Every November 2, Mexicans mark the Day of the Dead by honouring deceased loved ones.

Given the disproportionate number of deaths produced by Mexico’s US-backed drug war, officially launched in 2006, it is starting to seem like an ever-more tragically appropriate tradition.

In a recent investigative piece for The Nation, Dawn Paley details the “spectacular violence” that has accompanied the drug war project.

“In 2014, Mexico ranked as the country with the third-most civilians killed in internal conflict, after Syria and Iraq. Bodies have been buried, burned, displayed in public places, hung from bridges and overpasses or beheaded and left at city hall.”

Estimates vary as to the total number of deaths since the start of the war, but many observers put it at above 100,000.

And this isn’t even counting the more than 27,000 Mexicans currently missing or disappeared – by most objective accounts an underestimate – or the 70,000-120,000Central American migrants estimated to have disappeared while travelling through Mexico since 2006.

According to the state-sanctioned narrative, the violence is the fault of Mexico’s drug cartels, period.

Read More- al Jazeera

Image courtesy of Getty