The Zetas now Mexico's largest drug gang. Who are they?

3. Why do Mexicans care?

Drug trafficking organizations have different reputations among Mexican society. There are often regional alliances, and some are even supported for their “good deeds,” like paying for church renovations or paving roads. But the Zetas are widely feared and detested in Mexico. They resort to targeting not just rivals but regular folks, extorting small business owners and kidnapping middle class citizens to line their pockets. The security consulting firm Stratfor notes that the Sinaloa group usually resorts to bribing and paying off officials to achieve its objectives.

“It also frequently provides intelligence to authorities, and in doing so uses the authorities as a weapon against rival cartels,” Stratfor notes. “On the other hand, Los Zetas prefer brutality. They can and do resort to bribery, but they lean toward intimidation and violence. Their mode of operation tends to be far less subtle than that of their Sinaloa counterparts, and with a leadership composed of former special operations soldiers, they are quite effective in employing force and fear to achieve their objectives.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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