Fall-out from the Fernando Marti case: 'Let them rot!' **

So read the banner headline in Friday's La Prensa, the city's leading yellow-note tabloid, showing a photograph of Felipe Calderon as he intensifies the law-and-order rhetoric against kidnapping gangs who really are blanketing this country in fear, up and down the class scale.

Since the grisly discovery of the body of 14-year-old Fernando Marti last week, troubled talk of "insecurity" and "delinquency" is crescendoing everywhere, from the radio dial to the street corner. Calderon is calling for life in prison for convicted kidnappers. The president has, in a way, drawn political benefit from the chatter of scandalized voices, some of whom are calling for the death penalty for such criminals. Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico City's ambitious mayor, must be a little bewildered that he is playing catch-up this week. Members of his police force are implicated in the Marti case. But so are members of the federal police. For now, the real question is, which man -- the PAN president or the PRD heir apparent -- will come out on the top in the war of security rhetoric, and posturing?

* RELATED: If you can stomach it, check out this exhaustive list of insanely bloody narco- and organized crime-related major incidents in Tijuana over the past 20-some years, from the San Diego Reader.

* PREVIOUSLY: "The Fernando Marti case: Presidents on alert," "The creeping march of narco violence in Mexico," and "Battle in Tijuana: A city 'burns' with narco violence."

* Photo above, from the July 26 edition of La Jornada, of a dead police officer in Culiacán, Sinaola, dressed up as a charro before being dumped by a road by his killers.

Comments

[frank]

One of many reasons we need to secure our boders. How many drug dealers, fugitives, corrupt cops and other criminals are sneaking across the Mexican border into the U.S.?? Sheriff Baca estimates that 25% of his inmates are here illegally.

[Mark Sternberg]

NO.
We should help end all of this.
Not just put up some wall and pretend its not there.
Stop the Kidnapps.

[Sean DeCarlo]

Stop these kidnappers.
I agree.