Mexico’s War More Deadly Than Iraq

BY MICHAEL WEBSTER: INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER Nov 9, 2008 at 5:00 PM PDT

 
According to records kept by El Universal Mexico’s largest newspaper they report since 2005, the 24 hours of last Monday alone was the most violent for the year in the country, with 58 murders linked to organized crime.  This figure surpasses the record set on Sept 12, 2008 when 41 murders occurred within a 24-hour period. Both records occurred in the same year.  Among those murdered just in one day were seven police commanders and officers.  One police officer was wounded and the severed head of a private security guard was left in a gasoline station restroom.

The overwhelming majority of main news items in Mexico on any given day is the killings and violence that happen in Mexico on a daily bases. At the current rate of violent deaths in Mexico it is projected that the number will reach 5,000. That is more deaths than in the Iraq war, where we as Americans are spending 10 billion per month of tax payer’s money to support that war and have over 150, 000 troops and other Americans in country today. Mexico is our immediate neighbor to the south with a population of well over 100 million people with a war that is killing it’s citizens at an alarming rate. Many of those murders kidnappings and violence in Mexico is spilling into the United States where Americans have been killed and/or kidnapped. This is all related to the drug war going on in Mexico between the powerful Mexican drug cartels and the Mexican Government.  

What follows is a compilation of the comparison of deaths both in Iraq and Mexico. To date there have been more then 4,000 plus violent deaths in Mexico both Mexican and U.S. citizens. In comparison to date in Iraq there has been killed appax. 1,312.

During the last 24 hours 38 persons have died in different events caused by members of organized crime; the number has reached 4,052 in 2008 in this country (Mexico), surpassing by more than three times the number of dead in Iraq this year.

 

Additionally an alarming number of Americans are vanishing in Mexico where there has been a dramatic increase in the numbers of U.S. citizens who have recently been reported missing or kidnapped along the border with Mexico, reports the Washington Post. Many who have vanished from U.S. cities are still missing and it is feared they will turn up in the mass graves that have been discovered lately in Mexico.

U.S. State Dept recently issued Mexico alert said “Recent Mexican army and police force conflicts with heavily-armed narcotics cartels have escalated to levels equivalent to military small-unit combat and have included use of machine guns and fragmentation grenades.   Confrontations have taken place in numerous towns and cities in northern Mexico, including Tijuana in the Mexican state of Baja California, and Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juarez in the state of Chihuahua.  The situation in northern Mexico remains very fluid; the location and timing of future armed engagements there cannot be predicted”. Public shootouts have occurred during daylight hours near shopping areas in many Mexican border towns. Click on or  

What follows is the deadly and apparently relentless daily routine of blood and mayhem spread throughout the country of Mexico. Remember this is just one typical day of violence in Mexico. This is from only a few Mexican newspapers. There is no attempt to report every similar instance published in other Mexican newspapers for that day.
 
The following are item headlines appearing on 10/28/08 in the papers indicated.

 

From El Debate (Culiacan, Sinaloa)
-    Unknown subject is murdered in Culiacan
-    Traffic policeman found murdered in Culiacan
-    Unknown subject is found incinerated
-    Shootout between police and hit-men results in one death
-    Guasave resident murdered in Tijuana (Guasave is a city in Sinaloa)
-    Man found incinerated at the Linita de Hitaje Cemetery. The body was in a car reported stolen.
From Diario (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, edition
-    Four executed and one abducted
-    Bullet riddled body found in Chihuahua
-    Policeman killed Saturday had been threatened in a banner
-    Armed commando kills four outside a bar
-    Shot with gun in the mouth
-    Juarez resident murdered near Sateno
-    Two executed in Chihuahua; they were police
-    Chase and shootout reported in the state’s capital
-    One more killed in Chihuahua City

There were at least 15 persons reported executed from dawn yesterday until press time for this edition; nine of them were in Tijuana, Baja Calif., four in Chihuahua and two in Sinaloa. The violence of criminal groups continues to be unstoppable in the country.”

The following is deadly attacks in Iraq so far this year 2008 totaling approx. 1,312

 From BBC News: Deaths in Iraq

23 Nov 06 – 200 dead
– Five car bombs and mortar attacks in Sadr City, Baghdad

13 Aug 06 – 57 dead
Four-storey building destroyed in blast in Zafaraniya district.

18 July 06 – 53 dead
Car bomb in southern city of Kufa near Shia shrine

1 July 06 – 66 killed
Car bomb in Sadr City, Baghdad

7 April 2006 – 85 dead
Triple suicide bombing at Shia Buratha mosque

5 Jan 06 – 110 dead
Suicide bombers hit Karbala shrine and police recruiting station in Ramadi

18 Nov 05 – 80 dead
Multiple bombings in Baghdad and two Khanaqin mosques

14 Sept 05 – 182 dead
Suicide car bomber targets Baghdad laborers in worst of a series of bombs

16 Aug 05 – 90 dead
Suicide bomber detonates fuel tanker in Musayyib

28 Feb 05 – 114 dead
Suicide car bomb hits government jobseekers in Hilla

24 June 04 – 100 dead
Co-ordinated blasts in Mosul and other cities

2 March 04 – 140 dead
Suicide bombers attack Shia festival at Karbala and Baghdad

1 Feb 04 – 105 dead
Twin attacks on Kurdish parties’ offices in Irbil

28 Aug 03 – 85 dead
Car bomb at Najaf shrine targets senior Shia cleric

In Ciudad Juarez the body of a man who had been beheaded and whose hands were handcuffed behind him was found hung from the Rotario Bridge in Juarez across the border from El Paso Texas. He had been forcibly kidnapped and carried off two days before according to police. A message from a local criminal organization was left nearby. The gruesome display even for this northern border city long accustomed to drug-related violence was shocked.
Shortly after the grisly sighting about 5 a.m., police found the victim’s head in a black bag in a nearby plaza, said state police spokesman Alejandro Pariente.
Pariente said the body was wearing black jeans, a red T-shirt and white sneakers, and was handcuffed. A banner apparently directed at rival drug-gang members was hung next to the corpse.
The victim’s father was barely able to identify his 23-year-old sons body.

 

Caution what follows is a photo showing the hanging body just before its removal.  Yet one more body was found near the Rio Grande in Juarez, this one shot in the head.

Elsewhere, masked men gunned down two police officers in a convenience store in Chihuahua City, the capital of Chihuahua state, where Juarez is located, said Eduardo Esparza, spokesman for the state attorney general’s office. After the killings assailants left a toy pig next to the bodies. A man wearing a pig mask was found hung in a residence in  Juarez. Near the body was a message threatening to do the same to others. Police believe the message was from drug gangs.
Drug violence has been escalating across Mexico and cartels have turned to increasingly gruesome methods to send a message to their rivals and police.

Also in Juarez, the same day four men were found shot to death. And four other men fell victim to gunfire attacks in various places in the city.
Elsewhere in town, the cadaver of a man was found hanging from a metal fence in front of an empty house. A mask with the face of a pig had been placed over his head and his hands had been cuffed. There was also a threatening “narco-message” left with the hanged body.

Later the same day Mexican army personnel detained four heavily armed men in Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua; the four had with them “an anti-tank rocket launcher, a high explosive rocket, two caliber 308 rifles capable of piercing armor, two cal. 223 AR-15 rifles, a caliber 556 rifle, a .22 caliber rifle, a .22 revolver, a caliber 11.25 pistol, 12 fragmentation hand grenades, a gas grenade and clips of various calibers.” They also had five “T3  level bullet proof vests, bandoleers, gas masks and ID cards of the PGR (Mex. Dep’t. of Justice) plus small amounts of drugs. Most of the front page and the headline on the printed version of a Juarez paper were devoted to the horror which Juarez residents feel because of the level and brutality of all the violence.

Tijuana violence does not cease there either it is becoming an everyday affair according to Jose Gonzalez a resident of Tijuana were there is more violence reported and where the finding of cadavers and narco messages keep police agencies on alert on both sides of the border and the civilian population in a state of panic.

In Tijuana alone there have been to date more than 700 execution type killings carried out by organized crime that have been counted this year, which makes it one of the most violent in the city’s history. Recently in TJ two more decapitated bodies were found, two police officers were murdered and so were eleven other men, all within a 14 hour period.

In a banner headlines on the printed front page of a TJ newspaper read: City policeman executed Physician kidnapped. 
 
A second “ministerial police” agent lost his life Wednesday afternoon in TJ. He was driving his car when the occupants of two other vehicles opened fire killing him dead in his car. Two severed human heads were left on top of the lids of each of two blue plastic barrels found near the Otay Mesa border crossing point on the east side of TJ near the California border. The location is just four blocks away from where six persons were killed by gunfire on Monday. The headless bodies were inside the barrels, and a narco message.
 
A “Ministerial Police” commander was killed and his police officer escort was critically wounded Monday afternoon when killers shot them repeatedly while the two were eating at a restaurant. The hit-men left and disappeared as quickly as they had arrived. 
 
Recently four men fell victim to a gunfire assault at a junkyard in the Lomas Verdes section of TJ but between 4 p.m. and late evening six other men were shot to death and two others were wounded in two other incidents elsewhere in town.

Just yesterday, ten gunmen lost their lives after a shootout with state agents in Nogales, Sonora. The police were attacked with fragmentation grenades; three police and three civilians were wounded.

The body of a gagged man was found in Cabo San Lucas; his fingers had been chopped off. Eight persons have died in Baja California Norte in the last 24 hours, the product of a spiral of violence.

Just recently two Rosarito police officers were assassinated while on patrol. Twenty kilometers away three other persons were murdered. Seven other crimes took place in Chihuahua; two men were found dead in Hermosillo, Sonora, two in Culiacan and “some others more” in Guanajuato, Guerrero, the Distrito Federal and Taxco.
A related account in “El Universal” (Mexico City) states that violence in Rosarito has cost the lives of seven police and at least a dozen other persons in less than thirty days; it adds that there have been mass resignations of police there because of fear of being murdered. Just some years back Rosarito was a laid back, peaceful ocean beach town.

Just recently Baja racer Arron Cooper another American was shot in Mexico while pre-running the Baja 1000 race. See: Baja Racing News.com for more details.

Sources:

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FORMER BORDER PATROL OFFICERS (NAFBPO)  
El Universal, El Debate and Diario newspapers. El Paso Police Dept. El Paso Sheriff’s Dept. Mexico City Police Dept., Juarez Police Dept.

Click on or Google:War on terror and drugs by Michael Webster