So wait, a Mexican Mayor ordered police to abduct and kill a bus full of 40+ teaching students at which point the cops handed them over to a local gang who killed them all, burned their bodies in a tire fire and dumped the charred remains in a river? How could so many government officials be so complicit in this?? Even in Mexico? Is this where ISIS is doing their training? Or maybe Mexico is recruiting ISIS militants to move to that lawless hell hole down south.
What makes you think that ISIS has anything to do with Mexico, of all places? Is this some Mexican version of the “Obama must be a secret Muslim because he’s black” theory? “Mexicans are brown, ISIS is brown, therefore they must both all be Muslim fanatics”?
I think he means that it sounds like the kind of terror tactics we’ve been hearing attributed to ISIS in recent months, and not that there is an actual connection between Mexico and ISIS.
And here’s a wet-nap for the spittle on your chin.
The search for these students has been in the news for weeks, even though what had happened to them was already known pretty much exactly. If I’m not mistaken, they already had found a mass grave, but it was other people in it, not the missing students.
I try to imagine the same thing happening over here to better grasp the measure of this event, and I just can’t. It defies reason that it could happen in a somewhat organized country. I know that Mexico has been very troubled for a while, but this is way beyond what I could picture. “The students might distract people from my speech” “Not a problem, darling, let’s have the police kill some and hand the rest to the gang that funds us for elimination”. Insane. And even more insane that it could actually be done.
Not going to make me any more optimistic about human nature. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since nobody in authority ever had any problem finding volunteers to kill whoever they thought needed to be killed. But typically, it’s a dictator or something, not a mere mayor…
I don’t watch TV news; I just heard this story now. Horrible! Almost unbelievable!
I don’t know about Mexico, but in Thailand the big local politicians typically are the criminal overlords. Still, I recall no recent story in Thailand even remotely like this (except for a massacre several years ago in the South, slightly “justified” since there is ongoing terrorist insurrection there).
Northern Mexico is a mess and has been for quite a while. They have an insurgency (cartel/economically motivated instead of ideologically motivated) that makes pre-ISIS Iraqi insurgents look like amateurs. The militias there typically are able to field well armed and well trained forces with effective small unit articulation. Additionaly they have local forces effectively infiltrated and/or co-opted.
The choice of targets was a little different (students instead of directly cartel related) but their protests were obviously perceived to be a threat to the local criminal elements. The location is outside the ordinary in southern Mexico versus near the US border. This wasn’t about fighting for control of smuggling routes though which is what usually drives such overt violence. After the initial surprise this seems to just be a slightly more extreme case of normal business in much of Mexico in the last decade.
If you want to understand why Mexico is like it is, I strongly recommend reading the chapter on Mexico City in The City in Mind, by James Howard Kunstler.
No wonder so many Mexicans are so eager to hike through a desert and dodge the border patrol, or get in debt to a coyote, just for the chance to hang around a Home Depot parking lot and pick up odd construction or landscaping jobs
Believe it or not it’s actually likely that the Mexican cartels have more soldiers (estimated at over 100,000) and probably make more money (estimated at over $15bn year and up to $50bn/yr by some.) Further, since the Mexican cartels actually control many, many local governments and have even infiltrated the Federals to some degree they actually have a lot more power and can operate a lot more safely than ISIS can.
ISIS largely seized territory that is either depopulated or that essentially no one was defending. The moment the West really got serious about stopping their advances (into Kobane and Kurdish Iraq for example) it’s been shown that even just relatively mild air strikes put an end to it. ISIS really just controls a lot of roads and oil fields (the big red splotch on the map covers a lot of areas where there aren’t really any people.) ISIS also has nothing like the established infrastructure of Mexican government that it controls, instead they have been slowly developing their own. ISIS also has made enemies of Bashar Assad, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Russia, Iran and begrudgingly Turkey. ISIS probably will be significantly degraded relatively quickly. The Cartels on the other hand are such a cancer that have infested so deeply into the government of many of the Mexican states that there’s few good answers on how to get rid of them.
Yeah Der Trihs, you need to crank that knee jerk down a bit.
As for the OP: As ugly as that incident is, if ISIS had been there they would had killed the students on location and then round up all the people in the city where the school is and all the relatives of the students, then demand complete allegiance to their faith… if they are lucky. Usually because ISIS already knows the majority of the people they rounded up do not believe exactly what they do they just kill them all.
So, the Mexican thugs here are not in their league yet, but I still remember what a Mexican priest in Guadalajara told me when I said that I left El Salvador fleeing the civil war, “the same [civil war] is going to happen here!” the worry here is that as in the old country the thugs in authority are starting to kill the students, the teachers and preachers; then the thugs will order that the leaders of the opposition will be next. And then the Mexican government will wonder why the people do not trust that democracy or the current institutions are going to do the right thing. The people will resort to violence if things like this are not investigated properly and the perpetrators taken to justice.
The despair many of the affected have is worse when one takes into account that the thugs that ordered this came from one of the main opposition parties in Mexico that was supposed to be the ones in favor of worker’s rights and causes the students were in favor of. Turns out that the business man that ran as a PRD member was also married to a wife that was involved with the drug trafficker families. The PRD did denounce the now arrested mayor of Iguala last year for his previous abuses, and it is clear now that that denunciation was one of the reasons the mayor had appeared in the radar of the students.
Except the cartels are already in full control of the town. So the analogy doesn’t work at all. That was a cartel town, the students had came to protest the Mayor who was an associate of the cartels, and were punished for it. Unlike ISIS which is desperate to get that kind of loyalty, the cartels already control most of the small towns in the States that are overrun with the drug war. ISIS has a few towns that are genuinely loyal to them, a few that are loyal to them anytime ISIS gunmen a around, and then a lot of roads and oilfields they collect tolls/produce oil from.
I think ISIS really are pretty small potatoes comparatively, and not built to last nearly as long due to not being able to control as much territory. While the news agencies post a map with a big red splotch, the more accurate maps show “thick lines” which represent the roads and the oil fields, which are the only places ISIS really has consistent 24/7 control.
Since many local government authorities in Mexico are essentially part of the cartel network, the cartels control them 24/7/365. The only real strike against the cartels is there are two major ones and a half dozen smaller ones and they often fight for control. Given the huge number of dead and the spectacular violence from the cartels it is surprising all it’s taken for ISIS to get more attention is cutting four people’s heads off and sending videos out. The cartels have done beheadings for years and years, and killed probably a lot more Americans than ISIS.
I actually agree with this Al-jazeera comparison of the two link
Clearly the U.S. should invade the benighted nation of Mexico to restore law and order and democracy. It’s pretty close, so the logistics should be easier than the former Mesopotamian adventure. And lots of Americans speak Spanish, so no language barrier. Heck, a decent chunk of the army is hispanic. Hearts and minds, people!