Finally, some good news from Mexico: On Thursday only 25 slain in one border city and only 85 prison inmates escape in another border city

But first some good news from the U.S. side of the border: President Barack Obama has taken bold, decisive action in response to Mexico's drug-related violence by publicly contradicting his secretary of state. On Wednesday Hillary Clinton asserted that the violence was showing signs consistent with an insurgency and "looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narco-traffickers control certain parts of the country."

Now see how useful it is whenever a lawyer becomes an American president:

"Mexico is vast and progressive democracy, with a growing economy, and as a result you cannot compare what is happening in Mexico with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago," Obama told Los Angeles-based Spanish language newspaper La Opinion.

That's a neat way to dodge the question of whether standard definitions of an insurgency can be applied to the grip that Mexico's narco lords have on Mexico's state and local governments.



Moving along, Olivia Torres reported for AP on Sept. 10 around 11:45 PM ET:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Gunmen killed 25 people in a series of drug-gang attacks in Ciudad Juarez, marking the deadliest day in more than two years for the Mexican border city.
[...]
The toll in Thursday's attacks in Ciudad Juarez included 15 people killed when attackers stormed four homes in three hours, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office of Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juarez is located.

In the worst of those attacks, gunmen burst into a house and killed two young men — then killed four others for being witnesses.
[...]
In the border city of Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, 85 inmates — 66 of whom were convicted or on trial for federal charges like weapons possession or drugs — scaled the Reynosa prison's 20-foot (6-meter) walls using ladders, said the Tamaulipas state public safety secretary, Jose Garza Garcia.

Garza Garcia said 44 prison guards and employees were under investigation. Two were missing.

"The guards evidently helped in the escape," he said. So far this year a total of 201 inmates have escaped from prisons in Tamaulipas.

Friday's escape was the largest single mass prison breakout in recent years. In 2009, armed assailants believed to be working for the Zetas drug gang broke 53 inmates out of a prison in the northern state of Zacatecas while guards stood by and did nothing to stop them. [...]

Mexico's President also sprang into executive action in response to the latest round of violence:

[...] President Felipe Calderón hotly disputed a statement this week by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying Mexico resembled Colombia two decades ago.

"These kind of comments like the ones made by Secretary of State Clinton ... so careless, so lacking in seriousness, are very painful for Mexico, because they damage Mexico's image terribly," Calderón told the Spanish-language network Univision.

"I think the main thing we have in common with Colombia is that both of our countries suffer from U.S. drug consumption," Calderón said. "We are both victims of the enormous American consumption of drugs, and now the sales of weapons."

He left out the part about Americans being racists -- oh but wait; he only plays the race card against Americans when he's Mau-Mauing us about Mexican immigration.

Did you know he managed to Mau-Mau the Chinese over race? That feat should have earned him mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. I forget how many millions of dollars he pried out of Beijing last year by accusing the government of racism. That was when China's health ministry quarantined a planeload of Mexicans during the early days of the swine flu epidemic.

But enough praise for Calderón's talent as a fundraiser. He's not doing nearly so well with the project he announced in June, which was to hire the best PR firms in the world to improve Mexico's global image. Perhaps his advisors got him to abandon the project on the argument that not even the best PR firm can make a tourist attraction out of decapitated bodies.