Female Police Chief Murdered in Mexico
Mexican federal police officers man a roadblock in the town of Meoqui, state of Chihuahua, northern Mexico, Monday Nov. 29, 2010 after the police chief of the town was gunned down.
/ AP PhotoHermila Garcia, 38, was shot on her way to work Monday by a convoy of gunmen. Garcia, a trained lawyer, took the job as police chief on Oct. 9 in the town of Meoqui, in drug violence-ridden Chihuahua state.
The assailants intercepted her in the town of Los Garcia, some 10 kilometers from Meoqui around 7:20 a.m. Monday. Garcia was in charge of up to 90 police agents in a mostly agricultural region of the Chihuahua state, some 70 kilometers south of Chihuahua City, the capital of the state.
"La Jefa," as she was known to her police agents, didn't carry weapons or have bodyguards.
"If you don't owe anything, you don't fear anything," she was fond of saying when asked why she didn't have security.
Mexican media reported that Garcia was single and lived with her parents, whom she supported financially.
Mexico's drug violence has claimed almost 30,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006 and sent about 45,000 soldiers to fight the powerful drug cartels. In recent months, Meoqui had started to see some of this violence. A once peaceful town, the drug violence-related death tally has shot up to 40 deaths so far this year. Normally that death count would account for homicides over seven years.
Policing has become a job so dangerous that men are now shying away from such posts. Just last month, 20-year old mother and student Marisol Valles was appointed chief of police in Praxedis, in the Juarez valley, a key drug smuggling route just across the border from Texas also in Chihuahua state. Why did a 20-year-old mother accept the position? No one else would. Her predecessor was kidnapped more than a year ago. His head was deposited outside the police station a few days after he disappeared. After that, no one came forward to fill the police chief vacancy for more than a year -- until Valles was appointed top cop by the town's mayor.
Other women who have taken top policing jobs because no men would include two housewives: Ver?nica R?os Ontiveros and Olga Herrera Castillo, who took over policing jobs in El Vergel and Villa de Luz, both in Juarez, now known as the "murder capital" of the world due to its high murder rate. The Juarez valley has had more than 2,700 drug violence-related deaths this year.
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"We love it here," Anzures said." This quoted from a new resident in Texas now. For decades, the corruption of Mexican culture has paid off its dividends in Tijuana and other cities. The most damaging factor tough, it's not the individual character - which has the potential of developing into a cultural asset (and we all know that) - but the "culture", now spilled to LA and large areas of the US territory, in the form of economic migrants, which have not let the past behind, but embrace their "culture". If - as he says himself - "we love it here", why in God's name would anyone like to see the 'culture' returned, turning now everything into a big Tijuana, or Salvador?
What a horrible comment to make!! Violence is never an answer in a civilized world. Would you have us sink to their level??
The cartel leaders are human beings just like you. They grew up in poverty in a third world country and are just trying to better themselves. They are major employers in Mexico and are helping hundreds of people get out of poverty. They need love and understanding...put away guns and let's talk and we can solve this.
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Come on Juan, get real, you lose your right to be a human being when you cross that line and murder good innocent people, are you freakin kidding me.
Conservative principles, quite clearly, ARE:
1) Limited, locally controlled government.
2) Individual liberty coupled with personal responsibility.
3) Free enterprise.
4) A strong national defense.
5) Fiscal responsibility.
Prohibition is actually an authoritarian War on the Constitution and all civic institutions of our great nation.
It's all about the market and cost/benefit analysis. Whether any particular drug is good, bad, or otherwise is irrelevant! As long as there is demand for any mind altering substance, there will be supply; the end! The only affect prohibiting it has is to drive the price up, increase the costs and profits, and where there is illegal profit to be made criminals and terrorists thrive.
The cost of criminalizing citizens who are using substances no more harmful than similar things that are perfectly legal like alcohol and tobacco, is not only hypocritical and futile, but also simply not worth the incredible damage it does.
Afghani farmers produce approx. 93% of the world's opium which is then, mostly, refined into street heroin then smuggled throughout Eastern and Western Europe.
Both the Taliban and the terrorists of al Qaeda derive their main income from the prohibition-inflated value of this very easily grown crop, which means that Prohibition is the "Goose that laid the golden egg" and the lifeblood of terrorists as well as drug cartels. Only those opposed, or willing to ignore this fact, want things the way they are.
See: How opium profits the Taliban: http://*******.com/37mr86k
or: A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF NARCOTICS-FUNDED TERRORIST GROUPS
http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/pdf-files/NarcsFundedTerrs_Extrems.pdf
Prohibition provides America's sworn enemies with financial "aid" and tactical "comforts". The Constitution of the United States of America defines treason as:
"Article III / Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."
Support for prohibition is therefor an act of treason against the Constitution, and a dire threat to the nation's civic institutions.
The Founding Fathers were not social conservatives who believed that citizens should be subordinate to any particular narrow religious moral order. That is what the whole concept of unalienable individual rights means, and sumptuary laws, especially in the form of prohibition, were something they continually warned about.
It is way past time for us all to wise up and help curtail the dangerous expansions of federal police powers, the encroachments on individual liberties, and the increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the unworkable and dangerous policy of drug prohibition.
To support prohibition you have to be either a socialist, ignorant, stupid, brainwashed, insane or corrupt.
* The US national debt has increased at an average rate of $3,000,000000 per day since 2006. http://www.usdebtclock.org/
* The unemployment rate has increased by 7300 per day since 2008.
* The loss of manufacturing jobs has been 1400 per day since 2006.
* Without the legalized regulation of opium products Afghanistan will continue to be a bottomless pit in which to throw countless billions of tax dollars and wasted American lives.
* The hopeless situation in Afghanistan is helping to destabilize it's neighbor, Pakistan, which is a country with nuclear weapons.
* The mayhem in Mexico has deteriorated so badly that it's bordering on farcical.
There is nothing conservative about prohibition, which enlists the most centralized state power in displacement of domestic and community roles. There is everything authoritarian and subversive about this policy which has incinerated American traditions such as Freedom and Federalism with its puritanical flames. Any person seeking to insure and not further compromise the safety of their family and of their neighbors must not only repudiate prohibition but help spearhead its abolition.
We will always have adults who are too immature to responsibly deal with tobacco, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, meth, various prescription drugs, gambling and even food. Our answer to them should always be: "Get a Nanny, and stop turning the government into one for the rest of us!"
"There are no important detentions of Sinaloa cartel members," -- Diego Osorno, an investigative journalist and the author of a book on the Sinaloa cartel published last year.
"But the government is hunting down [Sinaloa's] adversary groups and new players in the world of drug trafficking."
Edgardo Buscaglia, a leading law professor in Mexico and an international organized crime expert, has analyzed 50,000 drug-related arrest documents dating back to 2003, and said that only a tiny fraction of the them were against Sinaloa members, and low-key ones at that.
"Law enforcement [statistics] shows you objectively that the federal government has been hitting the weakest organized crime groups in Mexico."
"But they have not been hitting the main organized crime group, the Sinaloa Federation, that is responsible for 45 per cent of the drug trade in this country."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT0HD_6hfq4
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman - one of the most wanted criminals in the world - runs the Sinaloa cartel. Arrested in Guatemala in the 1990s and transferred to a maximum security prison in Mexico, Guzman escaped in 2001 and has amassed a $1bn fortune by trafficking cocaine, heroine and meth to the US.
Mexico's civil war is a product of our failed policy of drug prohibition.
The second biggest business during alcohol prohibition in Detroit was liquor at $215 million a year and employing about 50,000 people. Authorities were not only helpless to stop it, many were part of the problem. During one raid the state police arrested Detroit Mayor John Smith, Michigan Congressman Robert Clancy and Sheriff Edward Stein.
When it comes down to business, the Mexican Cartels, just like their 1920s American counterparts, also like to be nonpartisan. They will buy-out or threaten politicians of any party, make deals with whoever can benefit them, and kill those who are brave or foolish enough to get in their way.
When pure pharmaceutical grade Bayer heroin was legally sold in local pharmacies and grocery stores for pennies per dose the term "drug-related crime" didn't exist, and neither was the United States the most incarcerated nation in history.
Nobody is suggesting that drugs are harmless and certainly youngsters must be educated about and deterred from their use. However the current system of prohibition does nothing to protect children and criminalizes the users who would be otherwise law abiding citizens. Prohibition was expected to rid the world of drugs by now, but the illegal drugs trade, which is reckoned to be the second largest world trade after oil, is totally in the hands of criminals. To continue with present policies is to accept and effectively tolerate, strengthen even, the existence of the criminal gangs and terrorists that control the trade.
Like it or not, there has never been, and nor will there ever be, a drug-free society; the use of addictive or recreational drugs is a natural part of human existence. Nobody here is claiming that any substance is beneficial for either the individual or society. It is true however that certain substances help the soul heal and relieve pain while others provide short-term relief from a monotonous existence at the risk of possible long-term health problems.
An important aspect of Individual freedom is the right to do with yourself as you please as long as your actions cause no unnecessary suffering or direct harm to others. Many among us may disagree with this, and they should be free to believe what they wish, but the moment they are willing to use force to impose their will on the rest of us, is the exact same moment that the petty criminals/dealers, the Mafia, drug barons, terrorists and corrupt government officials/agencies enter the equation. The problems created by self harm then rapidly pale into insignificance as society spirals downwards into a dark abyss, while the most shady characters and black-market corporate entities exponentially enrich themselves in a feeding frenzy likened to that of piranhas on bath-tub meth.
Prohibition is nothing less than a grotesque dystopian nightmare; if you support it you must be either ignorant, stupid, brainwashed, insane or corrupt.
"For the first time in our history, full faith and confidence in and respect for the hitherto sacred Constitution of the United States has been weakened and impaired because this terrifying invasion of natural rights has been engrafted upon the fundamental law of our land, and experience has shown that it is being wantonly and derisively violated in every State, city, and hamlet in the country."
"It has made potential drunkards of the youth of the land, not because intoxicating liquor appeals to their taste or disposition, but because it is a forbidden thing, and because it is forbidden makes an irresistible appeal to the unformed and immature. It has brought into our midst the intemperate woman, the most fearsome and menacing thing for the future of our national life."
"It has brought the sickening slime of corruption, dishonor, and disgrace into every group of employees and officials in city, State, and Federal departments that have been charged with the enforcement of this odious law."
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/HISTORY/e1920/senj1926/judgetalley.htm
And the following paragraphs are from WALTER E. EDGE's testimony, a Senator from New Jersey:
"Any law that brings in its wake such wide corruption in the public service, increased alcoholic insanity, and deaths, increased arrests for drunkenness, home barrooms, and development among young boys and young women of the use of the flask never heard of before prohibition can not be successfully defended."
"I unhesitatingly contend that those who recognize existing evils and sincerely endeavor to correct them are contributing more toward temperance than those who stubbornly refuse to admit the facts."
"The opposition always proceeds on the theory that give them time and they will stop the habit of indulging in intoxicating beverages. This can not be accomplished. We should recognize our problem is not to persist in the impossible, but to recognize a situation and bring about common-sense temperance through reason."
"This is not a campaign to bring back intoxicating liquor, as is so often claimed by the fanatical dry. Intoxicating liquor is with us to-day and practically as accessible as it ever was. The difference mainly because of its illegality, is its greater destructive power, as evidenced on every hand. The sincere advocates of prohibition welcome efforts for real temperance rather than a continuation of the present bluff."
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/HISTORY/e1920/senj1926/walteredge.htm
And here is Julien Codman's testimony, who was a member of the Massachusetts bar.
"we will produce additional evidence on this point, that it is not appropriate legislation to enforce the eighteenth amendment; that it has done incredible harm instead of good; that as a temperance measure it has been a pitiable failure; that it as failed to prevent drinking; that it has failed to decrease crime; that, as a matter of fact, it has increased both; that it has promoted bootlegging and smuggling to an extent never known before"
"We believe that the time has come for definite action, but it is impossible to lay before Congress any one bill which, while clearly within the provisions of the Constitution, will be a panacea for the evils that the Volstead Act has caused. We must not be vain enough to believe, as the prohibitionists do, that the age-old question of the regulation of alcohol can be settled forever by the passage of a single law. With the experience of the Volstead law as a warning, it behooves us to proceed with caution, one step at a time, to climb out of the legislative well into which we have been pushed."
"If you gentlemen are satisfied, after hearing the evidence supplemented by the broad general knowledge which each of you already possesses, that the remedy that will tend most quickly to correct the wretched social conditions that now exist, to promote temperance, find to allay the discontent and unrest that the Volstead Act has caused, is to be found in the passage of one of the proposed bills legalizing the production of beer of an alcoholic content of 4 per cent or less. We do not claim that it will do away with all the evils produced by attempted prohibition, but it would be a step in the right direction."
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/HISTORY/e1920/senj1926/codman.htm