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  1. #1
    Senior Member zeezil's Avatar
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    Mexico’s Drug Cartels Take Barbarous Turn: Targeting Bysta

    Mexico's Drug Cartels Take Barbarous Turn: Targeting Bystanders
    In Sinaloa, Carnage Brings Widespread Terror

    By Manuel Roig-Franzia
    Washington Post Foreign Service
    Wednesday, July 30, 2008; A09



    GUAMUCHIL, Mexico -- The three teenagers started their big weekend singing "Happy Birthday" to the parish priest.

    The next day, they prayed for hours with their church youth group, then went on to a quinceañera, Mexico's archetypal 15th-birthday celebration. As the party wound down, they talked their parents into letting them go for a late-night cruise down the main drag in Guamuchil, a Saturday night ritual in this sleepy market town, friends and family say.

    During that cruise, investigators believe the teens inadvertently blocked drug cartel assassins in hot pursuit of their enemies. Once police arrived in the wee hours of July 13, the assassins were gone but the three teens and a 12-year-old girl who was riding with them lay dead in their cars. Four others -- another teenager and three adults -- were dead in nearby cars. There were 539 bullet casings on the ground.

    The killings here -- a massacre of eight people who were not suspected of drug-trafficking ties -- punctuated a vicious turn in Mexico's drug war, a savage conflict between rival cartels and the federal government that has taken more than 7,000 lives in the past 2 1/2 years.

    In the past, cartels have killed their rivals, as well as police and public officials. Occasionally even family members have been slain. Yet in recent weeks, an increasing number of innocent bystanders have been gunned down by suspected drug cartel hit men here in Sinaloa, a cartel stronghold on Mexico's Pacific coast, as well as in the brutally contested drug corridors along the U.S. border.

    In most instances, investigators believe, the victims were merely at the wrong place at the wrong time, gunned down by assassins who were once known for their precision but have now taken to wildly spraying bullets. The effect of the carnage has been widespread terror and a society afraid to demand justice.

    "They have us in a panic," Luciana Arredondo Arredondo, a prosecutor in Guamuchil, said of the cartels in an interview. "They have us terrorized."

    Here in Sinaloa -- a drug-trafficking haven where more than 580 people have been killed since January -- the danger to innocents has reached crisis proportions, Graciela DomÃ*nguez, a state legislator, said in an interview at her office in the state capital, Culiacan.

    "You don't have peace of mind walking the streets -- you don't have peace of mind at home," she said.

    Three days before the massacre in this town, cartel assassins killed 11 people in three daylight shootouts in Culiacan. Among the victims were two college professors who had the misfortune to be waiting in a car repair shop when the shooting started. Cartel members also are blamed for holding hostage dozens of customers in a Mazatlan shopping center and firing bazookas into a Culiacan neighborhood, though no civilians were killed.

    In a country where drug trafficking touches nearly every village and mountain range, Sinaloa state is generally considered the ground zero of Mexican organized crime. The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico's largest, authorities say, and has been rapidly expanding by crushing rivals or making alliances with other trafficking organizations in a loosely configured conglomeration known as the Federation.

    Sinaloa is the starting point for much of the drugs that pass through Mexico to the United States. The long, narrow state stretches over 450 miles of coastline laced with tiny inlets and bays, affording drug traffickers countless clandestine drop points for shipments of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Once on shore, traffickers can quickly squirrel away their cargoes in rugged nearby mountains where villagers tend to be more loyal to the cartels than to law enforcement.

    The current uptick in violence in Sinaloa is most likely the result of "a historic rupture" in the alliance between Mexico's most feared drug lord, JoaquÃ*n "Chapo" Guzmán, and a pair of brothers who had served as hit men for his Sinaloa cartel, according to a top federal police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. One of the brothers, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, was arrested in January, and his loyalists -- mistakenly believing Guzmán helped arrange the arrest -- are now seeking revenge against the drug lord, the federal official said.

    "The streets where they once lived together now don't seem big enough for both of them," the official said.

    But law-abiding Sinaloans have also begun to accept some of the blame for the violence. Drug cartels have openly used this mountainous state as a center of operations. The richest cartel leaders have flaunted their wealth by buying fancy cars and living in swanky mansions in the region.

    "The problem is that for years we let this grow -- the society is as much responsible as the government," said DomÃ*nguez, the state legislator. "This is a lesson for society: If all this hadn't been accepted, we wouldn't be reaching these levels of violence."

    Drug trafficking is directly or indirectly responsible for 20 percent of the economic activity in Sinaloa, according to Guillermo Ibarra, an economist at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. Ibarra also estimates that drug cartels have at least $680 million of laundered money deposited in Sinaloan banks. As a result, Sinaloa is one of the top six Mexican states in terms of bank deposits even though it is 17th in economic production, he said.

    "Sinaloa is not a banking center by any means," Ibarra said in an interview. "It is a financial center for drug traffickers."

    The economic might of the cartels makes residents more likely to turn a blind eye to drug traffickers because they depend on the money, at least in part, for their livelihood, he said.

    "If you took drug money out of Sinaloa, half the automobile dealerships would fail," Ibarra said. "Half the restaurants would fail, the real estate market would collapse. Even if you only reduced drug money by 9 percent, there would be an immediate recession, a crisis much like the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States."

    Sinaloans tend to clam up when investigators try to unravel drug crimes, law enforcement officials say. In Guamuchil, for instance, drug cartels are suspected of killing 21 people -- including the eight slain July 13 -- in the past three weeks. But the cartels have made residents so fearful of retribution that investigators have not received a single tip about any of the killings, said Arredondo, the prosecutor.

    "I have nothing, nothing," she said. "Imagine, the families are coming to me and saying, 'Why aren't you doing anything?' But what can we do? We have no information."

    Arredondo's own office, now ringed by cyclone fencing, was attacked by cartel hit men in May, though no one was killed. Arredondo missed the attack -- she was on a three-month leave because of stress.

    The Mexican government has responded to the outburst of violence by nearly tripling the number of federal police and troops in Sinaloa to 2,000. Convoys of federal police -- most wearing face masks to protect their identities -- ply the streets of Culiacan, and military helicopters regularly swoop down over the city. But the presence of troops and federal police has not stopped the violence; many here feel it has provoked more confrontations.

    "The government is failing," DomÃ*nguez said. "They've been implementing these operations, but it appears that they are going about it without any kind of strategy."

    Antonio Guadalupe Arredondo Higuera -- brother of Ignacio Arredondo Higuera, a 38-year-old welder who was one of the July 13 victims in Guamuchil -- doesn't expect much from the federal forces either. "They'll go away soon and leave us here with the cartels," he said during an interview in the dusty yard of his parents' home.

    Arredondo Higuera considers the drug cartels "untouchables." He has come to think of their leaders as "the Kings of Sinaloa," he said.

    "They're just laughing at the law. They kill for the fun of it," he said. "And they're going to keep doing it."

    His mother, Regina Higuera Gutiérrez, sat a few steps away, shaking her head. She has wanted to honor her son's memory -- and perhaps ensure a better world for the child her son's partner is due to deliver in three months -- by marching to protest the violence ruining her home town. She tried to talk her husband, Concepción Arredondo, into taking to the streets and saying, "Enough!" But he refused and forbade her from joining in.

    "He's afraid," she said, shaking her head. "We're all afraid."
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  2. #2
    Senior Member azwreath's Avatar
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    In most instances, investigators believe, the victims were merely at the wrong place at the wrong time, gunned down by assassins who were once known for their precision but have now taken to wildly spraying bullets. The effect of the carnage has been widespread terror and a society afraid to demand justice





    That's precisely the effect the cartels are after.

    It's no different from the tactics used by terrorists in the Middle East, or what we see with gangs here. They terrorize a community with "object lessons" and then are free to blend in with the surrounding community to avoid detection, among a population too afraid to point them out to the authorities.

    They may also be hoping that this slaughter of innocent citizens might lead to Calderon having a fit of remorse over the loss of life and deciding to back off, and/or that he can be pressured into backing off by the citizens, other government officials, maybe even other countries or the UN.

    These cartels know what they're doing.
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  3. #3
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    And these drug gangs are the kind of citizens-to-be we want in our sanctuary cities?
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  4. #4
    Senior Member crazybird's Avatar
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    "The problem is that for years we let this grow -- the society is as much responsible as the government," said DomÃ*nguez, the state legislator. "This is a lesson for society: If all this hadn't been accepted, we wouldn't be reaching these levels of violence."

    Bingo......nip it in the bud from the start. Exactly what we should have been doing all along as well. It's alot easier to stop it from the start, than to think if you ignore it long enough it will somehow work it's self out.....and then when it's beyond control try and do something.
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