45 dead in attack on casino in northern Mexico

[Losonti Tokash]

http://www.chron.com/news/article/45-de ... 141766.php

MONTERREY, Mexico (AP) — Two dozen gunmen burst into a casino in northern Mexico on Thursday, doused it with gasoline and started a fire that trapped gamblers inside, killing at least 45 people and injuring a dozen more, authorities said.

The fire at the Casino Royale in Monterrey, a city that has seen a surge in drug cartel-related violence, represented one of the deadliest attacks on an entertainment center in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006.

"This is a night of sadness for Mexico," federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire said in a televised address. "These unspeakable acts of terror will not go unpunished."

Calderon tweeted that the attack was "an abhorrent act of terror and barbarism" that requires "all of us to persevere in the fight against these unscrupulous criminal bands."

Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said the number late Thursday had risen to at least 45.

"But we could find more," said state Attorney General Leon Adrian de la Garza, adding that a drug cartel was apparently responsible for the attack. Cartels often extort casinos and other businesses, threatening to attack them or burn them to the ground if they refuse to pay.

State police officials quoted survivors as saying armed men burst into the casino, apparently to rob it, and began dousing the premises with fuel from tanks they brought with them. The officials were not authorized to be quoted by name for security reasons. De la Garza said the liquid appeared to be gasoline.

With shouts and profanities, the attackers told the customers and employees to get out. But many terrified customers and employees fled further inside the building, where they died trapped amid the flames and thick smoke that soon billowed out of the building.

Workers continuing to remove bodies well into the night.

Monterrey Mayor Fernando Larrazabal said many of the bodies were found inside the casino's bathrooms, where employees and customers had locked themselves to escape the gunmen.

In an act of desperation, authorities commandeered backhoes from a nearby construction site to break into the casino's walls to try to reach the people trapped inside.

Maria Tomas Navarro, 42, stood weeping at the edge of the police tape stretched in front of the smoke-stained casino building. She was hoping for word of her brother, 25-year-old Genaro Navarro Vega, who had worked in the casino's bingo area.

Navarro said she tried calling her brother's cell phone. "But he doesn't answer. I don't know what is happening," she said. "There is nobody to ask."

Larrazabal said the casino, in a well-off part of Monterrey, had been closed by authorities in May for building an expansion without a permit, but a judge later granted the owner an injunction to continue operating.

Initial reports said 11 people had been killed, but the death toll climbed as emergency personnel and firefighters searched the casino building. Medics treated survivors for smoke inhalation.

State police officials initially said witnesses reported hearing three explosions before the fire started, but later said a flammable material was used. The officials were not authorized to be quoted by name for security reasons.

The reports of explosions may have been the sound of the ignition of the liquid.

It was the second time in three months that the Casino Royale was targeted. Gunmen struck it and three other casinos on May 25, when the gunmen sprayed the Casino Royale with bullets, but no was reported injured in that attack.

Last month, gunmen killed 20 people at a bar in Monterrey. The attackers sprayed the bar with rounds from assault rifles, and police later found bags of drugs at the bar.

Monterrey has seen bloody turf battles between the Zetas and Gulf cartels in recent months. Once Mexico's symbol of development and prosperity, the city is seeing this year's drug-related murders on a pace to double last year's and triple those of the year before.

___

Associated Press Writer Katherine Corcoran contributed to this report.

[Big Orange]

The death toll has climbed up to 53.

[ComradeClaus]

Did the casino lack sprinklers? Or did the cartel attackers knock those systems out?

Man, all this war-zone shit going on down there. We need to surge a few divisions there to help our Mexican Ally. Maybe have Seal Team 6 take out the leadership. This violence is probably causing a fair number of refugees fleeing across the border.

So the place was called Casino Royale?! I thought MGM copyrighted that name for the Bond franchise.

[The Romulan Republic]

You know, I'd have no problem with sending some of our soldiers down their to clean up these scumbags, provided the Mexican government did not object. Aside from the shear horror of this, there's an element of self-interest- the violence in Mexico spills over into the US, and as you noted probably results in more illegal immigration.

[The Romulan Republic]

I don't want to go into that many countries. But Mexico- its on America's border. Of course, as its an ally we should go in only with their government's permission.

Of course, legalizing pot would probably help. Prohibition leads to an increase in crime- legalization would presumably reduce it.

[Losonti Tokash]

I don't know about you guys, but I've had enough of us invading other countries to "fix" them. It never ends well, and you'd have to be a pretty big moron to think you can solve what is essentially a three-sided civil war in Mexico just by having SEALs assassinate some cartel leaders. PS, chance of Mexico or any other Central American country accepting our help or trusting us=effectively zero. Probably something to do with us constantly fucking the place up or starting wars because a fruit company asked us to.

Best thing to do is offer aid and asylum to refugees fleeing the violence, along with trying to stop the violence from spilling over here more than it has. I'm just glad my relatives got out before the worst of this shit went down, what with informants being decapitated or the military being attacked with RPGs in broad daylight.

[The Romulan Republic]

I don't know about you guys, but I've had enough of us invading other countries to "fix" them. It never ends well, and you'd have to be a pretty big moron to think you can solve what is essentially a three-sided civil war in Mexico just by having SEALs assassinate some cartel leaders. PS, chance of Mexico or any other Central American country accepting our help or trusting us=effectively zero. Probably something to do with us constantly fucking the place up or starting wars because a fruit company asked us to.

I did repeatedly state that we should intervene only if the Mexican government was okay with it, so don't straw man my views as endorsing an invasion.

However, I do not agree with your apparent view that intervention is always a bad thing.

Best thing to do is offer aid and asylum to refugees fleeing the violence, along with trying to stop the violence from spilling over here more than it has. I'm just glad my relatives got out before the worst of this shit went down, what with informants being decapitated or the military being attacked with RPGs in broad daylight.

I approve of such actions entirely.

[Block]

Best thing to do is offer aid and asylum to refugees fleeing the violence, along with trying to stop the violence from spilling over here more than it has.

Yeah, no. That just gives them even less incentive to stay in Mexico and fix the problems. Tighter border controls would help more, cutting off the flow of money and weapons.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Best thing to do is offer aid and asylum to refugees fleeing the violence, along with trying to stop the violence from spilling over here more than it has.

Yeah, no. That just gives them even less incentive to stay in Mexico and fix the problems.

"Fix the problems"? And how exactly are a bunch of refugees going to "fix the problems"? All you are doing is sending them back to be killed.

[Losonti Tokash]

You know what gives them even less incentive to stick around? Criminal cartels engaging in open warfare with the government and murdering anyone that tries to "fix the problems." When your neighbor winds up in the middle of the street with her head between her legs and a note saying that this is what happens to people who help the police (who are probably the ones who did it in the first place), you don't feel too patriotic.

It's also pretty funny that you think tighter border controls would have any appreciable effect on the cartels' income or weapons. You're not going to stop the coyotes by building some shitty fence or putting more border patrol agents on it. Ironically, you can reduce their effectiveness by not forcing people to require their services to escape goddamn death squads.

[Block]

Best thing to do is offer aid and asylum to refugees fleeing the violence, along with trying to stop the violence from spilling over here more than it has.

Yeah, no. That just gives them even less incentive to stay in Mexico and fix the problems.

"Fix the problems"? And how exactly are a bunch of refugees going to "fix the problems"? All you are doing is sending them back to be killed.

Because the only way to fix the problem is to prevent them from becoming refugees. You're not sending them back to be killed if they don't flee, because they stay and continue to function as part of society. It's hard for them, sure, and if they need aid in place, well, that's why they have their own government, and if the government asks for help, we should give it. It's not like Sudan, it's not like Rwanda, where wholesale slaughter was taking place. If it were something like that then I can see accepting refugees, but it's not.

[Block]

It's also pretty funny that you think tighter border controls would have any appreciable effect on the cartels' income or weapons. You're not going to stop the coyotes by building some shitty fence or putting more border patrol agents on it. Ironically, you can reduce their effectiveness by not forcing people to require their services to escape goddamn death squads.

No, you stop it with more effective enforcement, harsher punishment for violators and a stricter policy of deportation. I'm sure someone will come along to call me racist shortly, but it has nothing to do with race, and a lot more to do with the illegality of it.

[Barlestone]

It's not like Sudan, it's not like Rwanda, where wholesale slaughter was taking place. If it were something like that then I can see accepting refugees, but it's not.

While not on the same level as Rwanda, 34,612 deaths in non-negligible. What exactly do you expect the people fleeing the cartels to do, just sit there and die?

You don't prevent people from becoming refugees by trying, and ultimately failing, to keep them from fleeing, but by ameliorating the situation so they no longer have to flee.

No, you stop it with more effective enforcement, harsher punishment for violators and a stricter policy of deportation

Deporting people will not affect organized crime, because it is not the cartels fleeing the drug wars. It's mostly ordinary people who, understandably, don't want to be burned alive whenever the local mafioso decides to burn down a casino. What the Border Patrol can do to hurt the cartels is better control the southward movement of guns and money. Aggressive deportation would distract from this, because resources that could be used to actually hurt the cartels would be used to deport people not related to the cartels.

I'm sure someone will come along to call me racist shortly, but it has nothing to do with race, and a lot more to do with the illegality of it.

If the US government were to offer asylum to Mexicans fleeing drug violence, they would, by definition, be here legally.

Remember that the law, when wisely made, is made for a purpose. Humanitarian concerns aside, one of the main reasons for making it easier to legally immigrate to the US is it frees up resources used to prosecute gardeners for use against the drug smugglers, gun runners, and murders. It would also make immigrants more likely to cooperate with police, because doing so would no longer increase the risk of deportation.

[cosmicalstorm]

Mexico is becoming ever more fucked up. It seems to be one of those situations where there is no really nice thing at all that can be done about it too. It's just going to remain shitty for the forseeable future.
Also, the US invading entire Latin America? What the fuck would that ever do?

[Shroom Man 777]

Guatemala in this decade has been the staging ground for more air, sea and land transshipments of Colombian cocaine to the United States than any other country besides Mexico. The trend is only rising. This year the State Department reports that Guatemala now transships between 200 and 300 metric tons of cocaine annually -- or well over half of all the cocaine reaching the United States. The Guatemalan military has been responsible for much of the cocaine transshipping, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But the Clinton administration has looked away from the scandal, even trying to cover up the murder of Guatemala's top judge in 1994, which only established the Guatemalan military's impunity from American prosecution.

U.S. complicity with the Guatemalan military has a long history, of course. The CIA has enjoyed especially close ties. Back in 1954, the agency did everything but hold Col. Carlos Castillo Armas' hand as he deposed Jacobo Arbenz, the country's democratically elected president. The CIA-backed 1954 coup not only killed Guatemalan democracy, it established the country's military as its most powerful institution, accountable to no law. When leftist guerrillas began to emerge in the early 1960s, the CIA helped drive back the insurgency. When it resurfaced with surprising force in the early 1980s, the CIA too played an integral role in shaping the country's brutal response. Under both the Reagan and Bush administrations, the CIA provided substantial covert aid to Guatemala when Congress, largely over human rights objections, refused to overtly fund its counterinsurgency.

Uh-oh. US-backed anti-communist juntas end up becoming huge ass drug lords. Uh... FUCKING CUBA! GRR... SEND THE US NAVY DELTASEAL RANGER FORCE RECON!!!

Turns out that a lot of the drug lords are actually intimately tied to local political and military powers, rather than foreign subversives. So if your local government is US-backed, then your drug lords who are actually intimately tied to the local political and military powers will be actually intimately tied to the local US-backed political and military powers. Because, turns out, drug lords and shit develop domestically instead of being introduced by OMG TEH COMMIES.

Turns out, to get their drugs rolling, drug lords will have to buddy buddy head honchos in the guvmint and the military rather than some commie shitkickers in the jungle.

Hey, look, another CIA-backed shmoe. Oh no, the commies!

Hey, I heard that in the 70s, a lot of the drugs from the Golden Triangle was actually brought in via connections American gangsters had with the US military who then had contacts in the Southeast Asian drug scene, am i rite?

[Thanas]

Locked pending mod action.

[Thanas]

Pointless hijack split.

Continue.

[Lord Baal]

Me, being from a Latin American country (and one with a death toll of 4 people every half hour, thats it, a murder every 7 minutes and 30 seconds), regrettably can speak of the horrors that the drug business can do to a population. There's simply no easy "fix" to this matters. Generally those people are backed up by either politics, military or both, so no, sending in the "space marines" at the best of the cases IF they successfully kill some one important, will only end up creating a power void that will be filled by the next person on line, and a brutal reaction against everyone.

The trouble can't be "fixed" by the locals either, not police or civilians, they are generally under the foot of the bigger fish, police oppress the civilians, and the police it self is in check by the drug cartels or the military, more often than not under a threat to their families.

Sadly, "fix" this issue would involve a lot more of work than just more bullets sprays. For one tighten the border patrol won't do nothing, but probably just more deaths of innocent civilians. Legalizing marijuana won't do nothing either, what do you think? This guys are going to simply drop their weapons, register a company and start behaving like decent people just because "now it's legal". You can't tax a drug cartel, legal or not, besides the heavier income come from heavy stuff like cocaine, what are we gonna do, legalize that crap too???

If you wanna let dry those cartels you have to fight their main income, that's it, the addicts scum bags, and that is a REALLY HARD thing to do. That's a problem you can't solve with bullets (well one "could", but those pesky human rights get in the middle... ). To solve that would take many years upon many years, and it's not a work involving the addicts alone, is purging the government from corrupts officers that look away when that garbage comes trough to have a share of it, its a matter of parents paying more attention to their kids and really talking about this with them, so people develop more character and confidence so one day they can simply say no and not fall idiotically under peer pressure. It's a matter of having a better legal system so people involved on this gets bigger punishments, its a matter of a hell of a lot of work, that would require whole countries changing!!! Yeah, I wasn't talking only about USA, (though the majority of the drug that goes through Mexico end up there...)... I don't say they(USA) are the ones that have to change, because even if we make the highly hypothetical case that USA changes overnight and (Zeus forbid it, cause it would be the en of the world), it becomes the "perfect Cristian paradise where no one do drugs", the cartels would receive a hard blow, but they will simply turn into other countries and "internal market" to compensate for the loss.

Let me tell you a history about my country, maybe some of you know how to speak Spanish so I will give you the link, here and here.

Long history short, the 10th of this month a plane with a ton and a half of high purity cocaine was intercepted. All good and nice! All the media show circus (that belongs to the government, all of them, can you spell c-o-m-m-u-n-i-s-m??) make a lots of noise about how effective our security forces are and what not... what happens, just 3 days latter? The fucking plane disappears in the thin air (I'm sure that's actually a pretty literal description of what happened), had it be a train or a truck (or elephant) I would believed that David Copperfield is in need of a serious rehab...

So there comes the minister of some shitty ministry (we have +40, 12 years ago we had 7. Corruption and excessive bureaucracy?? Nah.. just socialist revolution, yay!) and give some idiotic declarations that would make some of the members of the hate mail wall of trophies of Mike looks on par of Martin Luther King debating skills! He does not trouble with why the plane is not here anymore, or why the flight log of the plane shows regular flights from a famous Venezuelan military base to Honduras and back, from several months...

My country state is regrettable at best, it break my heart to see a land with so much resources, from fertile lands and oil to uranium (which BTW, we are secretly selling to Iran) being ran by ignorance and hunger with no measure! And while governments like this exists, drugs will continue to have ways of moving around and generate income, even if we are to take out USA from the equation. So, no, a couple of bullets wont serve nothing but as a little speed bump at best.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, legalizing alcohol did screw over Al Capone.

[Lord Baal]

I would disagree with you, more like 11 years on a federal prison screw him up.

[Shroom Man 777]

I meant ending the Prohibition, and legalizing booze, did screw organizations like Al Capone that derived a lot of their power from smuggling contraband booze illegally.

[whackadoodle]

Legalizing marijuana won't do nothing either, what do you think? This guys are going to simply drop their weapons, register a company and start behaving like decent people just because "now it's legal". You can't tax a drug cartel, legal or not, besides the heavier income come from heavy stuff like cocaine, what are we gonna do, legalize that crap too???

More than 60 percent of the cartels' revenue -- $8.6 billion out of $13.8 billion in 2006 -- came from U.S. marijuana sales, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

[Flagg]

Legalizing marijuana won't do nothing either, what do you think? This guys are going to simply drop their weapons, register a company and start behaving like decent people just because "now it's legal". You can't tax a drug cartel, legal or not, besides the heavier income come from heavy stuff like cocaine, what are we gonna do, legalize that crap too???

No dumbass, they'll be put out of the marijuana business by legal manufacture and selling of marijuana just like the prohibition gangsters were put out of the alcohol business by its repeal. And yeah, why not make cocaine legal too?

[Simon_Jester]

If they lose 60% of their income, they may not go out of business, but they'll be relatively weaker, there will be more fighting amongst themselves over the diminished market share, and so on. There's no single silver bullet to get rid of organized crime, but you can still make big holes in their power if you're smart.

But yeah, Baal, it's the competition from legal growers (quite a few in the US itself, probably) that would undermine the cartels if marijuana were legal in the US. It's not like you see criminal cartels trying to ship tobacco or alcohol into the US, after all; what would be the point?

[Shroom Man 777]

That's actually something that the invisible hand of the free market would be good for.