subject: Mexico Is Columbia All Over Again [print this page] Mexico Is Columbia All Over Again Mexico Is Columbia All Over Again
As twin border cities, El Paso and Ciudad Juarez are the main crossing point for drugs smuggled into America. The battle is not only against those in authority, but drug cartels fighting among themselves for control of the lucrative trafficking routes.
With over 4,000 people killed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in drug-related violence in the past two years, the city now has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.
It is believed Gunzman's Sinaloa cartel is winning Mexico's drug war, having pushed out the opposing Juarex gang. Guzman fled from a Mexican federal prison ten years ago, by hiding in the back of a laundry truck. He is now chief of the world's biggest cartel, as well as making it into Forbes magazine's list of the top billionaires.
"Mexico is looking more and more like Columbia looked 20 years ago, where narco-traffickers controlled certain parts of the country", Hilary Clinton told a foreign policy think-tank in Washington recently.
President Obama was swift to rebuff Clinton's statement.
The South American country was gripped by attacks on political figures and civilians, at the height of Colombian drug violence in the 1980s and 1990s. Colombia spent decades fighting leftist rebels, financed by a lucrative cocaine trade.
Analysts believe that Mexican cartels have grown in power in recent years, as they took over the vast majority of the drug trade from the Colombians.
Since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006 over 28,000 people have been murdered. Calderon has deployed 45,000 troops and 5,000 federal police in 18 states, but the gunmen in the drug war are considered to be as young as 12 years old. This is said to be because the prison population has doubled in number, putting a lot of the older gunmen out of action.
2010 appears to be on track to becoming the bloodiest year yet, with mainstream reporters being murdered and newsrooms attacked. A young Mexican university student has begun publishing a Narco-blog. The web page publishes accounts from both the dealers and the agencies that hunt them.
"The idea of creating blog Narco arose because the media and government in Mexico is trying to pretend that nothing is happening, because the media is threatened and the government is apparently bought" the author wrote in a page translated from Spanish. The blog was established out of frustration.
An earlier blog had displayed a Municipal policeman being questioned. After confessing that prison officials had permitted prisoners out at night to do the dirty work of a rival drug gang, the policeman was murdered by the drug dealers.
