(Warning for very disturbing image at the link)
The bodies of 35 people with links to organised crime have been found in two abandoned lorries on a highway underpass in eastern Mexico, authorities say.
The bodies were discovered near a shopping centre in Boca del Rio, adjacent to the port city of Veracruz, state prosecutor Reynaldo Escobar told television station Milenio.
“These were people involved in organised crime,” Escobar said of the victims. Seven had been identified.
Al Jazeera’s Frank Contraes reporting from Veracruz said “the bodies piled up on the streets showing marks of torture, while body parts were also found.”
Newspapers Milenio and La Jornada said some of the bodies had their hands tied and showed signs of torture.
Local television showed some corpses dumped on the street and others in the vehicles covered with blue plastic sheeting.
I haven’t posted about Mexico’s ongoing social issues for a couple of reasons: for a start, I have very close family living in Mexico City and I try not to read related news because I know I’d become super worried. But also, the other reason I haven’t been posting about the subject is because almost every report coming out in English language media fails to address the structural issues that Mexico faces and that have led to these problems.
For instance, the news above, cannot be reported without contextualizing US immigration laws, border politics, the US “war on drugs”, free trade agreements like NAFTA and the socioeconomic imbalance created by all these combined factors (and several others too long to elaborate on a brief post like this). Instead, we are invariably presented with news items that report on crimes and drug related troubles as if they happened in isolation and not within a macro landscape that surely involves Mexican responsibility but that cannot be removed from a few centuries of different kinds of colonial/ imperial forces at play (first from Spain and later on by the US).
Just to illustrate what I mean, the closing quote from the article linked above:
About 42,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderon launched a campaign against drug cartels at the beginning of his term in late 2006. Most of that violence has been focused on the northern border with the United States.
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