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A Painful Story Repeats Itself

MÁS EN ESTA SECCIÓN

Fighting Sargassum

Community Colleges

COMPARTA ESTE CONTENIDO:

What is taking place in Mexico is frightening, and more so for Colombians since they know what it means to live in a country in which drug trafficking carteles fight over power leaving behind a trail of innocent victims and terrorized civilians.

It offends Colombians when this conflict is described as Mexico becoming “Colombianized”, but that is the least of their worries, what that South American nation wishes is that no other country is put through such an ordeal.

An everyday occurrence for Colombians was: district attorneys murdered after being tortured or subjected to execution-type deaths;  the need for faceless judges in an attempt to protect them from the mafias; the headache resulting from having the USA “de-certify” Colombia because it regarded the efforts to combat the drug cartels insufficient; and, the terrified anticipation that a car-bomb would be detonated in a mall or a busy street.

This goes without even mentioning the burden of having to extradite some criminals to the US, which even resulted in the assassination of a presidential candidate.

The case is not that drug trafficking has now been eradicated from Colombia, but this country could not bear any longer with so many dead, added to those from the “internal war” combating the paramilitary and the guerrilla, both organizations also involved in controlling drug trafficking.

Mexico seems to be following the same path.  Three dismembered bodies in Zacatecas, 24 dead with signs of having received a coup-de-grace on the head, only 19 miles from the Mexican capital, seven dead in an attack to civilians in Michoacán, the arrest of 175 Gulf cartel distributors in the US, seizure of tons of drugs transported on ships, all of this in one single week.

It is such the sense of deja-vú that now the request from Mexican President Felipe Calderón is identical to that of his Colombian colleges: “International cooperation against organized crime”.

Colombians would just smile with a smirk when any President that happened to be ruling the country at that time would say something like: “This crime shall not go unpunished.”   Now Calderón repeats the very same phrase when the death toll already numbers 3,000, all thanks to organized crime in Mexico.

The assault with hand-grenades in Morelia during a celebration of their Independence Day last September 15 “reflects an extreme situation” in words of an outraged Calderón.  This constitutes “a despicable act… that shall not remain unpunished”.

Colombia always requested that control must be exercised, not only on the supplier’s side but also on the side of demand or drug-consumption.  It is right there where international cooperation has failed miserably, hypocritically putting the entire onus on a failed policy of controlling crops through eradication.

Drug consumption; here is the key.  Colombians were forced to learn this and just hope that the Mexicans succeed in rallying consumer nations, including the United States most prominently, so they begin to gear up their efforts targeting that community within their own, the one paying to drug itself.

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