Mexico massacre question: How did it happen twice?
Read the whole thing, although you still won’t have an answer to the question.
With only odd jobs to support a young wife and 2-year-old son in their concrete hut on a dirt road, Uriel Carvajal decided to seek work in the U.S., heading from central Mexico by bus to the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas.
When he didn’t call home, his two brothers went looking for him, also by bus. Now none of the brothers - Uriel, 21, Rene, 28, and Cirilo, 23 - has been heard from.
Nearly a month after Uriel left home, the Carvajal family only knows that his brother Rene’s identification card turned up in one of 26 pits found in Tamaulipas, where 145 bodies have been dug up so far. Authorities told the family to take Uriel’s toddler, Ariel, to state offices to give a DNA sample.
The same trauma visited three times on one family reflects larger questions that so far state and federal authorities have failed to answer: How could bodies pile up again in a place just 90 miles from the U.S. border where 72 migrants were slaughtered eight months ago, then the worst mass murder of innocents in Mexico’s fight against organized crime?
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But public and off-the-record statements by parties involved indicate that Tamaulipas presents a complex situation that even federal forces can’t handle. Generations of mistrust complicate the federal effort, as well as links between local officials and organized crime dating back to the 1920s Prohibition era in the U.S., when the border state became a popular smuggling route for liquor.
San Fernando is the largest township area-wise in Tamaulipas, with about 58,000 people in a region roughly the size of Delaware covered with countless flat, dirt farming roads that enable people and goods to traverse undetected.
As a result, the 72 police officers there, 36 per shift, patrol less than 5 percent of the territory, according to Tamaulipas state interior secretary Morelos Canseco.
With 16 officers detained because of the recent killings, the already minimal force is down by 20 percent.
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