The men lying under arrest in the photograph above are not dead, but, who knows, by now they could be. It's been three days since this post from Ciudad Juarez by journalist Diego Osorno has been published. In Juarez today, three days is plenty of time to possibly get killed.
Juarez is a government-sustained human rights disaster, a 21st Century-style slow-burn multi-actor city-cide. Don't get the daily carnage tally by Molly Molloy at Frontera List? It tests the stomach. Juarez is drowning in death. But Juarez is just the tip of it all.
Read this piece in Spanish by Froylan Enciso in a recent issue of Gatopardo. Up in a town in the Sierra Madre, up from Mazatlán, a drug-trade-related ambush during Christmas 2009 leaves at least 40 people dead, maybe up to 100, Enciso writes during a visit home.
The incident never makes it into the press. It didn't happen. I checked the federal government database on homicides this morning. For Mazatlán, only 97 homicides are reported in 2009. That doesn't sound right ...
They tell us lately "at least" 35,000 have been killed in Mexico's drug-trade violence since the governments ignited it on themselves in 2006. That can't be accurate. Just ask someone who knows better, ask Metinides. As Enciso illustrates, so many dead are not reported, so many kidnapped are never returned. We'll never know.
The "drug war" is a fiction. The violence it is inflicting on the people of Mexico is very real. It is crushing the country. I don't know about you, but I've been tired of it. Yet there's still no end in sight.
Violence stops by decriminalizing and demilitarizing the binational industry that pumps drugs into the United States. But don't expect Obama or Calderon to come to that conclusion in the blah-blah at the White House this week.
Man, then who'd get to keep all the money?
* Photo via Gatopardo.com