"Then we are agreed. The traffic in drugs will be permitted, but controlled, and Don Corleone will give up protection in the East – and there will be the peace." - Don Barzini (The Godfather)
The Godfather has the answers to so many questions. Permit drugs and there will be the peace. But the politicians want to keep fighting a war that only grows the Big Brother powers of the state and undermines liberty.
So the needless violence goes on and on.
At least 17 people were killed and several wounded when gunmen opened fire on customers and staff in a bar in Monterrey, Mexico, says the BBC.
The gunmen burst into the city-center bar late on Friday.
Monterrey, in north-eastern Mexico, has been the site of a bloody turf war between drug cartels for several years.
More than
34,000 people have been killed in the last four years in Mexico's crackdown on the drug gangs, the government said in January.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, said in a visit to Mexico on Friday that she was "deeply concerned by the very high and still escalating levels of violent crime in some parts the country.
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Cornfields. They just don't learn. When you are invited
to a meeting at a cornfield you decline. |
"Organized crime, with its brutal actions and methods, threatens the very core of the state and attacks the basic human rights we are struggling so hard to protect," she said in a statement.
Ms Pillay said she was also concerned by "
increasing reports of rights violations and excessive use of force by state agents in the course of their actions against organized crime".
She added: "Torture as a practice must be stopped."
The Drug War goes on and on
The drug war has been fought by pumping troops and police into cities like Juarez, which sits on the main smuggling route into the United States. It could be seen as a "shock and awe" attempt by the president to bring down the murder rate.
The mayor of Juarez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, uses a heavily armored vehicle.
More than 1,000 people have been killed in drugs-related violence in this - Mexico's murder capital - this year alone.
"We've already lost a generation. About 60 to 70% of those being killed right now are between 14 and 24 years old," Mayor Ferriz says. The reason, says Mr Ferriz, is "all social". Unemployment has been rising.
Assassins are paid $45 a week by the local drug gangs, he says, "not to become rich, simply to put food on the table".
In a small field, soldiers are uprooting bright green marijuana plants from the soil. They toss them on to a fire. The sweet smell of the drug wafts across on the breeze.
What is not funny though, for Col. Augustin Reyna Mendoza and his men, is that their efforts to eradicate marijuana will come to nothing.
"It's one of the main things people do here," the colonel says. "One of the main sources of income for them. It's a way of life. So it's a cycle. They grow and we destroy it. Grow and destroy."
In two months' time, they predict, there will be another field of the drug growing here.
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1920s Prohibition. As fast the police poured the banned products in the
sewers new supplies were coming in. The gang wars of Prohibition only ended
when the product was re-legalized. |
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