19 July 2010

Drug War in Mexico Targets Weddings

It makes sense that wedding would be high-value targets in a family-oriented business like the drug trade.

The gunmen did not say a word as they jumped from their cars and stormed the private party. They simply opened fire. When they were done, 17 people lay dead and 18 wounded.

Sunday's massacre in the city of Torreon was ghastly, but no longer unprecedented in northern Mexico, a region that is slammed day after day by gruesome slayings that authorities attribute to an increasingly brutal battle between drug gangs feuding over territory.

Investigators had no suspects or information on a possible motive in the attack, but Coahuila, where Torreon is located, is among several northern Mexican states that have seen a spike in drug-related violence as the Gulf cartel and its former enforcers, the Zetas, fight for control of drug-trafficking routes.

The attack on the party came just three days after a car bomb killed several people in the northern city of Ciudad Juarez — and a little more than a month after assailants raided a drug-rehab center in the northern city of Chihuahua, killing 19 people in cold blood.


That doesn't make it any better. Mexico is a failing state and we've got no security to prevent it from spilling over our border.

>By: Brant

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mexico seems to be experiencing an increasingly virulent narco-insurgency. No matter what sort of border security we try to establish, it will of course continue to spill onto U.S. soil. People who talk of "sealing" borders are either grossly misinformed or using the cartels' primary products. This is a problem that needs to be fixed by going into Mexico and targeting the leadership and middle management of the cartels.

Not through law enforcement; through the military and the intelligence community.

These are organizations that conduct car bombings, kidnappings, and shootings in order to influence public officials and private citizens on both sides of the border. They are conducting organized violence in order to attack the rule of law. These organizations are no longer just criminal enterprises peddling noxious goods. These are now violent enemies of Mexico and the USA.

Because of nature of the threat, we shift emphasis from trying to build cases against Mexican cartel personalities for prosecution in courts of law. That process is ideal over the long term, but the security situation appears to have deteriorated too far for that to be an acceptable solution over the short term. Shift from building cases to killing or capturing cartel personalities.

U.S. forces have plenty of recent experience that is directly applicable to this problem.

The cartels have made war on us. Let's make war on them.