newspeak

Ejecutan a hijo de García Paniagua / Nacional :: Impacto Diario.

I know this area quite well. My mother, who died a couple of weeks ago, lived not too far from here, and on while we were down in GDL for the funeral, we went to this quite fancy, very costly, but not bad, café/bistro. It’s therefore all the more shocking to read of this. But it does remind me of similar events/atrocities that occurred in any gang-controlled domain.

The problem is of course that the gangs act with confidence of their impunity. And they have that confidence not because the police are incompetent or unable but because the politica and economic structure, one built over more than half a century, has all but insured them against reprisal. The police are underpaid and undertrained and understaffed for a reason. Same with other governmental services Mexico (and so many other similar countries) offers. Such a situation gives lip service to bureaucratic norms and expectations while still providing for–encouraging, actually–the traditional system of patronage and petty bribery. And as long as this system did not raise the legal or whatever hackles of Mexico’s powerful neighbour, it was okay, part of the beautiful characteristic, not a (contagiously) fatal flaw.

But then things changed. And in rooting out the “evil,” in a format that at best resembles the war in Iraq and at worst that in Afghanistan (or vice versa), but in either case *wrong*, as seen by the 40K killed over the last 6 years, and for zero real gain, the depths of the corruption become clear. But not clear enough. The logic motivating the killings, the structure and its history–and its history is deeply buried in the everyday and very important–need more exposure, explication, so that a more accountable system, even democracy, can be realistically imagined and implemented.