Report & Die In Mexico

Photo © Reuters - Gangs target children in Mexican drug war, Lizbeth Diaz/Tijuana/TheAge.au :: :: :: Tracy Wilkinson/LAT: More than two dozen die amid Mexico violence: In a separate incident, Miguel Angel Villagomez, the editor and publisher of La Noticia, a daily newspaper in the state of Michoacan, was found dead Friday morning with three gunshots to his body. . . Francisco Rivera, deputy editor, said the paper recently published photographs of banners that had appeared in the city, purportedly the work of drug traffickers, and that might have been the reason Villagomez was targeted. .. "We don't see any other motive," Rivera said in a telephone interview. [Photo caption: "A policeman carries a child to safety during a three-hour gun battle outside a kindergarten in central Tijuana."] :: :: :: Once upon twenty-two years ago I sat listening to an Assistant AG describe "gang wars" as a fight with "no humans involved". As long as the combatants restricted their killing to each other, society in essence suffered no loss. Those were the days of the cocaine wars, when drug "lords" loaded planes, trains, and automobiles with magic white powder to feed the noses of the "counterculture cool" - and anyone else - who was willing to find out the extreme hard way what "first's one's free" really meant. Demand met supply and it's sidekick: "Meet my little friend." Nothing new. Some people never learn from the past, just seem to enjoy repeating it. We had Prohibition in the '20's, the Marijuana Tax Act in the '30's, in the 70's it was "Operation Intercept" and paraquat spraying, in the 80's we got Ronnie Rayguns civil forfeiture and racist coke statutes. All to the sounds of the constantly beating drum of the conservative brown-shirts, whose entire response to chemical stimulation was - and still is - "just say no", followed immediately by draconian punishment. Crime meets punishment, and it's sidekick: "the advanced school for criminals". Come now the latest monsters to breach the thin walls protecting society at large from the malignancy of racketeering influenced criminal organizations, who act in exactly the same manner as their predecessors, for exactly the same reasons, with exactly the same results. And as before, now humans *are* involved, as those feeding on pain for their personal gain have (correctly) guessed the entire systems of protection built into any given culture may be compromised for a price. Their trick is to find the weakest links in the chain of protection. Snap enough of those links and it is possible to create a global manufacturing and distribution network for just about any "product" - drugs, women, babies, weapons, cash - a marginally-human being desires to buy. On rare occasions these sub-human networks are exposed in the press, whose reporters are all too often the first thin wall crushed, as they have been in this latest series of attacks. It will continue, as it always does, for the same reasons, and with exactly the same results: voices will be heard through print, a great shout will rise from the masses, the government will get religion and make "visual progress" to stem the violence, the shouts will become murmurs as the body count goes down, and the "financial industry" washing machines will continue to fund the now-less-visible criminal organizations. Until the next cycle of cash-driven violence appears "above the fold", written by people compelled to tell a story, and maybe getting killed in the process.