Mexico: FAIL thread

[Disco Pickle]

Aren't the schools over there pretty much parochial still?

The good ones are, certainly.  I'm just going to have to deal with that reality for the kid as I won't public school him in Mexico.  Hopefully I'll have him out of there by then but who knows.

Going to have to have a long talk with him about that one day. 

[Cain]

Zetas got some competition

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576599161405735224.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird

MEXICO CITY-A self-styled drug-trafficking group calling itself the "Zeta Killers" claimed responsibility this week for the recent murders of at least 35 people believed to belong to the Zetas, Mexico's most violent criminal organization.

   The claim by the "Mata Zetas" has stoked fears that Mexico, like Colombia a generation before, may be witnessing the rise of paramilitary drug gangs that seek society's approval and tacit consent from the government to help society confront its ills, in this case, the Zetas.

   On Wednesday, Mexico's national security spokeswoman Alejandra Sota vowed in a statement that the government would "hunt down" and bring to justice any criminal group that takes justice into its own hands.

   ...."Our only objective is the Zetas cartel," said a burly, hooded man who said he was a Mata Zetas spokesman, in the video. The man said that unlike the Zetas, his group didn't "extort or kidnap" citizens and were "anonymous warriors, without faces, but proudly Mexican" who would work "clandestinely" but "always to benefit Mexico's people."

   The mysterious group appears to be part of the New Generation drug cartel, which operates in the northwestern state of Jalisco, according to an earlier video that showed some three dozen hooded men brandishing automatic rifles as a spokesman vowed to wipe out the Zetas in Veracruz. In that video, the spokesman lauded the work of the Mexican armed forces against the Zetas, and urged citizens to give information on their location to the military.

For those wondering, the New Generation are linked to the Sinaloa Cartel.

[The Johnny]

BC is my home-state, and this saddens me a little. What i love(d?) about it was how much i learned on moral/cultural relativism from the intermingling of societies on my early years, but with the good things, also comes the bad influences...

At the risk of over generalization, the populous at large is still pretty heavily catholic, so that doesn't really surprise me very much.

The spanish really did a number on em with that.

Non-practicing catholics. Pretty much all would consider themselves catholics, they too follow the rituals (1st communion, confirmation, marriage), but not all attend services frequently (i dont have an exact figure). What do i mean by this? The ideology isnt strictly catholic, its more of a right-wing stance based on a sense of universal-morals represented by tradition.

Aren't the schools over there pretty much parochial still?

I dont think so, its secular-nationalistic by a central agency, the SEP. Now regarding privates: theres both secular and religious.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Not fail: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/29/us-mexico-marriage-idUSTRE78S6TX20110929

[The Johnny]

Well, the presidential elections are coming, I for one, dont intend to vote, not because all of them have the same exact agenda (like in the USA), but because all their agendas are extremist, dangerous and damaging.

Case #1 (PRI - Institutional Revolutionary Party) Peña Nieto: son of a politician, has led the playboy lifestyle, has been involved in covering up a murder, does not know the minimum wage, hired a ghost writer to make a book, misquoted and misnamed several books that "influenced him" to great outrage of everyone, is married to a soap opera actress, his daughter tweeted something about "stop critizicing my father you proles" (mob or "low class scum"); also, PRI held power from 1929 to 2000 through massive electoral fraud.

Case #2 (PAN - National Action Party) Josefina Vazquez Mota: dont know much about her, but i know some of her party. Basicly the PAN has ties to most prominent ultra conservative groups that fight against woman and reproductive rights, the current jackass that has the presidency is PAN and hes the retard that started the War on Drugs (40,000 dead on records, i keep losing track, im sure its way more)

Case #3 (PRD - Party of the Democratic Revolution) Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador: a fucking messianic proto-fascist that makes allusions to leading the country properly "better than Lula (Brazil)" and has sympathy for all south american socialist dictatorships.

So lets see, should we vote for the old autocrats that stole like 15% of the GDP back in the 1990s? Should we vote for the ultra-conservatives and keep up the good fight in the War on Drugs? Or do we want a socialist dictatorship?

I dont want any of them, fuck off.

[Cain]

Stratfor have suggested that PAN may have a major cartel leader under wraps, and are preparing to do a show and tell before election day to try and swing the election.

[Cain]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-mexicos-murder-city-the-war-appears-over/2012/08/19/aacab85e-e0a0-11e1-8d48-2b1243f34c85_story.html

Good news!  Murders in Cuidad Juarez, the "murder capital of the world", are finally declining.

Bad news: this is probably because the Sinaloa Cartel has taken control of the city.

When this city was among the most murderous in the world, the morgue ran out of room, the corpses stacked to the ceiling in the wheezing walk-in freezers.

Medical examiners, in plastic boots, performed a dozen autopsies a day as families of victims waited outside in numbers sufficient to require a line.

For all this, Mexico has not made much sense of one of the most sensational killing sprees in recent history, which has left 10,500 dead in the streets of Juarez as two powerful drug and crime mafias went to war. In 2010, the peak, there were at least 3,115 aggravated homicides, with many months posting more than 300 deaths, according to the newspaper El Diario.

But the fever seems to have broken.

In July, there were just 48 homicides — 33 by gun, seven by beatings, six by strangulation and two by knife. Of these, 40 are considered by authorities to be related to the drug trade or criminal rivalries.

Authorities attribute the decrease in homicides to their own efforts — patrols by the army, arrests by police, new schools to keep young men out of gangs and in the classroom.

Yet ordinary Mexicans suspect there is another, more credible reason for the decrease in extreme violence: The most-wanted drug lord in the world, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, and his Sinaloa cartel have won control of the local drug trade and smuggling routes north.

Whatever happened with that suspected serial killer in Juarez in the late 90s?  The one preying on women.  I know the police did a complete botch-job on the case, but did more ever occur, or have those particular killings stopped?

[The Johnny]

Im not sure about which serial killer you mean, ill have to look into it.

Regarding the news:

1) Mexico is non-transparent and is well known to give false numbers on everything. Ill give one recent example: Teachers supposedly get paid between $20,000-40,000 USD each year, the reality (verified by painstakingly searching thru it) shows that they get paid in average $6,500 USD... apply that principle of false data to EVERYTHING.

2) The official overall tally of deaths according to Mexican media and government is running at about 55,000 but some guy from the USA (i cant remember, he was from the government) gave figures of about 150,000.

Therefore, we have a margin of error of AT LEAST 300%... applying this trend to the new figures for homicides in Juarez, which say about 40 per moth, we have: 120.

Also, the "40" spoken of are just the figure of one month, we would have to see how other months were doing.

[The Johnny]

I cant find the exact figures broken down by month. (SHOCKING)

But i did find 653 as the number of deaths in Juarez for the first semester of 2012, compared to 1,322 of 2011; thats still about 115 a month versus 2011's 220 a month. (Remember that 300% margin of error?)

http://latinocalifornia.com/home/2012/08/resurge-la-violencia-en-ciudad-juarez/

Now, nationwide, we have numbers that ammount to 7,000 in the first semester of 2012, which is 10% higher than last year

http://noticias.univision.com/narcotrafico/noticias/article/2012-08-16/ong-piden-a-mexico-cifras-vioolencia-del-narco#axzz24B8ASObh

What's more, the government has stopped publishing figures due to "methodology problems" and the numbers actually come from newspapers, and well, we know that media cant be influenced by government, right? right? (recently the star reporter of MVS, Carmen Aristegui, was fired at the request of President Felipe Calderon, in exchange for some media legislation)

[The Johnny]

In conclusion, nobody knows for sure, but if the history of falsifying information is anything to go by, the general situation is the same, or worse.

[Cain]

Still, it is worth noting that the Sinaloa Cartel are now in control of the city, regardless of the situation.  Especially since the Sinaloa seem to have a comfortable relationship with the Mexican government*, and a less adversarial relationship with the American government than Guzman's position of the FBI "Most wanted" list would suggest. 

*See also: http://www.madcowprod.com/2012/08/12/mexicos-ruling-party-caught-rain-spain/ and http://www.madcowprod.com/2012/08/09/investigation-arrest-4-mexican-generals-began-downed-cia-drug-plane/

In regards to the murders, there were a specific set of serial murders in Juarez between 1993 and the early 2000s.  The victims were women, of course, almost uniformly maquiladora workers.  Many, curiously, had also done some kind of modelling before they were killed, a most disturbing scenario if true.

There are often discrepancies between the date of abduction and the dates of death for the women.  Some of the bodies show evidence of ritualistic murder.  Frequently, all that is found are clothes and bones.  The bones are often mismatched, coming from more than one victim.  Sometimes the person has not been missing long enough for the bones to be showing naturally.  The bones sometimes show up in areas that had only recently been searched by the police.

The entire police investigation was a shambles.  People were often tortured into confessing, yet the murders continued.  The police infrequently claimed that gang members were being paid to continue the killings by the "killer" they had caught, but no evidence of this was ever produced.  Witnesses frequently vanish after talking to the police, and evidence has been disposed of by the police.  One woman, when interviewed by documentary makers for PBS, claims that police showed her photos of a woman being gang-raped, then doused in gasoline and burned alive.

Jorge Campos Murillo, a federal deputy attorney has claimed the murders are the work of individuals in well-connected Mexican families of some wealth and influence.  The Observer agrees, noting that this group includes "landowners, major drug dealers, construction barons, energy suppliers—and officials in both government and the police."

In short, these are not typical narco-war killings.  And, as far as I am aware, they were never solved.

[The Johnny]

Well i cant find information on it, and i myself didnt hear about those news when they happened, so i dont know where to look.

[The Johnny]

But you know, we are well known for transparency, so IM SURE its just conspiracy theories at play.

Also, we are well known for the tactical and strategically superiority and sticking to human rights, and not shooting anything that vaguely resembles a drug czar. Nope.

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/866452.html

In their first declarations, the elements of the Federal Police that were detained last friday, after an attack on an SUV with diplomatic car plates in which 2 members of the U.S. embassy in Mexico alongside a captain of the Marine, said they confused the vehicle with one belonging to a network of kidnappers that operates in Morelos

The US embassy said <<the vehicle tried to escape, was chased down and suffered considerable damages. The passengers called for the assistance of the Mexican Army, which responded and arrived some minutes later arrived to the scene.>> Extraofficially it was said that the US diplomats injured were Jess Hoods Garner and Stan Dove Boss, which were doing activities related to the fight of organized crime.

Oh the lulz, you little embassy people coming to talk about how to fight organized crime, when the biggest crime organization is the government.

Im sure this incident doesnt reflect at all how the drug war numbers tally so high, i mean, only confirmed targets are engaged.

If this wasnt high ranking people traveling in that SUV theyd probably just say they were "kidnappers, LOL" and throw them into a narcofosa.

[Cain]

I see its being reported El Chapo was arrested today, in a joint US-Mexican operation.

Heh.  Lets see exactly how long he stays in prison for this time.  I give it 7 months, tops.  Though perhaps I should say "prison", since by all accounts he lived like an Emperor last time he was in.

[The Johnny]

I see its being reported El Chapo was arrested today, in a joint US-Mexican operation.

Heh.  Lets see exactly how long he stays in prison for this time.  I give it 7 months, tops.  Though perhaps I should say "prison", since by all accounts he lived like an Emperor last time he was in.

You know what is tear-your-eyeballs-out-with-a-rusty-spork hilarious??? It suspiciously doesnt look like El Chapo, they seem to have captured a lookalike and done a lot of fanfare to divert attention. Pics upcoming.