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Jul 17 15 6:05 AM
Custodian of Castle Anthrax
Molly say:So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.
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Jul 17 15 7:06 AM
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Jul 17 15 9:01 AM
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Jul 17 15 9:54 AM
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Jul 17 15 11:18 AM
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Jul 17 15 12:10 PM
I not only live in a border state, but I'm also frequently making deliveries in those border towns where cartel violence is at it's most extreme. I'm a little more alert while there, but I'm also reasonably comfortable with the knowledge that I've not done anything to piss them off.
Except that ISIS/ISIL have killed what, maybe half a dozen US citizens, and none on US soil. While the Cartels kill several dozen a year... on US soil (and many more as a result of their 'product'). Regardless of how reasonably comfortable you are, lots more US citizens get killed by the cartels every year, than are killed by ISIS/ISIL, and no matter how reasonably comfortable you may feel, there is no guarantee they will continue to be reasonably comfortable with your presence.
To be in danger from ISIS/ISIL you will need to travel to Syria or some similar country.
Just looking in from the outside, I'd say US citizens are a greater danger to US citizens than ISIS/ISIL, given the number of firearms associated deaths per year, as compared to the number of US citizens killed by ISIS/ISIL.
But what would I know, I used to live in a tectonically active country, on a fault line, and experience quakes on a regular basis, and that never bothered me.
Jul 17 15 1:49 PM
So I'm still baffled at this claim that I should be more afraid of a Mexican cartel member than I should be of stumbling across one of the holy warriors of the Islamic State.
The scale of the September 11, 2001, attacks tended to obliterate America’s memory of pre-9/11 terrorism, yet measured by the number of terrorist attacks, the volume of domestic terrorist activity was much greater in the 1970s. That tumultuous decade saw 60 to 70 terrorist incidents, mostly bombings, on U.S. soil every year—a level of terrorist activity 15 to 20 times that seen in the years since 9/11, even when foiled plots are counted as incidents. And in the nine-year period from 1970 to 1978, 72 people died in terrorist incidents, more than five times the number killed by jihadist terrorists in the United States in the almost nine years since 9/11. ...The contrast between the level of terrorist violence in the United States today and that in the 1970s is indicated in RAND’s chronology of terrorism, which records 83 terrorist attacks in the United States between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three of which were clearly connected with the jihadist cause. (The RAND database includes Abdulmutallab’s failed Christmas Day attempt to detonate a bomb on an airplane.) The other jihadist plots were interrupted by authorities. In addition to the jihadist attacks, this total includes the anthrax letters sent in late 2001, which killed five people, as well as numerous low-level attacks by environmental extremists (38) and animal-rights fanatics (12), which account for most of the violence. In all, 24 people were killed between 9/11 and the end of 2009, including the 13 who died at Fort Hood.
Who Are the Recruits? Most of America’s homegrown terrorists are U.S. citizens. Information on national origin or ethnicity is available for 109 of the identified homegrown terrorists. The Arab and South Asian immigrant communities are statistically overrepresented in this small sample, but the number of recruits is still tiny. There are more than 3 million Muslims in the United States, and few more than 100 have joined jihad - about one out of every 30,000—suggesting an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology and its exhortations to violence. A mistrust of American Muslims by other Americans seems misplaced .....The 1970s Saw Greater Terrorist Violence While radicalization and recruitment to jihadist terrorism remain cause for continuing concern, the current threat must be kept in perspective. What has not occurred is just as significant as what has occurred: Thus far, there has been no sustained jihadist terrorist campaign in the United States. There are many possible reasons: Al-Qaeda simply lacked the assets to carry out terrorist operations. The local Muslim community rejected al-Qaeda’s appeals and actively intervened to dissuade those with radical tendencies from violence. Domestic intelligence efforts were expanded and improved and thus far have succeeded in thwarting all but two actual attacks. Surveillance of radical venues, real or imagined, plus actual arrests contributed to a deterrent effect. Guns are readily available, but the ingredients of explosives became harder to obtain and were more closely monitored. Security visibly improved. While constant government admonitions early in the decade to remain vigilant seemed silly afterthoughts to dire warnings of imminent attack, citizens became more watchful and reported suspicious activity, which in at least a few of the cases yielded real results, adding further to a deterrent effect. The scale of the September 11, 2001, attacks tended to obliterate America’s memory of pre-9/11 terrorism, yet measured by the number of terrorist attacks, the volume of domestic terrorist activity was much greater in the 1970s. That tumultuous decade saw 60 to 70 terrorist incidents, mostly bombings, on U.S. soil every year—a level of terrorist activity 15 to 20 times that seen in the years since 9/11, even when foiled plots are counted as incidents. And in the nine-year period from 1970 to 1978, 72 people died in terrorist incidents, more than five times the number killed by jihadist terrorists in the United States in the almost nine years since 9/11. In the 1970s, terrorists, on behalf of a variety of causes, hijacked airliners; held hostages in Washington, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco; bombed embassies, corporate headquarters, and government buildings; robbed banks; murdered diplomats; and blew up power transformers, causing widespread blackouts. These were not one-off attacks but sustained campaigns by terrorist gangs that were able to avoid capture for years. The Weather Underground was responsible for 45 bombings between 1970 and 1977, the date of its last action, while the New World Liberation Front claimed responsibility for approximately 70 bombings in the San Francisco Bay area between 1974 and 1978 and was believed to be responsible for another 26 bombings in other Northern California cities. Anti-Castro Cuban exile groups claimed responsibility for nearly 100 bombings. Continuing an armed campaign that dated back to the 1930s, Puerto Rican separatists, reorganized in 1974 as the Armed Front for National Liberation (FALN), claimed credit for more than 60 bombings. The Jewish Defense League and similar groups protesting the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union claimed responsibility for more than 50 bombings during the decade. Croatian and Serbian émigrés also carried out sporadic terrorist attacks in the United States, as did remnants of the Ku Klux Klan.Some of these groups clearly benefited from the support of radicalized subcultures or sympathetic ethnic communities, which made suppression difficult. And domestic intelligence collection was less sophisticated in the 1970s than it is today. The techniques that had in previous decades allowed authorities to penetrate large organizations such as the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan did not work with the tiny, more fluid terrorist gangs of the 1970s. Domestic intelligence also operated under greater constraints, which reflected a very different public perception of threat but also a reaction to revelations of prior abuses connected with domestic intelligence operations. The contrast between the level of terrorist violence in the United States today and that in the 1970s is indicated in RAND’s chronology of terrorism, which records 83 terrorist attacks in the United States between 9/11 and the end of 2009, only three of which were clearly connected with the jihadist cause. (The RAND database includes Abdulmutallab’s failed Christmas Day attempt to detonate a bomb on an airplane.) The other jihadist plots were interrupted by authorities. In addition to the jihadist attacks, this total includes the anthrax letters sent in late 2001, which killed five people, as well as numerous low-level attacks by environmental extremists (38) and animal-rights fanatics (12), which account for most of the violence. In all, 24 people were killed between 9/11 and the end of 2009, including the 13 who died at Fort Hood. America’s perception of the terrorist threat today differs greatly from the perception of 35 years ago. Current concerns are driven not by the little bombs of the 1970s but by fear of another event on the scale of 9/11 or of even more frightening scenarios involving terrorist use of biological or nuclear weapons. In response, the nation has conceded to the authorities broader powers to prevent terrorism. But that attitude could change with revelations of abuse or with heavy-handed tactics, either of which could easily discredit all intelligence operations, provoke public anger, and erode the most effective barrier of all to radicalization: the cooperation of the community.
Who Are the Recruits?
Most of America’s homegrown terrorists are U.S. citizens. Information on national origin or ethnicity is available for 109 of the identified homegrown terrorists. The Arab and South Asian immigrant communities are statistically overrepresented in this small sample, but the number of recruits is still tiny. There are more than 3 million Muslims in the United States, and few more than 100 have joined jihad - about one out of every 30,000—suggesting an American Muslim population that remains hostile to jihadist ideology and its exhortations to violence. A mistrust of American Muslims by other Americans seems misplaced
but I'm also reasonably comfortable with the knowledge that I've not done anything to piss them off.-Red
California is particularly vulnerable to Russian organized crime because only New York state has a larger population of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. These new crime groups have been identified in major California cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, and San Diego. They maintain ties to criminal organizations back in Russia and are forging working agreements with other Latin American and Asian syndicates.
Jul 17 15 4:14 PM
Perhaps I'm being a little dense, and if someone would like to take a try at enlightening me, I'll make a concerted effort to see the point.
Jul 17 15 6:40 PM
More truck drivers were fatally injured on the job, 852, than workers in any other single occupation, the Labor Department said, although the fatal injuries among truck drivers declined 5 percent in 2000.
However, the militants were primarily concerned with seizing and holding territory in Iraq and Syria until the US began targeting them.
Jul 17 15 8:31 PM
what happens when a theocracy with the potential resources that they have is allowed to spread totally unchecked?
That's hard to say, as they aren't unchecked... they may have been for a while, due to the fact that groups that are now checking them, were for quite a while on the USs terrorist list, and just as hotly pursued with US manufactured ordinance. That seems to have changed recently, as the US government appears to have realised that just because a group has an issue with a US supported dictatorship, it doesn't mean the group actually dislikes the US... per see, and that group could really be an ally if the US woke up to itself.
It also needs to be noted that groups like ISIS/ISIL exist as a direct result of US action in the area. It's unlikely they would now exist, if the US had not invaded Iraq, as the core of ISIS/ISIL is Iraqi Baathists.
Once again I don't see any apologist rhetoric in support of ISIS/ISIL, what I see is debunking of US government and main stream media claims that ISIS/ISIL is a direct and existential to the people of the US, which clearly it is not. It is a potential threat, that can become manifest, if the US government doesn't deal with it in an appropriate manner, and so far I have seen little of that, what I have seen is a hell of a lot of fear mongering, that directly feeds into Islamaphobia, with the wrong people being targeted, thus potentially, and actually (in that part of the world) causing support for such groups.
The fact is the cartels are an existential threat, whether you personally feel threatened or not. In the same way that seismic activity in New Zealand is, and was for me, an existential threat, no matter how little I personally felt threatened by it.
Jul 17 15 9:40 PM
They wasn't hurtin' nobody, just gatherin' themsleves up some land til that nasty 'merica came by 'n started a fuss. This is again slightly disingenuous, as it wasn't just land the group wanted, they desired to create, as their name implies, a Caliphate, a theocracy based upon their own interpretation of Islam, and their conduct while doing so was by any measure fairly horrific.
however, if we're playing the what if game, what happens when a theocracy with the potential resources that they have is allowed to spread totally unchecked?
Jan 01 2015Mexican Students Didn’t Just ‘Disappear’ Describing them as 'missing' is missing the context By Andalusia Knoll Large anti-government demonstrations were held across Mexico in the wake of the disappearance of 43 student teachers abducted in Iguala, Guerrero, in September The forced disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Mexico has catapulted the security crisis that the US’s southern neighbors are living into northern headlines. However, the majority of English-language news accounts have failed to provide a deeper context concerning the failed war on drugs and the use of forced disappearances as a repressive state tactic, and employ language that often criminalizes the disappeared students. On the night of September 26, approximately 80 students in the southwestern state of Guerrero were travelling through the small city of Iguala in a bus caravan on their way back to their teacher training college in Ayotzinapa. In Iguala they were intercepted by municipal police, who opened fire on their buses in three separate attacks, killing two students from Ayotzinapa, one teenage soccer player and two other bystanders. At least 25 people were injured, including one student who is still in a coma, and the municipal police forced dozens of the students to board their patrol vehicles. The number of detained students totals 43; no one has heard from them since they were last seen in police custody. The following day, another student was found dead near the scene of the attack with his eyes gouged out and the skin on his face torn off. According to the Mexican government, Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda ordered the attack, and the police handed the students over to a local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos. Supposed gang members who were later arrested testified that the students were brought to a garbage dump in the neighboring town of Cocula, where they were murdered, incinerated and their ashes dumped in bags in a river. Human rights groups have expressed concern that these detainees may have been tortured during their confessions, making their testimonies questionable. The Ayotzinapa students were unarmed and say their main defense during the attack was to drop to the ground, throw rocks to make the police stop firing or run to avoid the bullets (YouTube, 10/21/14). Yet, according to most English-language outlets, they engaged in a “violent clash.” According to BBC World (9/29/14), the “students…disappeared after deadly clashes erupted between them and security forces during a protest.” Al Jazeera America (10/1/14) basically repeated the same words: “In the aftermath of the clashes between security forces and students last week, 22 officers from the city of Iguala were detained Monday and charged with homicide.” The students of Ayotzinapa, a school for educators of the rural poor that is historically underfunded and constantly at risk of extinction, have a long tradition of taking to the streets to ensure their school’s survival. That said, according to all eyewitness accounts, they were not protesting education reforms that day, nor protesting local politicians. In fact, the students were all freshmen and largely unaware of the politics of the mayor who allegedly ordered the attack, fearing that the students would interrupt a public event hosted by his wife. According to the New York Times (9/29/14), the disappeared students had “been missing since Friday when gunmen fired on a demonstration they were attending.” Why do most media outlets inaccurately characterize the events in Iguala as a protest or demonstration? Because they pulled their staffers out of Mexico long ago due to budget cuts, and therefore instead of interviewing survivors or eyewitnesses have echoed misinformation in AP pressers (e.g., Guardian, 9/29/14). Various media outlets attempted to explain the police attacks as a result of the student’s commandeering of commercial coach buses. A New York Times article (10/18/14) claimed that the students had been organizing an October 2 protest against cuts to their state-financed school, but they appear to have gotten into a skirmish with the police when they tried to steal buses to travel to and from the demonstration, human rights groups said. According to Ayotzinapa students, they commandeer buses because their school does not have sufficient vehicles nor the funds to rent them. In recent years they have reached an agreement with two bus companies in Guerrero, who lend their buses and drivers to the students as long as they take good care of them. According to one student interviewed for this article, they already had an agreement with the bus companies for that night, and had travelled to Iguala to retrieve the vehicles. The Spanish word “desaparecido” does not directly translate to “missing,” although that word is commonly used to refer to the 43 Ayotzinapa students. At times, “desaparecido” is more correctly translated to “disappeared,” but often it is said students “disappeared,” as opposed to “were disappeared,” as if they mysteriously vanished rather than being forcibly taken away, which is what the word actually connotes. Simply saying people “disappeared” rips the word of its context, separating it from the tens of thousands of people whose fate is still unknown due to dictatorial rule in Latin America and the war on drugs in Mexico. The official number of disappeared people in Mexico is often cited in Mexican and international media as around 20,000, but a National Human Rights Commission report says 42,300 people are missing. This doesn’t include the thousands of migrants who cross Mexico yearly, many of whom are kidnapped or disappeared, nor the cases that go unreported. A February 2013 Human Rights Watch report detailed 149 forced disappearances at the hands of state agents during former Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s term (2006–12). Federico Mastrogiovanni, an Italian journalist based in Mexico, in his new book Neither Alive, Nor Dead, calls forced disappear- ances a strategy of terror. They are characterized, he writes (Mexico Voices, 10/29/14), by “the intervention, direct or indirect, by action or by omission, of public officials.” In Iguala, the city where the students were kidnapped, residents have reported hundreds of disappearances over the past few years, and nothing had been done to address the situation. NBC (11/5/14) mentioned disappearances, but not the government’s involvement in a large percentage of the cases: “Last year, federal authorities had said that more than 26,000 people had disappeared between 2006–2012 in Mexico, although it was unclear how many of those cases were linked to cartel violence.” Additionally, almost all US media outlets fail to mention Guerrero’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s, when the government and army waged a battle against emerging guerilla forces, disappearing hundreds of people believed to have been part of insurgent groups. The official documents detailing the government strategy were released in 2006, and according to Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico project of the National Security Archive, they contain “dozens and dozens of pages of the names of people picked up by the police and tortured and disappeared.” In Mexico, it’s hard to hear academics and activists speak about Ayotzinapa without referencing the “Dirty War,” yet this dark era in Mexican history receives almost no mention in US mainstream press. Over the past two months, the Mexican government has changed its version of the attack on the Ayotzinapa students at least three times. First they claimed the students were marched up hillsides in Iguala and forced to dig their own graves, then they said the students were killed and dumped in a garbage dump in Cocula, and then, in another version, they were killed and incinerated in a separate garbage dump in the same town. On December 6, an independent Argentine forensic team confirmed that the remains found in one of the bags of ashes belong to Ayotzinapa student Alexander Mora Venancio. However, this forensic team, along with the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center, said that they were not present for the discovery of the bag and could not confirm that it came from the Cocula garbage dump. The parents of the disappeared students, human rights organizations and the Ayotzinapa students have repeatedly stated that they will not believe that the other human remains belong to the other 42 students until they have been identified by the same Argentine forensic team. But prior to the confirmation of Mora Venancio’s body, US media outlets had already taken the 43 students for dead. An AP piece (10/11/14) says, “In the case of the missing students, many of the bodies in the mass grave were burned,” even though these bodies didn’t belong to the students. “The massacre of 43 students from a teachers college in Ayotzinapa has horrified Mexico,” writes Enrique Krauze, in a New York Times opinion piece (11/10/14) giving weight to the veracity of the government version of events. According to Mexican security analysts, Guerreros Unidos is a drug cartel that traffics heroin across international borders. US media, however, continually refer to them as a “drug gang.” This diminishes both their international scale and the power they wield within the Guerrero state government. “The killers in Iguala were not drug gangs,” writes Dawn Paley, a Canadian writer based in Mexico. She urges her readers to recognize who the agents were who fired on the students: They were cops and paramilitaries. Paramilitaries are non-state armed groups who work with state forces. There can be no clearer example of the horrors of state and paramilitary violence than what has happened to these students. “These organized crime groups are the armed wing of the government, and do the dirty work that they themselves would not do,” Abel Barrera, director of the Guerrero- based human rights organization Tlachinollan, told Extra!. Reports have sometimes mentioned how drug cartels seem to possess more power than the government, but fail to note that in various municipalities in Guerrero government officials are actually members of drug cartels. In social media and in the streets, many Mexicans have called for the resignation of President Enrique Pena Nieto due to his slow and ineffectual response to the crisis. But various outlets portray the issue as primarily a distraction from his neoliberal agenda, as in the AP headline (10/10/14), “Killings Drag Mexico’s President Away From Focus on Economic Reforms.” As time goes on, the foreign coverage of the Ayotzinapa case has improved, with international press featuring more critiques of the government and a deeper analysis of security in the country. The majority of articles, however, still lack a deeper understanding of the drug war, the corruption and ineptitude in all levels of the government, and the continuing police repression that surrounds the protests. The family members of the missing students and the Ayotzinapa classmates will continue to demand that their comrades be returned alive. Hopefully their voices, clamoring for justice, will be more centrally included in English-language press. Andalusia Knoll is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Mexico City who has been covering the repression against the students of Ayotzinapa since 2011. Since the Iguala attack, she has been reporting from Guerrero for Al Jazeera Plus, VICE News, Democracy Now! and various other outlets. You can follow her on Twitter @andalalucha.
Large anti-government demonstrations were held across Mexico in the wake of the disappearance of 43 student teachers abducted in Iguala, Guerrero, in September
The forced disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Mexico has catapulted the security crisis that the US’s southern neighbors are living into northern headlines. However, the majority of English-language news accounts have failed to provide a deeper context concerning the failed war on drugs and the use of forced disappearances as a repressive state tactic, and employ language that often criminalizes the disappeared students.
On the night of September 26, approximately 80 students in the southwestern state of Guerrero were travelling through the small city of Iguala in a bus caravan on their way back to their teacher training college in Ayotzinapa. In Iguala they were intercepted by municipal police, who opened fire on their buses in three separate attacks, killing two students from Ayotzinapa, one teenage soccer player and two other bystanders. At least 25 people were injured, including one student who is still in a coma, and the municipal police forced dozens of the students to board their patrol vehicles.
The number of detained students totals 43; no one has heard from them since they were last seen in police custody. The following day, another student was found dead near the scene of the attack with his eyes gouged out and the skin on his face torn off.
According to the Mexican government, Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda ordered the attack, and the police handed the students over to a local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos. Supposed gang members who were later arrested testified that the students were brought to a garbage dump in the neighboring town of Cocula, where they were murdered, incinerated and their ashes dumped in bags in a river. Human rights groups have expressed concern that these detainees may have been tortured during their confessions, making their testimonies questionable.
The Ayotzinapa students were unarmed and say their main defense during the attack was to drop to the ground, throw rocks to make the police stop firing or run to avoid the bullets (YouTube, 10/21/14). Yet, according to most English-language outlets, they engaged in a “violent clash.”
According to BBC World (9/29/14), the “students…disappeared after deadly clashes erupted between them and security forces during a protest.” Al Jazeera America (10/1/14) basically repeated the same words: “In the aftermath of the clashes between security forces and students last week, 22 officers from the city of Iguala were detained Monday and charged with homicide.”
The students of Ayotzinapa, a school for educators of the rural poor that is historically underfunded and constantly at risk of extinction, have a long tradition of taking to the streets to ensure their school’s survival. That said, according to all eyewitness accounts, they were not protesting education reforms that day, nor protesting local politicians. In fact, the students were all freshmen and largely unaware of the politics of the mayor who allegedly ordered the attack, fearing that the students would interrupt a public event hosted by his wife.
According to the New York Times (9/29/14), the disappeared students had “been missing since Friday when gunmen fired on a demonstration they were attending.” Why do most media outlets inaccurately characterize the events in Iguala as a protest or demonstration? Because they pulled their staffers out of Mexico long ago due to budget cuts, and therefore instead of interviewing survivors or eyewitnesses have echoed misinformation in AP pressers (e.g., Guardian, 9/29/14).
Various media outlets attempted to explain the police attacks as a result of the student’s commandeering of commercial coach buses. A New York Times article (10/18/14) claimed that
the students had been organizing an October 2 protest against cuts to their state-financed school, but they appear to have gotten into a skirmish with the police when they tried to steal buses to travel to and from the demonstration, human rights groups said.
According to Ayotzinapa students, they commandeer buses because their school does not have sufficient vehicles nor the funds to rent them. In recent years they have reached an agreement with two bus companies in Guerrero, who lend their buses and drivers to the students as long as they take good care of them. According to one student interviewed for this article, they already had an agreement with the bus companies for that night, and had travelled to Iguala to retrieve the vehicles.
The Spanish word “desaparecido” does not directly translate to “missing,” although that word is commonly used to refer to the 43 Ayotzinapa students. At times, “desaparecido” is more correctly translated to “disappeared,” but often it is said students “disappeared,” as opposed to “were disappeared,” as if they mysteriously vanished rather than being forcibly taken away, which is what the word actually connotes. Simply saying people “disappeared” rips the word of its context, separating it from the tens of thousands of people whose fate is still unknown due to dictatorial rule in Latin America and the war on drugs in Mexico.
The official number of disappeared people in Mexico is often cited in Mexican and international media as around 20,000, but a National Human Rights Commission report says 42,300 people are missing. This doesn’t include the thousands of migrants who cross Mexico yearly, many of whom are kidnapped or disappeared, nor the cases that go unreported. A February 2013 Human Rights Watch report detailed 149 forced disappearances at the hands of state agents during former Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s term (2006–12).
Federico Mastrogiovanni, an Italian journalist based in Mexico, in his new book Neither Alive, Nor Dead, calls forced disappear- ances a strategy of terror. They are characterized, he writes (Mexico Voices, 10/29/14), by “the intervention, direct or indirect, by action or by omission, of public officials.” In Iguala, the city where the students were kidnapped, residents have reported hundreds of disappearances over the past few years, and nothing had been done to address the situation.
NBC (11/5/14) mentioned disappearances, but not the government’s involvement in a large percentage of the cases: “Last year, federal authorities had said that more than 26,000 people had disappeared between 2006–2012 in Mexico, although it was unclear how many of those cases were linked to cartel violence.”
Additionally, almost all US media outlets fail to mention Guerrero’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s, when the government and army waged a battle against emerging guerilla forces, disappearing hundreds of people believed to have been part of insurgent groups. The official documents detailing the government strategy were released in 2006, and according to Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico project of the National Security Archive, they contain “dozens and dozens of pages of the names of people picked up by the police and tortured and disappeared.”
In Mexico, it’s hard to hear academics and activists speak about Ayotzinapa without referencing the “Dirty War,” yet this dark era in Mexican history receives almost no mention in US mainstream press.
Over the past two months, the Mexican government has changed its version of the attack on the Ayotzinapa students at least three times. First they claimed the students were marched up hillsides in Iguala and forced to dig their own graves, then they said the students were killed and dumped in a garbage dump in Cocula, and then, in another version, they were killed and incinerated in a separate garbage dump in the same town.
On December 6, an independent Argentine forensic team confirmed that the remains found in one of the bags of ashes belong to Ayotzinapa student Alexander Mora Venancio. However, this forensic team, along with the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center, said that they were not present for the discovery of the bag and could not confirm that it came from the Cocula garbage dump.
The parents of the disappeared students, human rights organizations and the Ayotzinapa students have repeatedly stated that they will not believe that the other human remains belong to the other 42 students until they have been identified by the same Argentine forensic team.
But prior to the confirmation of Mora Venancio’s body, US media outlets had already taken the 43 students for dead. An AP piece (10/11/14) says, “In the case of the missing students, many of the bodies in the mass grave were burned,” even though these bodies didn’t belong to the students.
“The massacre of 43 students from a teachers college in Ayotzinapa has horrified Mexico,” writes Enrique Krauze, in a New York Times opinion piece (11/10/14) giving weight to the veracity of the government version of events.
According to Mexican security analysts, Guerreros Unidos is a drug cartel that traffics heroin across international borders. US media, however, continually refer to them as a “drug gang.” This diminishes both their international scale and the power they wield within the Guerrero state government.
“The killers in Iguala were not drug gangs,” writes Dawn Paley, a Canadian writer based in Mexico. She urges her readers to recognize who the agents were who fired on the students:
They were cops and paramilitaries. Paramilitaries are non-state armed groups who work with state forces. There can be no clearer example of the horrors of state and paramilitary violence than what has happened to these students.
“These organized crime groups are the armed wing of the government, and do the dirty work that they themselves would not do,” Abel Barrera, director of the Guerrero- based human rights organization Tlachinollan, told Extra!.
Reports have sometimes mentioned how drug cartels seem to possess more power than the government, but fail to note that in various municipalities in Guerrero government officials are actually members of drug cartels.
In social media and in the streets, many Mexicans have called for the resignation of President Enrique Pena Nieto due to his slow and ineffectual response to the crisis. But various outlets portray the issue as primarily a distraction from his neoliberal agenda, as in the AP headline (10/10/14), “Killings Drag Mexico’s President Away From Focus on Economic Reforms.”
As time goes on, the foreign coverage of the Ayotzinapa case has improved, with international press featuring more critiques of the government and a deeper analysis of security in the country. The majority of articles, however, still lack a deeper understanding of the drug war, the corruption and ineptitude in all levels of the government, and the continuing police repression that surrounds the protests.
The family members of the missing students and the Ayotzinapa classmates will continue to demand that their comrades be returned alive. Hopefully their voices, clamoring for justice, will be more centrally included in English-language press.
Andalusia Knoll is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Mexico City who has been covering the repression against the students of Ayotzinapa since 2011. Since the Iguala attack, she has been reporting from Guerrero for Al Jazeera Plus, VICE News, Democracy Now! and various other outlets. You can follow her on Twitter @andalalucha.
Jul 17 15 10:52 PM
Padre Mellyrn wrote:So sorry, but yes our Involvment in the middle east, Iraq/Iran, Afghanistan and the continuous propping up of Brutal, dicatator and knocking them down again is getting little tiresome to the folks over there and is fueling the recruitment. That is history.
Sorry, but the Mexican Cartels have for more power, money and the desire to rule the Westren Hemispere simply because they can. They also worship a god, themselves. They don't even bother with the power excuse that they have a mandate from an undead, zombie, fairy daddy, Sky king. They believe in themselves, and they want power. It's the Brothers Kock, with less morals and fewer compunctions about slaughter hundreds of people just to make a point.
Jul 17 15 11:10 PM
tracyannef wrote:Once again I don't see any apologist rhetoric in support of ISIS/ISIL, what I see is debunking of US government and main stream media claims that ISIS/ISIL is a direct and existential to the people of the US, which clearly it is not. It is a potential threat, that can become manifest, if the US government doesn't deal with it in an appropriate manner, and so far I have seen little of that, what I have seen is a hell of a lot of fear mongering, that directly feeds into Islamaphobia, with the wrong people being targeted, thus potentially, and actually (in that part of the world) causing support for such groups. The fact is the cartels are an existential threat, whether you personally feel threatened or not. In the same way that seismic activity in New Zealand is, and was for me, an existential threat, no matter how little I personally felt threatened by it.
Jul 18 15 6:29 AM
The examples these articles pull out as other nasty bad guys do not have that same urge to destroy others who do not follow the same ideology.
Jul 18 15 8:55 AM
Padre Mellyrn wrote:The examples these articles pull out as other nasty bad guys do not have that same urge to destroy others who do not follow the same ideology. And that of course would the 'those evil Muslims', the elephant in the room being that the Christians on this side of the pond have the same types, the Evangelicals who also believe the end times are coming. And of course the Fox News Media, and several folks in Congress believe, and are pushing the war in the middle east in hopes of starting the "end of times wars".
And yet, we are all supposed to be scared to death of group of people, who have less territorry than the Greater Los Angeles area, and about as many people. We might as well be terrified that Nigaragu is going to come and invade us. I can't help but feel we are acting like the 'mythical elephant being terrified of a mouse'.
If you want a group of people to sweat, that is the ones I would be worried about, the Morons in congress who have acutal control over of the Nucs, who are being egged on by the Nut cases on Fox. But ISIS, somehow I just can't find in my heart to sweat them. Not they they don't need to be taken care of, but we in america have to stop chasing down every fly we see, while ignoring the packs of wolves just waiting for us to slip.
Jul 18 15 5:54 PM
Please don't put words in my mouth Padre, I never said anything about evil Muslims, and as I recall I never claimed that all Muslims were the root of all evil here.
which brings them between one million and three million U.S. dollars per day, they're also collecting taxes, conducting extortion of people and business, as well as receiving donations from wealthy sympathizers. They're hardly a mouse, they're well organized, effective and efficient, well led, well funded and very well armed.
As Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (2013–14) Main article: Timeline of events related to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant On 8 April 2013, al-Baghdadi released an audio statement in which he announced that al-Nusra Front had been established, financed, and supported by the Islamic State of Iraq,[115] and that the two groups were merging under the name "Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham".[57] Al-Julani issued a statement denying the merger, and complaining that neither he nor anyone else in al-Nusra's leadership had been consulted about it.[116] In June 2013, Al Jazeera reported that it had obtained a letter written by al-Qaeda's leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, addressed to both leaders, in which he ruled against the merger, and appointed an emissary to oversee relations between them to put an end to tensions.[117] The same month, al-Baghdadi released an audio message rejecting al-Zawahiri's ruling and declaring that the merger was going ahead.[118] The ISIL campaign to free imprisoned ISIL members culminated in July 2013, with the group carrying out simultaneous raids on Taji and Abu Ghraib prison, freeing more than 500 prisoners, many of them veterans of the Iraqi insurgency.[111][119] In October 2013, al-Zawahiri ordered the disbanding of ISIL, putting al-Nusra Front in charge of jihadist efforts in Syria,[120] but al-Baghdadi contested al-Zawahiri's ruling on the basis of Islamic jurisprudence,[118] and his group continued to operate in Syria. In February 2014, after an eight-month power struggle, al-Qaeda disavowed any relations with ISIL.[47]
On 8 April 2013, al-Baghdadi released an audio statement in which he announced that al-Nusra Front had been established, financed, and supported by the Islamic State of Iraq,[115] and that the two groups were merging under the name "Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham".[57] Al-Julani issued a statement denying the merger, and complaining that neither he nor anyone else in al-Nusra's leadership had been consulted about it.[116] In June 2013, Al Jazeera reported that it had obtained a letter written by al-Qaeda's leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, addressed to both leaders, in which he ruled against the merger, and appointed an emissary to oversee relations between them to put an end to tensions.[117] The same month, al-Baghdadi released an audio message rejecting al-Zawahiri's ruling and declaring that the merger was going ahead.[118] The ISIL campaign to free imprisoned ISIL members culminated in July 2013, with the group carrying out simultaneous raids on Taji and Abu Ghraib prison, freeing more than 500 prisoners, many of them veterans of the Iraqi insurgency.[111][119] In October 2013, al-Zawahiri ordered the disbanding of ISIL, putting al-Nusra Front in charge of jihadist efforts in Syria,[120] but al-Baghdadi contested al-Zawahiri's ruling on the basis of Islamic jurisprudence,[118] and his group continued to operate in Syria. In February 2014, after an eight-month power struggle, al-Qaeda disavowed any relations with ISIL.[47]
Jul 18 15 7:36 PM
Jul 19 15 6:50 AM
Jul 19 15 1:37 PM
... That is what makes us Americans.
I wasn't aware that Australia had been made a state of the US. The last time I looked we still had our silly Southern Cross and Union Jack flag.
Jul 19 15 2:37 PM
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