Mexican media reacts to Virginia shootings

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Mexicans have shared in mourning the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings and expressed condolences to their cross-border neighbors. But there’s also a widespread perception here that some of the United States’ biggest problems -- from drug abuse to foreign policy mishaps to high rates of gun-related homicides -- are often self-inflicted.

So it is with the Virginia tragedy. On Tuesday, the left-leaning daily La Jornada ran several stories under the headline, ‘United States, in shock for the new slaughter; the cause is ignored.’ The cause, in the paper’s view, is the large number of guns privately owned by Americans.

‘Tragedy in United States blamed on a culture of weapons and the ease with which young people acquire them,’ ran another typical headline in La Prensa, another Mexico City tabloid.

An editorial cartoon in Reforma, a centrist-conservative Mexico City newspaper, depicted George Bush saying that the Virginia Tech students were ‘in the wrong place, at the wrong time.’ Behind the president, the U.S. bald eagle was shielding its eyes and saying, ‘Speaking of which...,’ an apparent reference to the rampant bloodshed in Iraq.

What galls many Mexicans is their perception that the United States sometimes preaches one thing to the rest of the world, but practices another itself. Mexico has bristled in recent years at U.S. criticism of its failure to curb an outbreak of drug-related killings.

Mexicans, however, aren’t in a good position to cast stones over the Virginia massacre: In this morning’s edition of the Mexico City daily Milenio, the Virginia Tech story took up just one column deep inside the paper. The cover photo of a dead, mutilated man linked to a story about a new rash of brutal narcotics-related torture and assassinations -- in the Mexican state of Michoacán.

Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City