Hell on Earth: Mexican Drug War Yields 49 Headless Bodies

Topher Morrison

www.PurpleSerf.com

In what is widely believed to be the latest clash between two of Mexico’s main crime syndicates, the Zetas gang and the Sinaloa Cartel, officials struggle to identify 49 bodies.   The Associated Press (AP) reports that although the bodies were found without gunshot wounds some were heavily decomposed, decapitated and totally dismembered.

Victims of the latest carnage, the “Cadereyta 49” as they are coming to be referred, highlights the alarming notion that Mexico is teetering on the brink of narco-genocide, a type of national bloodletting of a wholly different order than previous eras. Rather than a government carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing or oppression the devastation being experienced in Mexico is due almost entirely to a black market in the violent throws of realignment after the 2008 financial crisis blew a hole in the U.S. economy.

“Drug violence has killed more than 47,500 people since President Felipe
Calderon launched a stepped-up offensive when he took office in
December 2006. The campaign has seen the two cartels emerge as
 Mexico’s two most powerful. At least one of the two cartels
is present in nearly all of Mexico’s 32 states.”
 – Associated Press

Astonishingly, it was been reported the people of northern Mexico sometimes have no one protecting them as some municipalities, including Cadereyta, have been without law enforcement for years allowing cartels to move in to fill the void.  When police are there, however, they are often corrupt to the point were an entire police force was fired and disbanned.  According to BorderLandBeat.com:

Though hard to imagine the cruelty of cartels to gather large groups of innocents for shock and attention thereby highlighting messages or a perception of power, another perspective is it is far easier, and efficient in their viewpoint.

By targeting a bus load of migrants, or giving corrupt police the task to collect innocent victims off the streets.  Compliant and respectful of authorities, they are easy prey, no bullets, no fighting, no bloodshed sustained on the part of the criminals.

Effectively, like lambs to the slaughter.

The recent slayings are only the last of four massacres in the last month.  The most horrific detail is these victims are not believed to be rival gangsters or meddling journalists, but innocent bystanders.  According to the AP:

Some victims in earlier body dumps have turned out to be bakers, brick layers, even students – anyone who could be snatched off the streets in mass killings that one captured gang member said were designed to ‘cause terror.’

The mass murder of 35 last year in Boca del Rio, Veracruz is a testament to this gruesome tactic.  The very same city whose police officers were purportedly rounding up children for the massacre.

The Cadereyta municipality has seen homicides of this nature increase 10-fold over the past three years.  Another example of why Mexico’s border region was the most violent place on the planet last year, more so than even war torn Afghanistan.  More from the AP story:

"[In Cadereyta] there have been 74 killings in the first four months of this year in, compared to 27 over the same period in 2011 and seven in 2010, according to figures from Nuevo Leon state prosecutors.

The massacre follows the discovery of 14 men left in a van in downtown Nuevo Laredo on April 17 and 23 people found hanged or decapitated in the same border city May 4.

Eighteen dismembered bodies were left near Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara, last week. Among the nine people identified in that attack were bricklayers, waiters and at least one student. None had criminal records."

This is all part of a sadistic strategy of “heating up the plaza” a way of luring local law enforcement, state police and Mexican military to crack down on a rival cartel’s activities.  A black market false flag so to speak.

The cartels are of course known for their barborous gambits.  Last year it was reported that Mexican drug lords are forcing innocent civilians into gladiatorial death matches.  Once a victor emerges they are “rewarded” by being forced to run a veritable kamakazi mission into a rival cartel’s territory.  According to Paul Thompson of the Daily Mail:

"Almost 200 bodies were found near the Mexican city of San Fernando with most having died from blunt force trauma.

Many are thought to be victims of the blood sport where cartel chiefs re-enact the gladiator contests."

In a country were citizens are defenseless, where the black market makes up a sizable portion of the economy, according to Havoscope $126.08 billion, and the state controls much of the rest it is hard to see a way forward.  There have been serious talks of legalizing illicit drugs throughout Central and South America, but without the major consumer, the United States, following suit all these efforts accomplish is open season for Cartels.

Some wonder why we don’t use our growing arsenal of drones to expidite justice.  The only question would be: when do the cartels get their own?  After all, they already have planes, trains, tanks and submarines.

Medical Marijuana, Big Pharma Style

Daily Kos
Gr33ner Pastures
June 6th, 2011

The federal government does support the marijuana industry, just not the one you think.

The East Bay Express reported last week that the DEA has been quietly giving out licenses for large-scale marijuana growing operations to a number of unnamed companies. But these actions have nothing to do with the real medical marijuana industry, which is still a favorite target for DEA persecution; instead they are designed to enable a total coup by the pharmaceutical industry. Until now, the belief was that there was only one DEA licensed and operated marijuana farm which existed mainly to provide research material. However, in a letter to the East Bay Express, the DEA revealed that:

“there are 64 active DEA registrations (reflecting 55 companies) for manufacturers that have listed drug code 7370 (THC, Delta-8 THC, Delta-9 THC, dronabinol and others) and drug code 7371 (TETRAHYDROCANNABINOL, ORGANIC) on their DEA record.”

In other words, 55 companies have active licenses for producing organic THC; which means growing marijuana.

Whether these companies have already began growing marijuana or not is irrelevant; the mere fact that the DEA can hand out growing licenses while continuing to raid state-approved growers and dispensaries is a testament to the government’s unlimited capacity for hypocrisy. It is also a sign of how the pharmaceutical industry has co-opted the DEA and the FDA, turning government agencies into its lackeys. Even as the Department of Justice intensifies its attacks on legitimate medical marijuana, the pharmaceutical industry demands to be given a way to profit from cannabis. Now that the patent for the (reportedly mediocre) THC pill Marinol has expired and GW Pharmaceuticals’ Sativex, a cannabis-based oral spray, is on track for U.S. approval, pharmaceutical companies are getting ready to cash in, and they are using the government to keep the competition at bay.

With the rapidly growing list of medical conditions treatable with marijuana making the plant’s medicinal properties almost impossible to deny (unless you are the DEA of course) the pharmaceutical industry figured it needed to get in on the action. This presented a conundrum: to make halfway decent pills, organic cannabinoids are needed, and for that marijuana would have to be federally rescheduled. However, if that happened, how could the drug companies maintain a ruthless monopoly on this plant? The result is a plan so devoid of logic or consistency it would get laughed out of Wonderland: to expand the less restrictive Schedule III category of drugs so that that it can include what the DEA calls “naturally derived or synthetically produced dronabinol.” Dronabinol is Marinol, which is synthetic THC.

Thus under this system a marijuana plant is illegal, but commercial organic THC is officially just a dronabinol analogue. Never mind that both are the same thing, and that such “dronabinol analogues” can be gathered from the still illegal marijuana plant; the alchemy of Big Pharma turns the illegal into business gold. Ironically enough, actual synthetic marijuana that the industry doesn’t have much of a use for, such as the JWH-018 or JWH-073 used in herbal blends like Spice or K2, has been aggressively pursued and banned by the DEA. There really is no overstating the depth of lunacy required for this to make sense to anyone; luckily for the pharmaceutical industry, our government can always be counted on to toss sanity out the window for the right price.

The Pharmaceutical lobby is the biggest lobby in America, spending over 240 million dollars in 2010 alone. With that kind of money going towards supporting politicians on both sides of the aisle, the industry has reached the point where it can get government agencies to carry water for it in even the most outrageous of situations. Only last year, GlaxoSmithKline used the FDA to keep a diabetes drug, Avandia, on the market despite a Senate committee report showing that not only was it dangerous, but that GSX knew this and had colluded with the FDA to hide it. Even the revelation that a member of the FDA advisory panel making the decision was a paid speaker for GSX failed to have any effect.

The government has also been proactive in its service to the pharmaceutical industry, most recently laying the groundwork for a federal center for drug research: The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The center will be operated under the National Institutes of Health, an agency with a history of conflict of interest issues, whose head recently resigned to join the board of directors at a pharmaceutical company. Drugs developed by this institution will be turned over to private drug companies, effectively turning it into a taxpayer funded R&D arm for the pharmaceutical Industry.

Given this very special relationship, is it any wonder that the government is willing to bend over backwards to take medical marijuana away from patients and hand it over to the drug companies wholesale? The key to winning this battle is the growth of the legitimate medical marijuana industry made up of dispensaries, doctors, growers, etc. As more states, businesses and patients put their weight and wealth on the side of real medical marijuana, they are building a wall to keep out the big drug companies. Economic and political power can stall the government and give the issue more time to mature into a powerful civil rights movement that will ultimately win the day in court.