Mother was told her children were beaten at Mexican military barracks

[Judi Lynn]

Source: San Antonio Express-News

Mother was told her children were beaten at Mexican military barracks
By Aaron Nelsen : October 31, 2014

PROGRESO — The mother of three Americans whose bodies were found in Mexico on Wednesday said a soldier at a military installation in Matamoros witnessed the siblings enter the barracks earlier this month with members of a recently formed police unit called Grupo Hercules.

But the soldier told the mother that said he feared for the safety of his family if he had intervened.

“He told us Erica was very beaten, and Jose Angel's legs were injured,” said Raquel Alvarado, 46, the mother said referring to her daughter and one of her sons who were killed. “They hit her as though she were a man.”

On Thursday, Pedro Alvarado, the father of the three Americans, identified the bodies of his children from soiled articles of clothing and photographs of tattoos on their bodies.


Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Mother-was-told-her-children-were-beaten-at-5861441.php

[weissmam]

1. people responsible need to pay for this

[jtuck004]

2. Lots of overdue bills in that country.

One of which is how we destroyed many lives there when we opened up the borders to American products being made there with NAFTA. We increased their poverty and destroyed the livelihoods of many rural people.

https://www.citizen.org/documents/ImpactsonMexicoMemoOnePager.pdf

That created a vacuum perfect for the drug lords, close to our borders where it didn't used to be.

Some of what happens there is a direct result of the greed of those who pursued and established that agreement.

So in answer to your demand, in some sense we have already been paid. We reap what we sow.

[AnalystInParadise]

5. Only two posts

Before someone ties this horrible crime that occurred at the hands of Mexican nationals to the United States.

[jtuck004]

6. Yeah, we're really good at screwing people over then riding around on our white horses looking

for suspects.

[AnalystInParadise]

7. So that's your final answer?

These poor kids were brutally murdered by MEXICAN nationals and it is somehow our fault. Good luck peddling that.

[DesertDiamond]

10. It's definitely much easier to peddle revenge and bloodlust against an entire country for what a few

have done. Finding the root of why it happened so that we can prevent future incidents is, yes, much more difficult.

[jtuck004]

11. The criminals that killed them did it. We helped empower the criminals.

But it is clear you care more about yourself than the kids.

bye.

[AnalystInParadise]

12. Wow

That is your take on this?

We did not force the Mexican nationals to do ANYTHING. They CHOSE to kill those poor kids. Think what you want, but those are the facts. Like I said, good luck peddling your alternative worldview where the deaths of Americans at the hands of Mexican criminals is the fault of the average American citizen.

[Throd]

13. For many on DU, all the horrors on earth can be traced back to the USA.

It's their version of "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon".

[Judi Lynn]

20. Spend some of your time doing your homework on the known history of US relations toward LatAm.

That would require YOUR initiative, YOUR hard work, just as those who are informed on the subject have already exerted theirs.

Informed people learned, through their own intelligence, thought, and natural curiosity what has not been included in right-wing versions of US history.

Talk to actual Latin American people who have lived through the aftermath of US actions in their countries throughout their lives.

You have a lot of education ahead of you, if you can give up some of your time trying to rip into people who've gone out of their way to find out for themselves what it is behind statements like "Yanqui, go home" in countries south of the U.S. border.

Spend some of your time trying to flail people who know, to find out for yourself, by investing your energy in something real, something productive, something worthwhile.

[Throd]

22. Why do you assume that I don't know any of this?

Oh yeah, you are the self-appointed arbiter of the official DU narrative of US/Latin American relations.

[Judi Lynn]

23. If you did know anything, you'd realize, along with so many Democrats why the people of Lat. America

believe racist, rapacious, greedy, murderous people should not be allowed to plunder and destroy their countries, force their people to work as near slaves in ferocious, destructive conditions, while their own land is torn apart, waters poisoned, livestock and human beings killed, crops destroyed, their markets flooded with cheap, US-taxpayer-subsidized products like corn, beans, rice, and their own hard efforts at farming, self sustaining, handed down to them from their ancestors finally are useless in supporting them, and millions lose their livelihoods, and live under the gun of local powerful landowners and their right-wing paramilitaries.

If you actually knew about US history in Latin America you wouldn't attack people who defend the right of Latin Americans to their own sovereignty, and security, beyond the reach and violence of US corporate greed and self-interest, backed up in too many cases by US government efforts on behalf of the predators.

If you knew what other DU'ers know, you would be unable to attack them. Totally obvious.

[Throd]

25. And how does any of that have something to do with these three being murdered?

By that logic, anything bad that happens in Mexico can be traced back to the USA.

[AnalystInParadise]

28. To certain self appointed

arbiters anything in Mexico that happens is America's fault, ditto for Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua.....you know the true BASTIONS of FREEDOM......

[AnalystInParadise]

27. Literally laughed out loud when I read this

Well done.....VERY well done.

[Comrade Grumpy]

14. Uh, not Mexican criminals. Mexican soldiers.

This looks like it's probably related to Mexico's drug wars. We do share some complicity in that situation, whether it's US consumers buying those banned products that enrich the cartels, or the US government giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Mexican military to fight its drug wars--despite clear and convincing evidence that the Mexican military has severe human rights issues.

It's not about blaming America, but recognizing why this shit is happening.

[AnalystInParadise]

15. In my experinces

growing up on the border, there is little difference between those two groups.

[99th_Monkey]

17. I think the word for this phenomenon is "BLOWBACK"

Our endless "War on Terror" in ME provides another prime example of how this works.

Murdering innocent people generates hatred, guaranteed. .. which then "comes back
around".

[AnalystInParadise]

19. I think the word is Choice

Mexican national CHOSE to murder young Americans, unless these kids were involved with the drug war, blowback does not apply

[99th_Monkey]

21. You are conflating two distinctly different things

Last edited Sun Nov 2, 2014, 12:50 AM - Edit history (1)

1) Yes it is tragic, inhumane and just plain atrocious for Mexicans to choose to murder Americans with impunity, regardless of their age.
2) The truism of no. 1 above does not necessarily mean that there are not American international policies that set the stage for such atrocities to occur more frequently.

BOTH 1 and 2 are distinctly different truisms, i.e. the fact that number 1 is true does not necessarily mean number 2 is false. I'm contending that they are BOTH true.

[LanternWaste]

26. You appear to believe the irrational concept that actions happen in vacuums.

You appear to believe the irrational concept that actions happen in vacuums...

[amandabeech]

18. No surprise there.

Also, no mention of all the manufacturing jobs, particularly in the auto industry, who relocated to Mexico after NAFTA. I'm from Michigan, and it was sucking sound from a galactic-class vacuum that hit my home state.

NAFTA may have been good only for shareholders who had nothing to do with the towns that they destroyed, the investment bankers and lawyers that managed the deals, and of course, the very top execs of the auto industry.

All else was laid waste.

[Judi Lynn]

8. NAFTA has been absolute hell for so many Mexican people who were destroyed altogether.

Our country started flooding Mexican markets with corn, beans, rice, etc. which were grown here, subsidized by US taxpayers, and dumped upon Mexico while simultaneously driving all the hordes of men and women who had been operating their own small farms for generations, going back into the remote past, in so many cases.

They simply could not stand up to the huge arrival of US subsidized crops replacing their own native products of their own hard work, on their ancestral lands.

This is something the corporate media has completely avoided mentioning altogether, and of course, stupid, brain dead people allergic to doing their own research never learned about at all, continuing to see, in their own unbelievably ignorant way, the US impact on the world has been that of a gentle giant, beloved by all. Uh, HUH.

Under Nafta, Mexico Suffered, and the United States Felt Its Pain
Laura Carlsen is the director of the Americas program at the Center for International Policy.

Nafta is limping toward its 20th anniversary with a beat-up image and a bad track record. Recent polls show that the majority of the U.S. people favors “leaving” or “renegotiating” the model trade agreement.

While much has been said about its impact on U.S. job loss and eroding labor conditions, some of the most severe impacts of Nafta have been felt south of the border.
Nafta has cut a path of destruction through Mexico. Since the agreement went into force in 1994, the country’s annual per capita growth flat-lined to an average of just 1.2 percent -- one of the lowest in the hemisphere. Its real wage has declined and unemployment is up.

As heavily subsidized U.S. corn and other staples poured into Mexico, producer prices dropped and small farmers found themselves unable to make a living. Some two million have been forced to leave their farms since Nafta. At the same time, consumer food prices rose, notably the cost of the omnipresent tortilla.

As a result, 20 million Mexicans live in “food poverty”. Twenty-five percent of the population does not have access to basic food and one-fifth of Mexican children suffer from malnutrition. Transnational industrial corridors in rural areas have contaminated rivers and sickened the population and typically, women bear the heaviest impact.

Not all of Mexico’s problems can be laid at Nafta’s doorstep. But many have a direct causal link. The agreement drastically restructured Mexico’s economy and closed off other development paths by prohibiting protective tariffs, support for strategic sectors and financial controls.

Nafta’s failure in Mexico has a direct impact on the United States. Although it has declined recently, jobless Mexicans migrated to the United States at an unprecedented rate of half a million a year after Nafta.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/24/what-weve-learned-from-nafta/under-nafta-mexico-suffered-and-the-united-states-felt-its-pain

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Regarding the militarization of the Drug War, Calderon got his going in Mexico with a tremendous send-off from George W. Bush:

November 9, 2011
Whose Drug War?
By Steve Coll

In 2006, Mexico’s newly elected president, Felipe Calderón, declared war on his country’s drug cartels. He militarized and intensified a conflict that had been managed by his predecessors through an opaque strategy of accommodation, payoffs, assigned trafficking routes, and periodic takedowns of uncoöperative capos.

The “war” is going poorly. Mexico’s murder rate, which had fallen by fifty percent between 1992 and Calderón’s inauguration, has about tripled since then. A murky, multi-sided conflict has descended into one involving severed heads displayed on pikes, mass executions, disappearances, attacks on journalists, and urban shootouts among the cartels’ trained paramilitaries. About forty-five thousand Mexicans have died since Calderón called out the dogs. Many thousands of the victims are public servants—police, judges, mayors, and legislators—or civilians caught in crossfire. In the name of defending them, the country’s military has carried out horrifying atrocities, degrading the legitimacy of a state that was weak enough to begin with, as a Human Rights Watch report released this week documents.

For all this, the flow of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth into the United States—although hard to measure with any precision—has not been substantially reduced.

“Politicians are lost for language to even describe the conflict,” writes Ioan Grillo, an English-born journalist, in his new book, “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency”:

Felipe Calderón dresses up in a military uniform and calls for no quarter on enemies who threaten the fatherland—then balks angrily at any notion Mexico is fighting an insurrection. The Obama administration is even more confused. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assures people that Mexico is simply suffering from inner city crime like the United States in the eighties. Then she later says Mexico has an insurgency akin to Colombia’s…. Is it a “narco state”? Or a “captured state”? Or just in a right bloody state?

The Mexican public is understandably ambivalent; it wants violence reduced but not at the cost of empowering nihilist warlords. “Protesters march to condemn the abuses of soldiers; but they also protest how the government is failing to protect them from gangsters,” Grillo records. “Often these two points are protested in the same marches.”

Grillo’s book is terrific—full of vivid front-line reporting; diverse interviews; a sense of history; a touch of social science; clarifying statistics; and realistic reviews of what might be done to improve things, none of it easy. It is essential reading. (If you have not already, read, too, my New Yorker colleague William Finnegan’s great reporting from the front lines.)

America has established a role in Mexico’s drug conflict of a sort Graham Greene would recognize. We are deeply culpable, and yet have managed, so far, to insulate ourselves from the highest costs.

In 2010, the border metropolis of Ciudad Juárez had more than three thousand murders. El Paso, just across the Rio Grande, had five. Crack Texas policing and tighter border surveillance cannot explain the gap; informal cartel policy does. It is in the cartels’ interest to keep America’s drug users apathetic and Pentagon generals unprovoked. In Cancun, where hundreds of thousands of Americans alight annually as tourists and spring-breakers, the “war” is barely perceptible. What good is a terrified customer?

Relatively little American blood has been shed, but we supply guns and money to both sides. George W. Bush backed Calderón’s militarization with a $1.8 billion package of helicopters, police training, and intelligence coöperation. Obama has continued the program. Yet it is another American policy—our weak control of automatic weapons—that influences the war’s apocalyptic character more. The Bush Administration rolled back Clinton-era restrictions on high-powered rifles. States such as Arizona have loosened the sale of guns designed for war, not for hunting or self-defense. Between 2009 and April, 2010, more than sixty thousand firearms captured in Mexico were traced to U.S. gun stores, Grillo reports.

More:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/whose-drug-war

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Thank you for taking the time to point out the truth about this.

[Comrade Grumpy]

3. Mexicans are already at the breaking point regarding cops and soldiers getting away with murder.

There have been huge marches in Mexico City and serious and prolonged rioting in the state of Guerrero over the disappearance of 43 radical student teachers at the hands of Iguala police. The mayor there is tightly linked with a local drug gang and has now vanished himself. The governor has been forced to resign. Pena Nieto is having to deal with this.

There's also the case of the 22 people apparently executed by soldiers in June in Mexico state. The army actually had to arrest some soldiers this time.

Now this case, involving US citizens.

During the drug wars (still ongoing), you would occasionally see press accounts of "vicious gun battles" between soldiers and cartel members. Funny thing was, there were no wounded cartel members and no soldiers injured, just a bunch of dead people.

[Judi Lynn]

16. Sooner or later they may slide into the Colombian habit of claiming the dead people were enemies

of the state, trying to kill the soldiers.

That would seem the next predictable evil step. It has been done to death, hasn't it?

[Judi Lynn]

4. Three U.S. citizens last seen with police in Mexico are found dead

Three U.S. citizens last seen with police in Mexico are found dead
October 31, 2014, 4:25 PM|Reporting from Mexico City

Three U.S. citizens who were in Mexico visiting their father and were last seen in the custody of police have been killed along with a friend, authorities said Friday..

Their bodies, each with a gunshot to the head, have been identified by relatives, authorities in the border state of Tamaulipas said. Two brothers, their sister and her boyfriend were killed after being taken away by an ad hoc police force in the city of Matamoros, authorities and relatives said.

The police force, known as the Hercules squad, was seen taking the three men and the woman away, witnesses said.

The Hercules police force is an elite group formed by the mayor of Matamoros, Leticia Salazar, according to the Tamaulipas prosecutors' office. Some officials in the most conflict-ridden parts of Mexico have formed their own security squads as a way to protect themselves when they cannot trust often-corrupt police.

The siblings' father, Pedro Alvarado, said he searched high and low when the four went missing but was unable to find them, until he was called to the morgue Thursday.

More:
http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-american-deaths-20141101-story.html

[Helen Borg]

9. What could have been the motive?

[hack89]

24. Ultimately it was their own fault for being Americans