Mexico Suffers Deadliest Year Ever: Violence Hits Cabo, Tourist Havens

Local authorities near the beautiful tourist town of Los Cabos on the Baja California peninsula found six bodies suspended from three different bridges this week.

Authorities did not want to comment on the details surrounding how the men got onto the bridges, but Reuters suspects “drug gangs”, who often hang the bodies of their murdered rivals in public for intimidation purposes.

According to official data in November, there were more murders in October in Mexico than any other month over the past 20-years.

Mexico is on track to have the deadliest year ever since modern records began. In the first 10-months of 2017, there were more than 20,878 murders nationwide, as many in the war-torn country have blamed President Enrique Pena Nieto’s failure to tackle drug violence.

One local prosecutor said in a statement to Reuters,

Two bodies were found on a bridge in Las Veredas, near Los Cabos International Airport, and two on a different bridge on the highway between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, local prosecutors said in a statement.

 

In a separate statement, the prosecutors said two further bodies were found on a third bridge near the airport.

The latest spree of violent crime has surged in Baja California, especially around the multi-national resorts of Los Cabos, with yearly visits attracting more than one million foreigners. To make matters worse, Los Cabos police chief Juan Manuel Mayorga was assassinated last week, as the once calm resort town descends into chaos.

Hotel Prices in Los Cabos (as of 12-21-17) have collapsed amid the violence spiraling out of control in the area.

In August, a hail of automatic gunfire killed three and wounded two others at a popular Mexican beach resort in Los Cabos.

Earlier this week, authorities in the northern state of Chihuahua reported a massacre of 12 killed in armed clashes between two rival drug gangs.

Carlos Mendoza Davis, the governor state of Baja California, said the authorities are investigating the recent surge in violence around the Los Cabos area.

Reuters further elaborates on Baja California and Los Cabos’s deadly year.

Homicides have more than doubled in Baja California Sur this year, with 409 people killed through October, from 192 in all of 2016. In June authorities said they had found a mass grave with the bodies of 11 men and three women near Los Cabos.

Assuming that Mexico descends further into chaos, broke Americans who are looking for an all inclusive vacation might want to checkout Los Cabos. Hotels rooms are being heavily discounted as drug violence penetrates the popular resort town. As for Mexico as a whole, it’s a complete mess, and this is the reason why President Trump wants to build the wall.

This Is What The US-Mexico Border Wall Actually Looks Like Right Now

Having signed an executive order to begin construction of the "great big wall" along the Mexican border, one which according to Congressional estimates will cost between $12 and $15 billion, some forget that even at this moment many parts of the border with Mexico are already covered in fences. In other spots, the wall is not made of bricks, but out of scanners, drones, and guards.

National Geographic photographer James Whitlow Delano has visited the border several times in the past decades as these walls have gone up. These are his photos and stories:

In the photo above, the border wall separates Jacumba, California, from Jacume, Mexico, in the high desert. Even after the first border barricade was built here in the mid-1990s to disrupt human and drug traffickers, residents of Jacume could cross freely into Jacumba to buy groceries or to work, and children would be brought across to go to school or to the health clinic. Since September 11, 2001, security has turned a ten-minute walk into a two-hour drive through the official border crossing in Tecate, segregating these communities from each other. After ten years, Jacume, a village of 600, was called "a black hole," where even Mexican federal agents had been held hostage for attempting to extort money from smugglers.

"A double border wall near San Diego blocks undocumented migrants from using the Tijuana River—located on the other side of the second fence—as a corridor into the U.S. In the 1980s, entire families would rush across the border, believing more of them would get through the gauntlet if the U.S. Border Patrol was overwhelmed. Here, in the 1980s, I watched waves of frightened Mexican families, young and old, run through, trying to evade Border Patrol agents and, at times, risking life and limb by crossing a busy freeway nearby. This wall put an end to the runs."

When I first visited this spot in San Diego, where the border meets the Pacific Ocean, in 1982, there was a single corrugated steel wall that ended at the top of the beach. Helicopters circled above, but it was still physically possible to walk straight into Mexico or vice-versa. At the very end of the wall, on the Tijuana side, someone had spray painted "sin fronteras" ("without borders"). Now the wall extends into the breaking waves.  

This lonely stretch of border is known for banditry. For all the talk of sealing the border, this valley about 19 miles (30 kilometers) from the Pacific Ocean has no wall at all. From the U.S. side, it"s forbidden to go any farther than the gate seen in the lower right, but the gate is the only physical barrier.

A parked U.S. Border Patrol vehicle looks out across the border wall at Tecate, Mexico, a city famous for Tecate and Carta Blanca beers. As is typical along the border, the city on the Mexico side pushes all the way to the wall, while the U.S. side is largely open country.

Yellow smoke rises from a brush fire south of the border wall in the Sonoran Desert, where California, Arizona, and Mexico meet. The increased surveillance near Tijuana and the coast pushed migrants eastward, where there were fewer U.S. Border Patrol agents.

The U.S. government filled in Smuggler"s Gulch with a structure resembling an earthen dam and built a triple-thickness border fence topped with razor wire, flood lights, remote sensors, and cameras to deter nighttime crossings.

For decades, traffickers would smuggle everything—cattle, people, moonshine, cocaine—through this canyon, making it one of the most treacherous places along the border. In the 1990s, Smuggler"s Gulch was a prime route for undocumented migrants attempting to enter the United States.

The Smuggler"s Gulch fence is part of a 60-million-dollar project to install triple fencing over the final 3.5 mile (5.6 kilometers) of fence between San Diego and Tijuana.

The border fence ends and is replaced by a barrier on a desert plain in the Imperial Valley, at the edge of the irrigated oasis farmland west of Calexico. Border patrols were completely absent here, as opposed to all other places I visited along the border. Elsewhere, Border Patrol agents regularly approached to determine my nationality and to ask why I was so close to the line. Here, there was nothing but solitude.

This wall separates Calexico, California from Mexicali, Mexico. As their names imply, the two are sister cities, and the wall was not always this big. In the 1980s, there was a rickety corrugated steel wall that didn"t even extend to the edge of the cities. But in 2008, when I visited again, U.S. crews were extending and reinforcing the barrier. Mexicali has a notorious reputation, but there were prosperous suburbs south of the city, complete with shopping malls and Starbucks.  

That said, Mexican cartel violence has been known to spill over the border because of the lucrative smuggling business. In April 2015, U.S. Border Patrol agents seized more than 69 pounds of methamphetamine coming over the border. In the process, they found how smugglers were getting around the wall between Calexico and Mexicali—they had built a tunnel.

Caught On Tape: Massive Explosion At Mexico City Fireworks Market Kills 29

A sprawling fireworks market outside Mexico City exploded Tuesday killing at least 29 people and injuring scores more. Ripped from the script of a Naked Gun movie, the scene of the disaster was anything but humorous...

At least 60 people have been hurt in an explosion at a fireworks market near Mexico City, local media report. https://t.co/WiHVYAj7l3 pic.twitter.com/T24satoqga

— CNN (@CNN) December 20, 2016

As WSJ reports, according to state and local officials, this is the third time in 11 years that the market was destroyed by explosions.

The San Pablito market is one of Mexico’s largest for fireworks, and does particularly booming business around the country’s Independence Day on September 16 and during the Christmas season celebrations, which begin Dec. 12 with the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patroness.

The previous explosions, which also destroyed the market, occurred in the days leading up to the Independence Day celebrations in 2005 and 2006.

The head of Mexico state’s pyrotechnical association told digital publication Animal Politico last week that the San Pablito market was the safest in Latin America, its stalls sufficiently spaced to “prevent a chain reaction in the case of a spark.”

We know this is a terrrible disaster, and our condolences go out to those who lost someone, but we just can"t help ourselves... "nothing to see here, move along..."