No Time for a Break at the Border

U.S. students have a couple more reasons to be cold this winter: Arizona Universities advise spring breaks south of the border should be avoided. Universities in Tuscon, Tempe and Flagstaff have all issued various travel advisories and warnings to students, in the wake of an upsurge of violence and crime in Tijuana, Juárez and Nogales.

“Mexico's drug cartels are waging a bloody fight for smuggling routes and against government forces, dumping beheaded bodies onto streets, carrying out massacres and even tossing grenades into a crowd of Independence Day revelers - an attack that killed eight people in September.”

More from MSNBC:
"In just the past week...

- In Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, the police chief of Mexico's largest border city quit after cartel hitmen started killing police officers and threatened to kill more until he resigned. Police went on high alert, travelling in groups with pistols in their hands.

- In Reynosa, across from McAllen, at least six people died in running battles between soldiers and gunmen armed with grenades and bazookas.

- In the state of Chihuahua, which includes Juarez, gunmen opened fire on the governor's convoy, killing one of his bodyguards and injuring two others."

Taking these articles as examples of two types of media coverage of this border-war-zone, I think they show a really strange lack of concern on behalf of the U.S. of the killings so geographically close to us, and even at times spilling over the border and into Phoenix. Is it the drug trafficking in and of itself that brings violence to the border, or can we look deeper into the escalating conflict and question how the U.S. and Mexico have been policing the border?

After midterms and a bad cough/cold...

...Comes 62 degree weather and more midterms! That's the University of Chicago for you. While I'm either too sick or busy to update this blog regularly, here are some articles to read instead:


*Thinking about shipping your kid off to Princeton to become a high-salary I-banker? Think again: "As Pipeline to Wall Street Narrows, Princeton Students Adjust Sights," details the struggle two Princetonian princesses are having trying to find work out of college. The problem is no less dire here at UChicago, I suspect. But before the Econ-majors all have an existential crisis (perhaps decide to pick up philosophy?) I think they should consider putting what will still be an extremely useful degree good use in the public sector. I wrote a short piece on finding internships with non-profit organizations for the University Community Service Center Newsletter a couple weeks ago. Also, check back next week for my co-worker Mutisya Leonard's piece on finding grants and fellowships for summer/post-graduate work.

*"Twilight Zone"—this Washington Post article addresses one of the very problems my midterm on U.S.-Mexico Borderlands is about. The author, a self-described border rat, details the changing climate of the third country that is "20 miles long and 2,000 miles wide." He says:

"Nowhere does the change in border dynamics appear more striking than in Ciudad Juárez, a city of about 1.5 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Juárez, which in recent years has seen a string of unsolved sexual assaults and murders of young women, was once the swingin'-est town on the entire frontier. Here, at the crossroads of NAFTA, terrific literature, quality artisan crafts, foreign-owned assembly plants and dance halls galore, the erosion of border life as it existed for generations is almost complete. Juárez awoke one day last December to learn that four policemen had been killed within a half-hour, one of them decapitated. It was the worst carnage of that week, but it numbed rather than outraged. Juárez experienced more than 1,500 homicides last year, which, along with daylight carjackings, occasional kidnappings, random street robberies and plain vanilla extortion, made for a population fearful of the new year."