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

transgression will likely lead to your death. The rule makers of the drug business do not impose fines, jail time, or community service, just death. And death is also good business. The Brookings Institution estimates that on average two thousand guns—ranging from cop-killer pistols to AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles—are legally purchased in the United States and then smuggled across the border into Mexico every day .
    This is what you cannot say: death is a part of the overhead, a business expense in a multibillion-dollar transnational illegal industry; the Mexican army and federal police are on the take, waging a war of extermination against suspected drug dealers and traffickers aligned with organizations that the federal government considers unruly or threatening, principally the Beltrán Leyva gang and the Zetas. That war of extermination provides cover for political assassinations, paramilitary executions, vigilante justice, and everyday extortion, abduction, and murder. That war of extermination has also fueled a coordinated, armed, and indescribably cruel counter-wave of murder as the Beltrán Leyva, Familia Michoacana and Zetas cartels scramble to maintain control of their territory and trafficking routes.
    Death is everywhere.
    In Ciudad Juárez, Francisco María Sagredo Villarreal, 69 years old, got tired of finding dead bodies discarded outside of his house. One day in November 2006, he nailed up a sign that read: PROHIBITED: LITTERING AND DUMPING CORPSES . He denounced the roaming bands of killers terrorizing the city and the complete impunity with which they always commit their crimes. He would find four more destroyed bodies there until October 2008 when a group of men shot Sagredo on his doorstep a little before noon. Two months later armed men killed his daughter Cinthia Sagredo Escobedo and dumped her body under the sign. The following day a group of men fired some twenty AK-47 bullets into his other daughter, Ruth Sagredo Escobedo, and a friend of hers as they drove in Cinthia’s funeral procession. Both died.
    The headlines assault. El Universal , July 25, 2010: “A Total of 70 Bodies Found in Narcograves in Nuevo León.” CNN México , June 11, 2010: “Armed Group Kills 19 Inmates at Rehabilitation Center in Chihuahua.” Milenio , May 1, 2010: “55 Thousand Pesos to Kill a Family.” Notimex , April, 9, 2010: “Two Bodies Found Hanging from a Bridge in Cuernavaca.” La Jornada , March 29, 2010: “10 Youths Between 13 and 19 Years Old Executed in Mountains of Durango.” New York Times , February 2, 2010: “Gunmen in Mexico Kill 15 in Attack on a Teenagers’ Party.” Associated Press , January 8, 2010: “Mexico Cartel Stitches Rival’s Face on Soccer Ball.”
    Of the 22,000 executions carried out between December 2006 and April 2010, the Mexican federal attorney general’s office (Procuraduría General de la República, or PGR) had investigated 1,200 cases. Meaning the Mexican government did not investigate 95 percent of the drug war murders. (By May 2011, the known death toll had reached over 38,000 people, and the dismal level of arrests and convictions stayed the same. Some 30,000 murders were not even under investigation, their perpetrators thus guaranteed impunity.) The Mexican national daily El Universal first reported this story on June 21, 2010, after the 22,000 number became part of the public record in the Mexican Senate. The story quotes Jorge Chabat, a well-known drug-trafficking analyst and professor at the nonprofit Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City. Chabat says, “The small number of serious homicide cases being investigated by the PGR is a reflection of the incapacity to investigate those crimes.” Incapacity? Ninety-five percent is too overwhelming a number to reflect incapacity. Ninety-five percent indicates an astonishing success rate, where the objective is not justice, but impunity.
    Federal police make scores of arrests across the country