On The Mexico/Texas Border - 720 Drug Related Murders So Far This Year

And it’s not even April yet.

Mexico is not only in a war with the drug gangs, its in what could turn out to a war for its existence as a democracy :

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (Reuters) - Brazen Mexican drug gangs are escalating their war with the army and each other, murdering a record 720 people this year and opening up a gruesome new battle front on the U.S. border near Texas.

Nationwide, the pace of drug killings is well ahead of last year, when President Felipe Calderon’s military crackdown on the country’s powerful smuggling cartels began in earnest.

As the army struggles to contain bloodshed in hotspots from the border area to the Caribbean coast, murders in rundown Ciudad Juarez, over the border from the Texan city of El Paso, have flared to unprecedented levels.

Some 200 people have been killed in drug violence in Ciudad Juarez so far this year, a tenfold increase over 2007, some shot dead on busy avenues or strangled after being tortured. Over the Easter weekend alone, 22 people were murdered in the city.

The gangs have infiltrared the police and the army and without a doubt to some degree the very government of Mexico. Our own government needs to wake up and smell the gunpowder just across our borders.

I’ve said for some time now that it’s only a matter of time before we start having to deal with a situation like Mexico has on its hands right now. I understand that America has more powerful - and less corruptable - resources than Mexico and if it comes to that kind of fight the drug lords would lose and lose badly, but that doesn’t change the fact that a fight is coming our way.

The market for all those drugs that the turf wars are being fought over is right here in the good ol’ USA. And our approach the drying up that market with our pointless and wasteful “war on drugs” just....hasn’t....worked. Like I’ve said many, many times, we need to re-think our approach because until we do we’re just spinning our wheels.

The drug lords are getting rich and a lot of people are getting dead.

The spice must flow.