubled to over 5,300 this year, scaring off investment and tourists. The United States has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help its southern neighbor fight the cartels.
The Mexican army has made some prominent captures, but the cartels seem able to quickly replace their losses. Meanwhile, a growing number of police have been gruesomely murdered.
A note left with the severed heads warned of more decapitations, the state police said.
(Reporting by Jason Lange and Armando Tovar, editing by Alan Elsner)
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Post by Tim Collins on Dec 22, 2008 7:08:56 GMT -7
The Mexican Government has already been trying to do something. The problem, IMHO, is that within the Government, after all these decades of corruption, no one knows who is friend and foe.
They need to form a shadow government/military of men from families who have lost people to these bastards, people with a personal motive to wipe them out.
Sorry my frustration is showing.
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rosa
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Post by rosa on Dec 22, 2008 7:12:55 GMT -7
so is mine in that they have done little to actually ferret out those they actually do know are corrupt, in my opinion
this is a government still known today for those dark sedans that show up in the barrios to take people in for "questioning", still known to kidnap/intimidate citizens when convenient
they know how to get dirty when the need calls for it. but what has happened is that they have allowed themselves to become so tied to organized crime, they can only implement their methods to a certain degree, without being targeted for revenge
there are rumors of a "white squad" w/in the army, tasked with "taking out" troublemakers, without regard to whether or not they are really connected to the cartels
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rosa
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Post by rosa on Dec 26, 2008 7:10:18 GMT -7
here's a follow-up to the topic on this thread; this one is out of Time MagazineConfessions of a Mexican Narco Foot-Soldier By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City Friday, Dec. 26, 2008 For a confessed drug cartel hood whose alias is "The Nut Job," Marco Vinicio Cobo is remarkably calm and plain-looking. Sitting in the blue-walled interrogation room of a Mexican army base, the chubby, goatee-bearded 30-year-old coolly describes his work for the Zetas, a feared paramilitary force responsible for thousands of brutal murders. And even when he details how his bosses kidnapped and chopped the head off a soldier, he appears relaxed and unemotional, as if he were discussing the weather. But despite the unsettling indifference of its tone, Cobo's confession — of which a video has been obtained by TIME — offers some extraordinary insights into how the cartels have grown into a formidable threat to the Mexican government, outwitting and outgunning the armed forces in great swathes of the country. In the statement made on video following his arrest in southern Mexico last April, Cobo explains how the cartels use a disciplined cell structure with a vertical, military-style chain of command to control thousands of men at arms. "I began as an H — the code they use for Hawk," he says. "After a time, I became a Central. I gave information to all the local H's in the community." He also reveals how his "family" stays one step ahead of the authorities by paying a vast network of informants, from local journalists to high-ranking federal agents. (See images of fighting crime in Mexico City) In the worst year for Mexican law enforcement in recent history, cartel gunmen have killed more than 500 police and military personnel, including eight soldiers who were beheaded near Acapulco on Sunday. Cobo's own life story also sheds light on the machinations of the crime empires behind this killing spree. From a lower-middle class family, Cobo had worked for a while as a journalist in the poor state of Oaxaca before joining the cartel in his late 20s because it was the best job opportunity available. "They first paid me $300 a fortnight, and then it went up to $400," he explains. "The money was deposited at the local Elektra ". His modest wage shows how many cartel foot soldiers such as Cobo live a world apart from the extravagant kingpins with their million-dollar mansions and fleets of luxury cars, but it was still five times the country's minimum wage. And it's the swelling of the narco armies with tens of thousands of low-paid recruits that helps explain the scale of the bloodshed here, with more than 5,300 drug-related killings over the past year alone.
Cobo claims he first came into contact with the Zetas while covering crime for the small-town newspaper Sol del Istmo. "Journalists were threatened," he said. "One time, they told me not to publish a story about some men who were arrested with guns. They said the story couldn't come out." When he joined up with these gangsters, he said his first job was to monitor the local roads. Later he helped set up the abductions of any cartel targets on those routes. "They kidnapped people who had committed what they said was a crime," he said. "Many were people who worked as drug traffickers." He lost count of how many victims they abducted, but said three had had been killed and buried in the yard of a suburban house.�
The Zetas act as the enforcement wing of the Gulf Cartel and extort payments from anyone who moves narcotics through their territories. The Oaxaca coast, where Cobo joined, is strategically important in trafficking routes of cocaine from Colombia to the United States. It is also the thinnest point between the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. "The Gulf Cartel controls the drug trade along the Gulf of Mexico and dominates the movement of drugs into this country primarily through Texas," said Michele M. Leonhart, Acting Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in a recent statement. "They are known, even among their rivals, for their extreme violence."
As a "Central", Cobo had 13 "Hawks" under his command. Above him were Second Commanders. The Zeta ranking system is based on the Mexican military, which is unsurprising considering that the organization was founded by soldiers from the army's special forces who defected to the gangsters in the late 1990s. Cobo knew his superiors only by aliases, in order to protect their identities. "There was Franco, Tarzan, Texas, and Zorro," he said. He saw a book with names of dozens of police under the unit's payroll, he said, including officers from many nearby towns and federal agents stationed there. The corrupt police were also given aliases, including Papa and Brother.�
In late March, Cobo's unit kidnapped a military officer, decapitated him and stuck his body out on a road, along with several bags of cocaine and about $2,000 in cash. "Franco told me that the officer was from military intelligence and he was getting too close," Cobo said. "The drugs and the money were planted so it would seem like he was involved in narco trafficking." Following the slaying, soldiers arrested Cobo and 13 others, along with semi-automatic rifles and radio equipment. His confession led the military to the suburban house where they dug up the bodies he had mentioned. Cobo was eventually sent to a civilian prison, where he awaits his court date on organized crime charges. Federal prosecutors declined to comment on whether his cooperation will lead to a more lenient sentence.
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Post by Tim Collins on Dec 26, 2008 8:02:37 GMT -7
Looks like the term "war on drugs" is not so inappropriate after all. The problem is we are fighting it like a conventional war or police investigation and they are playing at insurgency.
Makes you wonder if we should not just go to the growers of the raw material and offer them like $10million a year to give us tgheir entire crop, then rent them mercenaries as guards to kill their current buyers. Then we could legalize and regulate. It would take some really honest guards.
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rosa
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Post by rosa on Dec 26, 2008 8:27:07 GMT -7
"It would take some really honest guards"
oxy moron?
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