If a sensational attack in Mexico makes US news, chances are the Zetas are the suspects. One of the worst events in Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s five-year strategy against drug trafficking organizations was the arson attack at a casino in Monterrey in August of 2011. Some 52 people were trapped inside and killed, many of them middle aged women. The previous year, 72 migrants mostly from Central America were found killed en masse in the northern state of Tamaulipas, allegedly hauled off buses and killed after refusing to work for the Zetas. They are suspected in the shooting death of a US immigration agent in Mexico last year, and facilitating a prison riot that killed 44 people, mostly members of the rival Gulf Cartel in Nuevo Leon in February 2012. The prison riot was deemed Mexico's worst, and authorities believe it was a coverup for the escape of 30 Zetas. State Gov. Rodrigo Medina said the riot was premeditated, and investigations are underway into prison staff involvement in the murders and escape, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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