Friends & Neighbors Update

Source: wapo

ZIHUATANEJO, Mexico -- Andr?s Sauzo collects newspapers, astoundingly grisly newspapers.

There's the one with the close-up shot of a severed human head. There's the one with the wide-angle of a man hacked to death with a machete.

But the worst in his bulky archive of drug-war gore rolled off the presses the day after someone found pieces of what used to be Sauzo's 24-year-old namesake. A hit man had decapitated Sauzo's son, then chopped off his arms and legs. The killer was so unconcerned about being brought to justice that he scrawled his own name and nickname -- "El Barby" -- on a note left with the mutilated corpse.

Still, Sauzo's mother, Cristina Gomez, didn't bother to go to the police. "Why waste my time?" she said in an interview. "This is the way it is in a town without laws."

Gomez's reaction and the audacity of Sauzo's murder -- one of 11 decapitations in the state of Guerrero this year and one of 2,000 killings in a nationwide war between rival drug cartels -- are symptomatic of the unraveling of the rule of law that has plagued Mexico for years.

When you read this story remember, these same cartels are gaining strength in this country and our government refuses to acknowledge that fact.

Blogs for Bush sez: There is precisely nothing the United States can do for Mexico in this case - if Mexico falls, then it will have to be Mexicans who pick up the pieces and put it back together. Our job will be to provide what humanitarian assistence we can, but also to seal our borders tight lest 20 million Mexicans try to flee the collapse of their nation.

Mark Krikorian @ The Corner sez: Even the mainstream media are beginning to see that Mexico is unravelling (see here), or at the very least entering a long period of convulsions caused by the passing of the old oppressive order, similar to (but probably less violent than) the comparable cases of Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Iraq. And there really isn't much we can do about it, other than try to contain the fallout. As Roy Scheider might have said, we're going to need a bigger fence.

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