September 15, 2013
Most times the sound of two tires on pavement,
whirling chain, wind at ones back and nature around you is the best soundtrack to a good ride. But there are times we listens to music projected from a little speaker in my back bag. If there
is one soundtrack from a movie that captures the mood of this ride better than anything else it is Into The Wild by Eddie Vedder. Watch the movie, better read the book and definitely discover that album. Here are the lyrics to a song that plays over and over in my head as I watch the 100
thousand dollar RVs pass or wind past he million dollar homes here along the coast. Our little tent is a pretty nice little home of its own.
Society:
Eddie
Redder
It's a mystery to
me
We have a greed with
which we have agreed
You think you have to
want more than you need
Until you have it all
you won't be free
Society, you're a crazy
breed
I hope you're not
lonely without me
When you want more than
you have
You think you
need
And when you think more
than you want
Your thoughts begin to
bleed
I think I need to find
a bigger place
'Cause when you have
more than you think
You need more
space
Society, you're a crazy
breed
I hope you're not
lonely without me
Society, crazy and
deep
I hope you're not
lonely without me
There's those thinking
more or less, less is more
But if less is more how
you're keeping score?
Means for every point
you make your level drops
Kinda like it's
starting from the top, you can't do that
Society, you're a crazy
breed
I hope you're not
lonely without me
Society, crazy and
deep
I hope you're not
lonely without me
Society, have mercy on
me
I hope you're not angry
if I disagree
Society, crazy and
deep
I hope you're not
lonely without me
August 29
This website provider now has an app that allows me to update the website via my iPad.
We have travelled over 3000 km thus far in our adventure to cycle to stop the cycle of drugs and violence. From Inuvik down to Stewart BC the trip has been phenomenal. The natural highs of seeing
grizzlies, or stopping for more than a dozen black bears in as many km cannot be surpassed by any chemical. We have climbed high mountains, paddled deep lakes, camped out every night of the way,
cooked by fire and reconnected with each other and the planet.
Now that I can place images on here I will update the website regularly starting with a slide show from the start to this point of some of the highlights.
Please don't forget to spread the word. The more people viewing our adventure and supporting our effort to raise funds and awareness for the work of Smart Kids Don't Do Drugs, the better.
August 27, 2013
From the serenity of the mountains it is hard to reflect on what
inspired this ride. Here is a good reason. Anyone who says drugs are a victimless crime is wrong. No matter how you get around it illegal drugs support the worst criminals on earth. May these
poor families find peace somehow.
From the Huffinton Post today:
TLALMANALCO, Mexico -- The bodies were headless and covered in lime and asbestos, hidden under a thick concrete slab – young men and women not seen since they went out partying in an upscale area of Mexico's capital nearly
three months ago.
As the families of 12 missing youths settled in Saturday for an anguished wait for DNA identification, they and others
said this week's gruesome discovery at a muddy mass grave in the countryside east of Mexico City was bitter vindication for those who have said all along that the city's top law-enforcement
officials downplayed the disappearances and were at best incompetent in trying to find their loved ones.
The bodies were only found once federal investigators stepped in – after waiting impatiently for local police to make
progress.
The kidnapping and murder has revealed a gangland battle for control of the lucrative drug trade in the poshest bars and
nightclubs of a megalopolis that had been an oasis of calm during Mexico's nearly seven-year drug war. The head of Mexico City police on Saturday deployed more officers and a helicopter to some
of the city's upscale districts along with the rough neighborhood of Tepito where most of the victims lived, fearing retaliatory attacks.
A federal official who helped discover the bodies said that they were found separately from their heads in what could be
a frightening echo of the brutal mutilations of drug cartel victims in other parts of Mexico. The official spoke condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ongoing
investigation.
"Mexico City is not a bubble. If we don't put a stop to it, we're going to fall into a serious security problem," said
Miguel Amelio Gomez, a security consultant and former investigative police chief for Mexico City's attorney-general.
The kidnapping occurred three months ago midday on a sunny Sunday in an upscale district in the heart of Mexico City,
five cars pulled up outside the after-hours club known as Heaven, a block from federal police administrative offices and the U.S. Embassy. Eight men and four women who had been partying all night
left and climbed inside, grainy surveillance video shows.
Then they vanished.
Mexico City police said they were working on the case. But after more than two months of little progress, federal
investigators were brought in. They discovered 13 bodies, apparently the 12 young victims and an unidentified person, on Aug. 16 on a ranch 35 miles from where they disappeared. Tattoos and
dental work identified at least five of the victims from the Heaven club. Work to identify the rest continued Saturday, and families pleaded for the remains to also be examined by forensic
experts abroad arguing they can't trust their country's investigators.
Relatives of the 12 expressed grief, frustration and mistrust at the discovery. And they accused Mexico City's
law-enforcement authorities of moving slowly on the sensitive investigation, perhaps because they were afraid of what it might reveal.
"It's all really confusing to us," Beatriz Loza, the aunt of victim Monserrat Loza, said Saturday. "The investigation
failed. I can't believe that three months have passed."
Four current and former law-enforcement officials told The Associated Press the massacre appears to have been
orchestrated by a wealthy and powerful drug gang as revenge and a warning to a group of poorer interlopers trying to seize territory in some of the city's trendiest neighborhoods.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal details of the ongoing
investigation.
With some 100,000 police officers in the capital, Mexico's largest cartels have little public presence here. The retail
drug business is booming, however, and local drug gangs collectively make $100-200 million a day selling marijuana, cocaine and hallucinogens, said Gomez, the former district-attorney's
investigative chief.
Investigators told the AP they believe dealers from the poor eastern neighborhood of Tepito have been trying to move in
on the Union of Insurgentes, a gang that's named after the city's prosperous main north-south thoroughfare and controls sales in virtually all of the nightspots in the wealthiest parts of the
city. The gang in control hires women as spies to flirt with potential rivals looking to sell drugs on their territory, and valets are used as lookouts, Gomez said. Corrupt police with annual
salaries of less than $10,000 are paid to turn a blind eye.
Two owners of the Heaven bar, Mario Ledezma and Ernesto Espinosa Lobo, have been arrested. Some of the witnesses have
testified that both were working with the Union of Insurgentes, according to an investigative document written by Mexico City prosecutors and shown to the AP by a person with access to the case
files.
Ledezma claimed in a statement to authorities that he was threatened by armed men from the gang who informed him that
they were going to sell drugs in his bars – and kill him if he objected.
Ledezma said they told him if they ever saw other people dealing in the bars they had claimed as territory, those rivals
would disappear.
Of the 12 victims, at least some had family ties to a Tepito gang.
One, Jerzy Ortiz, has a father, Jorge, who is currently imprisoned for extortion, organized crime, homicide and robbery.
Another victim was Said Sanchez, whose father is serving a 23-year prison sentence for similar crimes.
Mexico City Attorney-General Rodolfo Rios has said the Heaven case was also connected to a murder two days earlier in a
nightclub in the trendy Condesa neighborhood, where an alleged drug dealer was taken out onto the street and shot in the head.
An official with the Mexico City prosecutor's office told the AP that investigators there are looking into whether the
gang feud was behind other deadly incidents in the capital around the same time.
In one case from April, relatives of five other young men reported that loved ones had been taken from a bar called
Virtual in the same area as Heaven. Relatives said that when they filed missing persons' reports authorities asked them to stay quiet for their own safety.
Surveillance camera footage that could have helped solve the mystery disappeared eight days after the kidnapping,
according to the prosecutor's official, who wasn't authorized to speak about the case.
In the Heaven case, families started to report the missing the next day but nothing happened until four days later when
the relatives blocked streets in a public protest. Even then the case seemed to be going slowly, with leads turning up and immediately going cold, and Mexico City officials repeatedly emphasizing
that the case was no sign of a broader problem of insecurity in the capital.
"They have many elements, many people, but where are the victims?" Leticia Ponce, mother of 16-year-old Jerzy Ortiz, one
of the missing, asked in July. "Are they really trying to find them?"
The break came on Aug. 16, when federal investigators were searching a suburban area east of Mexico City.
Attorney-General Jesus Murillo Karam said last week that the investigators were out on a completely different case when they stumbled across the ranch. But the official with the federal
prosecutor's officer told the AP that federal investigators had been assigned specifically to look for the Heaven victims in neighboring Mexico state, a sign of impatience with efforts by police
in the capital.
The investigators, following informants, had heard that the kidnappers might be in rural Tlalmanalco, already known as a
spot that was popular among criminal gangs. In their search, they came upon an armed man near a cemetery who took off in his truck at the sight of investigators, the federal official said.
The officers followed him onto a ranch known as La Negra, thinking perhaps they would find a "safe house," where
criminals hide guns, victims or themselves. They returned several times to move on the wooded property, where they found cows, turkeys and horses, plus an unfinished shed.
They got a search warrant on Wednesday to look for weapons. When they arrived on the ranch, they found bags of clothing
and a box full of cellphones.
When they started questioning two men living on the property, the men got nervous and investigators got suspicious.
Under separate questioning, the two gave different stories. Finally one confessed that someone had buried bodies on the ranch and led them to the site. By Wednesday night, federal and Mexico
state authorities were mounting a full-scale excavation.