In lieu of legitimate journalism, there is ‘la nota roja,’ a bustling tabloid industry dedicated exclusively to covering the daily slaughter. According to a large, handwritten note found by her body, Castaneda was targeted for using social media to report on cartel violence. The most recent killing is that of Marisol Marcia Castaneda, Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper Primera Hora. In 2011 alone, ten journalists have been murdered. In Mexico, the craft of reporting is a dying art, and legitimate journalists are literally an endangered species. That willingness to accept the government explanation is likely intimately linked to the current vacuum in Mexican journalism. This rationalization has been largely accepted by the Mexican people, to the point where they have internalized it as a kind of conventional wisdom, creating a cultural divide between themselves and the daily havoc of the drug war. The official government line is always that the persons killed were “dirty ” somehow mixed up in the crimes which inevitably lead to their demise. Nearly 40,000 homicides have been committed since Calderon declared “war” on drugs in 2006, and only five percent of them have been solved. Most Americans probably just assume that Mexico is a democratic country, after all, it shares a border with the “leaders of the free world.” But Gibbler shows us that it is the drug cartels – presently the Sinaloa Cartel – that are really calling the shots in Mexico, and that the administration of Mexican president Felipe Calderon barely meets the criteria for a functioning government. One man Gibbler spoke with nailed a sign to the wall of his house that read, “Prohibited: littering and dumping corpses.” Two months later, the man found his own daughter, murdered-her body was deposited directly under the sign. It’s a world where murderers don’t run from the scene of their crimes, they casually walk away a world where violent death is commonplace. He shows us a world where narcotraffickers travel in broad daylight in caravans through city streets, their vehicles outfitted with police sirens and custom license plates displaying the name of the cartel to which they belong. Gibbler begins by stating, “The bare facts are so terrifying, they pass beyond the edge of anything credible,” and over the course of the following 200 pages, proceeds to thoroughly corroborate his assertion. “The War On Drugs” is often used as a euphemism for enforcement of United States drug law, but in his book “To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War,” California journalist, John Gibbler, provides a fearless and unflinching look at the bloody reality of the ‘real’ drug war happening south of the U.S./Mexico border.
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