A week after a number of media sources wrote about Arab terrorists posting violent footage on YouTube, some press has begun to take note of video on the site uploaded by drug traffickers in Mexico. See the example video embedded at the end of this post. Though these films are essentially murder-photo montages set to music celebrating gang warfare, few of them appear to have been removed from YouTube. I hope they don’t take them down. This is a very real part of life in this world and people ought to see it. Why do these men end up shooting each other and making videos about it for money, adventure and dignity? For political context, I’ll refer you to my favorite article on the topic.

Further context is offered if only indirectly from the Wikipedia entry on involuntary human trafficking, including the estimation that 14,000 people are trafficked into the US as slaves every year. A fair number of those people are brought through or to the city I live in, Portland, Oregon. Just some things I’m thinking about this morning.