Word: drugging
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...movie script, American swindler Robert Vesco successfully evaded the U.S. justice system for more than 25 years. Perhaps most infamous for allegedly scamming investors out of more than $200 million during the 1970s, Vesco fled the U.S. in 1972, on the run from charges ranging from looting to drug trafficking. His fraud finally caught up with him when a Cuban court sentenced him to prison for more than a decade for marketing a bogus pill to cure cancer and AIDS. A recently discovered burial record confirmed his death in November...
Mexicans are accustomed to tales of crooked cops abetting drug-related killings. So this week's announcement that a federal officer is among those charged with conspiracy in a drug-mafia hit on the nation's acting police chief Edgar Millan caused little surprise south of the border. Mexican officials say the May 8 assassination was ordered by the Sinaloa drug cartel, and if convicted, the accused officer, Jose Montes, will join a long and infamous line of cops - including one of Mexico's former anti-drug czars - who have moonlighted for the cartels...
...Still, last week's murder of Millan, one of the the highest-ranking police officials ever to be gunned down in Mexico, set a new benchmark in the Colombia-style drug carnage that continues to rage from Tijuana to Cancun. Mexico has already logged almost 1,200 drug-related killings this year - putting it well on track to break last year's record of almost 2,500 - as an increasingly chaotic array of drug gangs fight one another for trafficking turf, and against any officials who dare to confront them...
...Professionalizing Mexico's police and judiciary is certainly the challenge of a generation rather than of an election cycle. But Mexico's security forces, whose firepower pales in comparison to the high-powered arsenals of the drug cartels, are in dire need of just the kind of short-term aid envisioned in the plan, dubbed the "Merida Initiative" for the Yucatan city where it was announced last year by Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon...
...such as demanding more concrete evidence that Mexico's security forces are being purged of corrupt cops and human-rights abusers. Such demands would surely raise the hackles of Mexican nationalists, who bridle against the sort of gringo-dictated conditions that they see in Plan Colombia, a similar anti-drug aid crusade in South America - and who blame Mexico's crisis on the appetite for cocaine in the U.S. and on the rampant smuggling of U.S. guns south of the border...