Poor Mexico

These days "poor Mexico" means a lot more than a Mexico suffering from poverty. The drug wars are crucifying large parts of that country.

In the past three years, over 18,000 people have been killed in the cartel wars: competing cartel gunmen, police and military personnel, journalists, civic officials and sometimes bystanders.

President Calderon has sent 11,000 soldiers and federal police to Ciudad Juarez, while great numbers of citizens and businesses have abandoned the city. 4,500 people have been killed there since January 2008, 500 of them so far this year. After a children's birthday party last Saturday, the Aztecas gang connected to the Juarez cartel murdered a U.S. consular official and her husband and a Mexican citizen in another car.

In Nogales, Sonora, just 62 miles south of Tucson, the homicide rate continues to grow: 52 killed in 2007, 126 in 2008 and 136 in 2009. By last Friday, this year's number of homicides had already reached 70.

The cartels' reign of terror is often carried out with automatic weapons and sometimes hand grenades. Many of the guns are obtained in the U.S.

Bodies are found, sometimes in the streets and sometimes in mass graves, with torture marks and sometimes beheaded.

This war particularly affects Tucson/Pima County, the Connecticut-sized Tohono O'Odham reservation just west of Tucson, and most of Arizona. 28 percent of prosecuted crimes in Pima Country are drug-related, compared to 10 percent nationally. In just 12 months, the Tucson Police Department's home-invasion unit investigated 150 home invasions, with about 80 percent of those drug-related.

(I'm not writing this blog from some ivory tower. Many a time I've heard gunshots. I recently found a wounded dealer and then worked with three friends to clean up the blood after a barrage of bullets was fired in broad daylight across the street from a school playground.)

A vast Mexican army presence on the other side of the border and a huge enforcement buildup on this side have not been able to stop the madness. The story is not complicated: the insatiable U.S. appetite for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana means people can make such incredible amounts of money that many will torture and murder to get it.