Steve Coll deconstructs the view from the other side of the border:
About forty-five thousand Mexicans have died since Calderón called out the dogs. Many thousands of the victims are public servants—police, judges, mayors, and legislators—or civilians caught in crossfire. In the name of defending them, the country’s military has carried out horrifying atrocities, degrading the legitimacy of a state that was weak enough to begin with, as a Human Rights Watch report released this week documents. For all this, the flow of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth into the United States—although hard to measure with any precision—has not been substantially reduced.
Meanwhile, the cartels are going after Mexican bloggers and social media users:
The moderator of a popular Mexican social network has been murdered, allegedly for tipping off the authorities about the local drug cartel. Nicknamed “Rascatripas” or “Scraper” (literally “Fiddler”) on the network Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, the 35-year-old appears to have been handcuffed, tortured, decapitated and dumped beside a statue of Christopher Columbus one mile from the Texas border. Below the man’s body was a partially obscured and blood-stained blanket. Written on the blanket in black ink: “Hi I’m ‘Rascatripas’ and this happened to me because I didn’t understand I shouldn’t post things on social networks.”
(Photo: The corpses of a man and a woman hang from a pedestrian bridge in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico on September 13, 2011. By Raul Llamas/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 