re: #176 MandyManners

Are you really drawing an equivalence between Fox and Chavez, Ortega and Castro?

Let’s just say that i doubt that these “wonderful” fellows were Venezuelan or Cuban.

Grisly slayings brings Mexican drug war to US
By PAULINE ARRILLAGA
AP National Write

Mexican cartels reaching farther into U.S.

COLUMBIANA, Ala. (AP) — Five men dead in an apartment.

In a county that might see five homicides in an entire year, the call over the sheriff’s radio revealed little about what awaited law enforcement at a sprawling apartment complex.

A type of crime, and criminal, once foreign to this landscape of blooming dogwoods had arrived in Shelby County. Sheriff Chris Curry felt it even before he laid eyes on the grisly scene. He called the state. The FBI. The DEA. Anyone he could think of.

“I don’t know what I’ve got,” he warned them. “But I’m gonna need help.”

The five dead men lay scattered about the living room of one apartment in a complex of hundreds.

Some of the men showed signs of torture: Burns seared into their earlobes revealed where modified jumper cables had been clamped as an improvised electrocution device. Adhesive from duct tape used to bind the victims still clung to wrists and faces, from mouths to noses.

As a final touch, throats were slashed open, post-mortem.

Curry would soon find this was a retaliation hit over drug money with ties to Mexico’s notorious Gulf Cartel.

Curry also found out firsthand what federal drug enforcement agents have long understood. The drug war, with the savagery it brings, knows no bounds. It had landed in his back yard, in the foothills of the Appalachians, in Alabama’s wealthiest county, around the corner from The Home Depot.

One thousand, twenty-four miles from the Mexico border.

One reason for that shift is the ability these days to “blend in in plain sight,” as the Atlanta DEA chief puts it. The flood of Hispanic immigrants into American communities to work construction and plant jobs helped provide cover for traffickers looking to expand into new markets or build hubs in quiet suburbs with fewer law officers than the big cities.