Assailants gunned down three people returning from a party at a U.S. Consulate employee’s home in the Mexican city of Juarez, including a pregnant U.S. government employee and her husband, in two attacks a few minutes apart that prompted a furious response from the White House on Sunday.
The White House said President Obama was “deeply saddened and outraged” by the slayings, which occurred in broad daylight. They appeared to be the latest sign of the surge of drug violence in Mexico in recent years, which has claimed thousands of lives in border cities such as Juarez. But it was unusual for U.S. citizens to be slain — particularly an American government employee.
State Department officials said authorities were still investigating whether the victims were targeted by drug gangs, but it did not appear that the slain consular employee was involved in counter-narcotics work. Her in-laws identified her as Lesley A. Enriquez, 35, of El Paso, just across the border. She was a locally hired employee of the consulate whose job involved helping U.S. citizens, American officials said. Her husband, Arthur Redelfs, 34, worked for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department, according to his brother, Reuben Redelfs.
First the Mexican Military terrorizes Texas border town and now this. I have to wonder… why can’t Obama keep us safe from terrorists?
/sarcasm
Terrorists, terrorists, and more terrorists. They’re everywhere, they’re anyone. Your neighbor, your classmates, people you see every day. They’re just waiting for an opportunity to kill you. /sarcasm
Anybody recall McCarthyism?
The mexican mafia can be pretty dangerous, but terrorists they are not. It seems terrorism’s the new boogeyman to frighten the children with. It’s a legal problem, what the hell are the DEA agents doing anyways? Sitting on their collective thumbs? This is the problem with becoming obsessed with your fears. If it’s not a terrorist activity it doesn’t get priority.
Terrorist–killing innocent people to make a statement? Close enough in this case I think. Not so much in the more recent 3-4 cases of mentally ill single actors. Here its the drug cartel.
Whats worse is USA interfering with Mexico trying to legalize drugs to lessen their/our woes. We would rather give them 100 MM in helicopters than much less for drug rehab programs within a legal system.
All this “moralizing” really is sending us into the crapper===right where we will meet idiots of all types who deny a healthcare approach to something that need not be treated as a crime.
But ya can’t argue with unthinking dogma and the idiots here posting as they do: “What legitimate drug company is going to sell death in a bottle—” thats sofa king retarded its f*cktarded—and yet fools like these are allowed to vote.
The weird thing is that anything “illegal” is, by definition, beyond government control.
The consequences of that statement are huge.
Anything “illegal” cannot be regulated.
Now, governments use corporations as the yoke to control behaviors. Yet, anything “illegal” is automatically beyond the scope of using a corporate control mechanism.
Governments use the corporate control mechanism because governments themselves, at least on scale, are woefully inefficient and therefore inherently incapable of achieving objectives.
Too simplistic?
Yes, because the other factor is “wealth”. Division of wealth is another undercurrent.
This would suggest the answer of making everything legal on some legal and of communism. Yet we know from several forms of history that “communism” hasn’t worked so far (one little known example is early Israel communes) and the idea of legalizing everything is a bit preposterous (think of the idea of legalizing child prostitution, for instance).
Oh complex world …
HMyer==you have about a 50% hit rate. This is one of your fails. Your analysis pinballs between extremes.
Find your course somewhere down the middle.
For instance: When you make laws that do not have a strong majority support, they are likely to be flouted without an unacceptable amount of resources given to enforcement.
That would indicate to make some/more/most drugs legal and then really think about why other drugs should remain illegal. The taint of moralism and untrue scare tatics will be removed.
Its not so much “complex” as by and large people can smell BS and don’t like it.
And the killings are occurring in Acapulco now.
At least 13 people were killed Saturday, some of them beheaded, around the popular beach resort of Acapulco, just as foreign visitors have begun arriving for spring break.
It is not just drug dealers who are being killed.
The dead in Acapulco included five police officers, who were ambushed while on patrol on the city’s outskirts about 2 a.m.
The headline in the LA Times:
MEXICO UNDER SIEGE
Obama’s response? Now, please don’t do that again or we are going to have to ask the Mexican government to put these alleged perpetrators on trial.
I’ll say it again: when drugs are legal, only people choosing to do drugs (sic) get hurt. When drugs are illegal, many INNOCENT people get hurt such as this thread reports.
It doesn’t even matter if on drug legalization more people ruined their lives because of addiction==those choosing not to do drugs would not be getting killed, maimed, burglarized etc.
If you support keeping drugs illegal, you can’t prioritize your own best interests==or anyone elses. My your life remain insulated and untouched by the chaos your laws create.
If I was a betting man, I’d bet that it will eventually turn out that these nice people who were murdered were in the drug trade. Just a hunch…
The evidence has been clear for decades that marijuana should be legalized. The people against it now must have psychological issues they’re working thru… that’s the only reason I can think of that they’d be against it.
#27 Phydeau:
The evidence has been clear for decades that marijuana should be legalized. The people against it now must have psychological issues they’re working thru… that’s the only reason I can think of that they’d be against it.
They are not, will not and won’t ever work through their issues. There’s no reaching these people. They are the people who are run entirely by burned in motivations, their “conscious” mind is just along for the ride, it’s only job is to bleat “reasons” for their behavior.
A lawyer friend of mine in Arizona who worked for the attorney general’s office there told me the problems in Mexico have much to do with their decrepit legal system. Couple that with mob-like “omerta” fears run rampant in a population, high demand for drugs in the good old El Norte, corruption, a violent machismo culture etc. etc. What a brew.
I also once knew a guy who had been busted trying to run a kilo of weed out of Mexico, and he spent two years in jail there, while his court-appointed “lawyer” tried to find out how much money his family had, so they could extort it. They finally let him go when they couldn’t squeeze any more blood out of the turnip. (his dad was a doctor in Indiana who ended up mortgaging his house to pay them)
Mexico is about a decade away from complete lawlessness. Soon we will be living next the North American equivalent of Somalia.
(Maybe it’s just he doesn’t want to bother with a Texas that wants to secede, changes history, lies in textbooks and actively tries to keep its children dumb about everthing that isn’t neocon/fascist approved.)
Oh! Did I say that outloud?
/sarcasm
Truth be told, illegal Mexican “immigrants” have caused me more personal grief and stress than the Islamists ever did.
#17, honeyman, re: “Of course the drug companies would NEVER sell anything unsafe or market destructive and deadly drugs, and the government would NEVER approve anything harmful or untested. ”
So after intense regulation and clinical proof, a very few drugs happen to get through the system.
… and your solution is to do away with the system and purposely allow all harmful drugs to be legal and freely available.
..there was a great gasp of incredulity.
#19, R.O.P., re: “sounds like you are describing the ills of alcohol in a bottle.”
Actually I am… so why not remove the illegality of alcohol below a certain age? According to you, we’ll all be better off.
…. A 10-year old with a bottle of Vodka is so liberal… so… what’s the phrase… a knuckle dragging leap forward.
#33 Skeptic
Your faith in an impartial system is admirable, but foolish. Drug laws are based in nepotism and corruption, not in science or harm reduction.
There are several wonderful drugs that I owe my life to. if that system wasn’t in place, I’d most likely be dead. So although the system has minor flaws and is fighting greed and corruption, doing away with it completely instead of addressing the problems and plugging the holes… is simply ridiculous.
The solution for Mexico is to cut them off. Stop taking vacations there. Stop trading with them for cheaply produced luxuries. Stop buying their oil…. until they clean up their own backyard.
Yah, I thought so.
They are probably pissed off about the jokes we tell about them.
#38 Skeptic
I’m not suggesting that drugs become completely unregulated. I’m suggesting that your view of illegal drugs is skewed by politics.