Mexico's Drug Wars

Mexico Acts As Executions And Kidnappings Spread
-- Times Online

Mexico’s Congress is to vote on a drastic security plan after another week of Iraq-style violence, including the dumping of 12 partially naked bodies, most with their tongues cut out, next to an elementary school.

Analysts blame the staggering violence and lawlessness over recent months in Mexico on the Government’s crackdown on drug cartels, which has cut off their income and caused rival organisations to wage war against each other.

The problem has been exacerbated by endemic police corruption — in one notorious case, the police were responsible for kidnapping and killing a 14-year-old boy even after his wealthy businessman father paid the ransom — and a rapidly deteriorating economy, which is heavily dependent on so-called “remittances”, or money wired back from illegal Mexican workers in the United States.

The US media, preoccupied by the Wall Street crisis and the presidential election, has shown little interest in Mexico’s troubles, even as the discovery of beheaded corpses becomes a weekly event and the country’s kidnapping rate — three or four a day — is worse than Iraq’s.

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