CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, March 3 (Reuters) – Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across Mexico’s bloodiest drug war city on Tuesday, trying to prevent a collapse in law and order just south of the U.S. border…
Calderon has about 45,000 soldiers across Mexico fighting cartels but has never before sent so many troops to one city.
At least four main cartels are fighting for control of Ciudad Juarez, and gangs of unemployed youths have joined the fray to extort businesses, kidnap residents, rob banks and work as hitmen.
Residents fear the city could go the way of Colombia’s Medellin at the height of the drug war there in the 1990s, when murder rates hit 6,000 deaths a year…
Some U.S. officials have publicly asked whether Mexico is becoming a failed state and voiced concern about a spillover of executions, kidnappings and extortions into the United States.
One wonders what it is going to take before the drug prohibitionists finally realize quite how counter-productive their efforts, and skewed their priorities, really are. Not content with doing their best to wreck the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, they have now set the stage for a major crisis along this country’s southern border.
Madness.