High school football game cancelled due to Mexican drug cartel threats
Sep 11, 2011, 3:01 PM EDT
One of the ongoing problems that people in Mexico have to face everyday is dealing with drug cartels who generally cause harm to others as they try to smuggle illegal drugs in and out of the country. Now, those drug cartels are even threatening high school football teams.
A game between Monterrey Tech and Stony Point had to be cancelled because the Monterrey Tech team received threats that might have prevented their passage into the United States unless they paid a fee:
Ricardo Garcia, director of communications for Monterrey Tech athletics, said the school received an anonymous phone call last week demanding $30,000 from the football team to cross the border into the United States. Although the school could not identify the caller, Monterrey Tech officials said they felt they had “no choice” but to cancel the game.
The risk you take is on the roads, the freeway that takes us from Monterrey to the U.S.,” Garcia said Thursday. “I’ve heard stories of trucks coming in from the outskirts, parking in front of you, guns out. It’s hard for the government because you can only protect so many miles of roads.”
Monterrey Tech had to cancel another scheduled game with Gregory-Portland because of the threats but the team was able to travel to America by plane at the cost of $25,000 to play in the Tom Landry classic.
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Stony Point game called off because of Mexican team’s concerns over drug cartels [The Statesman]
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- tigersgeaux - Sep 11, 2011 at 3:14 PM
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The Mexican government officials and federale’s often are corrupt, and those that are not are often murdered. What can the Mexican government do? Those there blame America for our unquenchable desire for drugs. Something needs to be done, here and there and I don’t know what but we need some new ideas and new backbone.
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- jbluewolf - Sep 11, 2011 at 3:54 PM
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Legalize drugs. Forget the phony moralizing that war is acceptable but drugs aren’t. Create and distribute them through Health and Human Services. Tax their production and sale. Put the money saved from subsidizing police efforts and enforcement costs into education and rehab. Take the money out of it and force the cartels into virtual financial ruin. It’s an easy solution if it weren’t for the American penchant for interfering in its citizens private lives based on puritanism and a desire to force the morality of everyone into their narrow little mold that pretends to value the individual then turns around a demands subservience to its myriad myths and twisted values.
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- gunsmoke527 - Sep 11, 2011 at 4:29 PM
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jb. My suggestion would be to execute all dealers. Are you a junkie or a dealer that just wants to go free wheeling? You know damn well if drugs were made legal, there would be an adjustment to the taxation (Enforce it? How?). There is a segment who will always improvise a way to make money illegally. Cartels won’t go away; they will revert back to the days of ‘you pay for protection, or you die’. They will monopolize distribution whether or not they is a law or not. All you are doing is asking for legalizing harmful drugs to our kids and weak-willed or addicted.
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- goforthanddie - Sep 11, 2011 at 5:23 PM
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Well, first off, you don’t legalize “drugs”, you legalize marijuana. It’s going to happen, just do it. Government grows it, government sells it, government controls pricing taxation. Pump profits into education/rehab for harder drugs, and law enforcement. Then you double penalties for everything else, and focus legal efforts towards eliminating them.
