https://www.blacklistedradio.com/?p=1453
Music by: Void Pedal - 21 Guns Pt.1
Felipe Calderon sent 50,000 soldiers after the drug cartels when he became president of Mexico in 2006.
So far the offensive to root out top drug traffickers, combined with conflicts between cartels over territory, has claimed more than 55,000 lives.
Here are some more numbers — drawn from reports including in-depth pieces by Reuters and the New York Times — that show just how scary the conflict is:
• 3,000 police officers and soldiers have died since 2006, which is equal to the number of coalition soldiers who have died in Afghanistan since 2001.
• An additional 5,000 people have disappeared since 2006.
• The Zeta cartel, which now controls more territory than any other cartel in Mexico, commands 10,000 gunman stretching from the Texas border to Central America.
• 49 corpses were decapitated, dismembered and dumped on a highway in northern Mexico last month. One of the worst atrocities of the drug war, it was allegedly done by Daniel Elizondo, alias "The Madman," who is a leader of the Zetas drug cartel.
• The United Nations estimates that the U.S. narcotics market is worth about $60 billion annually.
• The Justice Department estimates that Colombian and Mexican cartels take in $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year.
• In 2007 Mexican authorities made the largest cash seizure in history when they discovered $205 million in the home of a suspected cartel supplier of meth-precursor chemicals. The money weighed more than 4,500 pounds.
• Last December officials seized 252 tons of precursor chemicals for manufacturing meth at one of the Pacific ports used by cartels to supply their superlabs (which make industrial volumes of meth).
