Mexicans demonstrate against criminal insurgents

Houston Chronicle:

Disgusted and furious with the violence battering their country, crowds estimated in the hundreds of thousands took to the streets across Mexico on Saturday evening to demand peace and security.

"Enough with so much bloodshed and crime," said Rodolfo Sosa, 48, who was among the white-clad protestors braving torrential tropical downpours earlier in the day to march through the heart of Mexico City.

A crowd estimated by Reforma newspaper to be at least 200,000 marched in Mexico City. Smaller marches were held in Monterrey, Guadalajara and other major cities.

"Mexico is awakened now," said Leticia Ramirez, 45, a physical education teacher who was among a group of women carrying a banner demanding life sentences for kidnappers, rapists and murderers. "If our authorities can't handle the problem, they should resign."

The marches were hastily organized this month amid widespread outrage at the kidnap-murder of the 14-year-old son of one of Mexico City's wealthiest merchant families.

...

Saturday's protests were hardly new. In 2004, some 250,000 people marched through Mexico City amid a similar wave of kidnappings and other violent crime. Thousands more marched as well in the late 1990s, following the kidnap-murders of two sons of a Mexico City automobile distributor.

"We didn't achieve much with those," agreed Maria Quijano, 47, a housewife who marched four years ago and was doing so again Saturday with her son and 40 other family members and friends. "But we have to keep trying. We can't sit at home in fear with our arms crossed and do nothing."

President Felipe Calderon has ordered some 30,000 soldiers and paramilitary federal police into the streets of some of the most violence-racked areas. While he and his top security officials claim the effort is disrupting and weakening the drug gangs, it has done little so far to stanch the bloodshed.

...

It is going to take more troops and more honest police to defeat this insurgency. The insurgents are men without conscience so they are unlikely to be swayed by demonstrations. The mordita culture of Mexico has left it defenseless in many respects. It will take a change of culture as well as more effective protection of the people to win this fight.

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