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  In Mexico, War on Drug Cartels Takes Wider Toll
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ContributorArmyDem 
Last EditedArmyDem  Apr 14, 2008 08:02am
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CategoryNews
MediaNewspaper - Washington Post
News DateMonday, April 14, 2008 02:00:00 PM UTC0:0
DescriptionMilitary Campaign Draws Accusations Of Rights Abuses

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 14, 2008; Page A09

NOCUPETARO, Mexico -- Plastic sacks give Norberto Ramírez chills.

On the May night last year when his nightmare began, Ramírez said, Mexican soldiers pulled a plastic sack over his head and cinched it around his neck while he lay inside a dark bar in this desolate village. He gagged. They pulled off the sack, he said, then put it back and cinched it again.

It went on like that for hours.

"I thought I was going to die, and I wanted to die," said Ramírez, 44, whose recollections match details in a human rights commission report authorized by the government and in interviews with more than a dozen villagers.

Ramírez's ordeal occurred during one of the most volatile moments in Mexico's military campaign against drug cartels, a war that has ranged from the U.S.-Mexican border to Gulf ports to insular rural outposts such as this, and that pits the country's demand for security against its stated commitment to human rights.

A village of 3,000 mostly small-plot farmers, Nocupetaro is among a constellation of communities where the military has been dispatched to take on the cartels in one of the largest domestic deployments in Mexican history. President Felipe Calderón has sent more than 25,000 soldiers and federal police across the country over the past 16 months in response to drug-related violence that has killed more than 5,300 people since 2006.
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