Drug Killings Haunt Mexican Schoolchildren

[groovedaddy]

TIJUANA, Mexico — The little boy, his school uniform neatly pressed and his friends gathered around, held up 10 little fingers, each one representing a dead body he said he saw outside his school one recent morning. He was not finished, though. He put down the 10 fingers and then put up 2 more. Twelve bodies in all.

“I saw the blood,” offered a classmate, enthusiastically.

“They were tied,” piped in another.

Mexico’s explosion of drug-related violence has caught the attention of the country’s children. Experts say the atrocities that young people are hearing about, and all too frequently witnessing, are hardening them, traumatizing them, filling their heads with images that are hard to shake.

“Unfortunately, with this wave of drug violence, there’s been collateral damage among children,” said Jorge Álvarez Martínez, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who specializes in post-traumatic stress. Such exposure to violence can hinder learning, interrupt sleep and linger for years, he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/world/americas/20tijuana.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[Kulza23]

1. prohibition causes crime

Drug prohibition means that drug producers cannot use the courts to resolve their disputes; instead they have to take the law into their own hands. Hence the gang wars and turf battles.
Furthermore, prohibition leads to a cartelization of the drug industry. Drug enforcement means that small time users and dealers are caught by police, but large cartels can afford to bribe politicians and use fleets of airplanes. Essentially, the government protects the cartel.