Mexico: Model for the Future?

What is needed for your town to get to the place where Acapulco finds itself today?
Extortion and killing have made this once popular tourist destination a nightmare town. The latest atrocity discovered yesterday is a sack containing 5 human heads left outside an elementary school. The note inside warns specific drug traffickers of the same treatment. Now, the unanswered question asks are these heads of drug traffickers, killed by rival groups, or the heads of teachers who have been threatened with death if they don’t “donate” half of their salaries to the cartel.
Other heads and corpses with and without heads are found daily in many parts of Mexico. All of these are presumably drug cartel executions. Maybe there is the odd murder for gain, hidden in the avalanche of bodies, but mostly these are drug killings.
Corruption of officials at all levels lets this massacre go virtually unpunished, except by the law of the jungle. Could this happen in your town? Did it happen in Chicago in the early 1900s? Did it happen in New York? In Miami? In Los Angles? Could it happen in Tallahassee? In Thomasville? In Managua?
Friends, we are inching closer to this level of violence and criminal control every day in many places in the world. When we cede control of public functions to private enterprises we lose control. Then we open the door to corruption and criminal activity. There are credible reports that the US Government is contracting with the cabal that manages the Conficker network for access to botnets to infiltrate hostile governments. The cyber groups that run the Conficker network are criminals with criminal intent. So the infiltration of crime into government is already an established pathway.
Get real. We are not that far from Acapulco.

Image: http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/191819/slide_191819_376178_large.jpg
Graphic slide show: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/27/acapulco-severed-heads-mexico_n_984263.html#s376187&title=Recent_Violence_In
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/27/140704494/the-worm-that-could-bring-down-the-internet