Cartel lays siege to Mexican city after recapture of the son of 'El Chapo'
Source: Los Angeles Times
Armed men took hostages, burned vehicles and stormed an airport in northern Mexico on Thursday after federal forces captured Ovidio Guzmán, one of the world’s most wanted cartel leaders and the son of notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
The drug boss was arrested after a predawn gunfight in the city of Culiacán, a stronghold of Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel, and was later flown to Mexico City, according to Mexican Secretary of Defense Luis Cresencio Sandoval González.
Officials canceled flights, suspended school and ordered residents to shelter in place as cartels responded to Guzmán’s arrest by throwing up road blockades across the state of Sinaloa, with the worst of the violence concentrated in Culiacán. Sandoval said cartel fighters blocked all six entrances to the city with burning vehicles and attacked the city’s airport as well as an air force base located nearby.
One local journalist, Marcos Vizcarra, said he had been effectively taken hostage along with other civilians in a hotel, their cars confiscated by armed gunmen to be incinerated in the streets.
Read more: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-01-05/la-fg-mexico-el-chapo-son-captured
Damn.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Most deaths are due to impurities or being tainted, not the drugs themselves. Going with the model of harm reduction, things like needle exchange programs, easy access to things like test kits, safe places to use, social services for people with problematic use, elimination of nearly all of the criminal side of things.
But what should be obvious is that the criminalization of drugs (our illustrious "war on drugs"
has never been about the drugs, it's been about the marginalization of politically undesirable groups. In places where recreational cannabis has been legalized, there is suddenly a ton of tax money to address other social issues, like homelessness, education, and other services. All this without any serious uptick in crime.
Just imagine if harder drugs were made affordable and decriminalized. Meth sales and usage would plummet. The associated health problems and crime would disappear. People could become useful, productive members of society.
Of course, the prison industry would lose a TON of money, and their lobbyists aren't going to make that easy. Nor will organized crime for exactly the same reasons.
Just days after López Obrador met with Biden at the White House in July 2021, Mexican forces captured Rafael Caro Quintero, a cartel member believed to be behind the killing of U.S. DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985.
Jorge Israel, a human rights professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said on Twitter that López Obrador was “cleaning house before Biden arrives.”
Former President Vicente Fox, a major critic of López Obrador, called the capture of Ovidio an obvious “gift” for Biden."
This son of El Chapo is one of a group of brothers fighting to keep control after their father was put away. The cartel's reportedly weakened, this capture another bad sign, and may be on the way down.
In many places around the planet, criminal organizations, in and out of government, are endangered by Democratic control of U.S. foreign policy.