Acapulco is Now Mexico's Murder Capital

[IronLionZion]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/how-acapulco-became-mexicos-murder-capital/?utm_term=.729e0a9ada5d

The faded resort city is a symbol of the skyrocketing violence in Mexico.

ACAPULCO, Mexico ­— From the crescent bay and swaying palms, the taxi drivers of Acapulco need just 10 minutes to reach this other, plundered world.

Here, in a neighborhood called Renacimiento, a pharmacy is smeared with gang graffiti. Market stalls are charred by fire. Taco stands and dentists’ offices, hair salons and auto-body workshops — all stand empty behind roll-down metal gates.

On Friday afternoons, however, the parking lot at the Oxxo convenience store in this brutalized barrio buzzes to life. Dozens of taxi drivers pull up. It’s time to pay the boys.

When the three young gunmen drive up in a white Nissan Tsuru, Armando, a 55-year-old cabbie, scribbles his four-digit taxi number on a scrap of paper, folds it around a 100-peso note and slips it into their black plastic bag. This is his weekly payment to Acapulco’s criminal underworld — about $5, or roughly half what he earns in a day.

“They have the power,” said Armando, who identified himself only by his first name because he feared reprisal. “They can do whatever they want.”

Lots of powerful images at the link.

[mucifer]

1. I am a hospice nurse in Chicago who speaks Spanish. The things my patients and their families tell

me are horrifying. Children kidnapped and mutilated, drug lords running the town murdering at will.

No one has ever explained to me why Mexicans cannot be considered refugees. It doesn't make sense and it really angers me.

Chicago does have a lot of violence. We do have so many children and families that live in fear here. But, Illinois has about a third of the murder rate as the state of Guerrero Mexico there are several states in the USA that are higher than Illinois. We don't have the extortion and kidnappings and mutilations that happen on the scale of Mexico.

I'm glad that Washington Post is reporting on this and people really have to consider this when they are looking at the immigrant population from Mexico and also El Salvador and Guatemala.

It's horrific.