Miss Honduras, a victim of the lost Drug War

Reuters

"A Honduran beauty queen has been found murdered just days before she was due to compete in the Miss World pageant in London, police said on Wednesday.

The bodies of Maria Jose Alvarado, 19, and her sister Sofia, 23, were found buried near a river in the mountainous region of Santa Barbara in western Honduras, said Leandro Osorio, head of the criminal investigation unit.

Alvarado, a student who aspired to become a career diplomat, had been due to take part in the Miss World events that start on Thursday and culminate in the final in London on Dec. 14.

She and her sister had been missing since Thursday, when they were seen leaving a party in a car without a license plate in Santa Barbara, a coffee-growing region where drug gangs are active.

"I can confirm that the Alvarado sisters were found ... We also have the murder weapon and the vehicle in which they were transported to the site where they were buried," Osorio told local television.

Interior Minister Arturo Corrales told Honduran media that Plutarco Ruiz, the boyfriend of the beauty queen's sister, was responsible for the crime. Police arrested Ruiz and another man on Tuesday, confiscating two pistols and their pick-up truck.

Honduras is the world's most violent country with a murder rate above 90 people per 100,000.

Drug cartels use Honduras as a staging post for U.S.-bound cocaine from South America, aggravating violence in the impoverished Central American nation that has helped spark a surge in illegal immigration to the United States."

So, society is the United States is so dysfunctional that large numbers of us feel the need to use illegal drugs [about 2 million Americans used cocaine within the past month]. Miss Honduras pays the price for our sickness. And when people in Honduras want to live and work somewhere other than a cocaine transit station (all deliveries going one way only -- el Norte), we say that they should go back to where they came from. 

It's about time that "casual" drug users in the U.S. appreciated that scenes like the one below are caused by the demand they create. Acknowledging that the lost Drug War and Immigration reform are tied together is essential, but even better would be addressing whatever it is that is so rotten at the core of American society that so many of its free citizens choose to use drugs.

"Forensic workers stand next to 11 of 16 slain bodies dumped in an abandoned lot in the border city of Tijuana September 29, 2008. Police found 16 bodies dumped in the seedy Mexican border city of Tijuana on Monday in what the state attorney general’s office said could be a revenge attack for the arrest of a local drug gang hit man. "REUTERS/Stringer