Mexican Drug Wars Claim 5,000 Lives in 2008
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.
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.
WAIT BEFORE YOU GO...The BBC:
The bodies of 13 people have been found on a dirt road in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, home to one of the country’s most violent drug cartels.
The victims’ hands were bound and all had been shot. Most were teenagers.
Passersby found the bodies near a stolen truck in the northwest of the state on Thursday.
It comes a day after a leading newspaper, El Universal, said that at least 5,000 people had been killed in drug-related violence this year.
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Americas
Narco-messages are fairly common, and just as often, not sincere.
But Friday's massive battle in Culiacan, capital of Sinaloa state, was shocking for the government's open capitulation to the brazen gunmen.
So deeply has this incident shaken the country that, as author Ruben Martinez describes it, “To understand the historical significance -- and the moral and political gravity -- of what is occurring, think of 9/11, of Sandy Hook, of the day JFK was assassinated.”
Agents from the FBI and ICE swept through downtown L.A.’s fashion district on Wednesday, grabbing $65 million that allegedly belongs to Mexican drug traffickers.
After a 17-month investigation led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, federal, state and local authorities cracked down on a vast drug-smuggling network in Arizona that officials tied to Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, making 76 arrests in three separate raids.
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