Explorations in Policing, Faith and Life (With a hint of humor, product reviews, news and whatever catches my attention)

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Mexican Drug Cartels-making insane decisions.






Mexican authorities have found 59 bodies on a remote ranch in the La Joya farming village.  This occurred in the same area where they had found 72 bodies less than a year ago.

The news link from Yahoo


The story

At least 59 bodies found on Mexico ranch

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico (AFP) – At least 59 bodies have been found on a ranch in Mexico's northern state of Tamaulipas, on the US border, authorities said Wednesday, warning that the grim toll could rise.

The Tamaulipas state prosecutor's office said 11 people had been arrested and another five kidnapping victims had been set free in the same operation on Wednesday.

Police and military staff learned March 25 that several buses had disappeared in the area, leading to their investigation which turned up a grisly find: eight mass graves in the La Joya farming village, in the town of San Fernando, the prosecutor's office said.

"With our work that is under way, we are trying to establish if the remains are those of the people who went missing on the buses," the prosecutor's statement said.

Authorities said they feared the number of dead would rise as the remains had only been counted in three of eight mass graves. A military patrol located the mass grave, the source added.

The gruesome find was in the same town of San Fernando where 72 migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador and Brazil were killed in August 2010 for refusing to work for drug traffickers.

Meanwhile thousands of outraged citizens took to the streets of 38 Mexican cities on Wednesday, venting anger over widespread violence linked to the country's illegal drug trade.

The protest marches were organized following the murder of a well-known author's son along with four close friends and two others on March 28.

Javier Sicilia, a poet and columnist for the daily La Jornada and the weekly Proceso -- two of the country's leading publications -- called for the protests following the killing of his son Juan Francisco, 24, near Cuernavaca, 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of Mexico City.

Seven major drug gangs are operating in Mexico whose bloody clashes have left over 34,600 people dead since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon's government launched a military crackdown that has so far failed to stem the violence.

Authorities said Saturday that 20 people were killed in under 24 hours in Mexico's most violent city, Ciudad Juarez, which borders the US state of Texas.

Ciudad Juarez is considered the most violent city in Mexico, with more than 3,100 homicides in 2010. Most of the violence is blamed on drug cartels who fight for control of lucrative drug routes into the United States.

Just on Monday the United States boosted security at its consulate in Mexico's drug war-rocked northern city of Monterrey, where it built a second protective ring wall.

Two other US consulates on the Mexican side of the shared border were temporarily closed last year. Security concerns forced the office in Ciudad Juarez to close for several days, while another in Nuevo Laredo was closed after an explosive device attack.
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__My thoughts______________________________________

One of the core principles in illicit drug investigations is to approach the enterprise as a business entity and not as a criminal conspiracy.  You either attack the supply line or the financial line.  It is simple logistics, they have to move product in through a distribution network to their retail outlets and take out their profits, after paying the bills, usually through a different network.  They have personnel and raw material costs, banking/financing costs etc.  You attack one side or the other and work your way back.  It is a logical though criminal system.  The violence that a criminal enterprise generates can even be viewed in two ways:  one as an internal ( but extremely draconian) self correcting/disciplinary function or a method to gain market dominance.

However these mass killings do not make any business sense and I am having trouble placing them into prospective.  I understand that violence can streamline and prevent governmental/law enforcement interference by keeping information under control and increasing local populations participation in the criminal enterprise and decreasing its participation with law enforcement.   Further it can create a political climate that is conducive to their criminal activities, but that is usually achieved through different levels and types of corruption (See Chicago, New Orleans).  But the caveat to the use of violence to achieve financial ends is that once a certain threshold is reached and maintained the citizenry will rise up and fight back (See Columbia 1990's).

The cartels control almost all aspects of local Mexican governmental bodies.  They have almost total "buy-in" from the peasant class.  The terror they generate from killing criminal participants within and without their cartels is almost total for the population and sapped the majority of the will to combat illicit drug sales and distribution.  These mass killing gain the cartels almost nothing, in fact it is starting to raise resistance.  They do not make sense from a money making prospective.  It even allows further enticement for the American's to demand  and President Calderon to allow, American military cross boarder sorties against the cartels.

So what is this?  I can think of only three possibilities.  1st, there is an enforcer for a cartel that really is a serial killer that found his/her ultimate dream job.  2nd, it is another voodoo drug cult like the one where they discovered (04-11-1989) had murdered the 12 American college students in the Mexican city of Matamoros or 3rd some of the cartels have become terrorist groups that have both broad political and and financial goals ( example: al qaeda selling heroin).

I am waiting and watching for the answer.

1 Kings 18:4
While Jezebel was killing off the LORD’s prophets, Obadiah had taken a hundred prophets and hidden them in two caves, fifty in each, and had supplied them with food and water.)

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