Mexican Drug War

There is a nation on earth where thousands of people are dying in a brutal drug war, where the national government is about to collapse, where police chiefs and politicians are regularly targeted for assassination, and where "acid baths" have become one of the most preferred ways of making dead bodies disappear.

Does that sound like some far away third world hellhole?

It's not.

The name of the nation is Mexico, and it is just south of the United States.

In fact, because of drug violence, the area around the U.S./Mexican border is a war zone that authorities claim is now more dangerous than anywhere in the Middle East.

Things have gotten so bad that now the U.S. government is actually doing something to tighten security along the border. The federal government is concerned that the Mexican drug lords are getting guns from inside the United States - as if they couldn't get guns from a multitude of other sources if they needed to.

The brutal Mexican drug war has also created a huge demand for hitmen and acid baths. The most glaring illustration of this is when the authorities arrested Santiago Meza Lopez in January. Known as "the soupmaker", the 45 year old man has admitted that he made about 300 bodies, victims of murderers for hire, disappear by dissolving them in acid baths.

Official estimates are that 5,300 people were killed in Mexico in 2008 due to the drug war, but the actual numbers are probably far higher.

Now U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is claiming that an "insatiable" appetite in the United States for illegal drugs is to blame for much of the drug violence plaguing Mexico.

And you know what?

She is right.

Drug addiction in the United States continues to soar past epidemic levels. It is a national crisis that never seems to go away, and there is a ton of money in servicing all of those junkies.

It is also fueling the rise in gang violence across the U.S.

Federal authorities claim that there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs inside the United States. These 1 million gang members are responsible for up to 80% of the crimes committed in America each year.

It just isn't big cities either. Smaller cities such as Omaha, Nebraska and Nashville, Tennessee have a massive gang problem. According to USAToday, 58% of state and local law enforcement agencies reported that violent criminal gangs were active in their areas last year, up from 45% in 2004.

The reality is that urban America is overrun with gang violence. When they aren't killing each other, they are raping, murdering and intimidating the communities around them. Wherever gangs are active, home invasions are common and drug dealing is rampant.

There are many areas of the United States now where you simply DO NOT go out of your home at night. People are literally prisoners in their own homes.

And all of this economic chaos is just making the situation that much worse. You have a horde of young men that can't get jobs and that do not see a positive future for themselves in society.

The following description of life in east L.A. is quite sobering.....

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GANG LIFE IN EAST L.A. by Joseph Rodríguez

East L.A. has long been a neglected neighborhood with a predominately Mexican population. It has one of the nation's highest drop out rates from schools, youth unemployment hovers around seventy-five percent in the most neglected areas, and teenage pregnancy is at an all time high in this community. There is an aspect of suicide among many of these gang kids (between ten and twenty-one years old) whose options have been cut off-no education, no work, and no opportunities for advancement. They stand on street corners and parks, flashing gang signs, inviting bullets. Its either la torcida (prison) or death: a warrior's path when even self-preservation is not at stake. And if they murder, the victims are usually the ones who look like them, the ones closest to who they are-their mirror reflections. They murder and they're killing themselves, over and over.

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The truth is that when a nation rejects God and teaches their youth to do the same, this is what happens. We should not surprised that the youth of America have become godless, brutal and violent. America has rejected God, and this gang problem is just one more symptom of that. In 2 Timothy 3:1-4, it describes how people would become in the last days.....

"But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God"

So if you live somewhere that is being overrun by gangs, what do you do?

You move.

For the sake of your family move somewhere safe.

Although soon will anywhere be safe?

The reality is that the world is becoming more wicked every day and the future looks really dark.