Drug Killings Surge in Mexico

Three police officers were tortured and beheaded in southeastern Mexico in January, a continuation of a grisly trend. Authorities found the decapitated bodies of Anita Contreras López, Benjamín Montejo Avalos and Alvaro Navarrete Alducin on a roadside in the municipality of Huimanguillo on January 28, a day after the officers were kidnapped during a routine patrol in the nearby Veracruz municipality. Contreras was the mother of three children, Montejo was a father of two children, and Navarrete was a new recruit who had worked for the police department for just over a year. The perpetrators have not been caught, but this was almost certainly a drug cartel attack on Mexican police.

Nationwide, January murder rates jumped 34 percent from 1,442 homicides in 2016 to 1,938 homicides in 2017.

Decapitation is a terror tactic that Mexican drug traffickers have used since at least 2006, when armed criminals from the La Familia Michoacana cartel dumped five heads from plastic garbage bags on a white tile dance floor in the Sol y Sombra nightclub in the town of Uruapan. It is reported that drug cartel operatives adopted decapitation from al Qaeda terrorists as an intimidation tactic. In 2012, Mexico’s attorney general’s office estimated that 1,303 people were decapitated by drug cartels in the previous five years. The grisly tactic is used to terrorize local populations, intimidate rival cartels and send a warning to Mexican police.

In the seven-year period between 2007 and 2014, more than 160,000 people were murdered in Mexico, more than the total number of civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, over the same period.

It is estimated that 55 percent of all Mexican homicides and 7 percent of all United States homicides are related to drug trafficking. These murders are committed by more than 100,000 drug traffickers working directly for Mexican cartels.

Why is such a detestable evil so widespread, so incurable and so terminal? The primary reason these criminal cartels are so powerful, so motivated and so violent is that approximately 10 percent of Americans over the age of 12 are addicted to illicit drugs. Each year, more than 21,000 overdose deaths and 12,000 drug-related homicides are paid for by this $100 billion per year paid for by 24.6 million American drug users.

U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to “break the back” of the cartels by building a wall along the Mexican border and declaring a war on crime. The president’s constitutional duty is to enforce the nation’s laws, but North America’s massive drug problems cannot be blocked by a wall. Where there is a demand, there will be a supply. And where there is a $100-billion-per-year insatiable demand for heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and other drugs, well-paid, well-armed and cold-blooded cartels will provide a supply. Since the business is so lucrative, drug traffickers will continue to use unwilling victims, undergarments, body cavities, implants, electronics, toys, casts, statues, beer cans, live animals, surfboards, cars, drones, catapults, canons, ramps, insulating oil, liquidized cocaine, wheel chairs, crayon scribblings, fake fruits and vegetables, donuts, seafood, frozen meats, prescription pills, candy, fake lumps of coal, real lumps of coal, elaborate tunnels, shipping containers, private submarines, tractor trailers, trains, helicopters, prop planes, 747 jetliners, and many other means.

Drugs will flow north and drug money will flow south.

Hard-core drug legalization advocates will say that the solution is to legalize marijuana and decriminalize “hard drugs” like heroin and methamphetamines, even though both history and common sense show that drug legalization further increases addiction. The truth of the matter is that police are getting their heads sawed off in Mexico because a spiritual sickness is rampant in North America.

In the U.S. and Canada especially, the majority of children grow up in broken homes that do not teach them about self-mastery, restraint, moral uprightness, integrity or lawfulness. Millions of these children grow up with no sense of hope in their lives, and so they try to fill the spiritual void with drug-induced moments of fleeting euphoria. But drug addiction, legal or otherwise, leads only to more wasted lives, more violence, more domestic abuse and more family breakdown.

This isn’t a problem that’s going to be solved by the wall or the White House; it is a problem that must be solved inside the 168 million houses across Mexico, the United States and Canada. If there isn’t repentance inside these homes, the ripple effects of family breakdown will continue to spread until the entire North American continent experiences a tsunami of violence even worse than the horrific crime wave that is already inundating Mexico.