Drugs, Murder and Mexico

another terrible story which of course leads to an idea from DJT that would probably end poorly.

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-mexico-cartels-mormons-killed-ambush-145807595.html

President Trump on Tuesday offered to help Mexico “wage WAR on the drug cartels” after a shootout left at least nine Americans dead.

Initial reports indicated the victims were women and children traveling in at least three cars who may have been targeted by mistake or caught in a crossfire between rival gangs. All the victims were believed to be Mormons with dual American-Mexican citizenship.

A relative of one of the victims said his cousin was on her way to the airport when she was shot and killed in her car along with her four children near La Mora, a decades-old religious settlement about 70 miles south of the Arizona border. Her car had been set on fire with the bodies of the victims inside, according to Agence France-Presse. Two other vehicles, containing the bodies of two more women and two children, were found several hours later.

According to the Arizona Republic, at least a dozen people remain missing.

This story is completely bananas. The victims were part of the LeBaron family cult, whose late patriarch was responsible for 25-40 murders from the 1970s on and there is a rumoured link to NXIVM.

This story is like The Wire on acid to me:

The death truck: how a solution to Mexico's morgue crisis created a new horror.

The tale of how a truck trailer containing almost 300 bodies got stranded on the outskirts of Guadalajara.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/16/us/goshen-california-massacre-six-dead/index.html

not Mexico but seems like it's related to the cartel industrial complex, since drug violence is not exclusive to that country.

but obv this kind of thing is happening every other day in this country for reasons not related to "strictly business" so who knows

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/magazine/mexican-journalists-assassinations.html

good piece here. the life of a journalist covering the crimes of the drug industry in Mexico seems like nightmare fuel, not to mention the fear many there probably feel on a daily basis being surrounded by those who might kill them just for not going along w/the cartels. this story mentioned in the piece still really shakes me:

And in 2014, police officers in the rural city Iguala kidnapped 43 students on buses headed for a march in Mexico City and handed them over to a drug cartel that mistakenly assumed they were part of an attack from a rival. This year, a trove of text messages showed that nearly every branch of government in the region — including soldiers, the police and a local mayor — were communicating with the cartel, which killed the students and incinerated some of them in a crematory.

Don Winslow chillingly dramatized that anecdote in The Border.

this post upthread from Euler resonates:

& the erosion of limits on violence is key ; because you see men who are not psychopaths in any usual sense become professional killers, for whom it seems that the first kill is the crucial one, because to do so breaks a taboo that then permits the killer great power thereafter, power that is otherwise thought beyond reach. and it makes you like a god. I've been reading books on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism prior to this & there too you see torrents of violence following the first kills by "ordinary men".

This is an interesting long read on chemical supply for synthetic drugs in Mexico.

https://insightcrime.org/investigations/brokers-lynchpins-precursor-chemical-flow-mexico

Thought this revive was gonna be about Kerry Cartel