From The Guardian

Last year Mexico registered 35,964 murders, an increase of three times the previous year. Only a tiny fraction of crimes committed are solved, and increasingly ordinary people are taking the law into their own hands, specifically, 174 times last year, lynching suspects wherever they can find them.  Citizens are frustrated by incompetent policing, a failing justice system, and increasing organised crime.  It’s called “institutional abandonment” when the citizens feel they cannot rely on the authorities.  How much the detection rate is influenced by corruption isn’t clear, but what is clear is the ordinary folk are totally fed up. (The Guardian, 30 Aug 2019)

Nearly 36,000 murders in a single year!  It sounds like outright civil war, and yet we hear little about it, and no reasons are suggested for the massacre of so many people. One assumes it is an extension of what it is happening to the ofher countries in Central America:  drug cartel violence,  and the effects of climate change and the desperation this is starting to cause. If these are the main reasons then we have to look ahead to more bad news, year by year, and building walls is not going to insulate the US from the influx of desperate people – that’s just a cruel political gimmick.