I think it is one of the least-publicized and unknown chapters of the failure to address crime and violence in Mexico.  In addition to this new Washington Post piece, it seems a good time to again highlight Charles Bowden’s Mother Jones story from 2009… from the first years of the hyper-violence in Juarez and Chihuahua. He tells the story of Mexican reporter Emilio Gutierrez, fleeing for his life after being threatened with death by a Mexican army officer because of his reporting about military harassment against migrants passing through the border village of Palomas back in 2005…

I interviewed Emilio for hours at that time along with Chuck, and we also spent hours with the editors and fact checkers from the magazine who did not believe that the Mexican army could possibly be the perpetrator of the violence and corruption in Mexico. After all, the Mexican president had only recently sent the army to Mexican cities, towns and countryside to fight drug trafficking. Emilio was one of the first voices to tell American readers what Mexican state power was really up to. And what it did at that time was mild compared to the present and future now that the Mexican military has been granted even more impunity through the new internal security law: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-violence-victims/victims-of-mexico-military-abuses-shudder-at-new-security-law-idUSKBN1E92LR

Since 2007, the militarized “drug war” has killed more than 200,000 people in Mexico:

And Emilio’s life and freedom still hang in the balance.

Here’s the most succinct description of the truth we forever refuse to learn about Mexico (thanks to Charles Bowden, writing in 2009):

“There are two Mexicos.

There is the one reported by the US press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war on drugs, aided by the Mexican Army and the Mérida Initiative, the $1.4 billion in aid the United States has committed to the cause. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, laws, and is seen by the United States government as a sister republic.

It does not exist.

There is a second Mexico where the war is for drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share of drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed.

The reporter lives in this second Mexico.”

Go to the link to see the photographs and other graphics in this story and in the excellent Washington Post piece below …  molly molloy