What I hear all the time, but rarely see in print about Mexico
I’m not one of those guys who blames The New York Times for everything - for anything, actually. But as the most influential newspaper in the world, I think its editors have a responsibility to see that they are not publishing bullshit, day after day - and that is what the Times is doing in its stories about Mexico.
Thirty thousand people have been murdered there in the past 4 years, thousands of them in and around a single city, Ciudad Juarez.
The Times reports, day after day, that the murders are the result of a war that the Mexican Army and the Federal Judicial Police are waging against cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and the country’s drug cartels.
That’s incorrect.
That is a fantasy.
The Mexican Army and the Federal Judicial Police are fighting for their piece of the drug traffic.
Sometimes they fight the State Judicial Police. Sometimes they fight municipal police. Sometimes they fight the drug cartels. Often they murder innocent witnesses to their other murders.
None of those powerful institutions - the Army, the Federal Judicial Police, the State Judicial Police, or whatever Mexico’s latest crime-fightin’ guys are called - are fighting against drugs. They are fighting for their piece of it.
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I am not blaming all the Mexican police and army veterans for this, any more than I blame the New York Times reporters for their inaccurate articles. There is a tremendous amount of money involved, and powerful people who are willing to kill anyone to protect it.
But the New York Times’ top editors are safe in New York. They do not have to buckle to the pressure from powerful people in this country, and the other one, to write fairy tales about the continuing mass murders in Mexico.
The Times’ editors are either cowed or ignorant, or both.
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Read it all.