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Americans also fall prey to Mexico's drug war

September 28, 2008 | 10:29 am

Daniel Daniel not come home.

Linda LaPorte stood in the kitchen of her home in Pascoag, R.I., holding her cellphone. Her son's Thai girlfriend was calling from San Diego, speaking a mile a minute in fractured English, reports Evelyn Larrubia.

He said call mom if he not come home.

Linda and her husband, Joseph, had called their son just days earlier to wish him a happy 27th birthday. He'd said nothing about traveling anywhere.

Yet here was his girlfriend saying he'd gone to Mexico on business with a guy named Big Daddy. And he hadn't come back.

"What she was trying to convey to me didn't make sense," Linda recalled.

Dozens of American citizens have been kidnapped and killed in Mexico in the last year. They are a small fraction of the more than 3,000 people, the vast majority of them Mexicans, who have been slain gangland-style. Countless others have been kidnapped for ransom.

Read the rest of the dispatch about the disappearance of Daniel LaPorte here.

Click here for more on Mexico and here for our special report on the drug wars in Mexico, Mexico Under Siege.

— Deborah Bonello


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How much caffeine related crime does Mexico or the United States have? None.

Why? Because it's legal.

How many alcohol cartels does Mexico or the
U. S. have today? None.

Why? Because we re-legalized the drug alcohol in 1933.



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