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Saturday, January 15th, 2011

Crunching Numbers in Mexico’s Drug Conflict

Author:     JULIAN MIGLIERINI
Source:     BBC News (U.K.)
Publication Date:     14 January 2011 Last updated at 13:52 ET
 Link: Crunching Numbers in Mexico’s Drug Conflict
Stephan:   The War on Drugs has transparently become a program whose main function is to give several big bureaucracies, and a small number of corporations an endless supply of public money, and to feed into the American Gulag System, which keeps a whole other set of bureaucracies, and another group of corporations, many the same, hooked to the pipeline of public money. The fact that this system has destroyed the lives of millions of people, and caused the death of tens of thousands means nothing, when measured against the profit potential. After all most of those who die in the constant gunfire are just brown people in another country. It is digusting, and it is corroding our vitality as a democratic society.

MEXICO CITY — Nearly 35,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since late 2006

The launch this week of a comprehensive official database of drug-related killings around Mexico provides a new insight into the complexity of the conflict with criminal groups that traffic drugs into the United States.

Until now, the public relied mostly on tallies elaborated by national media outlets or on sporadic – and sometimes confusing – figures released by different government institutions.

Many in Mexico have therefore welcomed the publication of a unified set of data that for the first time includes not only fallen gang members, but also police, soldiers and innocent civilians killed in the fight against the cartels.

However, that positive development has been overshadowed by the grim scenario that the figures depict – and some complain that they only show one, even if the most tragic, aspect of the conflict.

According to the new database, the total number of people killed in the conflict between December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon came into power, and the end of 2010, stands at 34,612.

Last year was by far the bloodiest since Mr Calderon launched his head-on military confrontation with the cartels, with 15,273 deaths.
‘Transparency’

President Calderon said the database […]

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