Arturo Alba Medina became the seventh journalist to be killed in Mexico this year, approaching the record of twelve murdered last year, surpassing even the killings of news people in war-torn Syria. Alba Medina, a TV anchor, died significantly in the border town of Juarez, known from time to time as the “murder capital of the world.” There’s a lot of competition in Mexico for that title.
The various Mexican governments promised to catch the killers, but they hardly ever do since the killers are in control; namely, the drug cartels who run what is considered a “narco state.” Not just offending journalists, to be sure, are victims of their wrath. Mexican murders this year are about to overtake last year’s record of more than 35,000.
By any standards this is a major story, especially happening next door to the U.S., but try finding it in the U.S. media. More likely there will be reports of these kinds of deaths in distant Somalia or Libya. Media compassion is very selective. Slavery and the Holocaust are voluminously covered for good reason, but why so little on the current slaughter of Yemenis by Saudi Arabia with some U.S. assistance or the massacres in Mexico?
Ignoring Mexico can be attributed to that well-worn accusation “racism.” Mexicans don’t matter except in the U.S. where they vote. But the reason for this is probably more complex and indeed sinister. Americans profit from the Mexican violence, both those who take the drugs and those who take the drug money. Aside from some modest efforts to stop the trafficking, including a new border wall, illicit drugs continue to pour into the U.S., poisoning a vast number of people especially distraught by the coronavirus and the accompanying restrictions.
The American media has noticed this development and cited China as responsible. China is the manufacturer of deadly fentanyl which is delivered, however, by the Mexican cartels who control everything and every person that crosses the U.S. border. Once again the cartels evade blame. To whose benefit? Americans can get all the drugs they want that are killing them at a cost of some 100 billion dollars a year. Half of that is laundered or smuggled back to Mexico. The remainder stays in the U.S. to keep the cartels in business.
The bribes start at the border – maybe $5,000 or is it now $10,000? – to let a truck load of drugs through the border. Then right up the social scale to all kinds of respectable groups that need or desire the money. Those who resist or object can pay a serious price, as two FBI investigators (names omitted) learned when they tried to find where the money goes beyond the border. On discovering that it reaches bankers, judges and law enforcement, both lost their jobs and one had his life threatened by a knife. ”Big names,” they said, did them in.
Mexico is in essence a colony of the U.S. But it differs from previous colonial powers in that it takes no responsibility for the land that provides for it. Mexico can go about its business unmolested, a business that amounts to a humanitarian crisis for Mexicans. The U.S. is rebuked for its imperialism that led to the conquest and annexation of half of Mexico in 1848. Today’s imperialism is hidden but just as deadly.
