"While the vast majority of those killed are affiliated with the drug cartels, dozens if not hundreds of innocents have been killed in the past year. Among them: a little girl in Ciudad Juarez; six people in front of a recreation center, also in Juarez; a 14-year-old girl in Acapulco; two small children in Tijuana.
The violence has become so bad that last week U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to Puerto Vallarta to meet with her Mexican counterpart, Patricia Espinosa, and told her that tackling drug crime was a "national-security priority" for both countries."
We all know these dangerous drug terrorists hate our freedoms, so they are exercising some of their own for the immense profits only possible when government creates artificial black markets in commodities.
Indeed....a HUGE mess."National forests and parks — long popular with Mexican marijuana-growing cartels — have become home to some of the most polluted pockets of wilderness in America because of the toxic chemicals used to eke lucrative harvests from rocky mountainsides, federal officials said.The grow sites have taken hold from the West Coast's Cascade Mountains to federal lands in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Seven hundred grow sites were discovered on U.S. Forest Service land in California alone in 2007 and 2008 — and authorities say the 1,800-square-mile Sequoia National Forest is the hardest hit.
Weed and bug sprays, some long banned in the U.S., have been smuggled to the marijuana farms. Plant growth hormones have been dumped into streams, and the water has then been diverted for miles in PVC pipes.Rat poison has been sprinkled over the landscape to keep animals away from tender plants. And many sites are strewn with the carcasses of deer and bears poached by workers during the five-month growing season that is now ending.
"What's going on on public lands is a crisis at every level," said Forest Service agent Ron Pugh. "These are America's most precious resources, and they are being devastated by an unprecedented commercial enterprise conducted by armed foreign nationals. It is a huge mess."
Who could have ever anticipated that billions and billions in tax-free profits would incent armed foreign nationals to invade and degrade our country, through our border free-for-all.
Nevertheless, onward!
"Mexico's National Human Rights Commission has documented 634...cases of alleged abuse by the military since President Felipe Calderon sent more than 20,000 soldiers across the nation to take back territory controlled by drug traffickers.
But $400 million in drug-war aid just approved by the U.S. Congress doesn't require the U.S. to independently verify that the military has cleaned up its fight, as many American lawmakers and Mexican human rights groups had insisted.
Instead, the money comes with few strings and no yearly evaluations — exactly what Calderon wanted.
"The U.S. government has finally recognized that this is a shared problem, a bilateral one," Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino said Friday.
"Mexico's ruling party had complained that tying the money to a U.S. evaluation of Mexico's human rights record would violate national sovereignty. And many citizens defend the military, arguing that soldiers can't be hamstrung by fears of human rights investigations as they risk their lives confronting drug traffickers."
(It is truly breathtaking that any official from anywhere in the United States would actually lecture Mexico about cleaning up its human rights act viz a viz the drug war. Talk about pot calling the kettle....no pun intended.)
We all just need to understand how the evil scourge of personal drug usage is far worse for human beings than, say, brutalizating and subjugating them to limitless state control and coercion, enforced with violent often fatal impunity.
All this death and mayhem to make sure no one "gets high" on anything ... especially nothing natural....except of course for booze and prescription pills.
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