tagged w/ Narcos
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Quizas sintieron la presion de USA...
The Mexican government said Friday it has opened a federal investigation into the reported shooting of an American tourist on a border lake plagued by Mexican pirates and strongly denied delaying action on finding the man or his attackers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVL_pGyFvsIQuizas sintieron la presion de USA...
The Mexican government said Friday it has... more
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The bullet holes in the safe-house door tell you who's winning Mexico's drug war. The armor-piercing ammunition, fired from the inside by drug traffickers, shredded the 20-gauge steel like small cannonballs; the rounds fired from the outside, by federal police, merely punctured the metal like so much bird shot. After that midnight firefight on May 27--the result of a botched police raid in the desert city of Culiacán in northwestern Mexico--seven cops lay dead. Only one narco gunman died; the rest, at least half a dozen, escaped. For neighbors, the carnage carried an unambiguous message. "I realized," says Victor Rodríguez, a fishmonger and family man, "that the power of the narcos has surpassed the power of my government."
People across the country are coming to the same depressing conclusion. There have been 2,000 drug-related murders in Mexico this year, including scores of ghastly beheadings, putting 2008 well on pace to break last year's record of 2,500 killings. Hundreds of victims are police, including the chief of the federal police, who was killed in May. While inaugurating a federal-police post in Mexico City in June, President Felipe Calderón insisted that the "state is stronger than any criminal organization." But in a poll released a couple of weeks earlier by the Mexico City daily Reforma, 53% said the narcos were winning the drug war. Even Washington, famous for ignoring crises south of the border, is alarmed. To back up Calderón--and keep the mayhem from spilling into the U.S.--Congress recently approved $400 million for Mexico in 2009 as part of his and President George W. Bush's Mérida Initiative, a three-year aid package for beleaguered drug-interdiction forces.
While they're glad to have more money to fight the narcos, Mexican officials also say the U.S. could do much more--like policing its own side of the border more effectively. The gangs owe their wealth to U.S. consumers (Americans still snort half the world's cocaine) and their firepower to the deluge of pistols, semiautomatic rifles and grenades smuggled in from the U.S. "The effort and lives the Mexican people are giving to this fight," Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora tells TIME, are "much larger than their share of responsibility for the problem." As if to concede that point, Congress inserted $74 million into the Mérida plan to combat the gunrunning.The bullet holes in the safe-house door tell you who's winning Mexico's drug... more
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