Bloggers killed in Mexico by drug cartels

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Mexican bloggers killed for writing about cartels–meanwhile in the United States we are still free to write what we want because we have a functioning government.

We here in the free world–and the United States in particular–cannot properly appreciate how good we got it. Immigrants who come to the United States from far off places where there is nothing in the way of constitutional rights, like the one’s we probably tend to take for granted, are elated to be in a place where they can move about, think, say, write and associate however they like so long as it is done without infringing on the rights of others.

Consider this: In a lot of countries around the world this post would make me a marked man, and my days would be numbered. Mexico does have a government, but it in some parts it has been effectively neutered by cartel violence. In those places, free speech will get you killed. Example:

(Newsr) In Nuevo Laredo, what you say on the Internet can cost you your life. A man who helped moderate a website that posted news of shootouts and other Zetas cartel activities—something local newspapers have largely stopped doing—was found dead at an intersection in the Mexican border city, the Houston Chronicle reports. He had been tortured and decapitated. “This happened to me for not understanding that I shouldn’t report on the social networks,” said a note left next to the body.

A female blogger in the city was found decapitated in late September and the brutalized bodies of a man and woman were hung from a bridge earlier that month, with a sign saying they had been killed for their online activity. Some social media users have vowed not to give up. “Let’s continue denouncing them, now that we’ve seen it burns them, hurts them,” read one posting on the site the murdered man moderated. “We have to continue. We can’t give in.”

The reason a person can speak their mind in the United States without worrying about whether they will be killed for it is because we have a functioning government, and are a nation of laws. When I hear extreme freemarket people claim ‘all government is bad,’ and that it should be shrunk to fit in a bath tub and drowned, I know they haven’t really thought out what the alternative looks like–or have they?