I wanted to post when the head of Mexico’s federal police was assassinated, but it slipped my mind. In any event, the activities going on south and of the border are very worrisome. Triangle of death lite.

The bodies add up. Lack of real law enforcement due to corruption assassination etc. its a low intensity war zone.



In Tijuana, Unlikely Lawman
Answers High-Stakes Call
Capella Accepts Job
Few Others Want
Amid Drug Violence
By JOHN LYONS
June 2, 2008

TIJUANA, Mexico -- If this country's war on drugs is going to work, the new police commissioner here, Alberto Capella, needs to stay alive.

The trouble is, men like Mr. Capella are a dying breed. In the past year and a half, about 450 Mexican lawmen have been killed by the country's drug gangs, including a growing list of police chiefs. Weeks ago, hit men killed the head of Mexico's elite Federal Police.

The killings have instilled such fear that some Mexican cities now resemble the brutal cliché of Western movies, where no one wants to wear the sheriff's badge. The police chiefs of Chihuahua, a state capital, and Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, both walked off the job recently, afraid for their lives. No one wanted the Ciudad Juarez job, so the new chief is an army officer on loan from the military.


Mr. Capella, a lawyer with no previous law-enforcement experience, is one of the few willing to take on such jobs.

In so doing, he has stepped into the middle of a tug-of-war for the soul of Mexican law enforcement. On one side of the fight are powerful narcotics barons who have corrupted police agencies with cash, violence and the macho allure of the drug trade. President Felipe Calderón and recruits such as Mr. Capella are battling to bring these agencies back into the service of civil society.

President Bush wants to help Mexico win that fight with $500 million in U.S. drug aid. But Congress is set to cut the package by at least 20% and wants Mexico to meet higher human-rights and corruption benchmarks as part of any aid agreement.

In Mexico's drug war, it isn't clear which side has the upper hand. Mr. Calderón has deployed 25,000 troops to cities, including here in Tijuana, where drug lords hold sway, and has scored a string of seizures, arrests and extraditions. Drug gangs have retaliated by slaughtering policemen.

Mr. Capella almost didn't make it to the job. A few nights before he officially began working, armed men stormed his Tijuana home. Awakened by dogs, Mr. Capella grabbed an assault rifle left by his daytime guards. He fired from different windows to confuse the intruders, he said. The men fled after raking his home with return fire.

"I said to myself: God gave us a second chance, we have some extra hours, let's take advantage of it and do something worthwhile," says Mr. Capella, who now has a large, 24-hour security contingent.

Despite the aptitude for gunplay, Mr. Capella is an unlikely lawman. A chubby father of three, Mr. Capella was for a long time Tijuana's chief law-enforcement critic: As the head of a citizens' watchdog group, he led protests to pressure officials to stop a wave of kidnappings of businessmen and their families by drug gangs. He and others accused police of complicity with crime organizations.

The victims he met during his activist days deepened his commitment, he said. One that sticks with him: A father whose kidnapped son was murdered even though the father had paid the ransom as asked.

When Mr. Capella started receiving credible death threats, he dug in, sending his wife and children to live in another city.

Mr. Capella said he could hardly refuse last year when Tijuana's newly elected mayor -- from Mr. Calderón's law-and-order political party -- asked him to be part of the solution and take over the police force.

It hasn't been an easy move. Mr. Capella is surrounded by bodyguards with automatic weapons when he arrives each day at the cramped police headquarters. The guards, some with flack jackets over their street clothes, take up positions outside his office.

It soon becomes obvious they are protecting Mr. Capella not only from the bad guys on the streets, but from some of the policemen who work for him. When a municipal police officer wanders into the hall outside Mr. Capella's office, a guard wearing aviator sunglasses and toting an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle blocks him. "You know you aren't supposed to be here," he intones, prompting the uniformed cop to sheepishly turn around and leave.

Mr. Capella chose an outsider to run day-to-day operations: A lean military officer who walks the halls of police headquarters with an AR-15 in one hand and a semi-automatic pistol jammed into his waistband.

They aren't just being paranoid. In December, the new police chief in the nearby coastal resort of Rosarito barely escaped an assassination attempt from his own men.

In the climate of mistrust that has taken hold in Mexico, Mr. Capella's survival of the armed attack on his home has spurred rumors about his possible allegiances to drug barons. Mr. Capella calls these notions ridiculous.

What is clear is that no matter how clean someone appears in Mexico, officials such as Mr. Capella can come under enormous pressure to defect. In Mexican lore, cops are given a choice of plata o plomo -- silver or lead. Accept cash to look the other way, or get shot.

It is hard to fathom why Mr. Capella would accept such stakes. Mr. Capella says he is defending his home. Unseen by the Americans who jam Tijuana's seedy bars, the city has a vast middle class that thrives on economic ties to San Diego. For generations, families such as the Capellas carved out quiet lives in sun-drenched communities perfumed by ocean breezes.

The wave of middle-class kidnappings by drug gangs seeking to diversify their income is destroying this suburban dream. Families are moving away. Others isolate themselves behind bodyguards and bullet-resistant glass. Indeed, Mr. Capella's crusade is more about pushing drug-related crime back out of sight than stopping the drugs trade, he says.

"How are we going to stop the shipments if there is always someone who wants to buy it over there?" he asks, nodding in the direction of the U.S. border. "At the same time, the narcos have to understand that if they mess with society, then their party will be over."

Reforming the police will take time, Mr. Capella admits. Under a national plan, members of the force are undergoing psychological exams and lie-detector tests to determine if they are on the take. Mexican law prevents Mr. Capella from summarily firing those who fail the tests. But the tests have prompted some to quit, and give him an idea of who is who in the force.

Mr. Capella is also trying to make police work a respected job. He is recruiting local businessmen to set up scholarships to pay for private education for the children of decorated cops.

Violence is still a part of life. In January, a gun battle erupted when police stopped a carload of drug traffickers who had taken rival gang members prisoner. Army backup was called in, and the ensuing gun battle near a kindergarten left more than a thousand shell casings on the streets.

Despite the carnage, analysts considered it a victory: In the past, the drug traffickers might have simply bribed their way out and driven off. This time, the authorities tried to take them down.

"We are doing a chemotherapy," Mr. Capella says. "These ugly images of soldiers rescuing the children from the kindergarten, this is part of the therapy. This is the hair falling out. But we, as a society, are attacking the problem. We want to take this therapy, for all the pain that it generates."

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Obama-e fungis nati homines....

More casualties in the War On People Who Use Drugs. End the war, and the profit motive of the drug lords blows away in the hot Mexican wind.

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Today's forecast: Government corruption.

Tomorrow's forecast: 100% chance of more 'politics as usual'

Maybe it's finally time to vote Libertarian

Pretty scary. I don't envy the Mexican police at the moment.

As Evil said, the solution is pretty simple...

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"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God."
Matthew 5:9

"President Bush wants to help Mexico win that fight with $500 million in U.S. drug aid. But Congress is set to cut the package by at least 20% and wants Mexico to meet higher human-rights and corruption benchmarks as part of any aid agreement."

A few things of interest:

(1) For anyone who still doesn't think Bush is a big government liberal who happens not to like gays, here you go - let's ship some ungodly sum of money to help another country in the fight for large, nanny-state government. What a great use of my tax dollars

(2) I don't know how loudly Bush is trumpeting this or if this is his idea. Given his history as a drug user, I always sort of admired that he didn't particularly get on the soapbox about drugs for political expediency, the way countless hypocritical politicians before him have. I find this disappointing.

(3) I have to laugh at this whole thing because it's so completely absurd. It should make me angry, but it's just funny. We have a miserable failure of a "war on drugs". We waste progressively more money on this inherently doomed nanny-stating, and the problem only gets worse. So now, this has been such a ringing success, we decide to export it on our own dime, to some other country. Jesus Christ. I do understand that an argument may go that "cracking down on drugs in Mexico will mean less drugs here", but that's silly. Crack down on them in Mexico and people will make them here (or somewhere else besides Mexico). Mama government here reminds me of a drunk oaf playing whack-a-mole, stumbling around and hitting itself in the head with the mallot while cursing amused onlookers and vowing to "show them - show you all".

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Regarding the point of "if you don't import it they'll make it here."

Not only is this true, but if I were a parent, for example, I would much rather have my kids using imported drugs (cocaine) than domestic drugs (crystal meth).

__________________
"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God."
Matthew 5:9

I don't think it would necessarily be either-or. People would find ways to make/grow whatever drug others wanted. But, you do raise a good point in that prohibition has created some absolutely horrible and previously inconceivably dangerous substances, such as meth or crack.

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

On the bright side, even the DEA has admitted marijuana being produced in the US now exceeds import quantities and quality. And that's with the DEA stating they destroy 40% of US marijuana crops, a real joke to anyone living in a rural area.

Too bad that doesn't affect our current account balance.

The wisdom of our government banning sales of ingredients used to cook crank has forced most of that supply to now originate in Mexico, which offset declining sales of Mexican marijuana and increased drug trade violence in Mexico. Crank is a huge market.

And they say securing the borders makes us bad people. My god. These liberal goofs who want the U.S. to be as easy to get into as a mall should read this article.