Fewer Murders in Mexico than US before Drug War Offensive
[IMG]
[/IMG]
Before several Mexican cities became more dangerous than many Baghdad neighborhoods, the country once experienced fewer annual murders than the United States. Back in 2005, Mexico recorded 9,921 homicides, compared with 16,740 murders north of the border. By 2011, Mexico reported 27,199 annual murders, vastly surpassing 14,585 in the US.
Though Mexico’s 2005 murder rate of 9 per 100,000 people exceeded the US rate of 5.6 per 100,000, the concentration of homicides in the Southern United States and urban areas, had made several portions of the country more dangerous than Mexico.
But homicide in Mexico has risen steadily, ever since President Felipe Calderon kicked off the drug war with Joint Operation Michoacán in 2006, dispatching 6,500 soldiers to free the president’s home state from the grips of powerful drug traffickers.
...
http://revpana.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/fewer-murders-in-mexico-than-us-before-drug-war-offensive/
= new reply since forum marked as read
That's my theory. Soon after the Bushwhacks helped to rig the 2006 election (which leftist Lopez-Obrador lost by only 0.05%), their boy Calderon started pushing to privatize Mexico's oil (which is a constitutionally protected natural resource belonging to all Mexicans). There was huge, well-organized pushback by Mexicans. They hated that idea. Calderon wasn't able to carry out his mission no. 1 for his mentors. The plan to infuse billions of our tax dollars into things like the ATF running guns into Mexico, aiding fascist elements in Mexico's security forces, pitting drug organizations against each other, terrorizing Mexican society and making civic life impossible and drenching the country in blood, was hatched in 2008, just as the Bush Junta was putting the final touches on their ruination of the U.S. economy and worldwide depression.
They were good at wrecking societies. Iraq's. Afghanistan's. Colombia's. England's. Our own.
They deliberately wrecked Mexico, as a parting shot.
The U.S. "war on drugs" has been evil from the beginning. Remember who started it--Nixon. It was a way to destroy the "hippies" and the U.S. generation which said "make love not war," to put millions of people in jail to stop progressive movements here among the poor and the black, and to promote fascism and militarism in the U.S., but, more than this, it was a way to promote fascism and militarism in Latin America, for the obvious purposes of stealing their resources, creating slave labor forces and preventing democracy and economic fairness throughout the region.
It has had these purposes all along--but the Bush Junta brought new and quite mind-boggling twists to this already twisted "war"--a war that was NEVER INTENDED to stop the drug trade. They infused $7 BILLION in military aid into Colombia, for instance, and installed a Mob Boss as president of the country! Alvaro Uribe. He used the "war on drugs" to murder his enemies (trade unionists and other advocates of the poor), to spy on judges and prosecutors (obviously to intimidate and blackmail the legal system, and to be able to anticipate their moves against his criminal organization; he was also spying on trade unionists and others, to pass lists of targets to his death squads and to the military) and--the key to it all--he used the "war on drugs" (to which the Bushwhacks added the "war on terror"
to brutally drive FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their lands.
It was the latter--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth--that clued me into the upside down world of the Bushwhack "war on drugs." Many of these peasant farmers were growing a few coca leaves (traditional Indigenous medicine) for local use, along with food for their families and communities, and maybe sold a bit to the cocaine-makers/drug networks to supplement extreme poverty incomes. (Colombia also has THE worst poverty in Latin America, along with Guatemala.) (Venezuela, right next door, has THE most equal income distribution in Latin America. No.1! This is part of the reason that tens of thousands of poor Colombians have fled into Venezuela. The other reason: the Colombian military.)
It occurred to me that what Uribe/Bush were doing was eliminating the small players, consolidating the cocaine trade into fewer hands and directing its trillion+ dollar revenue stream to U.S. banksters, the Bush Cartel, the CIA and other beneficiaries. (Well, maybe they were muscling in on the CIA and that's what that conflict was about, or partly about.)
Colombia is THE most blood-drenched country in Latin America. The ghouls of the Bush Junta--their fangs dripping with blood--must have been very satisfied with their work.
They got control of the cocaine revenue stream, cleared the peasants off the land for the big, protected drug operations and for Monsanto, et al, prepped Colombia for U.S. "free trade by the rich" (by, among other things, decapitating the labor unions), fattened the pockets of many a war profiteer and spread corruption and brutality far and wide. All this worked so well in Colombia, they decided to use the same methods in Mexico (and what I think was a Bushwhack-designed coup d'etat in Honduras--which the Obama administration helped legitimize--is having the same effect--Honduras is beginning to resemble Colombia--rampant rightwing death squads, murders of labor leaders, journalists and others, fascism/militarism, expanding U.S. military presence, DEA agents killing innocents, etc.).
In other words, this curve that we are looking at in the OP chart--the low murder rate in Mexico compared to the U.S., prior to Bush Junta's bloodbath, and then the zoom up in bloodshed in Mexico--was DELIBERATE. It's goal was never in any way intended to stop the drug trade. Its goal was to bloody Mexico as well and destroy civil society--for transglobal corporate/war profiteer purposes--and, very likely, to get control of those drug routes and revenues!
