Just south of the border down Mexico way it appears that there is a war going on with violence to rival Afghanistan and Iraq.
July 19th. 2010
To cries of "Kill them all!" gunmen have opened fire at a Mexican fiesta, mowing down at least 17 people in an attack that laid bare the brutality of Mexico's long-running drug war.
A dozen people were also wounded today as the killers sprayed more than 200 bullets indiscriminately at the private party outside Torreon, an industrial city in the northern state of Coahuila.
Today's attack brought the number of victims across the country, which has been blighted by drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon launched a 2006 crackdown on the cartels, to at least 57 just in the past weekend.
Ground zero for the violence is Ciudad Juarez on the US-Mexico border, which saw some 2660 murders in 2009 alone - more than seven a day on average.
Almost at the same time but in Torreon, in the northern state of Coahuila, 10 people were killed when gunmen rolled up in a trio of Hummers and opened fire on a crowd inside a bar.
The recent wave of violence includes a car bombing in Ciudad Juarez on Thursday that killed four and wounded 11.
Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes said that gang members set a trap using a wounded person dressed as a municipal police officer to lure federal police into a main intersection before the car bomb was detonated.
Nearly 25,000 people have been killed since December 2006, when right-wing president Calderon made shattering the drug cartels a national priority and launched a massive crackdown.
To further complicate the issue comes this shocking allegation:
By Katie Cassidy from Sky News
:MEXICAN prison guards allowed inmates to walk out of jail with borrowed guns and drive away in official cars so they could carry out drug-related killings.
Following the murders, which included a massacre at a private party last week, the criminals dutifully returned to their cells, Mexico's attorney general's office claimed.
Four staff - including a prison director - were placed under a form of house arrest while investigations continued, Sky News reported.
"According to witnesses, the inmates were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director ... to carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and using guards' weapons for executions," office spokesman Ricardo Najera said.
"Unfortunately, the criminals also carried out cowardly killings of innocent civilians, only to return to their cells."
1 comment:
if all those Mexican protesters in the United States, the ones who are willing to go up against our law enforcement such as the demonstrators in Arizona and the ones who gather by the millions demonstrating throughout the US, would take that energy and unity on their home country, they could change their country and make it their own America.
Unfortunately, it is much easier to focus their energy on a society in a free government that won't fight back.
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