Count me out of your war to preserve the profits of both the criminal gangs and police/prison/military forces….there is a revolving door between the two.

Legalize and dis-empower both of those armed gangs.

The people who did this were ex-gov-troops, were they not? Veterans of Guatemala’s long dirty wars, wars ignored while US forces and occupied the Middle East.

The “Money for nothing” boys at work. Overpriced toxic oil, overpriced toxic drugs, and oh so many guns and violent thugs.

How many schools could we build across Central and South America using the funds we use to fuel our war on drugs?

Go to any inner city where people live in poverty and you’ll see schools that are grossly neglected and completely underfunded. It’s not a coincidence.

All enlighteneflourishingishing societies have one thing in common; the women have been educated. Educating women empowers them, giving them a weapon against the corruption of men. It’s something that they will pass down to their children as well.

Unfortunately, we are becoming a society that seems to think you have to earn the right to an education. We’ve decided it’s perfectly reasonable to jail black women who try to find ways around the system and enroll their kids in better school districts even though they don’t reside there.

Money is spent on make-believe walls and political campaigns instead of schools, allowing the rich to exploit the poor for profit. We love our cheap labor and as long as the violence poverty causes doesn’t reach our steps, we live happily in ignorance.

Makes me want to believe in god so that the justice will be meted out on the animals who committed this atrocity.

Makes me not believe in god, bc how could he allow such a horror.

Is it better to be naive or jaded?

Here’s some words about how
Mexicans feel about these matter.
From a report covering the massive and un-reported marches against the “War on Drugs” which has ravaged Mexico, and which you so strongly advocate escalating – as a response to the psyop terror committed by those who most profit from the present “War on Drugs”!

“The protest leaders called for an end to President Calderón’s “drug war”, claiming that the increase in military campaigns to stop the drug cartels is only escalating the violence and increasing civilian deaths.

Sicilia said: “The corruption at the heart and the root of the institutions has overtaken us.”

Before the march, Calderón rejected the movement’s calls, saying the war on drugs was the responsibility of all civilians and an end would allow drug cartels impunity.

But few seemed to be listening as thousands came together to silently show their outrage at the escalating violence.”

From the Independent of the UK:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mexico-marches-over-deadly-cost-of-war-on-drugs-2281626.html

…but who cares what the Mexicans want? Send in the Marines! You can raise the tax on beer to pay for it.

And Boing Boing is a little late to this “party”, although they have done better than most of the American media, whose coverage of drug issues is and has been nothing but Government propaganda for the Prohibition of drugs.

Focusing on the violence, and not the reasons for it, also serves to strengthen the prohibitionist “cause”…in fact, massacres such as this can serve to strengthen public opinion for Prohibition and for harsher drug laws and “police action”.

So….a step by gangsters, both in and out of Government, to keep their profit levels way way up, which they split with corrupt cops and anti-drug Government types.

The people in mexico know rthe score, and want the War opn drugs to send now…by full legalization of all drug use.

Others have long been reporting these “news”…

http://www.narconews.com/

…but it often seems that the major US Press and Media only pays attention if such serves to strengthen the emotional arguments for prohibition, and the hatred and fear of foreigners.

Right, Ackpht?
Scaring them straight,eh?

Whose interest does that editorial choice serve?

Which “side”? And why are there “sides” here at all?
Whose interest does THAT intellectual construction or presentation of these issues serve?

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

My main issue with your point is its reliance on the premise that a ‘black-market’ would arise in association with a legalized regulated market for now illicit drugs such as cocaine. That is likely true, there exist black-markets for tobacco and alcohol. However, they do not have the same rates of violent crime as is associated with the higher-margin, higher-risk trade of cocaine or heroin. See, http://ctsi.anu.edu.au/publications/WP/48.pdf for an exposition of the illegal tobacco trade in Australia; rates of violent crime attributable to those involved in the trade do not exceed the background rate of such crimes. I’ll of course accept all the difficulties with collecting those statistics, but not to the extent that I’ll accept that illegal cigarette vendors are responsible for as much violent crime as the Zetas or even their most conservative commercial competitors. So as far as the inevitable black-market arising, which diverts profits from Pfizer or whomever begins producing commercial cocaine, I’ll grant that their main crime would be tax-evasion (which is of course not victimless), but not that they would decapitate a ranch full of innocent hombres

The second, possibly more important point, is that you underestimate the Zeta membership if you believe they are not criminally versatile. A boingboing article currently on the front-page ( http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/21/how-many-flew-over-t.html ) discusses the nature of psychopathy, and the psychological correlates of this behavior are not induced by the specific incentives. Such an individual as cut off the heads of those ranchers, would exist regardless of the legality of cocaine in Baltimore, and they would tend to commit violent crime even for very small profit, in fact even in the absence of an economic imperative.

Vodka excluded.

i wish there was a simple solution but there isnt.

i think the suggestion for more education (spending the money going to the war on drugs on schooling) would be a great first step.

Turns out it’s cocaine and heroin, destined for North American consumers.

It’s us. We killed these people, as surely as if we’d wielded the knives.

Decriminalize. Now.

Their desire to provoke, succeeds.

Drug money fuels it (that’s right reader: you are perhaps part of the problem)

But lest we forget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'état

Sure, it’s just wiki: don’t mean it ain’t right.

And that was because of ~fruit~.

They are called ‘drugs gangs” for a reason, that’s where the lion’s share of their $$$ comes from, and without the $$$, nobody will bear arms and fight for them.

They would die from lack of fuel, eventually – legalization would cut off their funding, and there’d be no more need for killing other gangs…after all, that’s what happened when alcohol prohibition was lifted in the USA.

But it certainly is NOT the “only answer”, and the killers here ought to be hunted down and put away to do hard labour for life.

And there are people trying to do just that, even as I type this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13439321

May their hunting be successful!

You can deny and look for excuses, but no matter what you said, you are responsible of this too.

This is putting the cart before the horse. Los Zetas are a symptom of the drug trade, not it’s cause. They did not just coagulate together with the vague mission of committing crimes and then settle on selling drugs just because it was the best option. The American economic demand for drugs brought these men together as an enterprise.

Some of you folks are pointing out that this is the work of violent people who are perhaps psychopaths. The problem is not that there are violent people in Guatemala. There are violent people all over the world. The problem is that we have a drug economy that is providing an incentive for people to be violent on a large and organized scale.

You can arrest every single member of Los Zetas, but as long as that incentive exists people will rise up to fill the need. Before Los Zetas, it was the Sinaloa Cartel, and before them somebody else.

Watever, I guess its easier to blame it on those crazy psychopathic South Americans than to admit our own drug policy is directly causing this.

Second, your inability to catch an ironic coda – Vodka excluded – speaks to a sophistication level of, say, a 15-year-old. Which makes much of your gibberish about the Nazis, Soviets and other great terrors understandable.

Psychopathy is a very specific personality disorder that effects a certain percentage of the human population. You need to reacquaint yourself with the results of the Standford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment.

At Stanford, it only took six days for individuals who exhibited no psychological problems (they were screened prior) to descend into rampant abuse of the inmates (prisoners were forced to defecate on themselves). The experiment was stopped, because had it continued, chances are people were going to start killing each other.

In the Milgram Experiment, the subjects could hear the agonizing screams of the people they were led to believe they were shocking, and yet they continued. All it took were simple phrases like “the experiment has to continue”.

The Milgram Experiment was conducted in the wake of WWII to specifically understand the mindset of those who carried out the Holocaust. What was revealed is most people can be led to murder despite their own moral beliefs.

As for sex slaves replacing the drug trade, I can’t imagine it being even close to the lucrative profit margins associated with illegal drugs like cocaine.

Military weapons in the South American jungle? It’s at best a far-fetched scenario.

The only thing that’s keeping these gangs as powerful as they are is the illegal drug trade, and the most realistic way to destroy them is economic warfare in the form of legalization and regulation.

Do you want to see this kind of violence come to your town?

The cartels have already infiltrated the border patrol. There have been cartel-related murders inside the US. How long before random US citizens are found beheaded?

Anyone who thinks their casual coke or pot use is victimless need only look at these pictures. Or at our nation’s prison population.

Decriminalize and tax the shit out of it.

Why do we do this? Because no matter what policy they’re espousing, there are always politicians who can gain support by saying that it’s a simple problem with simple solutions. Don’t believe me? Read back up this thread and note how many commenters, including ones who completely disagree with one another, are saying it’s simple.

Onward.

What does this massacre say about human nature? Not a lot, really. What it does say that when power is consistently channeled outside the normal, civil, legal structures of society, it empowers lawlessness and violence, and gives it cover; and if that state of affairs continues, practitioners of naive violence will teach each other to become professionals.

That’s a general principle. We learn to live in the societies we create. We can learn to be decent, caring, law-abiding citizens who feel a sense of personal responsibility for the overall good of our society. We can also learn to be predatory thugs and murderers. Both options fall within the range of human nature. We’re a notoriously adaptable species.