Mexican gunmen tap bus passengers in mass killing - 59 bodies found

[somone]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110407/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_drug_war_mexico

Mexican gunmen tap bus passengers in mass killing
By KATHERINE CORCORAN, Associated Press

MEXICO CITY – The buses crawled to a halt to obey roadblocks manned by armed men, who boarded like military or police doing an inspection. One by one, they tapped certain passengers, all men, mostly young, to get off: "You. You. You."

Relatives and travel companions watched in horror as the buses pulled away without them, Tamaulipas officials quoted surviving bus passengers as saying. Less than two weeks later, security forces following reports of abducted passengers in violent Tamaulipas state bordering Texas stumbled on a collection of pits holding a total of 59 bodies.

Federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire announced Thursday that a total of 14 suspects linked to the killing had been arrested between Friday and Wednesday. Those arrests apparently led authorities to the pits. Poire said the suspects belonged to a "criminal cell," but did not specify which gang or cartel they may have belonged to. He said the government is now placing a special emphasis on dismembering "the most violent gangs," but did not specify who they were.

The grisly discovery this week came in virtually the same spot near the town of San Fernando where 72 migrants were murdered in August and on the same day several thousand people across Mexico took to the streets to say they were fed up with the violence. The United States' top drug enforcer said in Mexico a day earlier that the violence means authorities are winning...

[msongs]

1. This will continue as long as recreational drugs are illegal in the USA - legalizing

pot for personal use (grow your own particularly) will put these murderers out of busines. Unfortunately the US police/prison complex will lose jobs so that will never happen.

[TheWraith]

2. You and I don't agree on much, but we agree on this.

Although I wouldn't attribute it to money, actually. The value of the private prison industry in the US is an asterisk relative to the value of legalized drug production. Private prisons in the US are worth $3 billion a year. Medical marijuana alone is worth an estimated $1.7 billion, and marijuana production in the US as a whole is estimated to be $35.6 billion dollars a year. Even just laundering a little out of the California weed industry would be enough money to buy more politicians than the prison industry could ever hope for.

The problem is social conservatism, and decades of moralistic harping on the idea of drugs = bad evil nasty. Feeling morally superior to someone else is a deep seeded impulse in the human brain, and "dope fiends," "pot heads," "junkies," "crack smokers," et al are one of the few socially acceptable targets for hatred, now that hatemongers can't wander around ranting about the Jews, and the negroes, and the Catholics. Or they can, but their Fox News show loses all it's sponsors.