JG,
You should thank your lucky stars that they weren't picked up by the local police, driven to an ATM, and robbed...or worse. That sort of thing has been happening at a greater frequency than in the past lately.
From the Jan. 16, 2008 New York Times:
" NOT so long ago, Mexico seemed a reasonably safe place, especially when compared with Latin American societies in the throes of civil war or paramilitary violence. But that's changed. Now virtually every day, terrifying new crimes dramatize the country's public security crisis.
Just in recent weeks, a Vermont artist was knifed to death on a Pacific Coast beach. A kidnapper called a Mexico City newspaper to boast about hacking off the ears of his hostages and to jeer at the authorities' inability to stop him. Military police officers ordered to investigate the disappearance of scores of people in a city on the Texas border were themselves arrested collecting a kidnapping ransom. The State Department has cautioned visiting Americans about the rising crime rates.
Mexican criminologists, sociologists and others are debating what's gone wrong. How did one of the safest countries in the hemisphere become a place where tourists are panicking and millions fear criminal attack whenever they leave home?
Some blame the economy, which for 15 years has seen real wages fall and the breach between rich and poor widen. Some cite sociology, saying that an entire generation of police officers are now using their violent skills as participants in organized crime. Others trace the crisis to the justice system, which is so discredited that most crimes go unreported, fewer are investigated, and only a tiny fraction of the perpetrators are ever punished. Some even blame the growth of democracy, which by stripping Mexico's ruling party of many of its authoritarian powers has also diminished its ability to repress crime.
One thing is common to all these explanations. There is a sense that Mexico's top civilian authorities have lost control of the country's criminals, who now see lucrative opportunities on all sides.
''In practical terms, the Mexican state simply doesn't respond to most crimes,'' said Ernesto Lopez Portillo, co-author of a 1994 study of public security issues. ''The authorities refuse to recognize the severity of the public security crisis, partly because it's so frightening.''
The facts are sobering. Although record-keeping is chaotic, and fear of the police keeps many victims from reporting crimes, government statistics for Mexico City show that reported murders rose by 50 percent from 1990 to 1995 and that robbery incidents have multiplied six-fold in 15 years. Experts estimate that kidnappings in Mexico, once rare, now number at least 1,500 a year.
Rafael Ruiz Harrell, a professor who is one of Mexico's most meticulous crime statisticians, has charted annual figures for all reported crimes since 1930 and concluded: ''There's a clear association between economic crisis and crime.''
For 50 years after 1930, Mexican workers enjoyed an almost uninterrupted rise in their standard of living, and in those years, he says, crime declined with equal constancy, even though Mexican wages remained far below the standard in the United States. But beginning in 1983, the first year after an economic crisis sent wages into free-fall, crime rates took off, and they have yet to level out. In 1995, the year following a disastrous peso devaluation, reported crimes in Mexico surged 35 percent, he said.
''Never before in our history has crime grown this rapidly,'' Mr. Ruiz said. ''The figures speak for themselves.''
Economic determinism has its critics, however, including President Ernesto Zedillo. In an appearance this month in New York, Mr. Zedillo said that attributing street crime to economic factors amounts to blaming the poor. Instead, he said, the problem lies with the ''inefficiency'' of Mexico's crime-fighting institutions.
How do inefficient police and prosecutors translate into more crime? ''Potential criminals act rationally and base their decision to commit a crime on an analysis of costs and benefits,'' said a recent World Bank study of crime in Latin America. Potential criminals, it said, estimate the payoff of a crime, the costs associated with committing it, and the probability of punishment.
Those who apply this calculus in Mexico see that crimes like kidnapping and drug trafficking have proven extremely lucrative in recent years, and punishment is rare.
Career Opportunities
''In Mexico as elsewhere, crime is a career option that competes with others,'' said Mr. Lopez. Many Mexicans are turning to crime because punishment is remote. The criminal justice system is chaotic; the country has had seven attorneys general in nine years, and turnover among lower officials is higher. Given the disorder, Mr. Lopez estimated that of each 100 crimes reported to authorities, only five are investigated.
But Mexico's justice system has never worked efficiently, so why is crime surging now? Until recently, Mr. Lopez said, government officials from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the P.R.I., controlled the criminal class, often favoring one mafia in exchange for kickbacks while suppressing rival groups and never allowing crime to surpass certain bounds. But as the P.R.I. has begun to share power it has lost control of the criminals, he said.
''The old rules no longer apply and new ones haven't emerged,'' he said.
Lucio Mendoza, a former analyst at the national security agency who now runs a research organization, said the authorities have not only lost control but that members of the police are now the main organizers of crime. Starting in the late 1960's, he said, successive presidents gave the police, especially members of an elite corps known as the Federal Security Directorate, license to eliminate accused subversives by whatever means they felt necessary. By the early 1980's guerrillas had been suppressed, and the police turned their extralegal skills to organized crime. ''It was like a cancer that expanded,'' Mr. Mendoza said. ''They went into drugs, car theft, kidnaps, piracy, truck hijackings. This is the cause of the crime rates we see today.''
In a recent newsletter, Mr. Mendoza cited 39 articles published in major Mexican newspapers between May 22 and June 9, each detailing spectacular police criminality. One said Mexico City police officers, using a government computer, were identifying and then threatening citizens who report crime. Another reported the arrest of 11 police officers who were trafficking in migrant workers in the state of Veracruz. Another said a federal agent had organized a prison break in the state of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas.
If the hypotheses put forward to explain the crime surge are tidy, criminality is complex, and what seems to make sense in one place may not in another.
Homicide, for instance, has jumped dramatically in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, cities that are the main border drug corridors; organized crime is clearly at work there. Murder is also rampant in the Mexico City suburbs, where the newly rich are building luxury residences alongside slums. There, some believe that growing economic inequality is the cause, since, as the criminologist Lawrence Sherman of the University of Maryland says, ''Inequality is a major predictor of homicide.''
Some crimes and the investigations of them become so byzantine that they support various hypotheses. One such case was the murder of a senior banking executive, found dead in his car last August. Because his watch was missing, the authorities said he had been killed during a robbery; the economic crisis seemed to blame.
But then, as the case dragged on, new factors seemed to be at play. No arrests were made in this prominent case for 10 months; this demonstrated anew to millions of Mexicans that crime does indeed pay and added weight to the theory that lawlessness is surging because few crimes are punished. Then developments supported those who put police depradations at center stage.
Early this month, the police charged a 28-year-old laborer, Sergio Diaz, with the murder. But then chagrined prosecutors released him, based on his bizarre story. He said the police officers who arrested him had kidnapped him last year, holding him until his family paid a $9,000 ransom. But Mr. Diaz had dared to file kidnapping charges, and several officers were eventually arrested, though quickly released. They set about getting even, and eventually framed him on the murder charges. Prosecutors concluded that Mr. Diaz had nothing to do with the murder. The police have not been punished.
Citizen protests over many similar outrages appear to have gotten the Government's attention. On June 12, Interior Minister Francisco Labastida announced a bigger crime budget.
But critics say anti-crime efforts are still moving slowly. One example: In the mid-1980's, the Government promised to compile a single, computerized file of information on all Mexican police officers, thus helping the authorities to avoid hiring criminals. Three presidencies and nearly 15 years later, the list is still incomplete; now Mr. Zedillo's aides are promising to finish it.
When will the registry be done, an Interior Ministry official was asked.
''I wouldn't want to give a date,'' he said."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9905E5D6173FF93BA15755C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Darin's Tijuana Mexico JW experience
by Junction-Guy 32 Replies latest jw friends
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XJW4EVR
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5go
I am pretty conservative. In fact I won't eschew the label for the purpose of the discussion. Am I a thief too? Do you see the problem with those kinds of blanket statements?
Cheers,
Burn
And I was conservative. That was until I started to understand what the conservative* movement was really about corporate rights over individual rights.
If you run with thieves and crooks you risk being labeled a thief and a crook whether you do anything wrong or not. Remember I am just a stupid bleeding heart liberal despite the fact personally I don't really have much of a heart left to bleed.
*(really neoconservative most don't like to bring up that up because they are really the authoritarian branch of liberalism not real conservatism. In which real conservatism is for the divine right of kings and church being part of the state. Something that would never fly in the US)
Back on topic English is do to be replaced in Texas in fifty years last I heard. So I would think at least as far as the southwest is concerned it won't long there after. -
Junction-Guy
Yes XJW4EVER, I was aware of the crime situation there and it was truly a relief he made it back into the U.S. alive and in one piece. I was also worried he would get falsely arrested there and end up in a rotten jail.
He had a good time, but I'm glad he is just safe and sound.