CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) – The murders of 25 people by suspected drug hitmen on the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday was the bloodiest day in almost three years in an area gripped by an escalating drug war, officials said on Friday.

Gunmen burst into several houses in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and shot people accused of working for rival drug gangs, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general's office said on Friday morning.

Four bystanders were also killed on Thursday as a convoy of hitmen shot its way out of traffic in Ciudad Juarez, local newspaper El Diario said. Police declined to confirm that report, but said 25 people had died in drug violence, in the worst single day of killings in Ciudad Juarez since January 2008, when recent drug murders began.

Mexican police do not typically release information on death tolls from violence until the day after an incident.

The rampant bloodshed in Ciudad Juarez, where hitmen detonated a car bomb in July, and other parts of Mexico is helping fuel fears in the United States that the nation may be losing control of drug violence.

Earlier this week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised concerns about drug cartels in the region and said Mexico was starting to resemble Colombia 20 years ago, when narco-traffickers controlled certain parts of that nation.

President Barack Obama rejected those comments, as did Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has defended his efforts to curb drug violence, which has killed more than 28,000 people since the conservative leader took office in late 2006.

Thousands of troops and elite federal police have been unable to quell a brutal offensive in Ciudad Juarez by Mexico's most wanted narcotics trafficker, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, for control of the border city.

Since January 2008 more than 6,400 people have died in drug violence in Ciudad Juarez, which produces goods exported to the United States, as rivals fight over smuggling routes and a pool of local addicts.

Guzman wants to wrest control of the city from Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, long-time head of the Juarez drug cartel, who drug experts say handles about a fifth of a drug business believed to earn up to $40 billion a year for the cartels.

Mounting insecurity in Mexico could eventually pose a threat to efforts to pull Latin America's second largest economy out of its worst recession since 1932. Export-driven cities like Ciudad Juarez, which lost 75,000 manufacturing jobs last year, have suffered particularly during the downturn.

(Writing by Robin Emmott; Editing by Missy Ryan and Paul Simao)

Damn.  They are stacking them up like cordwood down there...again.

How many drug gangs are there?  Seems if they just keep going about it the way they are there will a few less.

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Letting them go also gives the shaft to the many uninvolved people that get targeted by extortion (and murder) to fund the battle.  



 

Juarez is roughly comparable in population to Phoenix, San Antonio, Philadelphia and San Diego- depending on whose numbers you use.

Philadelphia, widely thought of as having a real crime problem....had a little over 300 murders last year. Juarez has had 6500- and counting since 2008.......They literally DO stack the bodies up in the morgue like cordwood....I have pictures but you don't want to see them......

oh well what can you do?

Not to mention these folks:

WTF.

How does Obama obama not see that this is a problem, and not just a problem in South America but on the doorstep.

Seriously.... I don't know much about Obama but this is a serious case of having your head up your arse.

Been down there, seen it, freaking hate that part of what is now Mexico.  It's an utter craphole, and for those trying to make an honest living, well, God have mercy on them...

This WILL be going on here soon enough (And it WILL be used by anti's

obama is either the least intelligent president weve ever had or is the most malicious.  pick one





 

Obama, Clinton Split on Mexico Drug War Parallel With Colombia Insurgency
Sep 10, 2010 1:12 AM CT
 
Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton sees similarities between the drug violence now
afflicting Mexico and Colombia's narco-war of the 1980s.
President Obama, not so much.
    "You can't compare what is happening in Mexico with what
happened in Colombia," Obama told a Spanish-language newspaper in
remarks published on its Web site on Thursday.
    Obama's remarks in La Opinion appeared at odds with
Clinton's comments a day earlier that the situation in Mexico is
"looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago," with
drug traffickers controlling "parts of the country."
    "In Colombia, it got to the point where. . . more than a
third of the country - nearly 40 percent of the country at one
time or another - was controlled by the insurgents, by FARC,"
Clinton said, referring to the Colombian revolutionary group.
    The two sets of comments seemed to reflect a rare
disagreement between Obama and Clinton, former political rivals
who have gone to great lengths to emphasize their unity and
growing friendship over the past year and a half.
    But the administration denied that there was any daylight
between the president and his secretary of state.
    Asked whether Obama's interview contradicted Clinton's,
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley replied, "Not at all."
    "These are two different countries and different
circumstances. The Secretary completely agrees," Crowley said in
an e-mail. "What she was saying is that, first, criminal
organizations are challenging authority in Mexico as we saw in
Colombia. The growing brutality is beginning to resemble what
Colombia experienced. Colombia turned its situation around
through decisive action by a democratic government, supported by
the United States and the international community. We are seeing
the same sustained action by the Mexican government. As she said
also, this is a shared responsibility and we and others need to
support Mexico in this effort."
    Obama, in the interview, said the reason the two countries
cannot be compared is the gap between their economies.
   "Mexico is a large and progressive democracy with a growing
economy," Obama said.
    But in fact, two decades ago in Colombia, the elected
president, Cesar Gaviria, pushed through a series of economic
reforms known as "the opening," which, despite drug-related
violence, led to years of economic growth. With U.S. assistance,
Gaviria's government tracked down and killed Pablo Escobar, the
head of the Medellin cartel, in 1993.
    Clinton's comments made the front pages of Mexico's national
daily newspapers and were fodder for cable news and talk radio on
Wednesday and Thursday morning.
    Obama's remarks went up on news Web sites and television
news Thursday afternoon.
    The stories reported that Obama "rejected" or "corrected"
Clinton's statements. "Obama: You cannot compare Mexico to
Colombia" was the headline on the El Universal news Web site.
    Clinton's remarks were controversial in Mexico. President
Felipe Calderon administration's central mission is to not become
like Colombia was 20 years ago, when car bombs exploded daily in
the national capital and driving into the countryside was risky.
    Responding to Clinton on Wednesday, Calderon's national
security adviser Alejandro Poire said, "We do not share these
findings, as there is a big difference between what Colombia
faced and what Mexico is facing today."
    Poire also took a dig at the United States, saying that the
only thing the two conflicts have in common is that the drug
cartels in both countries are "nourished by the enormous,
gigantic demand for drugs in the United States."
    Some Mexican leaders, however, agreed with Clinton's
assessment. Many anti-narcotics experts and law enforcement
agents, along with Mexican journalists, frequently debate the
comparisons between Mexico's drug war and the one waged in
Colombia.
    "We are on our way to Colombianization," said Mexican
senator Alejandro Gonzalez, who belongs to Calderon's
center-right party.


    [email protected] [email protected]
    Correspondent William Booth in Mexico City contributed to
this report.

True on both accounts. They are already screaming about the number of American guns that are showing up in Mexico.

Oh please...this shit was going on when Bush was prez.

The only thing he did was rub Vincentes ****

Bush had 7 fkn years to restrict the border, he didn't do SHIT!  Was he an idiot also, or was doing nothing part of a plan

Points taken.

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There have been twice the murders in Zeros first 20 months than in all 8 years of W  .

i am having a tough time calling this a drug war.





28,000 dead in the past 3 years just so they can sell pot to some kid in suburban america?

 

It's mostly cocaine and meth.

We are going to own that war and that country some day.

It's worth TENS of BILLIONS of dollars......It's a Drug War. Hell, we had a minor one between street gangs in this country in the early 90's over crack distribution turf....this is a Hell of alot bigger pie at stake.

so?

Que?

28,000 in Mexico

 

If we said, "Mexico is officially a war zone" there would be expensive second and third order effects, and the .gov would be forced by its own hand to intervene. The US isn't going to acknowledge a problem in Mexico until they can see the smoke in Canada.

NANANANANANANANA

I CAAANNNN'T HEEEEEAAARRR YOOOOOUUUUUUU

NANANANANANANANANANA

It was still happening, and it was during Bush's presidency that they were able to ramp up profits from ZERO restriction at the border.

And IMO gun control is just a drop in the bucket of liberty the open border statists will try and take. And leaving our southern border wide open is part of their plan. Once people are being killed en mass in the US like mexico, the American people will agree to anything to stop it, up to I am afraid a dictatorship

And that is what the statists are counting.

The "territories in dispute" are in the correct color . . .

What web site is this? Get both.

They were never finding Mine Shafts with 138 bodies in them and up to 24 Beheaded  bodies at a time (multiple times)  and having half day  shootouts with small armies of Zetas  during Bush ???

Sounds like a self-cleaning oven to me. I'm, of course, talking about doper on doper violence, not deaths of innocent bystanders.

OK...we get it....it's Bush's fault

Legalize it all. The addicts continue to poison themselves,(at less expense, with a trickle down of less domestic crime), the cartels immediatly have no source of income, farms and pharmacuticals have a new revenue stream, .gov has new tax revenue stream, street level US dealers are out of a job. Transfer the DEA, its trained agents, and all of its assests to Border Patrol to assist in controlling illegal immigration.

Downside: reduced workload/need for law enforcement, (80%+/-? of crime is drug related?), polticians lose an old standby soapbox, thousands lose their job "fighting thr war on drugs". Anti gun nuts lose major source of leverage, both domesticaly and internationally

Still drug test workers & drivers

Nothing changes at my house

Yup, and also responsible for the 15 million mexicans who got in. You know, the ones who have had 10 million babies in the last 10 years. The ones Obama is trying get amnesty for.

Laser guided bombs could deal with that in one day, end of story. We have a war on drugs because rich & powerful people want a war on drugs.

A good point.  And tackling drug issues on this scale is about more than military intervention.... it's about commiting resources to disrupting the activity, making it harder to distribute, manufacture and profit from the activity and keeping the offenders on the back foot.

28,000 dead over the border from Texas, with an open border and a known trafficking route into the US across it....??    You've got to be pretty short sighted not to see the potenital for a serious impact on US Citizens.

I'm wondering if it would be economically more efficient to tackle it now, rather than leave it until it spills over the border (presuming it might do that).

Please bear in mind that this is my perspective from over the pond, so I'm not as close to this as you guys and don't have the knowledge of the history of this.  I take the point this may have been happening when Dubya was in office..... but the fact is it's happening now and seems to be escalating.

Is this impacting on the people who live in Border areas?

As I pithily said in a previous thread, the Mexican American border is becoming the Durand line of the Western Hemisphere.  Think about some of the implications of that.

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Let them kill each other and God can sort it out                                                                                                                                                                    

That's actually fairly depressing to contemplate.

There is a full scale war just feet across our border and as a consequence a SERIOUS national security issue.



The time has come for the United States of America to intercede and launch a pre-emptive military invasion of Mexico to re-establish stability. Obviously their socialism has lead to uncontrollable corruption that cannot be reformed in its current state without foreign intervention. Mexican drug cartels are now joining with radical communist insurgents throughout Mexico and Central America. If we don't deal with Mexico now we'll have to deal with it when things become even worse. May as well handle Mexico now before it forces our hand later due to serious loss of US life.



The only long term solution for stability in North America is to essentially nation build Mexico. Without a corporate culture and with oppressive socialism the Mexico we see today was inevitable and cannot be reformed. Bringing Mexico under control would benefit the United State of America more so than anything we can accomplish in Afghanistan.



The economic, defense, and social benefits of securing Mexico and establishing stability justify military action. In short, since the Mexican government either cannot or refuse to put their house in order than we should do it for them.

Exactly why we need to take action now. Once things become like the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan it's too late.  We cannot tolerate a Durand Line.

Our adversaries can exploit operational environment conditions on both sides of the border, like Mexican permissiveness and American rule of law and lax border enforcement.  Over time, and I personally believe, inevitably at this point, this environment will oil-stain out. They know our bureaucratic boundaries and seems, and can effectively play off both sides against the middle.

I don't want to sound like I'm patting myself on the back, here, but I've been monitoring this situation since 1993, when I spent two summers doing missionary work in the Juarez city dump.  You simply cannot have situation we've allowed to develop not create some conflict, from its own inherent contradictions, like wealth vs. poverty, corruption vs. rule of law, Anglo vs. Mexican, Southern Mexican vs. Northern Mexican, Mexican vs. Central American, et. al.

I don't know if the Mexican .gov is at loss of control point yet, but they can see it from here.  Personnally, I think that even drug legalization in the US won't stop the centrifugal elements in play...few Mexicans have faith in their system (though they are intensely patriotic, a trait they share with Americans.)  Thus, they will not probably allow American intervention until the situation is so perilous and far-gone where intervention won't help.

Even such a intervention would be an undertaking fraught with risk for the US, as the simple scope of the problem, the sensitivities of the American Mexican population, and economic impact of the border are just simply immense.

I did a year of Missionary in the DF in 2009 and I came away convinced that the only thing that would save Mexico would be about two years of vigilante violence that would dwarf the action that took down Escobar.

The problem is that the average Mexican is so innured to corruption, violence, poverty and disorder that they'll probably never reach the point where their situation is intolerable to them.

A culture where no one thinks anything of leaving the manhole cover off of a storm drain in the middle of a sidewalk is a culture that has accepted a fairly distorted set of social values in regards to effort v. risk.  

Great idea.  

De-criminalize and lightly tax the drug trade and the cartels lose power overnight.

The drug cartels will exist as long as there is demand for the products.  A demand that will never be extinguished.

Seriously, what kinds of math and comprehension are they teaching on that island???
28.000 is the actual number of corpses they have recovered.
The figure is much higher, closer to 45,000 or 50,000 now, many are never found.

hi, back again...still having trouble calling it a drug war, but i came across a comment from this article:








what will disprove this comment about an "armed revolution in its infant stages" ?

Call it whatever you want but the end result for America is the same.....bad fucking news. Whether it is a "drug war" or an all out revolution (something they have needed for a long time in truth) there will be massive disruption and displacement of people and they will be looking to come to the closest, most stable place they can- Here.

Very fucking interesting....

Of course, which is why the US.gov is attempting to play down the danger.