I don’t normally go around asking for stats. I’ll take a good anecdote over a slippery statistics any day. And yet… I feel like an old operator at times saying, “Number, please.” Last night I was writing and had a very simple question: how many US prisoners are in solitary confinement? Seems like a simple…
Read more
In 2007, Mexican and US drug agents raided a home in Mexico City. Over $200,000,000 in cash was found. Lot’s of other stuff, too. Like tigers and gold guns! It’s pretty impressive. I put the pictures in a PDF file. It’s not recent, but I just got an email with the pictures from a student.…
Read more
Not the government wants you to know. Immediately after Calderon came to office in late 2006, he deployed up to 50,000 troops in a frontal battle with narcotics cartels, a move that drew widespread praise for its courage. More than three years later, the pace of killings is soaring and public security worries are beginning…
Read more
And Mexico is no exception.
From the Wall Street Journal: Growing numbers of Mexican and U.S. officials say—at least privately—that the biggest step in hurting the business operations of Mexican cartels would be simply to legalize their main product: marijuana. Long the world’s most popular illegal drug, marijuana accounts for more than half the revenues of Mexican cartels. “Economically, there…
Read more
Only hours after the grieving family had finished burying [Ensign Melquisedet Angulo Córdova, a Special Forces sailor killed last week during the government’s most successful raid on a top drug lord in years] in his hometown, gunmen burst into the family’s house and sprayed the rooms with gunfire, killing his mother and three other relatives,…
Read more
Of coooourse. Washington says the rising death toll is a sign the drug gangs are weakening under President Calderon’s military crackdown, which has seen some 49,000 extra troops deploy across Mexico. You see the rising death toll in Mexico is always a sign that the drug gangs are weakening because, well, when the gangs are…
Read more
Strange question, but have any of you ever paid a bribe to a Mexican police officer in, say, the past 10 years? If so, when, where, why, and how much? There was an article in the New York Times the other day about Cancun police extorting people, in this case a Minnesota state senator. My…
Read more
The BBC has a good video reportage on the latest gun battles between the drug mob and police. This time in the port city of Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacán. The complete disrespect the drug people have for law enforcement is shocking. They engage in gun battles with heavily armed police and expect to win. Sometimes they…
Read more
Read a few perspectives in the New York Time