Mark "Zenpundit" Safranski has a links post to articles on the continuing mess in Mexico, along with a great picture of Pancho Villa.

As far as Mark's rhetorical question about there being more coverage of action in Waziristan than along the borfer wqiht Mexico, my cynical reply is "How many Waziristanis vote in the US elecitons?"

The order was clear: Kill the guy in the Astros jersey ( Read more... )

From John Robb:It appears that increasing militarization of both the US and Mexico's "war on drugs" is having an impact, although not what the governments had in mind. The myriad of groups that are dependent on the narco/smuggling economy now consider the two governments to be more of a threat to their continued success than each other. As a ( Read more... )

Ted Galen Carpenter of the CATO Institute has a new analysis of the continuing deterioration of civil society in Mexico due to turf rumbles between drug gangs. From the executive summary:

While U.S. leaders have focused on actual or illusory security threats in distant regions, there is a troubling security problem brewing much closer to home. ( Read more... )

Nobody tell De Beer.Whoever thought that science was a dry subject might change their mind after learning about a new discovery in which tequila is turned into diamonds. A team of Mexican scientists found that the heated vapor from 80-proof (40% alcohol) tequila blanco, when deposited on a silicon or stainless steel substrate, can form diamond ( Read more... )

The immediate foreign policy problem facing President Obama is a lot closer to home than Iran.Mexico has always struggled with crime and corruption, but its present troubles can be traced to the mid-90s downfall of the Colombian cartels. Those mega-cartels, epitomized by the excess of Pablo Escobar, directly threatened the Colombian state and lost ( Read more... )

There's one just next door."From the perspective of 4GW theory, it is beginning to look as if the drug traffickers/Hezbollah model may be more sophisticated and more successful than the al Qaeda model. Al Qaeda seemingly is on the ropes in Iraq, not because of the “surge” but because of its own blunders. To at least some extent those blunders ( Read more... )

As I have noted previously, operating within a hollowed-out state may benefit many 4GW entities more than replacing the state. A Potemkin state protects 4GW organizations from foreign attack; the U.S. cannot go after drug gangs within Mexico except in a surreptitious manner, because doing so would violate Mexican sovereignty. The penetrated Mexican ( Read more... )

Maybe Texas can follow the Chiapas police and throw some of the two-legged jackasses in the can for biting on the Bill of Rights.A donkey is doing time in southern Mexico for assault and battery ( Read more... )

As a break from covering the West Texas Pogrom, Grits for Breakfast has this post about the deteriorating situation in Mexico. This is a response to my giving him, in a comment to a previous post on this subject, a pointer to this post by Fabius Maximus on the Mexican situation, and he has elaborated on this from other sources.

Six police ( Read more... )