Mexican Narco Wars

Probably the most obscene (policy based i.e hopeless war on drugs) 'war' that has taken place in our 'civilized' world at this point in time, apart from the quagmire wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, (which are strategic battle fields to encircle Russia and China via NATO and America. Hence a forever war) - is the surreal reality of the Mexican Narco Wars which will fuel movies, books for years to come.

In saying that, the pure brutality of  the Mexican drug wars is something hard to fathom to the extent that, hostility, or conflict which transpires into all out carnage, dismemberment, rape and pillaging usually is the precurser to a dying empire and a world adrift.

Still some morbid humor can be found within this 'war'.  From The New Yorker (December 11 2012)

On the Fence
“Show me a fifty-foot fence and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder,” a drug warrior once told me, and the cartels have long excelled at so-rudimentary-they’re-obvious methods of pushing product across the border. In this instance, a group of smugglers near Yuma, Arizona, tried to drive a Jeep right over the fence. “Ramps!” you can almost hear them saying beforehand. “We could use ramps!” If you could inscribe the Quixotic essence of the drug war in a single image, the photograph above might very well be it.


The Narco Backers of the “Passion of the Christ” Prequel
It’s always a little surprising to reflect on the religiosity of contemporary narcos, in light of the more or less non-stop mortal sins that the profession entails. But I was especially surprised to learn that when Hollywood producers began the process of developing a prequel to Mel Gibson’s hugely successful 2004 film, “The Passion of the Christ,” one of the chief investors was an alleged narcotraficante named Jorge Vásquez Sánchez. After Sánchez was arrested in Chicago, in 2010, and pleaded guilty to extortion and other crimes, it emerged that, through some spectacularly ill-advised loans, the producers had come to owe him a ten-per-cent stake of any future profits from the film. The project, “Mary, Mother of Christ,” was well on its way to production, and had attracted the megapastor Joel Osteen as a producer, before the identity of the unsavory backer was revealed this year. A spokesman from Osteen’s church said that the pastor had no inkling of Sánchez’s involvement. Somehow, I believe him. (The film, which stars Ben Kingsley, is due out next year. Because Sánchez forfeited his stake in the production to the federal government, we are all, in a sense, now investors in the film.)

The Knights Templar Play Dressup
Actually, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that the cartels would have their eyes on Hollywood: a morbid theatricality is a persistent feature of narco culture. Earlier this year, during a routine patrol of a town in Michoacán, the Mexican Army discovered a training ground that belonged to the Knights Templar, a slightly zany offshoot of the already zany cartel known as La Familia Michoacana (about which William Finnegan wrote in 2010). When they searched the site, the soldiers discovered a hundred and twenty hard plastic helmets—a special order, it appeared, as each featured a plunging nose guard like those worn by the twelfth-century Christian order from which the cartel takes its name. The headgear apparently featured in the cartel’s initiation rites.