This is what we have in store for us--in America. We need to wake up to what's going on near our border. The drug gangs in Mexico are fighting over the increasingly growing market in the U.S. If they continue to get stronger this will mean more drugs on the streets of America. Border security has been scrapped as an issue because of the economic crisis and the lack of guts on the part of politicians in both parties. We can't afford to ignore this issue if we don't to wake up some day soon and find the drug gangs taking over the streets of America as they did in the 1980s:
Gunmen killed a state police officer and 10 members of his family, including five children, during a violent weekend that left at least a dozen Mexicans dead in separate events.
The shooting late Saturday also killed a street vendor in front of the house of state police officer Carlos Reyes, said Tabasco deputy prosecutor Alex Alvarez. Among the five children killed was a 2-year-old boy.
Reyes was a member of a special unit of high-level officers who investigated organized crime and kidnappings, the Latin American Herald Tribune reported.
Police hadn't determined a motive for the attack but Reyes directed a car chase and raids on two homes on Wednesday that led to the death of three suspected gang members and the arrest of seven others, Alvarez said.
"It is confirmed that [the assailants] wanted to kill the state police officer but they killed his whole family," Alvarez said.
At least a dozen gunmen in three SUVs sprayed the house with bullets, leaving police to find 11 bodies scattered inside three houses, the Latin American Herald Tribune reported.
An official from the Tabasco Attorney General's Office told the newspaper the killers "had no mercy" and were taken by complete surprise.
Meanwhile, seven people dining inside a new restaurant in Hostotipaquillo, western Mexico were also gunned down Saturday night.
Those attackers, armed with AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles, arrived in four SUVs and opened fire, the Herald Tribune reported.
The violence is getting worse with guns obtained from you know where:
It's a bloodbath that started as a drug-gang kidnapping, ended in a shoot-out with Mexican troops. Twenty-one were killed in a snowy, desert town, including one soldier.
Since January 1, some 230 drug slayings have occurred around Juarez, Mexico's murder capital. Compare that to 75 this time last year, and you get a sense of the exploding violence, CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports.
Vicious cartels are battling to control the $14 billion a year illicit trade feeding an insatiable U.S. appetite for drugs. Mexican authorities are hitting the cartels with all they have.
Soldiers stormed a Juarez warehouse last week, seizing two tons of marijuana. Tuesday 10 gangsters were arrested in Mexico City with their cache of guns and grenades.
But the gangs have the money and the weapons to fight back.
"While drugs are being smuggled north, a lot of guns are going south," said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at Rand Corp.
By U.S. estimates, 95 percent of cartel guns are smuggled from the states - 2,000 a day according to a recent investigation.
Janet Napolitano, the new head of Homeland Security, has ordered a crackdown on gun smuggling. On the streets of Juarez, it feels like war.
"It's such a huge fight that I don't think it will end," said Juarez resident Ricardo Felix. "It's going to continue until one of the cartels takes control of the country."
They had taken control of Villa Ahumada, the desert town where 21 died Tuesday.
Troops came in last year after traffickers killed three police chiefs, and forced the mayor to flee. Tijuana journalist, Vicente Calderon, says the government was slow to react the cartels' growing threat.
"The government used to tell us this is just a problem among drug cartels," said Calderon. "During the last two years, it's coming out into the surface and affecting everybody else."
With more than 6,000 slayings, 2008 was Mexico's most deadly year for drug violence.
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