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By Karen Connelly
$11.90
By Nomi Prins
$17.13
$24
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: All about Francis: Do we even need a pope? And did he collaborate with a brutal military dictatorship? Also: Why corporations don’t pay taxes, and more.
Posted on Mar 15, 2013
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: All about Francis: Do we even need a pope? And did he collaborate with a brutal military dictatorship? Also: Why corporations don’t pay taxes, and more.
Posted on Mar 15, 2013
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D.A.R.E.
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Without much notice, the drug war has expanded government search and seizure powers, turned children into their parents’ monitors and urged many Americans toward blind obedience to authority, Kevin Carson writes in CounterPunch.
Posted on Mar 13, 2013
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AP/Dario Lopez-Mills
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One legacy of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s drug war is the splitting up of the country’s drug cartels into 60 to 80 new trafficking gangs, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam says.
Posted on Dec 19, 2012
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AP/Andres Leighton
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“Mexicans want peace,” said new Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto as he announced the establishment of a national police force for combating crime, violence and drug gangs.
Posted on Dec 18, 2012
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Still from "The House I Live In" courtesy Derek Hallquist
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By Peter Z. Scheer — A new documentary about prison and the drug war makes the science fiction dystopias of “Looper” and “Dredd 3D” feel disturbingly plausible.
Posted on Oct 1, 2012
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By David Sirota — Colorado is the frontline in the war on marijuana. Will voters trust that their beer-mogul-turned-governor is actually worried about health and children?
Posted on Sep 21, 2012
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dsearls (CC BY 2.0)
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In one of the largest prison breaks in Mexico in recent years, 132 inmates escaped from a facility in the northern state of Coahuila on Monday, setting off a massive manhunt by police and soldiers near the U.S. border.
Posted on Sep 18, 2012
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Flickr/Caveman 92223
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The battle between the city of Los Angeles and medical marijuana advocates is intensifying again after a group representing hundreds of pot shop owners and patients sued the city in an effort to overturn a ban on dispensaries.
Posted on Aug 20, 2012
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Photo by Jeff Turner (CC-BY)
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The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to ban all medical marijuana dispensaries in the city. A fig leaf provision designed to honor California’s 16-year-old legalization of marijuana for medical use would allow patients and caregivers to grow a small amount of their own supply.
Posted on Jul 24, 2012
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ssoosay (CC BY 2.0)
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By Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch —
Drugs are all anesthesia from pain. The ruthless Mexican cartels crave money, which they make from the Yankee craving for numbness. They sell unfeeling, and we buy it, at tens of billions of dollars and thousands of Mexican lives per year.
Posted on Jul 13, 2012
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Paresh Nath, Cagle Cartoons, The Khaleej Times, UAE —
Posted on Jul 1, 2012
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Tektum (CC BY 2.0)
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In addition to having produced 60,000 dead, 20,000 disappeared, hundreds of thousands displaced, wounded or on the run, and tens of thousands widowed or orphaned, Mexico’s drug war—which seems to be off the radars of that country’s presidential candidates—is a chain wrapped around the nation’s considerable industrial potential.
Posted on Jun 23, 2012
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Freedom of the press is threatened every day in Mexico as journalists are tortured and killed; Obama’s support of gay marriage distracts the public from the impunities in Afghanistan; press freedom is also under attack in the U.S. as journalists are arrested for protesting. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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By Amy Goodman — President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign launched its first Spanish-language ads this week, just after he returned from the Summit of the Americas.
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AP / Marco Ugarte
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To what length should governments enable crime in order to catch criminals? That’s the ethical issue raised by a New York Times article that reports DEA agents have laundered millions of dollars in drug proceeds to battle Mexican cartels. More than 40,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since 2006.
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World Economic Forum (CC-BY)
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Mexican human rights activists have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate President Felipe Calderon (above), senior Mexican officials and the country’s most-wanted drug kingpin for allegedly overseeing the capture, torture and killing of civilians in violence surrounding drug trafficking and the government’s effort to suppress that illegal trade. (more)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in collaboration with KPFK: the politics of global warming; the ever more complicated fight to legalize marijuana; Robert Scheer’s update on the debt; the director of the new documentary “Honest Man”; and the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey
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This week on Truthdig Radio in collaboration with KPFK: The politics of global warming; the ever more complicated fight to legalize marijuana; Robert Scheer’s debt update; the director of the new documentary “Honest Man,” and the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Posted on Jul 27, 2011
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Flickr / U.S. Embassy New Zealand
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At a regional conference this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged almost $300 million to the governments of Central America during 2011 to aid in their efforts to oppose cartels and others involved in the region’s violent, illegal drug trade. (more)
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The Mexican resort city of Acapulco is a vacation destination for U.S. travelers and locals alike, but a short distance away from the beaches, a battle among Mexican authorities, drug cartels and indigenous communities is playing out.
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Flickr / Esparta
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For the future of unchecked global capitalism, look to the savagery of the drug war in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, says The Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy. (more)
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The Zapatistas in Mexico mobilize against the drug war; the AOL-HuffPo merger is starting to lose its charm; and Google’s Internet monopoly is threatened by Facebook. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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AP / Dario Lopez-Mills
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Mexico’s drug war has been blamed for the deaths of more than 34,000 people, and now comes a report showing that the violence has uprooted nearly a quarter of a million people south of the border, with many of them thought to have fled to the U.S.
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By Amy Goodman — The Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol that Jared Loughner is accused of using in his rampage in Tucson, Ariz., is, according to Glock’s website, “ideal for versatile use through reduced dimensions” and is “suitable for concealed carry.”
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AP / Rodridgo Abd
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The hold of Mexican drug traffickers has overflowed the country’s southern border, as the Zeta cartel has seized control of parts of northern Guatemala, leading the government there to declare a state of siege in the area.
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AP / Guillermo Arias
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By Deanne Stillman — In light of a recent murder, and considering that we are about to ring in a new year, I think the time has come to reframe the border discussion.
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AP / Primera Plana
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The Bible-quoting, drug-running leader of Mexico’s notorious La Familia cartel, Nazario Moreno González, is believed to have been killed by federal troops in a two-day gunbattle in the beleaguered state of Michoacan.
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AP / Guillermo Arias
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In an apparent mixing of official messages, President Obama has contradicted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by rejecting the analogy that Mexico is becoming more and more like 1990s drug-heyday Colombia, when 40 percent of the country’s territory was controlled by rebel groups.
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AP
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Adding to the more than 28,000 people who have already died in Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s nearly 4-year-old war on drugs, 27 suspected drug cartel gunmen have been killed by the Mexican army in the border state of Tamaulipas after a suspected Zeta drug ring training camp was spotted from the air.
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Flickr / scmikeburton (CC-BY-ND)
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Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has conducted a deadly war with drug cartels since 2006, said he is open to debating the legalization of drugs, although his office maintains that he opposes the idea.
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Flickr / brian.ch (CC-BY)
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Much has been made about Mexico’s deadly drug war and the potential for violence to spill across the border, but it is less often reported that American guns make that war go. Over the weekend, police in Laredo, Texas, seized 147 AK-47 rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition en route to Mexico.
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Flickr / BluEyedA73
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America’s college kids are keeping it classy once again, taking recent reports about violence in Mexico as their cue to perform keg stands in other sunny locales for this year’s spring break festivities. Florida, you’ve been warned.
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U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
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The head of the Gulf Cartel, the leading drug cartel in northern Mexico and southern Texas, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after cooperating with the U.S. federal government and pleading guilty to five counts that included attempted murder and money laundering.
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This satirical Onion headline says it all: DEA Recruits Lil Wayne to Use Up All Drugs in Mexico.
Posted on Dec 29, 2009
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USAF / Tech Sgt. Jerry Morrison
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The U.S. plans to move its anti-drug operations from Ecuador to Colombia, which is just a little too close for Hugo Chavez, who said “the winds of war were beginning to blow.” Luis Inacio Lula da Silva added, “As president of Brazil, this climate of unease disturbs me.”
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msnbc.com
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U.S. government officials are conducting a new kind of “surge.” The DEA has started dispatching agents to Afghanistan to target opium trafficking networks that are believed to be funding the Taliban insurgency, a change from the Bush-era policy of poppy crop destruction.
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cnn.com
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In the next step of the continuing battle between the Mexican government and the country’s powerful drug cartels, 5,500 police and military personnel are being sent to the state of Michoacan, where recent drug-related violence has killed 20 government security agents.
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USA Today
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Twenty-seven politicians in the western Mexican state of Michoacan were arrested by police in the largest operation to target mayors and other officials in Mexico’s drug war. The politicians are suspected of collaborating with the state’s powerful narco-syndicates.
Posted on May 27, 2009
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By David Sirota — Finally, after America has frittered away billions of taxpayer dollars arming Latin American death squads and incarcerating more of its own citizens on nonviolent drug charges than any other industrialized nation, the government is starting to re-evaluate federal narcotics policy.
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newsday.com
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In a move that further militarizes a bloody drug war that left 6,300 people dead in 2008 alone, the White House is sending FBI agents and equipment to the U.S.-Mexico border to defend against the “spillover” of drug violence. The relocation of federal agents to the U.S. Southwest follows the dispatching of thousands of Mexican soldiers to combat drug cartels earlier this year.
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Flickr / Marcin Wichary
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More than 6,000 people died in Mexico’s drug war last year, far too many as a result of U.S.-purchased firepower. Though Mexico has strict gun laws, smugglers have no trouble legally purchasing military-grade weapons, such as AK-47 rifles, in the U.S., and then shipping them south of the border, where they are used with devastating effect.
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amazon.com
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A new book casts an illuminating spotlight on Colombia’s guerrilla war, fueled by cocaine profits and U.S. military aid.
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nytimes.com / Adriana Zehbrauskas
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It’s been a creeping tragedy that has escaped serious attention by many major media outlets, but the recurring waves of drug violence in Mexico have taken the lives of about 5,000 people in 2008. In response, the Mexican government has deployed more than 40,000 troops, though corruption within the state’s security forces remains a grave problem.
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Wikimedia Commons
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While the rest of the world has been preoccupied with a financial meltdown, a handful of wars and a terrorist attack or two, Mexico has been waging war on its homegrown drug industry, and the death count is mounting. U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza announced that El Norte is sending a couple hundred million down south to aid the cause.
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Washington’s role in Mexico’s drug war, from the $400 million in annual military aid to the U.S. security contractors teaching torture techniques to Mexican police, is often ill-reported in the mainstream media. Canadian journalist Avi Lewis and the “Inside USA” television crew look critically into the conflict that has killed 1,800 people so far this year alone.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Despite spending countless billions and passing draconian laws, the United States is anything but a drug-free zone. The percentages of those in the U.S. who have tried marijuana or cocaine are greater than the percentages of any other country surveyed, according to a new study. The Netherlands, which has notoriously lax drug policies, had less than half the percentage of marijuana users and an even lower level of cocaine dabblers relative to the U.S.
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latimes.com
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The Pentagon has traditionally played a major role in monitoring U.S. borders and assisting the Coast Guard in intercepting drug shipments, but the burden of Iraq has forced the military to scale back its efforts, opening holes for drug smugglers to exploit.
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