And what about “Sir” Allen Stanford..?
Now, more than a decade later, federal sources tell the Chronicle, any alleged Stanford connection to [Mexican] drug cartels and their money could lie buried in the paperwork gathered for the Security and Exchange Commission’s civil inquiry.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Stanford, drugs and the CIA (updated)

Posted by: Tom | Mar 8 2009 0:41 utc | 3

This military to military relationship is quite in keeping with the regulatory unification of Mexico, Canada and the USA.
No citizen has ever voted yes or no on the complete melding and merging of trade, finance, policy and regulations across the three governments, nor on the close cooperation of the military machinery of the three governments, but it is being pursued apace.

Posted by: Antifa | Mar 8 2009 1:18 utc | 5

L.A. County C.A. has approx 10 murders every weekend – that’s not weekdays, just the weekend numbers. I used ten as the lower of the numbers I found cited on the ‘net.
That’s 480 murders in just one U.S. in a year. Extrapolate that out to all the major U.S. cities and the numbers begin to seem staggering. Maybe we should worry about trying to keep americans from killing each other before we spend more time/money intervening in Mexico.
The “War on Drugs” is/was the biggest scam/social experiment to have ever taken place. I grew-up in a nice little part of California; there were more rednecks than hippies, but everyone was pretty tolerant. One day one of the county sheriffs got the idea he wanted to start flying helicopters and he found a way to get an old army helicopter donated to the department by the Feds, and I believe he was able to have the government even fund his training.
It was probably the first fall after that guy and his helicopter took to the air when dump trucks full of weed were being driven out of the foothills to be burned (well some of it was…) at the county dump. Talk about a scam, legalized thievery if you ask me. I was young at the time, and I remember the events of that fall shaking the community to the core; no-knock raids, spies, snitches. The grade school was on the main road and we’d see the trucks and the sheriff’s cars full of volunteers (to cut the plants) drive past and we children would wonder whose parents were headed to jail. It was a crazy, sad time for everyone and the weirdness led to me losing some friends and I was just a damn kid.
There are several people who blame Prop 13 for bankrupting Butte County and that it was this legislation that eventually caused the county become a center for meth. This was because the county couldn’t afford to pay sheriffs (ironically), a fact that was exploited at the time by those mad, mad meth heads (sick shit, stay away from it!).
But if you knew law enforcement officers as well as I did when I later worked at the paper, they would tell you what was obvious to most people – the flying sheriff managed to strangle the county’s largest industry. Pot made more money, by a factor of 10, than any thing else in the area and this is in a place where the legal crops are nut trees (almond and walnut,) citrus and pit fruit like apricots and peaches – all high priced cash crops in themselves, not to mention the lumber mills.
By killing the dope industry he effectively killed the county and it took several years to recover the loss of money, which moved to more remote, or relaxed places. I still remember a time shopping for school clothes before the helicopter, when rather than buy all my clothes from thrift stores (like normal) we’d did some shopping in the downtown stores. I guess I should add that my dad was the mechanic to the growers and not one himself, and we were the po’ folks on the hill, or at least some of the poorer ones. Damn, dad should have went to CalPoly SLO and studied agriculture, rather than that two-year trade school …So I remember we went into this store, Ryan’s, that I thought of as being a “fancy” place (if only I’d known about Aspen, HeeHee.) At home my mom commented to my dad that she couldn’t believe the service we’d received; salesladies fighting and hovering over us like we were oil sheiks… Only later did we realize they thought, because of how we looked, we must have pockets full of greenbacks to spend.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who notices the government spends an awful lot of money working to keep people apart rather than spending money bringing people together. Not in some economic bullshit way; but in a real sustainable, macro, long-term way.
A war on anything is a war against people and everyone will suffer. The whole mexico/canada/usa thing is a move to make fewer people richer. Soylent Green may be the answer: Eat the Rich!

Posted by: David | Mar 8 2009 3:41 utc | 7

Well, I just thank the gods i live out in the county, and if I want to plant some smoke there’s a little woods with a creek nearby. Good water, decent soil, and the shit grows like a weed anyway. Point of fact, though, I gave all that up about 20 years ago. In reality I wonder which direction this country is heading. I would imagine there’s a big “terra” attack coming, followed by a lockdown and general repression of any personal freedoms, at which point we’ll be one step closer to the new world order. I read where some are writing about the Amero, a new monetary unit to be used by the ‘North American Union’, and I wonder if this is all paranoid delusions. Of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you.

Posted by: Jim T. | Mar 8 2009 4:35 utc | 9

@David – @7 – Murders in the U.S. in 2007: 16,929
The “high” number in Mexico is thereby in line, population adjusted, with the U.S. numbers. Too high of course overall, but I find it weird that U.S. news somehow tries to make one think that these are abnormal.

Posted by: b | Mar 8 2009 6:41 utc | 11

b@11,
I think both numbers are pretty abnormal. Civilized people don’t kill each other or at least shouldn’t. But then what do I know?
But yeah, it’s like the pot calling the kettle black… Gawd, I can’t believe how blatantly hypocritical america is. Or has it always been and I didn’t notice because Fox new, MSMBC and their ilk weren’t ignorantly shouting from the rooftops? Sigh…

Posted by: David | Mar 8 2009 12:09 utc | 13

Behind or underneath the thirst for gain there is the actual material organic Nature. Canada has water,copious amounts, the largest in the world, the West, that is the Pacific Southwest is thirsty. To tap the great lakes will be an onerous political battle, Canada is weak. Mexico is weaker, it has an enormous labor force that can be tapped cheaply, it has an equable climate, a beautiful sky, it is thirsty in the North and Center but it has abundant water in the South. The littoral is tropical, the produce first rate. What else do we want? The petroleum is said to be near exhaustion but one never knows what the oil companies know. Perhaps along those coasts there are large fields. That white USA people don’t like brown Mexicans is a given, but necessity creates wonderful adaptations and changes. We shall see.

Posted by: jlcg | Mar 8 2009 14:58 utc | 15

cuidado, zapata, el gringo quiere bring la democracy a tu country!

Posted by: pancho | Mar 8 2009 15:54 utc | 17

The Mexican drug war is already spilling over into the US Southwest, armed gangs are now prowling Tucson and Phoenix, the US State Department issued a warning to students against travelling to Mexico on Spring Break.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 8 2009 19:44 utc | 19