{"id":1070,"date":"2014-11-16T13:04:41","date_gmt":"2014-11-16T20:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=1070"},"modified":"2014-11-16T13:15:55","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T20:15:55","slug":"43","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=1070","title":{"rendered":"#43"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mission,<\/a><\/p>\n

43 students. 43 young people kidnapped in the night. 43 sons and daughters murdered by the hands of corruption.<\/strong> 43 bodies discarded and burned like household trash. 43 chances for a better future lost. 43 more reasons to mourn for Mexico.<\/p>\n

The 43 slain university students<\/a> of Ayotzinapa<\/a> died because on Sept. 26 they commandeered several public buses and blocked a highway, a common form or political protest in Mexico, and by doing so interfered with the wife of the mayor of Iguala<\/a>, one of the most violent and corrupt cities in the Guerrero, one of Mexico\u2019s most violent and corrupt states. She was en route to give a speech, found the road blocked and called her husband to demand he do something about it. The mayor,\u00a0 Jos\u00e9 Luis Abarca, ordered the local police to attack them. The cops handed them to a criminal gang associated with the narcos who control the region. And the students disappeared.<\/p>\n

All this happened with the same impunity on the part of the mayor, the police and the narcos that infects all of Mexico and has quite literally allowed killers of all political and illegal persuasion to get away with murder for years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the beginning of what has come to be called the Mexican Drug War<\/a>, launched in 2006 by then-President Felipe Calder\u00f3n again the web of cartels who generate between up to $50 billion in illegal drug sales<\/strong> annually and control 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United State, the official death toll of the violence between the cartels, between the government and the cartels and between both of them and the innocent citizens of Mexico \u2013 like the 43 students of Ayotzinapa \u2013 has reached 60,000. That\u2019s the official number. Unofficially, human rights observers put the estimate at 120,000.<\/p>\n

For some perspective, consider that 58,220 Americans died in the Vietnam War<\/strong>, a conflict that compelled my generation to fill the streets of the U.S. capital in protest and led to vast changes in American society.<\/p>\n

Of course, Vietnam was an American war and a draft existed that pulled those who could not dodge the conflict directly into it, but still one might imagine that a war of similar lethality occurring in a country visited annually by more than 6 million Americans<\/strong> would spark a modicum of outrage here at home.<\/p>\n