I met with some attorneys from Mexico yesterday and last night in my normal course of business. They flew up from Mexico City to meet me. While our discussions had nothing to do with the current national health concerns in that country, the flu is on everyone's mind. According to one very influential attorney (not a wild-eye'd crazy or conspiracy theorist by any means), the word in Mexico city is that over 5,000 people have died from the flu. Those numbers do NOT jibe with the word coming over the wire services. He said, "the people are poor, they can't afford medicine and they just die. If they don't go to the hospital, they're not counted."People are trying to take precautions but most of those involve staying home, away from work and away from public places, further weakening an economy that was on its knees. Just about everything in Mexico City is closed and a horrible situation down there with the drug cartels is enhanced with fears of an epidemic ripping through the Mexico City slums.
As an aside, in separate incidents, seven police officers were murdered by the drug cartels in Tijuana yesterday alone and another ten were wounded by gunfire. The cartels attacked several small police stations in the city and killed or wounded all the officers who happened to be inside. The death toll from organized crime murders is over 2,000 so far this year with a guess that the yearly number will top 8,000 by 2010. I don't have a precise number but there have been about 100 police officers murdered by organized crime/cartels in Mexico so far this year.
UPDATE:
- The first US Death from swine flu was reported today.
- Researchers believe they located the first case of swine flu in the city of LaGloria, in Veracruz. And the first victim (a child) survived the illness.
- Every public business in Mexico is closed until May 6th. To their credit, the Mexican government is clearly taking serious measures to deal with the crisis.
7 comments:
Mexico sounds like a dangerous place. I think we should leave the border wide open. Maybe that would help.
Flights from Mexico should have been canceled or at the very least folks should be quarantined and the borders need to be on lock-down.
Mexican Organized Crime is a sickness that's been getting worse for a long time. Makes the pig flu look tame. All our fault of course. God forbid that some murdering, baby raping thug should be blamed for anything he's done.
Me? Bitter? Why no, why do you ask?
i hope i dont have the swine flu!
I'm sure the current administration wouldn't want to do anything to offend our neighbors to the south, plague and rampant homicide notwithstanding.
Closing the border doesn't do much anyway since in a good economy hundreds of thousands of (I'm being PC here) migrants in search of a better life cross the border illegally every month.
My goodness, what a sad state of affairs! Thank you for the update.
Throughout reading this post I was wondering which is worst: epidemics or organized crime. By worst I mean which one had claimed more lives. I tried to take a look at history in worldwide perspective. Epidemics can surely be accounted for millions of deaths over history, but with modern technology and good health care the numbers today are not that bad and we can even say that shows a declining tendency over the decades. On the other hand organized crime just keeps rising and I can only hope that it can be stopped.
Best regards, Chris.
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