city

of Iguala. Evidence indicates that these may be some of the bodies of those 43

students who recently went missing after a clash with local police during a protest - an

incident

that involved officers killing at least 6 people. The situation in Iguala is bad, but

a closer look at

this incident and the recent history of mass killings in Mexico tells an even darker story.

There are reports of the police handing the students over to a local drug cartel. One

of the

suspected killers has already admitted to that. But authorities can’t be absolutely

certain

that these are the missing students until DNA testing is complete, because the bodies

could

also belong to literally thousands of other people. Mass killings by drug cartels - and

the law

enforcement agencies tasked with fighting those cartels - happen with alarming regularity

in

Mexico. This incident is the 4th widely reported mass killing this year alone - and it’s

more than

likely that most incidents aren’t even being reported.

When the last President of Mexico left office, over 26,000 people were reported missing.

The

current President, Enrique Peña Nieto, revised that number down to

8,000, but after public outcry, he revised the number back up to 16,000. But all three

of those

estimates are still far lower than what some human rights groups claim as the real number.

Things have gotten so bad in Mexico that according to some reports, drug-related violence has

claimed more than 70,000 lives since 2006. So, why did this situation get so out of hand?

Well, in 2006, the Mexican government along with the US Drug Enforcement Agency, started

targeting the heads of drug cartels. They captured or killed 30 of the 37 most wanted

cartel

leaders. And without their leaders, those cartels broke into hundreds of separate factions

and alliances that began warring against each other with greater frequency and brutality.

We

basically cut the head off the snake, but instead of the snake dying, it just created

thousands of

smaller more violent snakes.

When Mr. Peña Nieto became Mexico’s new President in 2012, he changed the

strategy in their war on drugs. He shifted the focus away from cartel leaders and put

it

on local law enforcement stopping drug violence instead. He also struck a deal to allow

vigilante groups to keep their weapons as long as they agreed to be integrated into

official security forces. But corruption among local law enforcement is widespread, so

in a lot of regions the people tasked with stopping the cartels are the very same people

who are working for them. Hence, the accusations that police handed the student

protesters over to the cartel in the recent incident in Iguala.

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