Again...

And so it begins again.

The unannounced policy of the state government of diminishing the military presence in the state and replacing it with the new state police is having the consequences anyone with two neurons still firing could have predicted: organized crime.

At our quinta, people began watching the house from vehicles, planning something--robbery, kidnapping, who knows?  The first problem was trying to report this activity.  The so-called emergency number didn't even answer; the state police number was "restricted".  The army and the marines did anwer their phones and take down our information, but they obviously have to report incidents of this kind to the state command center (yes, it works), which sent out state police who have been patrolling the countryside around the quinta for several days now.

Yesterday a man was kidnapped by a ski-masked commando from an upscale butcher shop on one of the main streets in our township, supposedly the safest one in the state.  But thanks to the epic stupidity of our state government at all levels, thanks to a do-nothing national congress (you think the U.S. congress is bad?  You aint seen nothin' yet!), municipal and state governments have become indebted for the next several decades.  We have police patrols that are out of action due to lack of maintenance.  It took the police fifteen minutes to show up at the butcher shop yesterday even though it is a scarce few blocks from police headquarters--one patrol, one policeman.  Fortunately the anti-kidnapping unit is in action, and they are the only ones who seem to capture criminals and rescue victims now that the army and the marines are in the back seat.  Some suspect they aren't even in the car any longer...

But let's talk about the state police.  This new, "elite" police corps has around 2500 people at the very most; it is well-equipped so far.  Unfortunately, some of its members have been involved in theft, in rape, and in kidnapping and assassination of a kidnapping victim.  I don't care how many people, victims themselves of an almost mythical level of wishful thinking, claim that these are just a few rotten apples, there is rot and then there is massive, horrendous, unimaginable decomposition that stinks to high heaven and beyond.  You can't claim to be using filters and high-level training when you wind up with members of a police force that are psychopaths.

The only thing standing between the citizenry of this country and the law of the jungle is the military.  The reason, of course, it that Mexico is next to the most prolific user of legal and illegal drugs in the world.  With breath-taking hypocrisy the United States thinks it can threaten Mexico with reprisals if we legalize marijuana here when there state after state is doing just that--legalizing it.  Didn't the U.S. learn anything from the Prohibition era?  Or does it not matter as long as the bloodshed is happening across the border and not within the U.S.?

There is a saying in Spanish: "Poor Mexico, so close to the U.S. and so far from God."  Maybe the two conditions are inevitably connected.