Month: November 2022

Who are the most courageous people in the world? There’s a lot of competition, but I would nominate the journalists of Mexico. Those who cover the doings of the drug cartels are watched, warned, threatened and murdered for their efforts.

Sometimes they can be paid to say nothing: “plata o plomo” (money or bullet). Still, they persist, as Katherine Corcoran did in pursuit of the killers of another enterprising journalist, Regina Martinez, as revealed in her book “In the Mouth of the Wolf.” Americans may not have heard of Martinez because their media doesn’t cover the cartels – less about these neighbors than about the “terrorists” in distant Somalia or Yemen.

Corcoran explains that the murdered journalists are rarely high profile and thus can be ignored. “All the victims are local, some as small as bloggers or citizen reporters who posted news stories on Facebook pages. This made them easy to dismiss by both the government and the public.” Yet these locals are doing the job their betters should be doing.

As they say, Corcoran left no stone unturned in her pursuit. Under each one she discovered yet another lie or excuse or crime exposing the gangster state. People were even afraid to talk about Regina Martinez. Some cartel informers might be listening. Regina was startled to learn that her boyfriend had been paid to inform on her. Betrayal is every day. Money talks or rather assures there is no talk.

In the course of her investigation Corcoran learned that people were disappearing in great numbers, never to be seen again – that is, alive. In 2011 nearly two hundred bodies were discovered in makeshift graves in the state of Tamoulipas under the control of the especially violent Zetas cartel. Her own state of Veracruz was not immune. The director of a shelter for the dispossessed warned, “You have to open up the earth in Veracruz and expect a swarm of skeletons.”

As of early 2022 the number of missing had reached 100,000, far more than under the dictatorships of Chile or Argentina or elsewhere in South America. The gangster state had outdone the autocratic states. Families pleaded in vain for the bodies of missing members and risked sharing their fate for speaking out. A father was told he could get his daughter back for a million pesos. He delivered what he could at the appointed spot, but there was no daughter. Don’t worry, said the police who arrested three culprits, one of whom they tortured to death to keep the others from telling what happened.

Regina Martinez, as expected, was busy investigating the mass burials, but eventually Corcoran found the apparent reason for her murder. She had uncovered links between prominent politicians and drug runners. It was not a major surprise, but no one was supposed to know about it. Martinez paid the price. Corcoran called the office of one of the politicians thirteen times over three months with no response. Perhaps it was just as well. In the months leading up to the publication of her book this year seven more journalists were killed. The drug cartels were not slowing down now that they had near total control of the U.S.-Mexican border and were rapidly increasing their thousands of illegal marijuana farms in California and Oregon.

Anxious to establish the identity of his quite new country Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov replaced a statue of communist theorist Karl Marx with a more exalted one of the 14^thcentury Mongol conqueror Tamerlane on horseback. It was an appropriate change to avoid a too close connection to the Soviet Union of which Uzbekistan was then a part. But did itconform to reality? Was Tamerlane, man of the sword, a greater conqueror than Marx, man of the word? Which ultimately was the mightier weapon?

No one ever defeated Tamerlane on the battlefield. It couldn’t be done. He was a mister of tactics who outfought and outlasted all his enemies. He was merciless in his victories, making sure those he subdued would never rise again. His calling card, say historians, was a tower of skulls from severed heads that surrounded the massacre of men women and children in the cities he destroyed. He was seldom out of the saddle. That was home. A devout Muslim, he had no hesitation about killing other Muslims. He was indiscriminate in his slaughter.

The glorification of battle was all. He didn’t envision a permanent empire like Rome. His was an empire on the run, bound to dissolve after his death in 1405. But he had one lasting monument, the extraordinarily beautiful Samarkand in Uzbekistan. The riches in the cities he conquered were transferred to Samarkand, along with artists, architects, scholars, astronomers, glass blowers, weaversand all others worth keeping alive. “He threw himself into beautifying his capital with all the furious energy of war,” writes Justin Marozzi in his biography of Tamerlane. That can still be seen today.

No one ever defeated Karl Marx in argument. He wouldn’t allow it. Words were his weapon and he used them as aggressively as possible. He never killed anyone. But his words? Tamerlane is considered responsible for 17 million deaths. Many million more can be attributed to the name of Marx – Marxism – if not to the man who while promoting revolution was vague about the outcome. In revolution he said there’s no such thing as excess. Terror isexpected, as is the culminating rise of aproletarian leader of global proportion. He didn’t live to welcome the Russian Revolutionand the emergence of globalist Stalin, who might quickly have disposed of him as an unnecessary nuisance.

Marx is famed for his books Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. But he was mainly atireless journalist who was constantly urging on his advocates around the world. It was indeed an empire of letters.  And he had no greater weapon at his disposal than the occasional slogan that sliced through argument as cleanly as Tamerlane severed heads: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains.They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite.”

Poor Tamerlane. Today except for Uzbeks, we hardly speak of him, while Marx remains on the tip of tongues, however removed from the master.  That statue of his should be kept in reserve, just in case.