Drug-war violence reaches new levels
Massacre of Americans shows indiscriminate nature of cartel crimes in Mexico
There was a time when the violence of Mexico’s 2006-2012 drug war shocked Americans, but barely touched them. This time — like everything else about the country’s renewed cartel conflict — it’s worse.
The slaughter of three American women and six of their children, some infants, in the northern state of Sonora on Tuesday punctured the old belief that the drug cartels would avoid killing foreigners, women or children.
But it wasn’t the first, or the only, such case.
Children are being killed with chilling frequency as the unwritten rules of Mexico’s drug war appear to fade. In August, gunmen burst into a house in Ciudad Juarez, home of the Juarez cartel, and fired 123 bullets that killed girls aged 14, 13 and 4, along with an adult male who apparently was the real target.
A few days before the Sonora killings, police arrested a suspect in the state capital of Hermosillo who was holding a New York-based businessman for ransom. The man was kidnapped near Tucson, Arizona, and apparently moved across the border in the boot of a car.
The shocking killings of the nine Americans by gang gunmen prompted an offer from US President Donald Trump to help Mexico wage a war to wipe cartels “off the face of the earth”.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rebuffed the offer, but others in both countries are wondering if the time has come for him to change his “hugs not bullets” policy of avoiding confrontations with gangs and instead addressing social problems.
Breaking the old rules against killing children, families or attacking foreigners no longer appears to be a priority — or even a concern — for criminals anymore, given the weak law enforcement in Mexico.
“From the criminal’s perspective, killing one person or killing nine, it’s all the same,” said security analyst Alejandro Hope. “They don’t see any increased risk in committing these kinds of acts of extreme brutality.
“The same goes for killing children, they don’t see any line drawn in the sand,” said Hope. “And the reason they don’t see it is that the Government hasn’t drawn it.”
The Americans lived in communities in Mexico founded decades ago by an offshoot of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Moving reports of mothers trying to protect their children from the hail of bullets and wounded children walking for hours to get help for the youngest survivors intensified calls from abroad for a new war on drug cartels.
Mexico’s militarised war on drug cartels began in 2006 under President Felipe Calderon and was continued by his successor, President Enrique Pena Nieto.
The centre-left Lopez Obrador has rejected this approach, instead creating a National Guard and saying the way to fight Mexico’s violent crime is with work programmes and opportunities for youths. He stuck to that position following Tuesday’s massacre, and rejected calls for a war on cartels, saying: “We declared war, and it didn’t work.”