The central statistic of Mexico’s violent drug war – 40,000 gangland murders in the past five years – is repeated so often it almost fails to alarm us anymore. But what happened last Thursday, Aug. 25, in the northern business capital of Monterrey – 52 innocent people massacred after gangsters set fire to a casino, presumably …
Mexico
Mourning Monterrey: Drug Mafias Darken Mexico’s “Lighthouse”
It’s getting harder and harder to remember the Monterrey, Mexico, I first visited in 1990. Not because I’m 21 years older, but because the city now seems frighteningly darker. Monterrey in those days, on the eve of NAFTA, wasn’t just Mexico’s new business capital. It was the country’s window to the developed world – a …
Mexico’s Free Speech Fracas: For Once It’s Easy to Defend the Church
Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church isn’t an institution that progressives usually rush to defend. Its leadership is about as obscurantist as they come, and its history – including the disgraced Legionaries of Christ and their late pedophile leader, the Rev. Marcial Maciel – is checkered at best. But if you advocate free speech, …
Why the NYT’s Immigration Report Is A Welcome Antidote to the U.S. Debate
It’s big (and overdue) news this week that Mexico City and Washington have finally come to an agreement that lets Mexican truckers ferry their freight into the U.S. But Damien Cave’s excellent and provocative New York Times article about the decline of illegal Mexican immigration into the U.S., which ran on the front page yesterday, …
Four Decades Later, It’s Time to Scrap the Dead-End Drug War
I recently returned from the desert city of Durango, Mexico, where forensic officials are still trying to identify some 240 corpses discovered this year in mass graves. More than 200 other bodies have been found in similar fosas across northern Mexico. All were victims, many of them innocent victims, of the drug-trafficking …
“Caravan of Solace” Moving Towards Peace, Slowly
William Lloyd George explores the “Caravan of Solace” anti-drug violence movement for TIME. Just as hundreds of Mexicans screamed “Justice” during the final stop of the Caravan, many of the activists associated with the protest questioned both the success and the overall mission of the week-long tour. While Mexican activists agree that …