Mexico: Gunmen execute eight men in Monterrey street
MONTERREY, MEXICO (BNO NEWS) — A group of gunmen executed eight people in a downtown street in northern Mexico on early Thursday morning, officials said on Friday. It is the latest violence in connection with the so-called drug war.
The brutal killings happened on early Thursday morning on the crossroads of Aramberri and Martín de Zavala streets in downtown Monterrey, the capital of the Mexican state of Nuevo León.
Police said the group of gunmen and the victims arrived at the scene in a number of vehicles. The gunmen then forced the victims, some of them believed to be minors, to exit the vehicles before they were executed in the middle of the crossroad.
After the gunmen fled the area, a large number of security forces arrived at the scene and cordoned off the area to carry out an investigation. After conducting initial analysis of the bullet shells scattered on the ground, Attorney General Adrián de la Garza said the assailants used 40 caliber hand guns.
The identities of the victims were not immediately known, and police were interviewing witnesses on Thursday as they investigated the killings. Authorities believe the massacre is related to the murder of a ninth person, a woman, at a nearby lot near Santa Lucía.
Just several weeks into the new year, Mexico has already witnessed at least 98 similar executions as the Mexican drug war continues. Figures released by the country’s Attorney General office (PGR) earlier this month showed that more than 47,000 people have been killed during the past five years as a result of organized crime in Mexico.
Figures for the entire year of 2011 are not yet available, but PGR said at least 12,903 drug-related killings were reported between January and September 2011. This will likely bring the total figure for 2011 to more than 17,000, the highest annual number yet.
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Some simple facts:
* Colombia, Peru, Mexico or Afghanistan with their coca leaves, marijuana buds or poppy sap are not igniting temptation in the minds of our weak, innocent citizens. These countries are duly responding to the enormous demand that comes from within our own borders. Invading or destroying these countries, thus creating more hate, violence, instability, injustice and corruption, will not fix our problem. We need to collectively admit that we are sick. — Prohibition is neither a sane nor a safe approach; left unabated, its puritanical flames will surely engulf every last one of us.
* A rather large majority of people will always feel the need to use drugs, such as heroin, opium, nicotine, amphetamines, alcohol, sugar, or caffeine.
* Just as it was impossible to prevent alcohol from being produced and used in the U.S. in the 1920s, so too, it is equally impossible to prevent any of the aforementioned drugs from being produced and widely used by those who desire to do so.
* Due to Prohibition (historically proven to be an utter failure at every level), the availability of most of these mood-altering drugs has become so universal and unfettered that in any city of the civilized world, any one of us would be able to procure practically any drug we wish within an hour.
* The massive majority of people who use drugs do so recreationally – getting high at the weekend then up for work on a Monday morning.
* A small minority of people will always experience drug use as problematic.
* Throughout history, the prohibition of any mind-altering substance has always exploded usage rates, overcrowded jails, fueled organized crime, created rampant corruption of law-enforcement – even whole governments, while inducing an incalculable amount of suffering and death.
* The involvement of the CIA in running Heroin from Vietnam, Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and Cocaine from Central America has been well documented by the 1989 Kerry Committee report, academic researchers Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott, and the late journalist Gary Webb.
* It’s not even possible to keep drugs out of prisons, but prohibitionists wish to waste hundreds of billions of our money in an utterly futile attempt to keep them off our streets.
* Prohibition kills more people and ruins more lives than the prohibited drugs have ever done.
* The United States jails a larger percentage of it’s own citizens than any other country in the world, including those run by the worst totalitarian regimes, yet it has far higher use/addiction rates than most other countries.
* The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.
- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, essayist and philologist.