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Mexico drug wars have killed 35,000 people in four years


DJ Stashman

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A total of 34,612 people have died in drug-related killings in Mexico in the four years since President Felipe Calderón declared an offensive against cartels shortly after taking office, officials said tonight.

Killings reached their highest level in 2010, when there were 15,273 deaths, up from 9,616 the previous year.

At a meeting with anti-crime groups at which the government presented a data system to track drug-related crimes, Calderón said 2010 had been "a year of extreme violence".

The office of federal security spokesman, Alejandro Poire, said the four-year figure included 30,913 execution-style killings, 3,153 deaths in shootouts between gangs, and 546 deaths involving attacks on authorities.

Calderón said many of the killings in 2010 were generated by the turf war between the Zetas drug gang and their former allies in the Gulf cartel.

About half the killings took place in three northern states: Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Tamaulipas.

Poire said drug-related killings peaked in the third quarter of 2010 and declined by almost 11% in the fourth quarter.

Calderon said the decline towards the end of the year was important but refused to rule out another rise.

He said Mexico's 31 state governments must do more to deal with corruption in local police forces and to fight organised crime. The president said the federal government was doing its part, pointing to the recruitment of army troops to serve as state police officers in northern Nuevo León state, where killings have spiked this year.

Calderón's interior secretary, Francisco Blake Mora, presented a prototype of a national identity card, Mexico's first to be distributed to youths under 18 in some states. Most Mexicans currently use their voter ID cards as identification, but the new cards will have better security measures, including digital fingerprints and iris images, to prevent criminals from using false IDs.

In a separate development, the defence department said today that soldiers had caught Rigoberto Andrade Rentería, an alleged operations leader for the La Familia cartel, in the northern border city of Tijuana at the weekend. He was found with almost 60lb (27kg) of methamphetamine, it said.

The government had offered a reward of 5 million pesos (£263,000) for information leading to his arrest. La Familia cartel is based in the western state of Michoacán, but apparently has ties with traffickers in northern border states.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/13/mexico-drug-deaths-figures-calderon

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Guest WAVESURFER

It's crazy over there.

My uncle recently moved back home after living there for a few years because of all the madness.

Told me the other day he wanted to go back to Mexico, my plainface couldn't have been more powerful.

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i consider the ban on illegal drugs to be an illegal holocaust greater tha

n the jewish holocaust and caused by wwestern  democracys

by keeping it banned it has allowed the criminality to flourish

from mexico to colombia to afghanistan... we all die to so the white mans country remains drug free

doesn't make sense, u concocted this argument too quick and it doesn't stand up

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Guest WAVESURFER

i consider the ban on illegal drugs to be an illegal holocaust greater tha

n the jewish holocaust and caused by wwestern  democracys

by keeping it banned it has allowed the criminality to flourish

from mexico to colombia to afghanistan... we all die to so the white mans country remains drug free

Please tell me which "white mans country" you consider to be "drug free".

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hold tight the US providing the mexicans with the guns to carry out all these killings

who see that crazy tunnel what lead from mexico to California these man are serious

also heard about that law which I belive was passed in border states where feds can stop anyone who looks foreighn what a par

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hold tight the US providing the mexicans with the guns to carry out all these killings

who see that crazy tunnel what lead from mexico to California these man are serious

It's incredible the arms race which has sprouted either side of the border, some deadly hi tech game of bulldog. Drugs, people, weapons, money in transit by land sea and/or air, 24/7. It's unimaginably lucrative and the thin percentage of what the authorities can intercept justifies it

Drug mules who carry shipments in their guts, and if apprehended at the border they will try and shoot their way out and escape - because if they are caught and arrested (and the coke lost) they/their families will be brutally murdered when they see prison or freedom, either side of the border

This is the reality for the poor in these areas, effectively living under warlords who rule absolutely

And as you said the guns which Mexico is trying to clean up are being bought legitimately in stores in the US (esp Texas) and smuggled over. Nice policy cohesion there

35,000 people dead over preventable idiocy. 30,000 executions ffs.

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