Assignment 1 Rojas

1)What I find interesting about Mexico's crime is that they have the army do all of the law enforcing, instead of police officers. I wonder how the government can be so sure that the army isn't so corrupt either.

2)My view on Mexico hasn't changed after the article, because I go down there frequently to visit family. People often here about how all you have to do if you get pulled over in Mexico is give the officer $20 and he'll forget anything ever happened, and it's entirel true. The cops down there will do anything for money, a lot more than just let your speeding ticket disappear. Since these cops are so corrupt, in the last few years, the only job the police do is mainly simple traffic watch. You see the army everywhere. There's drug checking stations going in and out of any major city, and everyone's car gets checked. They cruise around the street, with someone always on the turret gun on the back of the Hum-v. We drove through a city and saw an entire small neighborhood on lockdown, because the army was storming all the houses in the area, and we drove through a small town that was almost entirely abandoned because three weeks before we were there, there was a huge shootout between drug runners and the army, and most of the houses were basically ruined from the bullet holes. But the kidnapping problem has also grown to be corrupt in so many different ways. A few years, one of Mexico's biggest and most respected drug lords was actually abducted and held for ransom. Basically, no side is safe from this problem.

3)I wouldn't really fear being abducted too much, since it only happens to families with a lot of money. But just knowing that a lot of the people around you are so evil is reason enough to live in fear. While 9/11 was on a much larger scale, the situtation in Mexico could bring more fear to the people, since the bad people is everyone around them, insead of from a distant country.