Without the rest of the world paying much attention, the tortured relations between drug traffickers and the rest of the Mexican population have taken a significant turn. Following a series of hair-raising events over the past few weeks, it appears that the government of Felipe Calderón may be preparing to replace its aggressive military campaign against the drug trade with a rather different policy—opening the door to a previously unthinkable debate about legalizing drugs. Either that, or the administration is losing its bearings at an even faster rate than we had supposed.
It all started with something that is by now horrifyingly routine: a YouTube video of the gory execution of a Mexican policeman by a gang of narcotraficantes. Posted on July 22, it begins with the interrogation of the policeman, who was from the northern state of Durango, by masked gangsters employed, in this case, by one of Mexico’s most powerful trafficking groups, the Zetas. Such interrogations have been circulated on the Internet before, and, as here, they often end in death. However, in the course of this particular video the policeman stated that the director of a federal prison in Durango was in the habit of releasing and arming certain prisoners at night, so that they could commit murders aimed, broadly speaking, at the Zetas. The recent massacre of seventeen people attending a birthday party in the neighboring state of Coahuila was the work of these temporarily sprung assassins, the policeman said, as were two other mass killings earlier this year.
Read Full Article »