What is more dangerous for Americans than the coronavirus? Going to Mexico.
Edgar Lopez, a golfer who lives in El Paso, Texas, was quarantined from coronavirus along with his Mexican girlfriend just across the border in Juarez. They were protected from the wrong ailment. Both were shot to death in broad daylight by assailants who were not caught and never will be. That same weekend an American woman and a young boy were shot and killed after crossing the bridge from El Paso. Another American woman was murdered inside a tortilla shop in Juarez
Americans used to be immune from drug cartel violence – bad for business. But no longer, and they are just a tiny fraction of the more than 2000 murdered so far this year in Juarez. Imagine if that number of people had been killed in a U.S. city. A frenzied media would be demanding accountability, urging concern and compassion. Yet the Mexican massacre hardly rates any coverage as if death across the border is somehow less consequential. Who really cares?
Yet a case can be made that Americans’ vast consumption of Mexican drugs finances the cartels that do the killing. To what extent then are Americans responsible, and shouldn’t the media be making that crucial connection? Or perhaps it doesn’t care to. Americans dying of overdose is one thing, Mexicans murdered quite another.
In the meantime Juarez is well on the way to reclaiming its title of the “murder capital of the world” in competition with equally crime ridden Acapulco, where in that same weekend of slaughter three police officers were gunned down while patrolling an upscale tourist district. Ten other people were also killed in the area, and an investigation continues of a burned body in a car that may be that of a Canadian businessman who had disappeared.
A small sampling of a larger disaster that unlike coronavirus is man made and thus can be unmade by man if so desired. No search for a vaccine is necessary.
