100,000 dead, 30,000 missing: Mexico’s war on drugs turns 10 - CBS

[TomSea]

AP December 11, 2016, 3:31 PM
100,000 dead, 30,000 missing: Mexico’s war on drugs turns 10

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico - Ten years after Mexico declared a war on drugs, the offensive has left some major drug cartels splintered and many old-line kingpins like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in jail, but done little to reduce crime or violence in the nation’s roughest regions.

Some say the war has been a crucial, but flawed, effort. Others argue the offensive begun by then-President Felipe Calderon on Dec. 11, 2006, unleashed an unnecessary tragedy with more than 100,000 people dead and about 30,000 missing - a toll comparable to the Central American civil wars of the 1980s.

In some places, homicide rates have lessened. In others, the killings continue unabated. The drawn-out conflict has also had a profound effect on those close to the cross-hairs of suffering: youths inured to extreme violence; adults so fed-up with poor and corrupt policing that they took up arms as vigilantes; and families who banded together in the face of authorities’ inability to find their vanished loved ones.

A law enforcement official in the northern border state of Tamaulipas told The Associated Press he now routinely encounters young cartel gunmen who have few regrets about their vocation. In fact, they see killing as the best way to afford things like smartphones, cars and girlfriends.

“I ask them, ‘What do you want to be?’ And they say, ‘To be a chief look-out and have a narco-corrido song written about me,” said the official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name. “As young as they are, they have no other aspiration in life.”

Continued At: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/100000-dead-30000-missing-mexico-war-on-drugs-turns-10/