The Times on Mexico

Not to be outdone by its two biggest rivals, the New York Times ran an article about how Nuevo Laredo, once the wildest city in Mexico, has slipped back into normalcy:

Tamaulipas State, where Nuevo Laredo is located, used to be ground zero in the country’s drug war, with convoys of criminals riding through the streets as if they owned them and one of the highest murder rates in the country.

The thing is that Nuevo Laredo was never that violent. As I mentioned here, even at the apex of its violent arc, Nuevo Laredo was never significantly more violent than Washington, D.C., and for most of its recent history, has been less so. Given the attacks on its newspapers and its government officials, Nuevo Laredo was in worse shape than Washington, but the idea that it was the Juárez of 2005 strikes me as not quite right.

Plus, Nicholas Kristof came out for a new approach in the war on drugs.