No End In Sight

I've about given up beating this particular dead horse, but every time I think I'm beyond being shocked, the animals that make up the Mexican drug cartels outdo themselves.

Mexican drug cartels targeting and killing children

SAN LUIS POTOSI, Mexico — On a sunny afternoon last week, when the streets of this mountain mining city were filled with schoolchildren and parents hurrying home from work, gunmen entered a tiny apartment and started firing methodically.

The assassins killed everyone: the family matriarch and her adult son; her daughter and son-in-law, and finally, her 22-month-old granddaughter.

The child was not killed by mistake. Preliminary forensics indicate that the gunmen, unchallenged, pointed a pistol at Scarlett Ramirez and fired.

What kind of sick twisted fuck kills a 22-month-old baby in cold blood? If there is a Hell I hope this bastard and every other one like him has a reserved seat by the fire.

In Mexico’s brutal drug war, children are increasingly victims, innocents caught in the crossfire, shot dead alongside their parents — and intentionally targeted.

According to U.S. and Mexican experts, competing criminal groups appear to be killing children to terrorize the population or prove to rivals that their savagery is boundless...

Sick sick, sick...

Recent killings of children — shot in a car seat, dumped in a field with a bullet in the head, killed as their grandmothers cradled them — have shocked Mexicans and shaken their faith that family is sacred, even to the criminal gangs.

“Before, they went after their enemy. Now, they go after every member of the family, indiscriminately,” said Martin Garcia Aviles, a federal congressman from the Party of the Democratic Revolution from the state of Michoacan.

A Chihuahua state police commander was attacked as she carried her 5-year-old daughter to school two weeks ago. Both died of multiple gunshot wounds.

In February, assassins went hunting for a Ciudad Juarez man, but the intended target wasn’t home, so they killed his three daughters instead, ages 12, 14 and 15.

In March, a young woman was bound and gagged, shot and left in a car in Acapulco. Her 4-year-old daughter lay slumped beside her, killed with a single bullet to her chest. She was the fifth child killed in drug violence in the resort city in one bloody week.

“They kill children on purpose,” said Marcela Turati, author of “Crossfire,” a new book on the killings of civilians in Mexico’s drug war. “In Juarez, they told a 7-year-old boy to run, and shot his father. Then they shot the little boy.”

Words fail me.

Unfortunately, there's more.

Clutching a manila folder with photos of her missing son, Eloísa Camacho followed Hazmat-clad investigators into a room at a state morgue to give a blood sample Saturday, hoping all the while her DNA would not match any of the dozens of bodies that have been found buried in mass graves in northern Mexico.

She emerged a few minutes later, retching at the heavy odor of decomposing bodies — an unmistakable stench that saturated the air outside the building every 90 minutes or so, when investigators opened the back of the refrigerated trailer to transfer yet another body into the morgue.

As of Saturday, the bodies of 72 men had been pulled from pit graves in the Zeta drug cartel-controlled desert near San Fernando, about 85 miles south of Brownsville.

Rumors swirled that more will be found, and those with missing family have begun showing up at the morgue, trying to find some kind of resolution yet all the while praying for none.

The bodies were found beginning April 1 at 10 sites, in the same area of northern Mexico where 72 Central American migrants were found murdered last August.

Authorities blame the Zetas, a ruthless offshoot of the Gulf Cartel. Survivors said the Zetas were trying to build their ranks and killed those who refused.

And then we have the Stew Maker.

Investigators have unearthed human bones and teeth from pits used by a man known as the "Stew-maker," who confessed to dissolving 300 bodies of drug cartel victims, prosecutors said Friday.

Miguel Angel Guerrero, head of the Baja California state prosecutors' office on disappearances, said about 30 bone fragments and 15 tooth fragments were dug up Monday at a ranch in eastern Tijuana that was once occupied by Santiago "El Pozolero" Meza Lopez.

Pozole is a form of hominy stew, made with corn processed with caustic soda. Meza purportedly used a similar process to dissolve his victims.

We won't be able to ignore this much longer. There are indications that the violence is spreading northward across the border. 

The United States Consulates General in Matamoros, Nuevo Laredo and Nuevo León said Friday night that the U.S. government has received uncorroborated information that Mexican criminal gangs may intend to attack U.S. law enforcement officers or U.S. citizens in the near future in Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and San Luis Potosi.

The information is being distributed to all U.S. government employees in the three states. No other information was available at press-time.

I live and work several days each week within spitting distance of the Texas-Mexico border. Since the federal government has been completely, totally, and 100% negligent in securing the border, I'm pinning my hopes on Texas Senate Bill 354, which would allow concealed-handgun licensees to carry their weapons on college campuses. Unfortunately, it seems to have stalled in committee.

So I, and others like me, are faced with two choices. Either continue to obey the law and go around unarmed and unprotected while praying that nothing happens to us and our students, or break the law and carry a weapon that is legal everywhere else except our place of employment.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives cower in safety in places like Austin and Washington D.C., protected by distance and armed guards, neither of which are available to us.

Cowards ...