Two women from the world of Mexico City journalism were abducted and slain, their naked, bound bodies found Thursday in a field behind a cemetery, authorities said.
Although dozens of journalists have been killed, kidnapped or threatened as part of Mexico’s spiraling violence, this appears to be the first time news media employees have been slain in the relative safe harbor of Mexico City.
It was not immediately known whether the attacks on the women were related to their work. The treatment of the victims followed the pattern of hits ordered by drug gangs.
K., an occasional Slog correspondent from Mexico City, writes:
It was all over the news last night. It’s very ugly. The reporters worked for Contralinea which is anti-drug war.
People here gossip about the news a lot; there’s no trusted official version of what happened. For example, many people say that because the magazine they wrote for was anti-drug war they were retaliated against by federal police. However, there is no news organization reporting on this…
For me, I have trouble distinguishing if all people here are conspiracy theorists or if everything here is a grand conspiracy.
From a rainy Mexico City,
K.
I’ve reported before that the narcos and the government appear to be thoroughly integrated and have been since before U.S. drug-prohibition policy began in the early 1900s. Meaning: the journalists could have been killed by nearly anyone, working on nearly anyone’s orders. It’s a sinister puzzle.
The narcos have a pretty compelling interest in keeping drugs illegal, too.
The narcos, like all organized crime, are well-diversified beyond drug smuggling now. The recent Monterrey casino attack, for instance, was in retaliation for refusing to pay protection money. Nothing to do with the drug war at all.
The current enthusiasm among some of the “no more blood” groups for just giving up and letting the cartels run rampant — not just supporting simple legalization but going back to the full collusion between cartels and government, and beyond, indeed just giving the government to the cartels, which is what some of these people are asking for, isn’t going to solve the problem.
The cartels are now essentially in a position to demand that not only should the drug trade be unimpeded, but it should be mandatory. They’ve slaughtered addicts in drug treatment facilities too. They are not going to stop until they consume all of Mexican AND AMERICAN society; every one of us will be forced to pay them whether we want the damn drugs or not.
This is of course unsustainable, but the amount of damage they can do in the meantime is incalculable. This is not the time for surrender; it’s the time for organizing a more professional modern policing system. Legalizing drugs in the US, whatever merits it may have, isn’t going to change anything.
but duuuuuude, my drugs don’t come from Mexico. I buy ’em from a white dude.
Fnarf, marijuana is still their largest money-maker if I’m not mistaken. How could removing their single largest source of income not change ANYTHING? I get that the cartels are diversified, but they’ll still have less money, less money to buy goons, buy guns, buy government officials if we legalize weed here. How is that not a good thing, how is that not a step in the right direction that we should be taking?
Fnarf: I also live in Mexico City, working as a teacher. This past week, in the aftermath of the Monterrey casino attack and a beheading that I don’t think really got reported on up north but that happened two blocks from my work, I’ve been having drug policy debates in my classes. I haven’t had a single student who HASN’T been favor of legalizing drugs – they’re usually just debates on which drugs should be legalized. Many of them have even gotten mad at me for saying things that “coca should be legalized but not cocaine” like I’m some sort of hopeless conservative ranting in favor of apartheid or whatever. And while this may not have been the most representative sample, my students are generally otherwise wealthy and square, so I think it’s pretty safe to say that if they’re in favor legalizing drugs, then nobody down here thinks that continuing with drug prohibition is a good idea.