Drugs, Murder and Mexico

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