On November 13, Mexican crime reporter Armando Rodriguez was killed outside his Juarez home by an unknown attacker. Rodriguez covered the crime beat for the national daily El Diario for fourteen years, and had briefly been transferred to the paper’s El Paso office after receiving death threats this past February. Rodriguez was not that week’s only gang victim in Juarez: four law enforcement officers were killed over the past few days, and a police inspector was killed just a few hours after the Rodriguez’s murder, continuing a disturbing trend of gang violence.
Mexico’s gang wars are a miniature guerilla war: more than five thousand people were killed despite the crackdown on drug cartels that President Felix Calderon launched shortly after taking office in December 2006. More than thirty-six thousand federal troops were dispatched to some of the country’s trouble spots, but the killings continue unabated in the border city of Juarez, which had more than twelve-hundred gang-related homicides in 2008.
Rodriguez is the fifth journalist to be murdered in Mexico this year, and the 25th this decade, making Mexico one of the most dangerous countries for reporters. While the crime remains unsolved, the likelihood that Rodriguez was murdered in response to his reporting on Juarez’s drug gangs highlights the dangers of covering one of the continent’s most important ongoing stories. In her magazine piece for the current issue of CJR, Monica Campbell explores the impact of Mexico’s drug war on the country’s working journalists.—Armin Rosen
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This is a valuable and well-written report. It should be collated with the miserable practices in education in New York, where the incapable Joel Klein racially segregates his "elite" schools, discriminating against the very students with Latin American backgrounds he should be trying to educate. This is the man who allows Kaplan to fiddle with the future of America in New York schools.
The inability of the American school and university leadership to understand the power of "No Country For Old Men," book and film, and how prophetic it is, is proof that the U.S. educational system is mired in the 1950s.
If we were to teach students how to assimilate "Terror and Consent," "Legacy of Ashes," "Tree of Smoke," and "No Country For Old Men," up to the highest standards, along with the Royal Dutch Shell scenarios mentioned in "Terror and Consent," Bobbitt's own global scenarios, forthcoming 2008, and the latest intelligence projections to 2025, grounding the work in the best corpus linguistics books, such as the COBUILD English Grammar, Longman Advanced American Dictionary, and Longman Language Activator, we could revolutionize this system of oblivion in just two years.
American education in the social sciences is dead. The newspaper that should be most capable of running deep online analysis is in the grips of cipher and factitious editors. Here is my comment on the defense of I.F. Stone at Paper Cuts. It was not posted because The New York Times online is suppressing my comments out of editorial incompetence:
# 3. November 20, 2008 9:11 pm Link
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
If Barry wrote so intelligently on the subject, why do we need the follow-up? If I.F. Stone were here, I would ask him if he thought that The New York Times should be suppressing reader comment without offering any rational justification.
I will give you an example of an extremely mild comment not acceptable to The New York Times online but published elsewhere with no problem:
"American military and intelligence strategy should be powerfully refocused to destroy all elements of Al Qaeda, in a timetable that ideally would extend no more than two years, but certainly no more than four.
The best book about the legal context for this needed reshaping of U.S. policy is "Terror and Consent," by Philip Bobbitt, who should be a central part of the Obama administration. He should have the weight to ensure that his ideas on strategic legal reform will be put into effect as soon as possible. We need reviews of this book that go well beyond THE FEEBLE ANALYSIS BY NIALL FERGUSON IN THE NEW YORK TIMES.
American schools grades 7-12 should offer honors social sciences programs in history, politics, and economics as reinforced by foreign language training and the full employment of language (the corpus revolution in linguistics) and literature ("Tree of Smoke," "Libra," and "No Country For Old Men"). High school education in honors social sciences in New York should be introduced in January 2009. The new freedom towers should have a large national-model social sciences school.
ETS/College Board/Kaplan trash is contaminating New York education and half killing America. Social sciences students in honors programs should begin the day with an 8-print newspaper reading cycle (Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, USA Today, The Australian, Times of London, and Globe and Mail). They should have to internalize the cycle, which takes hard work, so that they could practise the very pattern recognition and information coherence that would have stopped 9/11 cold.
The failure of America to educate its potential honors social sciences students is tantamount to CRIMINAL MISCHIEF. Anyone who reads T.J. Waters's "Class 11″ closely will see that inept teaching extends into CIA training, despite the glowing reports on CIA education initiatives in "Enemies of Intelligence," by Richard Betts. "Legacy of Ashes" is a far better book.
Where is The New York Times report on the Royal Dutch Shell scenarios mentioned by Bobbitt, along with an analysis of an advance copy of Bobbitt's own global scenarios?
The death of Al Qaeda is the only rational goal for American foreign and internal policy, which must be restructured and integrated according to the Bobbitt analysis. That means the individual death of all Al Qaeda practitioners of terror."
If Barry or Jack could explain to me exactly what makes this comment unprintable, I would like to know what their reasoning is. Often when bad writers want to call attention to themselves (I could not mean you, Jack, but thanks for the ad anyway), they call others "Stalinist." But very often it turns out they are cryptic Stalinists themselves, heavy on sloppy innuendo, quick to suppress other points of view.
You should learn how to read, Jack, especially your own text. You pay little attention to what you are saying. If you had had anything to contribute, you would have read the latest intelligence "global scenarios" to 2025 and offered your point of view. Such as it is.
― Clayton Burns
Posted by Clayton Burns on Fri 21 Nov 2008 at 03:34 PM
The name of the Mexican president is Felipe Calderon, not Felix (2nd intro par)
Posted by Ilyana Guzman on Thu 4 Dec 2008 at 10:08 AM