About the sixth bus, apparently the sicarios realized it wasn't who they were looking for and shouted: "we fucked up", and the leader replied: "leave no witness alive"
edit: I think it's kind of sad that there's people capable of ending other people's lives just like that, with no remorse, no second thought about it. With that said, many did survive.
edit 2: after re-reading the source I posted below I noticed that I had missed something, he ordered them to go away after shooting (I'm guessing to the sky?). Still, hearing someone order your death, can't imagine how scary that'd be.
>About the sixth bus, apparently the sicarios realized it wasn't who they were looking for and shouted: "we fucked up", and the leader replied: "leave no witness alive"
I'm not sure I take the word of this "alleged survivor." It sounds suspiciously made-up.
Ex.: He seems to have witnessed events that happened simultaneously in different locations, while at the same time being one of the victims himself. Also, he seems to have been able to intuit various people's intentions and reactions as if he could read their minds.
> Now the evidence itself suggested at least a plausible hypothesis: the attacks were triggered when a bus used to transport heroin was commandeered by the students, and that the motive—because the municipal police and others involved in the attacks didn’t know which of the commandeered buses had the drugs aboard, or perhaps had been specially outfitted to smuggle drugs without detection
That's a very plausible theory. I wonder how much drugs could a bust like that carry.
The thing about the events and the theories is that the real situation is now evident and the particulars matter only in a symbolic way.
Essentially, the students were murdered by the ruling narco-state fusion. The Federal authorities efforts to blame the events on a fusion of local authorities and narcos likely is perceived as an effort to cover up the general collusion between the state and the narcos on all levels.
This is a world in which during the course of the investigation, 60 other mass graves, of other large groups of people murdered in area were found [1]. When industrial-scale for murder and the disposal of bodies are operating, yeah, it's hard to figure out how certain people died and where they are not.
As a cause, I get the impression that finding the students' murderers now is oriented towards not finding some specific hidden villain or exact turn of events but rather on casting light on the entire narco-state complex where corruption goes up to highest level (and extends into the US).
BBC: "Mexico missing students: Search uncovers 60 mass graves" The attorney general's office says the remains of 129 bodies have been recovered from the graves. None of the remains have been linked to the students who vanished in Iguala."
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-33671636
but it isnt all of mexico right? (forgive me, I have read a lot of books + articles on this but this is my impression) the violence is more concentrated in areas like Sinaloa, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo etc.
I know there are multiple cartels but it is my understanding that a lot of the murders can be attributed to the war been Sinaloa and the Zetas up north ?
That's bullshit (about being safe every where unless doing shady business) as an example I was almost abducted while waiting for my bus in the bus terminal.
I know of people missing who's only doing was driving thru a highway to go somewhere else.
This idea that only Bad People doing Bad Things™ are in risk here is dumb.
Good for you, nothing to do with my point that not only people getting drugs get in incidents, as proved by the article.
I'm pretty sure someone could come and tell you "I've lived in LA/Washington and never got robbed", would that make your experience getting robbed in LA or statistics about Mexico City being safer than DC untrue? no.
Also, drug buyers are customers. It would seem crazy for a dealer to endanger customers on a regular basis. So, buying drugs in a shady part of town should be (relatively) safer than most activities?
I don't know about being relatively safer, if you have a higher income than average you definitely can become a target because, via their other business (extortion, kidnapping and asking for rescue) they can also obtain profit, so being successful can be risky.
Now, are dealers purposively endangering their clients? I don't think so, but risks do come with getting drugs (e.g the police/military comes by, a rival cartel comes by, etc). Also, most of their income comes from the drugs they sell in the states so I don't think losing customers here is such a (monetary) loss to them.
You (wrongly) assume drug dealers and their surrounding cast are balanced and rational individuals. There's a huge spread, but when you interact with criminals living on the edge of society you should not expect to be safe.
I wouldn't say in EVERY mexican city, there are "safe" cities where drug related crimes are not a big concern. There are others where you can get shot on the street doing nothing but just walking i.e. most of the border towns, some cities in Guerrero, Veracruz, Tabasco...
I think that's because the many powerful movie plots are drawn from the parts of real life that most people in the modern developed world are insulated from most of the time.
As a side note, you can see how corrupt the Mexican State is when the police knew there were students in those buses but didn't care about the consequences of their actions.
> but didn't care about the consequences of their actions
Corruption is not black or white. The choice for the police officers is not "take the money or leave it", but "take the money or have your wife and daughters raped and/or killed and thrown in a landfill".
A point of controversy is whether or not the 43 students were incinerated. The indedentent experts (GIEI) report insist that it was impossible:
> Dr. José Luis Torero, an internationally recognized fire-investigation expert, was hired by the GIEI to conduct an independent examination into the incineration scenario. Torero, a Peruvian who participated in the forensic investigations of the World Trade Center attacks, has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously a professor of fire security at the University of Edinburgh. He currently heads the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland, Australia. The incineration of forty-three bodies in an open-air terrain like that of the Cocula dump, Torero concluded, would have required some thirty-three tons of wood or fourteen tons of pneumatic tires, along with the same amount of diesel fuel; the fire would have had to burn for sixty hours, not the twelve that the P.G.R. claimed it had, based on the confessions of captured Guerreros Unidos sicarios. The smoke from such a fire would have risen nearly a thousand feet into the sky and would have been visible for miles around; no such pillar of smoke was spotted, or even captured by satellite imagery.
The pro-government media is pushing back that its just one scientist's opinion, which is at odds with the opinion of scientists at UNAM (national university of mexico) who participated in the government investigation and concluded that the missing students _were_ incinerated.
That sounds eerily reminiscent of the Climate Change Denialist camp: bribe some unscrupulous scientist to push whatever narrative you want people to believe, then use the media to frame the conflict as a matter of opinion.
If the facts says that burning 43 bodies would require more fuel than what could be moved in secret to the place, and would leave unmistakable traces that are simply missing, that's what the facts say. Period. The UNAM scientist can claim that the Earth is flat... it is not as if their paycheck don't ultimately come from the same people that is trying very hard to cover up the whole affair.
I'll be honest here, the 43 students is a tragedy that got, unfortunately, badly politicized and should not be taken seriously anymore.
The official demand by the people behind that political movement is "we want them back alive", but since when a government has been able to bring dead people back to life?
The real issue behind this tragedy is that drug dealers are infiltrated in the government and military forces, and their influence was demonstrated when they "got rid" of those 43 students when the students stole a bus with a cargo of drugs.
The demand behind the movement should be to remove any criminal influence from the government and the military forces, not to bring back to life those 43 students. They're not asking for something that will benefit us as a country, they're asking for something that will never happen, even under the best possible circumstances.
But remember, they are not confirmed dead, just "missing".
I think the official demand is intentionally absurd because the situation is absurd as well. Think about it: some students were "disappeared" and then the government tries to perform a Jedi mind trick on everybody? The scary part is that they (the state) are befuddled because the mind trick has always worked.
The tragedy of the 43 is hardly unique on it's own. The political consequences of it is what makes it interesting, important and –as the article states– historic.
IMHO: "we want them alive", is another way of saying: "we want blood for blood".
This isn't really about the war on drugs, but about the tradition in Mexico, not uniquely more than most countries, that literally every state organ is involved in criminal activity, and is in many ways indistinguishable from the crime cartels. It varies a lot across the country, but this has been true for a lot of Mexico's history. It may look crazy to us, but the political establishment has always been a part of whatever makes money in Mexico; it just happens to be drugs these days.
The sad part is how cheaply the lives of these young people, including the future school teachers of this part of Mexico, were thrown away. In a podunk place like Iguala, where literally every state and local was on the payroll with the cartels, the apparent desperation at having a drug-carrying bus discovered galvanized not just the police, not just the 27th Battalion, but EVERYBODY, to slaughter anybody they could find on a bus. They appear to have been more organized about this mass murder than they were about anything else in their sorry careers "protecting" the people of Mexico.
Every time I feel disgusted about the state of politics in the United States, I should remind myself of what Churchill said about our system: it's the worst, except for all the others.
Yes but the more money at stake, the more violence is fueled. There's a big difference between corrupt traffic cops (Mexico in the 70s) and narcos cutting the heads off of dozens of bodies and hanging them from an overpass (Mexico today). The Zetas never would have formed if it weren't for the billions of dollars available from cartel activities. The US can't legalize drugs soon enough for me, and I don't even drink alcohol.
Often a feeling that (insert first world country) is absolutely terrible is cured by a visit to any third world or developing country. What you are describing is hardly unique to Mexico.
It is like telling a friend who just got a great job that they shouldn't be happy because there are other people who won the lottery or had far greater success stories. (I did reverse it from negatives to positives.)
Make sure to reverse all applicable portions of the argument, or it won't make sense (and even then it's not necessary that the reverse be true for the argument to be true).
It's more akin to a friend who has a terrible job spending a few days working at a good job and realizing their job is terrible (to keep it reversed), or like a friend that has a good job but thinks it's terrible spending a few days actually working a terrible job and realizing how good theirs is (to keep the argument the same as AJ007 presented).
No, because the original view was still of something bad (corrupt first world governments). They aren't as bad as something else (corrupt second/third world governments), but they aren't good.
So using jobs, it is like having a job where you have to often pull 60 hours weeks and then having to spend a few days helping a friend pulling 80 hour weeks (with same compensation). Even then, the 60 hour weeks being the norm is a bad thing and saying that someone shouldn't feel bad about it doesn't make sense.
It's all about relative experience. Your 60 hour a week job may not be good, but you may be able to see and appreciate the parts that aren't as bad as what you've now seen, and even a great job may not look as good after you've experienced the perfect job.
And to be clear, I don't think the cure for thinking that "(insert first world country) is absolutely terrible" is now good, just that it's relatively better than the initial assessment.
To get back to your original response, it's like telling your happy friend they shouldn't be absolutely content because yes, there are people out there that are doing better financially (assuming you are willing to equate financial success to happiness). It won't make them happier, but it will make their outlook more realistic (which isn't always a good thing). But again, reversing the statement like that doesn't preserve it's logical attributes. e.g. If A implies B, you can't infer that B implies A..
>> The sad part is how cheaply the lives of these young people, including the future school teachers of this part of Mexico, were thrown away.
This is what gets me about Mexico. There's simply no value to human life there anymore. It's so depressing seeing what's happening there. The corruption is so deep and so ingrained in their culture, I can't even fathom how they will ever get better.
How can it get better: Legalize drugs and drug trafficking. It's not a perfect solution, but it would take away much of the reason for the narco-gangs existence; as well as the corruption of the government/police/military.
I think it's too late for that to be a solution for crime. What would these criminal groups do if they lose their drug revenue stream? Go and find a job? I doubt it. They'll just diversify their criminal activities.
> The U.S. government is directly responsible for these and all drug war deaths.
Directly? That's a reach. Many factors lead to a situation like this, and US policy may have contributed, but don't diminish the part played by the people actually murdering and ordering the murdering.
edit: I think it's kind of sad that there's people capable of ending other people's lives just like that, with no remorse, no second thought about it. With that said, many did survive.
edit 2: after re-reading the source I posted below I noticed that I had missed something, he ordered them to go away after shooting (I'm guessing to the sky?). Still, hearing someone order your death, can't imagine how scary that'd be.