Read To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War for Free Online

the recent kidnappings while soldiers and police made up 22 percent of the nation’s kidnappers. On one balmy day in August 2010 in Tamaulipas state, gunmen executed seventy-two Central and South American migrants in a barn. Soon after, the National Human Rights Commission reported having received 198 witness accounts of kidnappings involving nearly ten thousand migrants, all in the first six months of 2009. In Ciudad Juárez, extortion and kidnapping have driven thousands of small and medium-sized businesses to ruin, prompting the closure of ten thousand businesses in the past three years. Under the headline “Crime steals cattle and sells on the formal market,” the daily newspaper El Universal wrote in September 2010 that at least eleven states show an increase of 30 to 50 percent in cattle rustling. Ranchers “attribute the increase to the growth of organized crime and the fact that the drug-trafficking cartels are expanding their field of activities.”
    And then there are the guns. In Mexico, federal law prohibits open gun sales and the permits granted directly from the Secretary of Defense are extremely rare. In the U.S. border states of Texas and Arizona, one can purchase AK-47 and AR-15 machine guns, 9mm handguns, and even Barrett .50-caliber rifles in an over-the-counter cash transaction. Calderón’s “drug war” has apparently created a boom for the 7,000 or so legal mom-and-pop gun stores in the U.S.-Mexican border region. According to a report published by the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Mexican government’s seizures of illegal firearms more than tripled between 2007 and 2008, from 9,553 to 29,824. The Washington Post reported in September 2010 that 62,800 of the more than 80,000 illegal guns confiscated between December 2006 and February 2010 were traced back to gun stores in the United States. (In 2008, U.S, agents confiscated only 70 guns at border crossings.) And those are just the guns found and reported by Mexican police and soldiers. In January 2011, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence released a report using data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to show that since 2008 more than 62,000 firearms have “gone missing” from U.S. gun store inventories. Since the ATF only inspects 20 percent of gun stores, the number is most likely much higher. Similarly, the number of weapons seized, traced, and reported by Mexican authorities is surely only a fraction of all those guns still in use. The National Rifle Association says that Mexican drug gangs get their weapons from Central American arms traffickers and army deserters who take their guns with them. While that is not disputed, the number of guns seized in Mexico and traced back to legal U.S. dealers is staggering. Wherever they come from, all these machine guns and automatic pistols make up another booming side industry made possible by the murder spree in Mexico. Ironically, Calderón often blames U.S. gun laws and the easy availability in the United States for the violence in Mexico. (U.S. laws are largely to blame, but not the gun laws.)
    Illegality also requires that one back up the moral discourse of prohibition with massive infusions of funds into armies and law-enforcement agencies. These infusions in turn require the production of arrests and drug seizures. Competitors in the drug economy use this need as a way to eliminate opponents and rivals, tipping off federal authorities to the whereabouts of one’s enemy’s stash and bedroom.
    And in this context, illegality leads to a third complication: all disputes within the industry must be settled outside the law. The most popular method of conflict resolution in an illegal business culture where cash is so abundant as to be a kind of burden is contract murder. Betray, snitch, steal, mess up, forget, offend the boss, or say too much, and your