Assailants gunned down three people returning from a party at a U.S. Consulate employee’s home in the Mexican city of Juarez, including a pregnant U.S. government employee and her husband, in two attacks a few minutes apart that prompted a furious response from the White House on Sunday.
The White House said President Obama was “deeply saddened and outraged” by the slayings, which occurred in broad daylight. They appeared to be the latest sign of the surge of drug violence in Mexico in recent years, which has claimed thousands of lives in border cities such as Juarez. But it was unusual for U.S. citizens to be slain — particularly an American government employee.
State Department officials said authorities were still investigating whether the victims were targeted by drug gangs, but it did not appear that the slain consular employee was involved in counter-narcotics work. Her in-laws identified her as Lesley A. Enriquez, 35, of El Paso, just across the border. She was a locally hired employee of the consulate whose job involved helping U.S. citizens, American officials said. Her husband, Arthur Redelfs, 34, worked for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department, according to his brother, Reuben Redelfs.
First the Mexican Military terrorizes Texas border town and now this. I have to wonder… why can’t Obama keep us safe from terrorists?
/sarcasm
I’m surprised Obama and the CIA don’t launch a few UAV drones over the Mexican border to kill them and along a couple dozen innocent civilians.
“why can’t Obama keep us safe from terrorists?”
Terrorist deaths in USA under Obama – 2
Terorist deaths in USA under Bush – nearly 2,000
I am no fan of Obama, but to be fair the situation with Mexico has been in the crapper for years, and is hardly a Democrat or Republican problem.
The border is a problem that will continue to grow until the incentive is gone.
The situation in Mexico itself, is I hate to say this, Mexico’s problem. The last thing we need is for US troops to be patrolling the cities of Mexico. Mexico is a dangerous place, bad things will happen to good people. It sucks and I feel for the people involved, but this happens sometimes when diplomats are stationed in dangerous places.
#2. Does that include domestic terrorists, i.e. CIA, FBI, Police…etc?
You know, the murders that don’t make the news.
I wonder if’
we bombed Mexico with Letters, asking if they wish to join the USA…
WHO would complain?
THE RICH.
THE CORPS.
THE MEX bureaucrats..
The drug cartels..
And all the rest??
Tell them to SIT at home and wait, as we walk across the nation and CLEAN IT UP..
Call off the war on drugs, allow legal manufacture by American companies, tax it, and these guys disappear. Along with drug related crimes and a sizable portion of our national debt.
#6 Well said R.O.P!!!!!
To get Mexico to work again, things to start with would be:
1) Renegotiate NAFTA, let México protect its own markets again. That will mean less unemployment and less crisis south of the border.
2) Stop medeling in Mexican politics. No more CIA involvement to get people like Calderon elected instead of candidates such the real winner of the 2006 elections: AMLO http://www.amlo.org.mx/
3) Legalize all the main drugs that cross the border.
MI-13, the Crips, Bloods, Hell’s Angels, Pagans, the Mafia, etc. would have to support themselves with bake sales and car washes.
#8. Agreed. But I’ll take it one step further. If the addicts can’t afford it…give it to them. Have them sign up (like methadone clinics) and give them all they want. I would rather they die under a bridge with a needle in their arm than invade my grandmothers house and kill her for their fix.
“At least 18,000 people have been killed in Mexico since December 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón deployed the army to battle increasingly powerful traffickers.”
#8 Do you really think if drugs were legal these gangs would disappear? Or would they find other means like extortion, kidnappings, home invasions, armed robberies…
Of course they would disappear or appropriately down size. Right now home invasions and armed robberies are largely carried out by the customers of the drug gangs/cartels desperate for access to the drugs their addictions crave. Legal, low priced (maybe subsidized), recovery support programs available certainly takes away and even eliminates the need for criminal activity. The Italian mafia sure isn’t living large off extortion or kidnappings, what makes you think these other gangs would? Even a small portion of the money spent ineffectively fighting the drug wars focused on other crimes and recovery programs would make a huge difference in public safety with money left over for the national debt. The war on drugs has been an incredibly expensive and ineffective program to eliminate the crime around the sale of drugs in this country. It’s time to try something else.
#4 Maybe you should move to Venezuela with your good buddy Sean Penn.
#6, yeah right.
#2, touch yourself much?
#2 The last major attack I think was Fort Hood but hardly the only one. There was an earlier attack on some military guys that were outside by a Islamic. I think he got two. Then you have the guy in Texas who didn’t like taxes. Crashed a plane I think? Not sure how many he got.
In any event dude you aren’t exactly keeping up on the body count. I think the number might still be less than twenty if they have to be dead but I haven’t been keeping close tabs. Of course less than half the people shot at Hood actually died. Over thirty people were shot at Hood.
If you want to start counting people murdered by Mexican drug traffickers you might have to add a dozen or more bodies.
I have to ask.
How many People here Know that Obama Just resigned the Patriot Act? How safe does that make you feel right now?
#14 Skeptic
Of course the drug companies would NEVER sell anything unsafe or market destructive and deadly drugs, and the government would NEVER approve anything harmful or untested.
There was a great rolling of eyes.
Silly boy…those aren’t terrorists. -those are messengers sending a message of whats to come..a HUGE difference. (esp since there is no such thing as a terrorist in the “real” world)
when “messengers” come knocking and slay people, we always blame the violence on drugs to cover the truth and profit from the lie.
sad.
-s
#14, sounds like you are describing the ills of alcohol in a bottle.
Terrorists, terrorists, and more terrorists. They’re everywhere, they’re anyone. Your neighbor, your classmates, people you see every day. They’re just waiting for an opportunity to kill you. /sarcasm
Anybody recall McCarthyism?
The mexican mafia can be pretty dangerous, but terrorists they are not. It seems terrorism’s the new boogeyman to frighten the children with. It’s a legal problem, what the hell are the DEA agents doing anyways? Sitting on their collective thumbs? This is the problem with becoming obsessed with your fears. If it’s not a terrorist activity it doesn’t get priority.
Terrorist–killing innocent people to make a statement? Close enough in this case I think. Not so much in the more recent 3-4 cases of mentally ill single actors. Here its the drug cartel.
Whats worse is USA interfering with Mexico trying to legalize drugs to lessen their/our woes. We would rather give them 100 MM in helicopters than much less for drug rehab programs within a legal system.
All this “moralizing” really is sending us into the crapper===right where we will meet idiots of all types who deny a healthcare approach to something that need not be treated as a crime.
But ya can’t argue with unthinking dogma and the idiots here posting as they do: “What legitimate drug company is going to sell death in a bottle—” thats sofa king retarded its f*cktarded—and yet fools like these are allowed to vote.
The weird thing is that anything “illegal” is, by definition, beyond government control.
The consequences of that statement are huge.
Anything “illegal” cannot be regulated.
Now, governments use corporations as the yoke to control behaviors. Yet, anything “illegal” is automatically beyond the scope of using a corporate control mechanism.
Governments use the corporate control mechanism because governments themselves, at least on scale, are woefully inefficient and therefore inherently incapable of achieving objectives.
Too simplistic?
Yes, because the other factor is “wealth”. Division of wealth is another undercurrent.
This would suggest the answer of making everything legal on some legal and of communism. Yet we know from several forms of history that “communism” hasn’t worked so far (one little known example is early Israel communes) and the idea of legalizing everything is a bit preposterous (think of the idea of legalizing child prostitution, for instance).
Oh complex world …
HMyer==you have about a 50% hit rate. This is one of your fails. Your analysis pinballs between extremes.
Find your course somewhere down the middle.
For instance: When you make laws that do not have a strong majority support, they are likely to be flouted without an unacceptable amount of resources given to enforcement.
That would indicate to make some/more/most drugs legal and then really think about why other drugs should remain illegal. The taint of moralism and untrue scare tatics will be removed.
Its not so much “complex” as by and large people can smell BS and don’t like it.
And the killings are occurring in Acapulco now.
At least 13 people were killed Saturday, some of them beheaded, around the popular beach resort of Acapulco, just as foreign visitors have begun arriving for spring break.
It is not just drug dealers who are being killed.
The dead in Acapulco included five police officers, who were ambushed while on patrol on the city’s outskirts about 2 a.m.
The headline in the LA Times:
MEXICO UNDER SIEGE
Obama’s response? Now, please don’t do that again or we are going to have to ask the Mexican government to put these alleged perpetrators on trial.
I’ll say it again: when drugs are legal, only people choosing to do drugs (sic) get hurt. When drugs are illegal, many INNOCENT people get hurt such as this thread reports.
It doesn’t even matter if on drug legalization more people ruined their lives because of addiction==those choosing not to do drugs would not be getting killed, maimed, burglarized etc.
If you support keeping drugs illegal, you can’t prioritize your own best interests==or anyone elses. My your life remain insulated and untouched by the chaos your laws create.
If I was a betting man, I’d bet that it will eventually turn out that these nice people who were murdered were in the drug trade. Just a hunch…
The evidence has been clear for decades that marijuana should be legalized. The people against it now must have psychological issues they’re working thru… that’s the only reason I can think of that they’d be against it.
A lawyer friend of mine in Arizona who worked for the attorney general’s office there told me the problems in Mexico have much to do with their decrepit legal system. Couple that with mob-like “omerta” fears run rampant in a population, high demand for drugs in the good old El Norte, corruption, a violent machismo culture etc. etc. What a brew.
I also once knew a guy who had been busted trying to run a kilo of weed out of Mexico, and he spent two years in jail there, while his court-appointed “lawyer” tried to find out how much money his family had, so they could extort it. They finally let him go when they couldn’t squeeze any more blood out of the turnip. (his dad was a doctor in Indiana who ended up mortgaging his house to pay them)
Mexico is about a decade away from complete lawlessness. Soon we will be living next the North American equivalent of Somalia.
(Maybe it’s just he doesn’t want to bother with a Texas that wants to secede, changes history, lies in textbooks and actively tries to keep its children dumb about everthing that isn’t neocon/fascist approved.)
Oh! Did I say that outloud?
/sarcasm