Report: Mexican Cartels Hiring US Soldiers as Hit Men

Some Mexican cartels began as rogue army units

Mexican cartels are recruiting hit men from the U.S. military, offering big money to highly-trained soldiers to carry out contract killings and potentially share their skills with gangsters south of the border, according to law enforcement experts.

The involvement of three American soldiers in separate incidents, including a 2009 murder that led to last week's life sentence for a former Army private, underscore a problem the U.S. military has fought hard to address.

Comments

[godzleaf]

Should this surprise anyone? Our government has been sending various special forces operators down there for years to train the "good guys" on how to effectively track and "apprehend" (and just as often kill) their targets. I'm not saying that providing this kind of training to law enforcement down there is necessarily a bad idea. But we need to keep in mind the potential impact this is going to have on the Mexican people as we help to militarize their law enforcement. For example, it is not uncommon for many of these same special op trained law enforcement officers to either step over to the other side and/or begin to participate in extrajudicial killings. Hell, our own special ops folks have a pretty extensive record of participating in government sanction extrajudicial killings. I would rather see us export more effective drug policy strategies south of the border; like education, treatment, and the benefits afforded via the regulation and control of these substances through the implementation of anti-prohibitionist drug polices including legalization. Of course, don't expect Uncle Sam to do that in the near future.