It’s even more depressing than that. Actually, while looking for the students they found more than a dozen other mass graves in the area, the largest of which had 38 bodies in it.
There have been so many other mass slaughters in Mexico that the only thing I find surprising about this is how much more attention it’s getting than previous ones.
Actually, at the end of the Mexican-American War there was a movement to annex all of Mexico to the U.S. It broke up on two objections: 1) It was felt that imposition of American democracy on people by armed force was just not the thing, and 2) (from John C. Calhoun) these people just aren’t white!
Also, there was no slavery in Mexico at the time, so admitting Mexican states to the Union would have hopelessly altered the free-state/slave-state balance, preserving which was the whole point of the war as far as the South was concerned.
He didn’t have to read between the lines. It is right there, quite explicit, in your OP. (Well, o.k., the racism is only implicit, but the idiotic linking of a totally unrelated atrocity, in a quite geographically and culturally separate part of the world, to the moral panic du jour, is right there.)
It needs to be added here that civil war came anyhow thanks to California becoming a free state. California and other states came as a result of the big chunk of Mexico that was taken after the war; it caused the free-state/slave-state balance to fail, making the Mexican-American war one factor that caused the United States civil war.
Just when I thought I’d seen the most brain dead post possible in this thread…
Nope, that definitely doesn’t beat your OP in the brain dead department.
You may not have been motivated by racism when you drew this stupid parallel between ISIS and Mexican drug cartels, but njtt is quite right that it is idiotic. It must be motivated by something stupid, whatever it is. Other than that they both have killed people, what exactly is the point of including ISIS in the OP at all?
Mexican cartels have been mass-murdering people since way before ISIS was a thing. And as can be deduced by anyone with the most basic reasoning and cognition, they aren’t in any way related. So what parallel were you trying to draw?
Very simple. It takes vast amounts of money to corrupt officials to this extent. It is provided to the cartels almost entirely by US drug users.
The cartels and all the people they have corrupted add up to a very small fraction of the population of Mexico (less than 1/10 of 1 percent.) But the people who finance them represent a very significant portion of the US population (over 10%)
You guys that don’t see close parallels between the terror tactics used by ISIS and what’s been going down in Mexico for the last two decades should be prohibited from accessing anything sharper than 3rd grade safety scissors and should have your drivers license revoked because, well, never mind. No point in explaining.
Go ahead and read the article linked to up thread. Or get someone to read it to you.
While I did link to it I don’t fully agree with the author’s conclusions. I agree that ISIS and the cartels are very comparable, and in terms of “raw amounts of bad shit” the cartels currently have ISIS beat. But I don’t necessarily agree with the argument that unless we’re willing to go to total war against the cartels we shouldn’t be bombing ISIS (which the author does believe, and he expands on at his personal blog.) Our relationship with Iraq and Syria is fundamentally different than with Mexico. We’d never do anything like that in Mexico without explicit approval (in the present day, obviously 100 years ago was different), and while the Mexicans certainly have wanted (and received, to some extent) our help in certain areas of battling the cartels they do not want us rolling divisions South to start engaging in pitched battles with narcos on Mexican soil.
Syria we don’t really have to ask anyone about what we do there since it is a lawless/stateless region, and Iraq has specifically requested our aid with ISIS and we have a lot of “international responsibility” in regard to Iraq.
It’s a version of “white girl syndrome”. Teaching students are perceived by first-worlders and the educated classes of other countries in the region as being “like us”; uneducated peasants or middle-aged housewives are not.
There is a hint of moral self-blame in this sentence. Bad Americans ! It’s the gringos’ fault ! Drugs are wrong !
If people didn’t insist on saving people — from drink, tobacco, narcotics, stimulants etc. — against their will, and let the chips fall as they, may then vast sums wouldn’t be supplied to the cartels, only small sums, and they could be told to bugger off.
Perhaps every life saved from the Reaper through drug overdoses is cancelled out by a murder south of the Rio Grande.
Possibly outside of Mexico, because it’s not so evident what the background of the students really was. These particular teaching students were actually from peasant backgrounds. The school was in a rural area where poor people sent their kids to learn to be teachers and get a better life. Perhaps the fact that they were student teachers makes this resonate more outside of Mexico, but I think the latter has a lot to do with why it’s caused such an uproar in Mexico itself.
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You guys that don’t see close parallels between the terror tactics used by ISIS and what’s been going down in Mexico for the last two decades should be prohibited from accessing anything sharper than 3rd grade safety scissors and should have your drivers license revoked because, well, never mind. No point in explaining.
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, I have to agree that your comparison of the Mexican case and ISIS was both stupid and misleading. I think it is due to ignorance on your part about both Mexico and ISIS. Saying that everyone else is stupid for pointing this out isn’t going to convince anyone. Doubling down on stupidity when called on it in the Pit isn’t a good strategy.
I know, but I know because my mother is a normal graduate herself, most people don’t even know the word. And while from peasant backgrounds, they are very specifically educated, and in a field which doesn’t sound “alien” to reporters and politicians like, say, engineering would.
ISIS and the cartels seem to share similar tactics. They not only murder, but commit mass murder, record themselves torturing and murdering their victims in order to intimidate, and are gaining control of large towns and cities. When I found out about the videos that cartels like the Zetas make, the first comparison I made was to that of Al Qaeda videos where they beheaded people.
Does it have anything to do with a mayor being implicated in the mass murder? Lots of my family from Mexico have been sharing videos and links about this particular story on Facebook, but I don’t think any of my American friends know too much about it.
However, most of the murders of the cartels are clandestine. They attempted to cover up this particular mass killing, as well as the other the killings revealed by the other mass graves in the area. And the cartels are killing people who act against their interests, while ISIS may do that, they kill people simply for belonging to a different religion, or even a different sect, than they do.
There maybe some overlap all kind of other terroristic groups like the FARC, Shining Path, etc, as well but the Mexican cartels and ISIS differ so much in ideology, objectives, and history that linking them doesn’t really make sense.
Mexicanos are numb (unless directly affected) to news about killings and missing people. There have been 70,000 deaths and 20,000 missing since Calderon’s US sponsored war on drugs here. No one talks about it.
The missing 43 students has been different. Lots of reports, news and demonstrations. I hope it will be a wake up call here. But, I am an optimist. The problem, corruption, is so engrained here that people expect it. And are not surprised when they hear about it. Even in my wildest dreams, I cannot see a solution.
Today, I read that Brazil had 60,000 people murdered in 2012! And I thought, hell, we ain’t so backward after all.
Both groups use terrorism as part of their strategies. For ISIS terrorism is more of a core value. Beyond that, the analogy fails.
This incident has gained so much traction in Mexico and maybe around the world because the Mexican population has reached a tipping point. It symbolizes what they have been enduring for years and is not really any more horrific than many other incidents, nor does it reveal any higher level of corruption of local governments than has been revealed countless times before. It has become a rallying point, triggering mass demonstrations and demands for change so it is making a lot more news than other similar incidents in the past.
Since I live in Mexico I wouldn’t exactly call it self-blame. And I make no moral judgement about the use of drugs in itself. I have posted many times before in similar threads that my solution would be to legalize drugs across the board and use the money to fund rehab and education programs instead of giving it to criminals. The symptoms of the US addiction to drugs should be treated in the US. In the same moment it would also put every drug cartel out of business overnight while providing funds to help those in the US who genuinely want to get help.
But when someone in the US asks “Seriously what the fuck Mexico??” while over 10% of the US population is directly funding the problem, and drugs are easily available in virtually every small town and one-room schoolhouse across the entire USA, indicating a large degree of corruption on the part of the US to facilitate that multi-billion dollar marketplace for the cartels, it is fair to point out the hypocrisy of all that the question implies.
So did the Romans.
Somehow I doubt few people consider either ISIS or the cartels to be the spiritual successors to those guys.
There really isn’t that much of a connection here, except “here’s two groups of people I don’t like who happen to not be very nice to other human beings”. And that’s a weak connection.
That article doesn’t say what you seem to think it does, and regardless your OP didn’t discuss that article or any of the points it raises. Your OP asked the questions:
"Is this where ISIS is doing their training? Or maybe Mexico is recruiting ISIS militants to move to that lawless hell hole down south.
Seriously what the fuck Mexico??"
None of those stupid questions are raised in the al jazeera article that you are now citing as somehow supporting your original lamebrained thesis.