As of publication, the death toll in Mexico City and several adjacent states was put at more than 200. It was expected to rise as rescue efforts continued. If Tuesday’s afternoon quake had struck in the early morning as in 1985, the death count would surely be much higher. Worse yet, this week’s earth whammy comes less than two weeks after a shattering quake of magnitude 8.2 killed about 100 people in southern Mexico, mostly in the poor, indigenous state of Oaxaca. 

Transnational organized crime generates $2 trillion in revenue per year globally, roughly the size of Britain’s economy, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Wonder how much money those fake Luis Vuitton handbags and DVDs of the latest Hollywood hits bring in? At $654 billion annually, counterfeiting and intellectual property piracy tops the global list of most lucrative illicit activities. 

On Sunday, May 13, Mexican police found 49 mutilated bodies, believed by some to be migrants, on a road that connects the industrial city of Monterrey with the United States border. The corpses had their hands, heads, and feet chopped off, making them difficult to identify. Drug cartels have increasingly used the public display of corpses as warning to other cartels or criminal organizations.