Thunder Road

During Prohibition moonshiners in the mountainous areas of Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia would run their product in fast cars from the stills to urban centers where customers awaited the illegal produce. The highways were called “thunder roads” because of the violence.

IH 35 in the United States and 85 in Mexico far exceed the violence of the original “thunder roads”.

IH 35 runs from Laredo, Texas to Duluth, Minnesota near the Canadian border. It is the major highway route serving the North American Free Trade system promoting manufacturing in Mexico, from Mexico City north to Nuevo Laredo. Mexican  labor costs as low as $2.50 an hour are a powerful inducement to move factories from Canada and the United States as well as European manufacturers for export.

These twin cities total a population of over 700,000 while reflecting both similarities and differences in the cultures of the Mexican and the Mexican American.

In the coming couple of months we will review some of the commonalities and differences between communities like these two. The most visible contrast is between the violence rate in the two communities. Nuevo Laredo has a rate about 25 times as high! Education levels are substantially different. Perhaps as we examine this “natural experiment” between two nearby communities we will shed some light on the reasons for high violence in all of Mexico and provide some understanding such as the reasons for the likely murder of 43 community college students in the State of Guerrero this fall. Those likely murders may turn the nation against the assurances of the PRI and the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto that the violence of the PAN years and leadership of Fox and Calderon were why drug violence exploded from 2000 to 2012.

Mexico H85 connects to IH 35 at the border and continues via Monterrery, through the states of Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosi to Mexico City. The highway is the original Pan American Highway and helps create the busiest land port in North America. At the Rio Grande the terrain is flat and shrubs and desert. However an hour or so to the South the mountains begin to appear as one approaches Monterrey.

There are four highway bridges and one rail between Laredo-Nuevo Laredo with 8,500 trucks passing each day of the year. The crossing is the key to international trade and development for the Americas.

It is also the gateway for the bulk of illegal drugs that enter the United States and long a warring site for Cartels including the Gulf, Zetas and Sinaloa. This report below from early November reminds us that this war, now not acknowledged by the Mexican government, continues.

Monterrey (Mexico) (AFP) – Gunmen killed a Mexican general sent by the government to tame violence in a northern state plagued by drug cartel crimes along the US border, authorities said.

General Ricardo Cesar Nino Villarreal and his wife were shot dead as they drove Saturday in Vallecillo, in the northern state of Nuevo Leon.

But their two-door car and the bodies were found only Sunday by people who were driving on the road linking the cities of Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo, said the security task force of the neighboring state of Tamaulipas.

More than 100 high-caliber bullet casings were found at the scene of the shooting, officials said.