Northern Mexico’s State of Anarchy: Residents Abandon a Border Town as Vicious Drug Cartels Go to War
This article provides a good overview of what’s been going on in Tamaulipas, and a glimpse at the rest of Mexico. The extra features are great; an interactive graphic, a video, and a slide show (the last slide almost made me cry.)
Caravans of armored SUVs crammed with gunmen firing automatic rifles prowled the streets. Parents pulled terrified children from schools. The town of 6,000 went dark every time the combatants shot out the transformers. In May, a man was hung alive from a tree in the central plaza and dismembered while town folk heard the screaming from behind shuttered doors.
Then last week, after a new offensive by the Zetas, one of the two groups that have turned the town into a no-man’s land, hundreds of residents packed what they could into their cars and fled, leaving eerily empty streets with burned out shells of cars and bullet-pocked walls.
“It’s like we’re in the Wild West,” says Santos Moreno Pérez, a Pentecostal minister who is among the refugees here in neighboring Miguel Alemán. “We have no mayor, no police, no transit system. We have been left to fend for ourselves.”
[…]
Since the 1980s, Tamaulipas had been home to the Gulf Cartel, which began as an outfit that smuggled electric appliances into Mexico’s closed economy and turned into one of the country’s largest drug-trafficking groups as trade opened to the U.S. The Gulf Cartel’s leader, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the younger brother of Ezequiel, planted the seeds for the present bloodletting when he persuaded 31 highly trained Mexican army special forces soldiers, called the Zetas, to defect and work as enforcers for the cartel in the early 1990s, analysts and government officials say.
[…]
While schools remained in session, parents often refused to send their children, deeming it unsafe. “Every child I taught was thinking: ‘I’m next to be killed,’” says a town teacher, who recalled that a theater class he taught suddenly sank from 20 students to just four.
Medical services were scant. “The pharmacies were closing down or weren’t open,” recalls an 87-year-old man who fled the town last week. Manuel Alejandro Peña, a general practitioner who heads a branch of the state’s health office in the village, recalled that he was unable to get penicillin for two months this summer when drivers couldn’t safely make the journey from the city of Nuevo Laredo, fearing they’d be attacked on the highway.
“We watched our medicine reserves begin to vanish,” Dr. Peña recalled.
[…]
Read the whole thing. It’s well-written.