Sadly, the US government’s war on drugs has escalated to the point where DEA agents and informants are given free reign to murder innocent people. Even more sadly, you’re not likely to have heard about the story which I’m about to relate if you’ve been living in the United States. No, this story comes to us from The Guardian, a UK newspaper, and it isn’t (possibly can’t be) widely reported in American papers. I’m disheartened that I have to seek foreign media sources to learn about the real state of affairs in my own country, and I’m even more disheartened that “our” government has been allowed to perpetuate this false war on drugs to the point where completely innocent people are being tortured and murdered over plants which, left to their own devices, would grow wild the world over. And so, Luis Padilla, a father, husband, son and law abiding person became only one of the victims of a false war over little plants. His life doesn’t matter, nor does his death, in the eyes of the US government. He’s only Hispanic–not the kind of life we concern ourselves with when fighting a war against plants. We can’t concern ourselves with the lives of Latinos, can we? If we did, the DEA and others would have to admit to the atrocities they’ve committed. And if they were to admit it, public opinion might finally turn against them in their war on plants. No, they tell themselves, we can’t concern ourselves with the lives (and deaths) of Hispanics.

The US media have virtually ignored this story. The Observer is the first newspaper to have spoken to Janet Padilla, and this is the first narrative account to appear in print. The story turns on one extraordinary fact: playing a central role in the House of Death was a US government informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, known as Lalo, who was paid more than $220,000 (£110,000) by US law enforcement bodies to work as a spy inside the Juarez cartel. In August 2003 Lalo bought the quicklime used to dissolve the flesh of the first victim, Mexican lawyer Fernando Reyes, and then helped to kill him; he recorded the murder secretly with a bug supplied by his handlers - agents from the Immigration and Customs Executive (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security. That first killing threw the ICE staff in El Paso into a panic. Their informant had helped to commit first-degree murder, and they feared they would have to end his contract and abort the operations for which he was being used. But the Department of Justice told them to proceed.

Lalo’s cartel bosses told him whenever they were planning another killing, using a grisly codeword - carne asada, ‘barbecue’. In the six months after Reyes’s death, they used it on many occasions. Each time, says Lalo, he informed his handlers in ICE. They did not intervene.

The US government is complicit in these murders. The US government is, in fact, entirely responsible. If they hadn’t created an entire war around these little plants, there would be no drug cartels and no mafia style drug murders. There would be no reason for these crimes against humanity to be committed in the first place. There would be mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers released from prison to become productive members of society again. There would be no more horrendous killings related to the illegality of such innocent looking plants. Like the end of alcohol prohibition in the US, the end of drug prohibition would save countless lives and bring the drug trade from the ugly and seedy underworld to the light of day. There would no longer be a “need” for unmarked mass graves. There would no longer be a “need” for a father to be stolen from his children. It isn’t the cartels that are responsible for this. It is the US government that has created, maintained and perpetuated the violence. It is the US government that needs to be punished for its misdeeds.

When Lalo arrived, two cops were already there. He went out to buy the quicklime and duct tape, and when he returned Santillan turned up with Reyes. The policemen jumped on the lawyer, beating him and trying to put duct tape over his mouth. Lalo, wearing his hidden wire supplied by ICE, recorded Reyes’s desperate pleas for mercy. ‘They [the police] asked me to help them get him to the floor,’ reads a statement he made later. ‘They tried to choke him with an extension cord, but this broke and I gave them a plastic bag and they put it on his head and suffocated him.’ Even then, they were not sure Reyes was dead. One of the officers took a shovel ‘and hit him many times on the head’.

Sutton could and should have shut down the case, there and then,’ says Bill Weaver, a law professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has made a detailed study of the affair. ‘He could have told ICE and the lawyers “go with what you have, and let’s try to bring Santillan to justice”. That neither he nor anyone else decided to take that action invites an obvious inference: that because the only people likely to get killed were Mexicans, they thought it didn’t much matter.’

In the days after Reyes’s death, officials in Texas and Washington held a series of meetings. Finally word came back from headquarters - despite the risk that Lalo might become involved with further murders, ICE could continue to use and pay him as an informant. And although Santillan had already been caught on tape directing a merciless killing and might well kill again, no attempt would be made to arrest him.

I’m not speaking from conjecture. There is proof that the US government is directly responsible for many murders and indirectly responsible for many more. These tall green plants, these pretty little poppies, they hold a power over the US government, and the US government in turn holds a power over us. The US government doesn’t care to stop the violence. They don’t care to stop the bloodshed nor the wasteful spending of taxpayer money on a false war against an entirely government created enemy. They don’t care that people are dying so long as those people are Mexicans and black gang members. They don’t care that otherwise innocent people, once productive members of society with jobs and money and families are rotting in prison at the taxpayers’ expense so long as they can maintain their power structure. The US government and all of its drug enforcement agencies are playing a cruel game with society–and society has sat back and let it happen.

But ICE and its allies in the DoJ were covering up their actions, helped by the US media - aside from the Dallas Morning News, not one major newspaper or TV network has covered the story. The first signs came in the response to Gonzalez’s letter to Gaudioso - not from ICE, but from Johnny Sutton.

He reacted not to the discovery of corpses at Calle Parsonieros, but with concern Gonzalez might talk to the media. He communicated his fears to a senior official in Washington - Catherine O’Neil, director of the DoJ’s Organised Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Describing Gonzalez’s letter as ‘inflammatory,’ she passed on Sutton’s fears to the then Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and to Karen Tandy, the head of the DEA, another Texan lawyer.

How long do we allow this to go on? How long do we allow our families to be destroyed and our society to be crushed under the weight of a made up war? How long are we going to take this?