The murder of a seven-month-old baby and his drug-dealing parents during a narco-turf war in Mexico has sparked outrage in that country.
The image of the young boy’s bloody body next to that of his parents has been widely circulated on social media by people demanding that the boy’s murder get the same media attention that the photo of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi garnered.
The image of Kurdi’s body as it washed up on the beach travelled the world as it was featured on every major news outlet and became the rallying point for European nations in regards to the Syrian refuge crisis.
In Mexico, citizens are demanding that the image of seven-month-old Marcos Miguel Pano Colon become the rallying point for Mexico’s never ending drug violence. What many outlets such as the Daily Mail are failing to report is that the parents of Pano Colon were not innocent bystanders but in fact were employees of the local drug lord who was the actual target of the shootout. The child was killed as part of a narco-turf war in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
According to Mexico’s Noticiasnet.mx, the child’s parents, 24-year-old Juan Alberto Pano Ramos and his 17-year-old girlfriend were in fact street level drug dealers for local drug kingpin Isidro “El Isis” Gonzalez Jeronimo.
The shootout that resulted in the death of the couple, the child and El Isis was in fact a hit by a rival cartel group in an effort to take over his drug territory. The couple were meeting with their boss who had his cartel security detail with him near a local shopping center. A rival cartel group had been tailing El Isis and moved in to kill him setting off a fierce firefight. Pano Ramos and his wife tried to run towards the shopping center to get away from the gunmen but were killed in the hail of bullets.
News outlets have generally been silent about the multiple casualties that regularly take place in Mexico as a result of that country’s raging drug violence. News outlets remained silent last November when, in the border city of Reynosa, as Breitbart Texas reported, the Gulf Cartel attacked a Mexican military truck forcing it into a taco stand that killed four people including a four-month-old baby. In response to the murder and the Gulf Cartel hanging banners blaming the military, Breitbart Texas Managing Director Brandon Darby wrote an editorial charging the Gulf Cartel’s boss Comandante Toro had a baby’s blood on his hands.
Another case where cartel gunmen have been responsible for killing innocent children, took place last Sunday in the border city of Matamoros when, as previously reported by Breitbart Texas, a 13-year-old girl was killed by a stray bullet. Leslie Rodriguez, the young teen, was with her parents when they were caught in the crossfire of a fierce gun battle between Gulf Cartel members and the Mexican military. In that shootout, the Tamaulipas government claimed that seven gunmen and the 13-year-old girl were the only victims. However, law enforcement officials who have spoken with Breitbart Texas under condition of anonymity confirmed that the shootouts in Matamoros left 18 dead and more than 20 injured gunmen and bystanders alike.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
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