White History Month

http://www.kpho.com/story/16656530/state-representative-suggests-holiday-for-white-people



PHOENIX (CBS5) - Arizona is already taking a lot of heat for its reputation regarding illegal immigration, and for Gov. Jan Brewer's finger-wagging at President Barack Obama during a recent visit, and a state lawmaker isn't exactly helping the state's image.

Rep. Cecil Ash, a Republican from Mesa, is suggesting Arizona needs a holiday for white people.

"I wanted to speak to you all about Latino Americans here in Arizona," said state Rep. Richard Miranda on the House floor Monday, starting the conversation that sparked the controversy.

Miranda said Arizona should have a Latino American day in Arizona.

After some heated debate, Rep. Cecil Ash stepped up to the mic.

"I'm supportive of this proposition. I just want them to assure me that when we do become in the minority you'll have a day for us," Ash said.

Reaction on the streets is mixed.

"Crazy idea," one person said.

"Good idea. Like they have Cinco de Mayo for Mexicans. We need something for whites," another commented.

Ash never thought his comment would cause such a stir.

"There was a little contention there so I was just really trying to lighten things up a little bit," Ash said.

He did get some laughs that day.

But he said he's not backing down from his statement.

"Yes, I think it was appropriate. It was appropriate for the mood that was in the House and I think that if and when the Caucasian population becomes a minority, they may want to celebrate the accomplishments and the contributions of the Caucasian population the same way," Ash said.

Ash went on to say the state should acknowledge the accomplishments of great people, no matter their ethnic background.

The Real Slave Trade

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952335,00.html#ixzz1l7F2vNzQ





For a South African victim of human trafficking, this was the endgame. On a freezing night last July, Sindiswa, 17, lay curled in a fetal position in bed No. 7 of a state-run hospice in central Bloemfontein. Well-used fly strips hung between fluorescent lights, pale blue paint flaked off the walls, and fresh blood stained her sheets, the rusty bedpost and the linoleum floor. Sindiswa had full-blown AIDS and tuberculosis, and she was three months pregnant. Sweat poured from her forehead as she whispered her story through parched lips covered with sores. A few blocks away, the roars of rugby fans erupted from Free State Stadium. In June the roars will be from fans of the World Cup.
(See pictures of South Africa.)

Sindiswa's family was one of the poorest families in Indwe, the poorest district in Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces in South Africa. Ninety-five percent of the residents of her township fall below the poverty line, more than a quarter have HIV, and most survive by clinging to government grants. Orphaned at 16, she had to leave school to support herself. Last February, a woman from a neighboring town offered to find work for her and her 15-year-old best friend, Elizabeth, who, like Sindiswa, was poor but was also desperate to escape her violent older sister. (I have changed Elizabeth's name to protect her identity.)

After driving them eight hours north to Bloemfontein, the recruiter sold them to a Nigerian drug and human-trafficking syndicate in exchange for $120 and crack cocaine. "[The recruiter] said we could find a job," Sindiswa recalled, "but as soon as we got here, she told us, 'No. You have to go into the streets and sell yourselves.' " The buyer, Jude, forced them into prostitution on the streets of central Bloemfontein for 12 straight hours every night. Each morning, he collected their earnings — Sindiswa averaged $40 per night; Elizabeth, $65. Elizabeth tried to escape three times, once absconding for several weeks. Jude always found her or used Sindiswa as a hostage to lure her back, then enlisted an enforcer named Rasta to beat her.
(See pictures of violence in South Africa.)

It is unclear if Sindiswa contracted HIV before or after she was sold, but some of her clients didn't use condoms. She was diagnosed with the virus only a week before I met her. When she was too sick to stand and thus useless as a slave, Jude had thrown her onto the street. Nurses expected her to die within days.

Despite more than a dozen international conventions banning slavery in the past 150 years, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. Slaves are those forced to perform services for no pay beyond subsistence and for the profit of others who hold them through fraud and violence. While most are held in debt bondage in the poorest regions of South Asia, some are trafficked in the midst of thriving development. Such is the case here in Africa's wealthiest country, the host of this year's World Cup. While South Africa invests billions to prepare its infrastructure for the half-million visitors expected to attend, tens of thousands of children have become ensnared in sexual slavery, and those who profit from their abuse are also preparing for the tournament. During a three-week investigation into human-trafficking syndicates operating near two stadiums, I found a lucrative trade in child sex. The children, sold for as little as $45, can earn more than $600 per night for their captors. "I'm really looking forward to doing more business during the World Cup," said a trafficker. We were speaking at his base overlooking Port Elizabeth's new Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium. Already, he had done brisk business among the stadium's construction workers.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952335,00.html#ixzz1l9KMYlDt




Although its 1996 constitution expressly forbids slavery, South Africa has no stand-alone law against human trafficking in all its forms. Aid groups estimate that some 38,000 children are trapped in the sex trade there. More than 500 mostly small-scale trafficking syndicates — Nigerian, Chinese, Indian and Russian, among others — collude with South African partners, including recruiters and corrupt police officials, to enslave local victims. The country's estimated 1.4 million AIDS orphans are especially vulnerable. South Africa has more HIV cases than any other nation, and a child sold into its sex industry will often face an early grave.

As Sindiswa told me her story, her voice trailed off, and the man who brought me to her — Andre Lombard, 39, a pastor of the Christian Revival Church — laid his hands on her. Lombard had a penetrating gaze and a simmering rage toward men who abuse women. His father, a brutal drunkard, had beaten his mother regularly. Lombard became a born-again Christian at age 17, then served in South Africa's élite special forces for 11 years.
(See 25 people who mattered in 2009.)

He began a street ministry in April 2006 and recruited some 60 volunteers to distribute food, blankets and Bibles to the dozens of women and girls selling sex within a 10-block radius of the stadium. They also preached to clients and traffickers. Fights were commonplace. Lombard allowed his volunteers to carry firearms, and several wound up in the intensive-care unit of the local hospital. Lombard acknowledges that most of the prostitutes were not enslaved. Still, in a controversial move, he purchased bus tickets home for more than two dozen women as a way to "escape the streets." With no comprehensive rehabilitation, however, several wound up back in prostitution. Mainstream antitrafficking organizations often decry such tactics as reckless. In response, Lombard says, "I'm a goer. If you drive by and just talk about it and don't do anything, you're actually justifying it."

After we left the hospice, Lombard drove eight blocks east of the stadium to the notorious Maitland Hotel. Police had identified the Maitland as a base of drug- and human-trafficking operations. HIV-positive survivors described how traffickers used gang rape, drug provision, sleep deprivation and torture to "break" new children on the fifth floor; the fourth floor featured an illegal abortion clinic. On other floors, as many as four girls slept on a single mattress. Police raided the Maitland in 2008 and shut the place down last January. Traffickers had been tipped off about the final raid, yet officials still rescued dozens of underage girls and seized weapons and thousands of dollars' worth of drugs. Though still officially closed, the Maitland was active. Next door, a club blasted music by Tupac, and several girls worked the front of the hotel, where a makeshift concierge took rents.
(See TIME's tribute to people who passed away in 2009.)

A shivering girl in a red sweatshirt and flip-flops stood alone at the corner of the hotel. She said she was 15 and desperately needed help. I asked Lombard's volunteer to translate from Xhosa. Shockingly, this was Elizabeth — Sindiswa's best friend — still controlled by Jude. Having researched modern-day slavery for eight years, I knew how difficult it was for survivors to heal after emancipation. In this case, mere emancipation would be a dangerous procedure.

Earlier that day, I spoke with Luis CdeBaca, who was visiting South Africa on his first foreign visit as President Obama's ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat human trafficking. "Dedicated cops, prosecutors and victim advocates are fighting the traffickers in several host cities, but they're largely doing it on their own," he said. Obama has pledged to make the fight to abolish modern-day slavery a top foreign policy priority, but the U.S. currently spends more in a single day fighting drug trafficking than it does in an entire year fighting human trafficking. So CdeBaca, whose office evaluates every country based on its efforts to fight human bondage, must rely largely on diplomatic pressure. "An exploitation-free World Cup will require resources and political will from the South African government and the international community alike," said CdeBaca.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952335,00.html#ixzz1l9KYoSXp




Such political will is not evident. At best, the South African government's response to child sex trafficking has been superficial or piecemeal; at worst, some officials have actually colluded with the traffickers. American and South African law-enforcement sources described how police at all levels have solicited underage prostitutes in Bloemfontein, Durban and other World Cup cities. South African officials claim that Parliament will pass a comprehensive law against human trafficking in early 2010. For now, enterprising police officers who take on human traffickers do so with few legal tools at their disposal. Convictions for trafficking-related offenses typically bring little or no jail time. And those vigilante humanitarians like Lombard face an emboldened and violent adversary, as I saw that evening.
(See TIME's South Africa covers.)

Elizabeth insisted that we recover her scant possessions: a handful of clothes and a Bible. Jude had convinced her that he would perform witchcraft on those items, to track and punish her if she again attempted escape. We drove to Jude's fortified crack den five minutes away. Lombard and I followed Elizabeth into the darkness behind the compound. We were joined by Shadrack, a kung-fu-trained church volunteer who worked as a financial adviser by day. Elizabeth tapped a secret knock, and after Jude ushered her in, Shadrack wedged his foot in the door. We pushed into the dingy flat, which bore the medicinal odor of crack. As the churchmen escorted Elizabeth to retrieve her clothes, I smiled and feigned ignorance of their intent. While Lombard and Elizabeth retrieved her possessions, I spoke to Jude alone. Short and muscular, with dark, patchy skin, Jude wore slim, brown corduroys and white Crocs with green dollar signs. Jude explained that he lured girls from Johannesburg, where many survive by "picking through garbage." Our conversation turned to soccer. I asked him if he was looking forward to the World Cup. "Yeah, this is good! Us people are going to make a lot of money then if you know what you're doing."
(See pictures of Johannesburg preparing for the World Cup.)

As I prepared to leave, a woman began screaming from a sealed-off room in the compound. Lombard burst back into the room and forced his way to the darkened recesses of the compound. He kicked in a door to find Rasta, the syndicate's enforcer, half naked with the screaming woman, who ran behind Lombard. "Did you beat her? Because if you beat her, you must beat me," Lombard said, inches from the flaring eyes of the muscular Rasta. Rasta launched a haymaker at Lombard, who ducked. Rasta threatened to call in his "brothers." "I'll break their legs too," Lombard retorted as we retreated to our car, where the photographer traveling with us, Melanie Hamman, was bent in prayer with Elizabeth. With Jude chasing us on foot, we drove off.

Newly elected South African President Jacob Zuma addressed fears about sex trafficking in a speech last August. "We have noted the concern amongst women's groups that the 2010 FIFA World Cup may have the unintended consequence of creating opportunities for human trafficking," the President said. "We are putting systems in place to prevent this, as part of general security measures that we should take when hosting an event of this magnitude."

Zuma's pledge was too little, too late for Sindiswa, who died on July 22. Immediately after we took Elizabeth off the streets, Hamman and I drove her eight hours to her home in Eastern Cape. Wary of the failure rate of Lombard's unmonitored returns, we worked with a dedicated social worker in Indwe to ensure that the conditions under which she was originally trafficked did not reappear. A suburban-Chicago couple has given her a full scholarship, enabling the otherwise impossible goal of finishing school. She is HIV-negative. It is a stretch to call her lucky. But she has another chance at life.

Skinner is the author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery (Free Press, 2008), which was awarded the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction. This investigation was supported by a grant from Humanity United.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952335,00.html#ixzz1l9KhD3DW

A Walk Down Canal Road In Strood

A Walk Down Canal Road In Strood.


If Dickens returned he wouldnt recognise the place,
Like a battered housewife with a broken face,
The hooting boats that chugged the tide,
And clanking cranes along the river side,
Are now rusting wrecks, offshored and globalised.

The Railway Tavern where I once used to drink,
Is now a gay bar seeking pounds that are pink,
Built where the Medway on a high spring tide,
Still rises to flood the snug with its filthy brime.

The call of a curlew in the misty fringe,
Drifts over the groaning recycling bins,
Sifting the shore where a soviet sub rests,
Beached like a whale, slowly rusting to death.

As whores in short skirts who work in spurts,
Seek paying strangers, their addictions curse,
Out from dusk to dawn in a life forlorn,
Is this the reason for which they were born ?

Clucking burglars prowl the midnight streets,
Needle famished, pathetic poppy thieves,
Whilst chains are drawn across front doors,
Flats full of single mothers fear the creaking floor.

In the morning workers walk the dog shit path,
Past concrete playgrounds devoid of grass,
Dodging the rabid pitbulls of chavs high on PCP,
Who seek the slow bleak death of this liberal liberty.

Then back along the same cruel street at night,
Tar black dark, lit with febrile orange light,
Where lurk gangs of hoodies who carry knives,
For whom 'respect' means more than human lives.

The Poet Is A Revolutionary.

The true poet is a revolutionary,

And the only poetry that lives,

Is the poetry of war.

It should be the kiss of a fist,

In the smug face of authority,

A petrol bomb cast into the palaces of apathy,

That cleanses with its fire,

The pig stys of politicians.

It should never be complicit,

It must seek to destroy to create,

And each line lead to a little death,

That is the birth of a new beginning.

Thatcher & The Betrayal Of Britain

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/euro-centric/the-iron-lady/




An old woman stumbles into the shop of an Asian grocer and peers quizzically at the price of milk. Indian music blares from the speakers as a large African smirks with the usual blend of contempt and hostility at the white slag fumbling with her pence at the counter. She shuffles home through the dirty streets, passing dull-eyed denizens of the metropolis, and complains to her husband about rising prices as they sit to a modest breakfast. Only after another woman enters the kitchen do we discover that Lady Thatcher is talking to herself, a prisoner in her own home and of her own memories. Like Britain herself, she has been buried alive.

The Iron Lady is a film about the ghosts of people, issues, and a nation long since vanished. It has little to do with Margaret Thatcher's accomplishments, beliefs, or time in office. Instead, most of the movie is spent watching an old demented woman scurry about her modest quarters in conversation with the shade of her dead husband. Occasionally, it shifts from clumsily executed biopic to outright horror. In one particularly disturbing scene, Lady Thatcher frantically turns on all the appliances in her house to drown out the hectoring of her dead husband. Denis Thatcher stares at his wife's back from within a mirror, as Lady Thatcher desperately pleads with herself to turn away from madness. The camera zooms in and out with one wild cut after another. Such a mood fits The Exorcism of Emily Rose or Paranormal Activity. So much for those who came to the theater to see a movie about the Conservative Party.

As a portrayal of a living woman, it is sickening and without excuse. Obviously, this kind of treatment is limited only to someone who is right of center. Can anyone imagine a biopic focusing on a senile Nelson Mandela or Rosa Parks? To ask the question is to answer it. Even as the issues Thatcher championed have faded, as "New Labour" and other left-wing parties reconciled themselves to a diminished role for the unions, the rage against the Iron Lady is constant and enduring and the controversy about her continues. Websites have been set up to commemorate her death with a party, the comment boards on videos and articles about her are filled with furious vulgarity and loathing directed at woman who hasn't been in power for 20 years, and even the Conservative Party has backed away from “Thatcherism,” as much as they can, even to the point of changing the Party's logo from a flaming torch to a tree seemingly drawn by a child.



Out with the old, in with the green.

The result is that in some way, the portrait of a defeated and dying woman is the only kind of tribute the Kali Yuga can pay to a figure of importance who came from the wrong side. Meryl Streep (whose mimicry is skilled, but what of it?) sets the tone with the usual comment along the lines of "of course, I don't agree with her evil politics, but this portrayal makes her sympathetic." Similarly, the chattering class of Britain in the press and online have come to terms with this portrayal of Thatcher precisely because it shows the Iron Lady at her lowest point. Thatcher is, of course, racist, a traitor to woman, an enemy of workers, a woman who made people starve and completely destroyed Britain. As a human being, however, she is sympathetic because she is dying. In a culture where the highest value is self-loathing, this is perhaps the most a conservative can hope for.

The movie also does its best to turn Thatcher into a symbol of identity politics. The young Thatcher lectures her husband (just after he has proposed no less) that "one's life must matter...beyond the cooking and the cleaning and the children, one's life must mean more than that." A young Thatcher dressed in bright blue and heels enters Parliament for the first time and is contrasted with the stereotypically stern aristocratic British men in dark suits who just strolled over from being evil in The King's Speech. All gaze at her in astonishment, although the first woman in Parliament had already taken her seat 30 years before. Ominously, the "Members" room has urinals, while the "Lady Members" room contains an iron. Obviously, we are supposed to think Lady Thatcher should have forgotten all this silliness about the collapsing economy and championed the sitzpinkler movement. As Steep herself observes, what is important about Thatcher is not anything she did (which was all evil) but that a woman was elected in "gender biased, homophobic, class-ridden England." Movement conservatives, of course, don't believe the movie is feminist enough.

What did Margaret Thatcher do? Well, we really never really find out. She confronted the unions...but why this matters or what was the outcome is never really explained. We know it is incredibly controversial but the military-style planning Thatcher used to humble the trade unions is ignored and the entire subject simply peters out. Then we jump straight into the Falklands War, which gives Thatcher the popularity needed to carry out the rest of her program. However, again, why the decision was difficult, why there was opposition, and why Thatcher made the difference as opposed to anyone else being in charge is not explained.

After the Falklands, prosperity magically comes to Britain (again, no explanation why) and Thatcher rules for a lengthy period of time—during which nothing apparently happens. There is a shot of perhaps three seconds of Margaret Thatcher dancing with a tuxedoed Ronald Reagan, but that's all the mention the "second most important man in my life" will get. Just them dancing around somehow causes the Berlin Wall to crumble. Rather than a tour through history, we are a treated to a montage out of Rocky IV...or maybe even Team America: World Police. Even Thatcher's collapse is reduced to the petty and the personal, as her colleagues seemingly betray her because she yelled at them, not because of any policy differences. Thatcher's warnings about increasing European centralization and fiscal union, a subject as timely as ever, is all but ignored aside from a brief comment about the UK not being "ready for it."

Such a treatment is perhaps inevitable because the issues that motivated Thatcher have become all but irrelevant. The best that can be said of Thatcher is that she confronted, and to some extent defeated, the primary challenge of her time by frustrating the British Left's attempt to turn the sceptered isle into a grim Airstrip One of Brezhnev bureaucracy and overwhelming state ownership of the economy. The Iron Lady contains one notable scene of an enraptured Thatcher watching her father speak of the virtue of a "nation of shopkeepers"; later, Thatcher speaks of the small businessman's proud rejection of noblesse oblige. Of course, Thatcher's libertarian rhetoric about there being “no such thing as society" belied her electoral dependence on a British traditionalism she did not identify with. Despite the fact that she in large partowed her rise to power to a thinly veiled critique of non-White immigration (and spoke even more frankly about the subject in private), Thatcher did precious little to stop the demographic transformation of the United Kingdom, the transformation of the British Empire into a mere satrap of the United States (or even worse, the European Union), and the eradication of the culture and identity of the British people.

Just as American conservatism of even the Russell Kirk variety was gradually replaced with a deracinated defense of "values," so did Thatcher ground her politics in abstractions rather than in a sense of British identity. When Enoch Powell commented to her that he would fight for Britain even if it were under a Communist government and that values "can not be fought for, nor destroyed" because they exist beyond space and time, Thatcher was literally rendered speechless. Thatcher represented the “Americanization” not just of the British economy but of conservative politics, and the result was inevitable retreat and failure on cultural issues, as in the United States.

Even her economic reforms can be seen with the advantage of hindsight as, at best, a rearguard action. While outright state control over the economy may have been blunted, the fall of trade-union power may have been inevitable. The larger concern is that as with the "Reagan Revolution" and later "Republican Revolution" within the United States, Thatcher's Conservatives failed to cut the growth of government or the ever increasing share of government spending that went to the welfare state. By saving British socialism from itself but ceding to the hard Left control of the commanding heights of the culture by defining conservatism purely as economic, Thatcher made "Cool Britannia" and its all encompassing political correctness possible.

Even victory in the Falklands may have simply postponed the inevitable, as Britain's military position has seriously declined and Argentina is simply biding its time to reclaim the Malvinas. Viewing contemporary debates over a national army for an independent Scotland and the Union Jack condemned as controversial because Blacks think it's racist, Thatcher's call to make "Great Britain great again" seems almost tragic. As London is no longer an English city and the governments of the West are girded for seemingly permanent economic decline, it is hard not to view Thatcher's story as irrelevant.

One can imagine an alternate British history with Enoch Powell as Prime Minister laying the foundation for a sustainable traditionalist Right that would preserve the long-term existence of British identity, culture, and economic power. Instead, we had the transformation of Toryism to American classical liberalism, and therefore its inevitable (and perhaps intended) defeat. With Thatcher's accomplishments alternatively co-opted or undone with the passage of time, what is left? To the emerging post-Britain, she'll be linked to the evil racist past, a bump on the road to Equality, her policies bluntly summarized as supporting the "rich people."

To the official conservatism of the rump Britain, she'll be a symbol of the Good Old Days of Conservative victories against unsympathetic statist enemies, with troubling questions about immigration, culture, and the long-term impact of her policies abstracted away and easily avoided. Of course, to official opinion, even harmless nostalgia can not be tolerated. Would that there was a real British Right to come to the same conclusion!

The Parable Of The Squirrels

This article should be called The Parable Of The Squirrels - as it explains exactly what the end results of immigration, diversity and multi-culturalism lead to.





The future is looking black for grey squirrels as numbers of darker variety soars in UK

By Tamara Cohen

Last updated at 1:55 AM on 31st January 2012

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After almost wiping out its red cousins in the UK, it seems the grey squirrel is getting a taste of its own medicine.

The black squirrel population is soaring and experts say it could eventually be the dominant variety.

There are now believed to be at least 25,000 – mostly in East Anglia – but isolated sightings have been recorded elsewhere.

A black squirrel in the UK: The squirrels were introduced in 1912 - scientists now aim to find out how far they have spread in the past 100 years

The spread of the black variant is the biggest change in squirrel demographics since the red population was devastated 50 years ago.

The grey squirrel was able to displace the native red because it is larger and better able to compete for food. It also infected the reds with a disease.

Once in the millions, red squirrel numbers have declined to just 120,000 in the UK.

The English population, found in isolated pockets in the North, East Anglia and the Isle of Wight, is down to 25,000 – the same as the black squirrel but about to be overtaken.

Black squirrel feeding: Scientists believe that the squirrels have spread around 50 miles in 100 years - a contrast to grey squirrels, which now number two million in the British isles

The black squirrel is actually the same native North American species as the grey but its colour is the result of a genetic mutation.

Scientists are not sure why the black variety is proving more successful. Research will focus on whether it is fitter or more aggressive.

Around 100 grey squirrels were introduced into Britain in the 1870s as an exotic pet. There are now two million. In the 1880s, around a dozen black squirrels escaped from a private zoo in Woburn, Bedfordshire.

The first one spotted in the wild was on the outskirts of Letchworth in Hertfordshire in 1912.

They compete with the greys for food and, when the two varieties mate, the black gene is dominant. Marina Pacheco, of the Mammal Society, said: ‘All of the grey squirrels could be black in a few decades.’

Scientists at Anglia Ruskin University have called on the public to report sightings to the website www.blacksquirrel project.org

Geneticist Helen McRobbie said: ‘Numbers have risen steadily over the years and they have been spotted in Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire.

‘But we don’t have evidence that they are living elsewhere in the British Isles.

‘Therefore it would be great if as many people as possible can submit their sightings.’



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093826/Nationwide-hunt-Britains-rare-black-squirrel-100-years-introduced.html#ixzz1l1jset1k

The Price Of Prohibition

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/mexico/9046441/Mexicos-drug-war-has-brought-terrifying-violence-to-the-streets-and-taken-a-dreadful-toll-of-lives.html


Twenty seconds of shooting, 432 bullets, five dead policemen.

Four of the corpses are sprawled over a shiny-new Dodge Ram pick-up truck that has been pierced so many times it resembles a cheese-grater. The bodies are contorted in the unnatural poses of the dead – arms arched over spines, legs spread out sideways.

The fifth man is a moustached 48-year-old lying 10 feet from the pick-up, bathed in his own blood. His eyes are wide open, his right hand stretched upward clasping a 9-mm pistol – a death pose that could have been set up for a Hollywood movie.

It is a balmy evening in Culiacan, Sinaloa, near Mexico's Pacific coast. The policemen had stopped at a red light when the gunmen attacked, shooting from the side and back, unleashing bullets in split seconds. A customised Kalashnikov can unload 100 rounds in 10 seconds. This is a lightning war.

I arrive 10 minutes after the shooting and a crowd of onlookers is already thickening. "That one is a Kalashnikov bullet. That one is from an AR15," says a skinny kid in a baseball cap, pointing at a long silvery shell next to a shorter gold one.

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Besides them, middle-aged couples, old men and mothers with small children gawk at the morbid display. The local press corps huddles together, checking photos on their viewfinders to ensure they have the best images. They are relaxed, cheery; this is their daily bread.

A battered Ford Focus speeds through the crowd. The wife of one of the victims jumps out and starts screaming hysterically. Her swinging arms are held back by her brother, his eyes red with tears. It is only when I see the pained look on their faces that the loss of human life really sinks in.

Anyone with half an eye on the news knows that Mexico is in the midst of a drugs war, with rival cartels battling for control of a $30 billion trade with the United States. The country so deep in blood it is getting harder to shock the locals. Even the kidnapping and killing of nine policemen, or a pile of craniums in a town plaza, isn't big news.

Only the most sensational atrocities now grab media attention: a grenade attack on revellers celebrating independence day; the sewing of a murder victim's face onto a football; an old silver mine filled with 56 decaying corpses, some of the victims thrown in alive.

In the five years of President Felipe Calderon's administration, the government admitted earlier this month, the drug war has claimed 47,500 lives including those of 3,000 public servants – policemen, soldiers, judges, mayors, and dozens of federal officials.

Such a murder rate compares to the most lethal insurgent forces in the world – and is certainly more deadly than Hamas, ETA, or the Irish Republican Army in its entire three decades of armed struggle.

The nature of the attacks is even more intimidating. Mexican gangsters regularly shower police stations with bullets and rocket-propelled grenades; they carry out mass kidnappings of officers and leave their mutilated bodies on public display; they even kidnapped one mayor, tied him up, and stoned him to death on a main street.

I originally travelled to Latin America with the goal to be a foreign correspondent in exotic climes. The Oliver Stone film Salvador inspired me with its story of reporters dodging bullets in the Central American civil wars. But by the turn of millennium, the days of military dictators and communist insurgents were no more. We were now, apparently, in a golden age of democracy and free trade.

I arrived in Mexico in 2000 the day before former Coca Cola executive President Vicente Fox was sworn into office, ending 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

This was a titanic moment in Mexican history, a seismic shift in its political plates, a time of optimism and celebration. The clique who ravaged the country and lined their pockets for most of the twentieth century had fallen from power.

In the first years of the decade, no one saw the crisis ahead. The American media heaped high expectations on the cowboy-boot wearing Fox as he entertained Koffi Annan and became the first Mexican to address a joint US session of Congress. The first wave of serious cartel warfare began in the autumn of 2004 on the border with Texas and spread across the country. When President Felipe Calderon took power in 2006 and declared war on these gangs, the violence multiplied overnight.

The same system that promised Mexico hope was weak in controlling the most powerful mafias on the continent. The old regime could manage organised crime by taking down a token few gangsters and taxing the rest. Mexico's drug war is inextricably linked to the democratic transition.

Its special-force soldiers became mercenaries for gangsters. Businessmen who used to pay off corrupt officials had to pay off mobsters. Police forces turned on one another – sometimes breaking into shoot-outs.

Following the rise of the Mexican drug cartels has been a surreal – and tragic – journey. I have stumbled up mountains where drugs are born as pretty flowers; dined with lawyers who represent the biggest capos on the planet; and I got drunk with American undercover agents who infiltrate the cartels. I also sped through city streets to see too many bleeding corpses – and heard the words of too many mothers who had lost their sons, and with them their hearts.

I have met the assassins, too; men like Jose Antonio from Ciudad Juarez, probably the most murderous city on the planet – just seven miles from the border with the US. Jose stands at just five feet six and has chocolate coloured skin, earning the nickname "frijol" or bean. He has a mop of black curly hair and bad acne, like many 17-year-olds. But despite his harmless demeanour, he has seen more killings than many soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Frijol came of age in a warzone. When Mexico's two most powerful cartels, the Zetas and Sinaloa Cartel, began fighting in 2004, he was just 12 – and joined a street gang in his slum. At 14, he was already involved in armed robberies, drug dealing and regular gun battles with rival gangs.

At 16, police nabbed him for possession of a small arsenal of weapons – including two automatic rifles and an Uzi – and being an accessory to a drug-related murder.

Frijol is typical of thousands of teenagers and young men. His parents hail from a country village but joined the wave of immigrants that flocked to work in Juarez, sweating on production lines making consumer goods for an average of $6 a day.

It was a radical change in their lives. Frijol's parents still celebrated peasant folk days and macho country values. But he grew up in a sprawling city of 1.3 million where he could tune into American TV channels and see the skyscrapers of El Paso over the river. Contraband goods and guns flooded south and drugs went north. He was in between markets and in between worlds.

While Frijol's parents slaved in the factories, he was left for hours at home alone. He soon found company by joining one of Juarez's street gangs - known as barrios, the very word for neighbourhood. His was the "Calaberas", or skulls, and had 100 members.

"The gang becomes like your home, your family. It is where you find friendship and people to talk to. It is where you feel part of something. And you know the gang will back you up if you are in trouble."

Frijol learned to use guns in the Calaberas. Arms moved around Juarez streets freely and every barrio had its arsenal. "Men with connections started looking at who knew how to shoot," explains Frijol. "There was a guy who had been in the barrio a few years before and was now working with the big people.

He started offering jobs to the youngsters. The first jobs were just as lookouts or guarding tienditas [little drug shops]. Then they started paying people to do the big jobs... to kill."

I ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Frijol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85.

The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juarez is just $85.

To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don't feel they crossed a red line. But to take a human life - that is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for $85 – enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week – shows a terrifying degradation in society.

I ask Frijol what it is like to be in fire fights, to see your friends dead on the street and to be an accessory to a murder. He answers unblinking. "Being in shootouts is pure adrenalin. But you see dead bodies and you feel nothing. There is killing every day. Some days there are 10 executions, others days there are 30. It is just normal now."

I speak to psychologist Elizabeth Villegas. The teenagers she works with have murdered and raped. I ask, how does this hurt them psychologically? She stares back at me as if she hasn't thought about it before.

"They just don't understand the pain that they have caused others," she replies. "Most come from broken families. They don't recognise rules or limits."

The teenage sicarios know that under Mexican law, minors can only be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison no matter how many murders, kidnappings or rapes they have committed. Many convicted killers will be back on the streets before they turn 20. Frijol himself will be out when he is 19.

But the law is the least of their worries; the mafias administer their own justice. Juarez Cartel gunmen went to neighbourhoods where gang members had been recruited for the Sinaloans; a death sentence was passed on the whole barrio. The Sinaloan mafia returned the favour on barrios that had joined the Juarez Cartel.

I went to a neighbourhood where 20 teenagers and young men had hung out on a street corner a year ago. Fifteen had since been gunned down, a bar they hung out in torched.

A few of the survivors are incarcerated, the rest have fled, leaving a neighbourhood looking like a ghost town.

Frijol recognises that youth prison may be hard. But it is a lot safer there than on the streets now. "I keep hearing about friends who have been killed out there. Maybe I would be dead too. Prison could have saved my life."

On the streets of Mexico, death was never far away. Five sources whose interviews helped shaped my book were subsequently murdered or disappeared – although these killings almost certainly have nothing to do with my work.

One of them, Honduran anti-drug chief Julian Aristides Gonzalez, gave me an interview in his office in the sweaty Honduran capital. The square-jawed officer chatted for several hours about the growth of Mexican drug gangs in Central America and the Colombians who provide them with narcotics.

In his office were 140 kilos of seized cocaine and piles of maps and photographs showing clandestine landing strips and narco mansions. I was impressed by how open and frank Gonzalez was about his investigations and the political corruption they showed up.

Four days later, he gave a press conference showing his latest discoveries. Next day he dropped his seven-year old daughter off at school. Assassins drove past on a motorcycle and fired 11 bullets into him. It turned out he had planned to retire in two months and move his family to Canada.

*El Narco: The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels by Ioan Grillo (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is available from Telegraph Books at £11.99 + £1.25