[Pretorian]

mex peso lost 10 centavos vs dollar within an hour after the news release

[Kaj]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('johhnytrash', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vetusfirma', 'I') don't speak spanish, the language of the oppressor, but I do know a good story in English, the language of the people who defeated the oppressors.

[outcast]

I'm sure the huge number of dead Indians who died because of famine under British rule would agree with you

[Cynus]

Gasmon, you Brits have got to start small. My advice: invade France. When you and France were perpetually at war with each other you both became more and more powerful until you were the most powerful nations on Earth.

[abelardlindsay]

I'd guess the coming Mexico collapse is probably the reason KBR is getting paid big bucks to build all these detention centers in south Texas.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/33295/

[cube]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('GASMON', '.')..
If I had my way we Brits would do it all again. We can't, so its now America's turn to police the world. Are you up to it ???.

[Cynus]

House approves aid to Mexico drug war
By STEWART M. POWELL

WASHINGTON — Brushing aside objections by Houston-area Republicans, the House on Tuesday approved bipartisan legislation authorizing $1.1 billion in emergency assistance to Mexico over three years to combat drug traffickers.

The Democratic-controlled House adopted the White House-backed Merida Initiative on a vote of 311-106.

Separate legislation necessary for spending the funds is winding its way through Congress.

The measure has stirred controversy since President Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon came up with the idea at their summit in the Mexican city of Merida last year. The plan would provide unprecedented U.S. assistance to Mexico, ranging from military equipment such as helicopters and encrypted communications to training of police.

Escalating drug-gang violence has killed an estimated 4,000 Mexicans over the past 18 months, prompting Calderon to deploy some 30,000 soldiers and federal police along the border and elsewhere.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hea ... 30295.html

[Cynus]

Macabre drug cartel messages in Mexico

Some of the communications intended for rivals, officials and the public have accompanied severed heads and been written on bodies.
By Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 11, 2008
MEXICO CITY -- In case decapitating their victims and dumping the heads in picnic coolers didn't make the point, the killers left a note.

"This is a warning," it said, listing an alphabet soup of Mexican police agencies and the noms de guerre of several well-known drug figures. "You get what you deserve."

The message, scrawled on a poster in black ink, accompanied four severed human heads that Mexican authorities recently found on a highway in the northern state of Durango.

The same day, police in neighboring Chihuahua state came upon five swaddled bodies accompanied by a hand- lettered placard.

"This is what happens to stupid traitors who take sides with Chapo Guzman," said the message found in Ciudad Juarez, referring to Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, the supposed leader of the main drug gang in adjacent Sinaloa state.

The killers closed with incongruous propriety: "Yours truly," they signed off, "La Linea."

...

Often, government forces are the target audience. A recent poster mocked army troops on patrol, calling them "little lead soldiers."

In the border cities of Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, in the state of Tamaulipas, neatly painted banners appeared this spring advertising jobs in the Zetas, one of the country's most fearsome crime groups.

The banners, addressed to "soldiers or ex-soldiers," offered "good wages, food and help for your family."

...

Ciudad Juarez residents have reason to take anonymous warnings seriously. In January, someone threatened city police by posting the names of 17 officers on a monument to fallen officers. Three of those listed were already dead.

By mid-May, about half of those listed had been killed, including the city's No. 2 police official, who was peppered with automatic-weapons fire one night as he returned home.

The messages keep on coming. Late last month, two hand-scrawled banners appeared in the Chihuahua state capital, also called Chihuahua. Signed by a group calling itself Gente Nueva, or New People, the banners listed the names of 21 state police officers.

The threat needed no elaboration.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... 5339.story

[Cynus]

Mexico's Calderon bogged down in bloody drugs war
By Catherine Bremer

MEXICO CITY, June 16 (Reuters) - President Felipe Calderon has staked his reputation on wiping out Mexico's drug violence but his campaign is in trouble as trafficking gangs murder ever more people, target police and openly recruit hitmen.

Calderon's first move on taking power 18 months ago was to launch a bold $7 billion army-led assault on powerful drug cartels, vowing to wrest back control of violence-scarred northern border states.

His army busts have put a string of senior smugglers behind bars and captured truckloads of cocaine and cash.

But the top drug lords are still free, and disrupting years-old trafficking alliances and protection networks has sparked an explosion in killings between rival gangs who dump hacked-off heads and tortured bodies in public.

The bloodshed has dented Calderon's popularity and left him bogged down in a vicious war with the odds of winning it stacked against him.

Calderon, 45, has defined success as reducing the violence, but drug murders have instead soared to more than 4,000 since his offensive began, and the turf wars intensified this year.

In brazen defiance of Calderon's pledge to gain the upper hand, cartel hitmen are picking off police from grim hit-lists and hanging banner adverts on highways offering fat wages for soldiers to defect and join them.

"They're not scared of him," said Eduardo Valle, a veteran drug expert who was a top advisor to Mexico's attorney general in the mid-1990s and now lives on the Mexico-U.S. border.

Although the army has failed to stop the violence, Calderon can not withdraw the troops without conceding defeat for a policy that the quiet but tough leader himself set as a top priority.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/latestCri ... 0620080616

[Cynus]

What's Next for Mexico? Gang Violence, Drugs, Political Corruption Imperil Country

WASHINGTON, June 16 (AScribe Newswire) -- A new book by College of William & Mary Professor George W. Grayson suggests that defeated leftist presidential candidate Lopez Obrador could frustrate the governmental reforms of its newly-elected President Felipe Calderon. Meanwhile, Professor Grayson says, "the state is disintegrating as the government loses control over key sectors of society."

Among the sectors sliding from the state's control are public education, the oil industry, and public safety in the streets of scores of Mexican cities, especially the capital and border towns. Moreover, the government collects less than 12 percent of its GDP in taxes - on par with Haiti, a failed nation - and monopolies and oligopolies compromise Mexico's ability to compete with Indian, China, and the Asian Tigers.

In addition, drug violence has claimed 1,552 lives so far this year, with murders often accomplished by decapitations before the victims are brutally maimed and tortured.

http://newswire.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/beh ... 8&public=0

[Cynus]

This article is a must-read:
Failed States: Mexico & California
[A]n implosion is occurring in Mexico. A failed Mexican state requires protective measures that are very difficult to fully assess. Chaos reigns. Debts fail. Contracts face renege. Federal deficits rise. Labor strife spreads. Corrupt grabs by the powerful are enacted. Poverty widens. A bunker mentality prevails. Money returns home. This is the opposite of the orderly Japanese Repatriation every March. This is disorder gaining momentum.

A failed nation state is the likely outcome south of the US border. Energy network attacks, growing poverty and inequality, inadequate government services, growing power of organized crime, corruption & desertion of police forces, assassination of judges and officials without consequences, and growing farmer bankruptcy are contributing to a failed system in Mexico. The current farm product price changes have resulted in tremendous additional disruption, losses, and disruption to Mexican agriculture businesses. Needs of people, upheld laws, tax structures, allegiance to authority, and sense of urgency all seem to be in breakdown mode, and have been for several months. Remarkably, the US press networks refuse to cover the stories that form long links in an ugly chain.

http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/edito ... /0620.html

[gypsybiker45]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kaj', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('johhnytrash', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vetusfirma', 'I') don't speak spanish, the language of the oppressor, but I do know a good story in English, the language of the people who defeated the oppressors.

[wisconsin_cur]

FT: US warns Mexican drug war threatens democracy

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A') top US counter-narcotics official has warned that Mexico’s democratic development is at stake in the country’s battle against drugs cartels.

Speaking as the US Congress approved a long-awaited $400m (€253m, £200m) aid package for Mexico’s anti-drug drive, David Johnson, the top counter-narcotics official at the Department of State, also gave a stark depiction of the challenges posed by the drugs industries of Afghanistan, Colombia and Burma.

Felipe Calderon, Mexico’s president, has deployed the country’s army in fighting its powerful cartels, but an upsurge of violence has led to 1,881 drug-related murders this year, according to local media reports.

While official Mexican figures are lower, they indicate a rise of almost 50 per cent from the same period last year. Last week alone, 130 people died, the highest such total for years

[BlisteredWhippet]

American laxity on immigration created modern Mexico, in my opinion, more than any other factor.

It is the factor America is responsible for, and any weaselment out of this dilemma by pro-migrant legalizers is tantamount to anarchy, at best, and treason, at worst.

What an incredible shot in the arm it would be for Mexico to be forced to receive its lost population.

These immigrants are economic refugees and unreformed cargo cultists, and create cargo cultists in their home country, awaiting the arrival of dollars that were created by stealing from the future.

Mexico should be treated like a tamale. Stuff the peppers back in the tortilla and increase the heat and pressure until the freaking sauce oozes out. Aztec purification.

[mercurygirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BlisteredWhippet', 'T')hese immigrants are economic refugees and unreformed cargo cultists, and create cargo cultists in their home country, awaiting the arrival of dollars that were created by stealing from the future.

Mexico should be treated like a tamale. Stuff the peppers back in the tortilla and increase the heat and pressure until the freaking sauce oozes out. Aztec purification.

[manu]

Maybe for awhile they will all head North. Then as there is less oil and a cold winter, the hordes will move South. Sort of what the Buffalo did before their die-off.

[wisconsin_cur]

Note delivered to Mexican officail... attached to head.



$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')EXICO CITY — Officials say a human head and was left near the home of the Oaxaca state attorney general with a note threatening three state officials.

State prosecutors say the head and note were found Saturday inside a plastic bag left a few yards the official's house in Oaxaca city.

The note threatened Attorney General Evencio Martinez as well as organized crime investigator Pedro Guzman and the leader of the state's governing party, Jorge Franco.

The note signed in the name of the Gulf drug cartel said officials must "learn to respect that we are here and we won't leave."

A body matching the head was found outside the city. Officials say they have not yet identified the man.

[socrates1fan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kaj', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('johhnytrash', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vetusfirma', 'I') don't speak spanish, the language of the oppressor, but I do know a good story in English, the language of the people who defeated the oppressors.