Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  Finally, the delegation followed the path out to a collection of houses on the highway. “The most, how can I say it, the most incredible thing was that the soldiers had a military checkpoint right there,” said Maria García. The checkpoint, which stopped every vehicle coming in and out of the area, was there from approximately 2008 to 2012, during the federal government’s military surge in the Juárez area. Over the same time period, the Juárez Valley became one of the most dangerous places in the country, with mass displacements and locals forced to seek asylum in the United States. “The Valle de Juárez is very large, and it is held by organized crime, but it is supervised by the army, the army supervises the entrances,” said Ledezma. The earlier walk had been an attempt to throw off the families; the authorities, archaeologists, investigators, and police were complicit in covering up the killers’ tracks. I met with Ledezma in 2013, just as Felipe Calderón began his tenure at Harvard University: “I was with him three times, and I personally told him,” she said, lowering her voice down to a near whisper, “The Federales took [our daughters], the soldiers took [our daughters].”

  It was the arrival of federal police and soldiers in Ciudad Juárez and the surrounding region that caused murder rates to take off. Missing person posters, many featuring the faces of young girls, punctuate lampposts and public spaces throughout Juárez and Chihuahua City, the state capital. Juárez became synonymous with violence and tragedy during Felipe Calderón’s term. As what officials called drug-related violence dominated the headlines, more and more young women began to disappear. “Beginning in 2008, when president Felipe Calderón, with the consent of the governor and the mayor, decided to implement operation Conjunto Chihuahua, which is a military confrontation against drug cartels, the assassination of women increased, but above all the disappearances of young women [increased],” said Dr. Julia E. Monárrez Fragoso, a professor and researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Ciudad Juárez.

  Indeed, the act of laying flowers on the tight dry earth where Jessica Leticia Peña García’s body was found is just one of the harrowing stories her mother Maria García shared with me when I visited her residence on the extreme edge of Ciudad Juárez. García, who lives in a single, uninsulated room in the corner of a cold, empty warehouse with her partner and son, shivered and cried as she told me how her life has come apart since her daughter was disappeared and murdered in 2011. The warehouse faces the highway, and from the garage-style door hangs a plastic banner with her daughter’s smiling face and a red rose in her memory. “I can’t take it down, it is what keeps me going,” she said. “I don’t want to admit to myself that she’s no longer here.” Jessica Leticia was a beautiful young woman, which I point out in an attempt to put Maria García at ease. “That’s what the police told me when I filed the report. They said, ‘No wonder she was kidnapped, she was very beautiful.’ Those were their words,” she said, with anger in her voice. Like other mothers, including those who make up Justice for Our Daughters, García took the search into her own hands, going from cantina to cantina, from corner to corner, with a photo of her daughter. She was eventually directed toward a hotel, where she saw two young women, who were being held hostage, pulled out of their hotel room by armed men. When she called the police, they ignored her complaint. “They thought I had gone crazy,” she tells me. The case of Jessica Leticia is far from an isolated incident involving a few bad apples, instead it is a manifestation of a form of structural violence that put Ciudad Juárez on the map, with a wave of women murdered in 1993. A word for the killings of women because of their gender was created: feminicidio in Spanish, or femicide, and eventually it was adopted by lawyers and activists around the world to describe the murders of young women for the simple reason that they were young women.

  In the course of every work day, Itzel González scans local newspapers, looking for mention of violent attacks on women. More often than not, she turns to the whiteboard behind her desk and updates the previous day’s total of women murdered in Juárez, the largest city in Chihuahua. Her makeshift tally is one of the few adornments in the understated, second-floor office of the Women’s Coordinating Network (RMM), near the city’s downtown. Gonzales is the coordinator of the RMM, a coalition of groups that work, among other things, on behalf of the rights of women in what has long been considered Mexico’s most violent city.

  “In the last few years the official discourse is that femicide has been eradicated, that it is a thing of the past and that it doesn’t happen anymore,” she said. In 2011, 196 women were killed in the city of approximately 1.3 million. “The situation continues to be very serious.… the problem has worsened.… Another one of the discourses or things that the state attorney’s office here says is that the majority of, or a high percentage of, these women are being assassinated because they are part of organized crime. But the reality is that these crimes are not being investigated; 98 percent of these crimes don’t even have an investigation file.” Between 1993 and the end of 2011, 1,344 women were murdered in Juárez. A whopping 844—63 percent—of those murders took place after 2008, the year police and soldiers arrived to fight the war on drugs. The stories of the women whose daughters were taken from them are among the most heartbreaking I heard during my research, but to focus solely on the fate of these young women without talking about what has happened to men is to paint an incomplete portrait of violence along this small stretch of the Texas-Mexico border. Over the past decade, for every woman killed in Juárez, nine men were murdered. Molly Molloy, a librarian at New Mexico State University who keeps tabs on murders in Juárez, notes that “female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women.”[1] Queer and transpeople in Chihuahua and throughout Mexico have also been murdered based on their gender and sexual preference.

  It is difficult to make sense of the violence in Mexico, and it’s hard to know if Jessica Leticia’s killer(s) were after anything beyond cheap thrills. Their actions and the impunity granted them, however, goes beyond an isolated act and reinforces an overall climate of rampant sexism, racism, and classism. The actions of those responsible for Jessica’s murder have impacts that permeate society as a whole, and were carried out in part because impunity is the rule, not the exception, in Mexico. When I asked Norma Ledezma how she defined impunity, she went much farther than to finger the state for complicity. “Impunity has been like an invitation from the authorities to the criminals,” she said. They tell them: ‘Es la tierra de no pasa nada,’ this is the land where nothing happens.” After our interview she left with her bodyguard, who protects her throughout her busy workday.

  The state’s initial response to the femicides upheld what geographer Melissa Wright interprets as a gendered version of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, by which the threat of violent death is used a governance tactic. She writes that the governor of Chihuahua “assured Mexican families that there was nothing to fear as long as they knew where their female family members were. The discourse of the public woman normalized the violence and used the victims’ bodies as a way to substantiate the politics based on patriarchal notions of normality. Normal Mexican families, with normal, private women safely at home, had nothing to worry about.”[2] This discourse criminalizes the victims of femicide, many of whom were working women without access to safe, accessible transportation to and from their workplaces. It is as though they are responsible for their own deaths. Similar discourses are at work in areas of Mexico that are impacted by the drug war, where one is made to understand from media and government reports that victims of violence linked to the war are blamed for their own demise.

  “Juárez and a good part of Chihuahua are—and this should be made known nationally and internationally—truly in a situation of humanitarian emergency. The almost 4,000
assassinations that have occurred in the state in the last two years would be worthy of international attention in any other country, except this one, where the government continues to play dumb, thinking that they’re winning a ‘war’ that increasingly has the characteristics of social cleansing,” wrote Mexican activist and columnist Victor Quintana in late 2009.[3] Waves of killings of youth, small-time drug dealers, street-involved people, and the poor aren’t just happening in Juárez. According to Gustavo de la Rosa, the former Chihuahua state human rights officer, “The majority of those killed … are malandros … people of no value in this war … no use to any cartel … people below poverty whose death has no explanation except as part of … social cleansing … the extermination of the lowest of the low. There are execution squads, another breed forensically killing malandros, planned assassinations of the unwanted. And if we look at exactly how they are done, they are experts in killing characteristic of training by the army or police.”[4] One crucial difference in Juárez is that there are functioning activist groups and organizations that rally together to denounce and document what is taking place because of militarization, and a culture of journalism that has led writers take greater risks to report the news than they do elsewhere. Jessica Leticia’s kidnapping in Ciudad Juárez in 2011 and the subsequent events that would test her mother’s faith in Mexico’s authorities are recounted here in order to provide a sliver of context for how—and why—Juárez residents have more reason to fear state security forces than to seek shelter from them. Writer Charles Bowden declared Juárez a “laboratory of the future.” The city is without a doubt Mexico’s most well documented test case for what takes place when federal police and soldiers are sent en masse to patrol the streets in the name of fighting organized crime.

  US-Backed Police Programs in Mexico

  Mainstream nongovernmental groups are categorical in their assessment of the impacts of the war on drugs: “The ‘war on drugs’ launched by [Enrique Peña Nieto’s] predecessor, Felipe Calderón, had produced disastrous results. Not only had it failed to rein in the country’s powerful criminal groups, but it had led to a dramatic increase in grave human rights violations committed by the security forces sent to confront them,” according to a February 2013 report by Human Rights Watch.[5] “Rather than strengthening public security, these abuses had exacerbated a climate of violence, lawlessness, and fear.” The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that the murder rate in Mexico increased by 50 percent each year from 2008 to 2010.[6] The United States plays an important role through its security programs in Mexico, which are focused on police professionalization and the provision of new equipment, as well as further encouraging militarization. The policing segment of the Mérida Initiative leads not only to better arming of long-time perpetrators of violence against the Mexican people (the police and army), but can also be seen as part of the state’s long-term preparations to help enforce growing inequalities that will arise from the privatization and austerity regimes connected to US-backed initiatives, discussed in the previous chapter. This is connected to one goal of counterinsurgency, which is to deploy army and special forces temporarily so as to return to a framework where state violence is carried out by police forces, not soldiers, and where those who resist are criminalized and jailed or killed by police.

  Similar to the way countries that take loans from international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank are required to carry out structural adjustment programs that further impoverish the population, drug war resources come tied to increased US involvement in internal affairs. Though the public doesn’t generally have access to the process through which aid is disbursed, a confidential US State Department cable from Ecuador, which illustrates how political pressure and drug assistance go hand in hand, was leaked to Wikileaks. Rafael Correa’s government wasn’t prepared to accept conditions for anti-drug money, creating a problematic situation for the US government. In the cable, the former US Ambassador to Ecuador described the following situation: “Correa and [Government of Ecuador] officials were prompted into objecting to our polygraphing members of vetted units and were likely opposed to a set-up that ensured significant USG control over the actions of Ecuadorian law enforcement personnel and teams. During subsequent negotiations of agreements with [Department of Homeland Security] and [Drug Enforcement Administration], GoE officials regularly pushed [Narcotics Affairs Section] to give them counter-narcotics funds with few controls.[7]” In the end, the US government got its way, by “refusing to disburse funds until the agreements were signed.”[8]

  Police training, which is also called police professionalization, has long been an instrument in the US foreign policy arsenal. “Police assistance can accomplish many of the same U.S. foreign policy objectives as military intervention while appearing less political in the process,” according to Martha Huggins, who has written extensively on US training of Latin American police.[9] “There is no evidence that almost a century of US assistance to foreign police has improved either the security of the people in recipient countries or the democratic practices of their police and security forces.… The outcome of such training may suggest that the training of Latin American police has deliberately been used to increase US control over recipient countries and those governments’ undemocratic control over their populations.” In 1974, after evidence of torture, kidnappings, and murders carried out by US-trained police overwhelmed proponents of foreign police training, Congress outlawed the training and equipping of foreign police. Interestingly, however, “The 1974 congressional ban exempted US police and military assistance for narcotics control.”[10] In 1985, the training and equipping of police forces outside of the US was again made legal by Congress under Ronald Reagan, returning the practice of police training to a central strategy for US control over international security. The FBI began training Mexican border police in 1987, and in 1990, the Department of Defense spent $17 million on “training and equipment” in Mexico. “The equipment provided consisted of UH-1 helicopters and spare parts, ammunition, small arms, riot control equipment, radios and miscellaneous personal gear.”[11] Ongoing programs to fund US police training took place over the following years, but it was with the Mérida Initiative that US police training in Mexico took off.

  The New York Times reported in August 2011 that “the United States has trained nearly 4,500 new [Mexican] federal police agents and assisted in conducting wiretaps, running informants and interrogating suspects.”[12] Since the beginning of the Mérida Initiative, the US has trained “8,500 federal justice sector personnel; augmented the professionalization of police units by providing training to more than 22,000 federal and state police officers, 4,000 of which are federal investigators; improved the capacity and security of its federal prisons, supporting the expansion of secure federal facilities from five with a capacity of 3,500 to fourteen with a capacity of 20,000; provided civic education and ethics training to more than 700,000 Mexican students; and improved the detection of narcotics, arms, and money at the border, reaching nearly $3.8 billion in illicit goods seized.”[13] In addition to the United States and Canada, police from Israel, Colombia, France, Spain, El Salvador, Holland, and the Czech Republic are all actively training different branches of Mexican police.[14] Regardless of US training and vetting processes, generalized corruption among Mexican police forces has not diminished. “We do not want to overstate this finding: We see no evidence that police corruption is actually falling,” reads a 2011 report prepared by right-wing think tank RAND Corporation.[15] In one high-profile incident in 2012, US-trained Mexican federal police ambushed an armored SUV with diplomatic plates, injuring two Central Intelligence Agency agents.[16] To this day it is not known why the ambush took place or what exactly the CIA agents were doing at Tres Marias, near the city of Cuernavaca.

  Police training programs in Mexico are taking place at a time when an already large police force continues to expand and be rearranged.[17] In 2010, there were an estimated 409,536 police in
Mexico, according to Insyde, a non-profit organization involved in US-funded police training.[18] All federal police, of which there are more than 30,000, also receive in-country military training, and many of them are, in fact, soldiers in police uniforms.[19] The United States is operating an intelligence Fusion Center in Mexico, but the National Security Agency has refused to disclose further information.[20] A training center dubbed Special Operations Command-North, based at US Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado, plays host to at least 150 Mexican soldiers, police, and intelligence agents per year, who get training in counterterrorism and conducting raids. And if that were not enough, in early 2012, the US government extended its anti-gang training program to police departments in Mexico and Central America.[21]

  In May of 2012, Mexico opened the Mérida Initiative-funded General Ignacio Zaragoza National Police Training and Development Academy in Puebla state, southeast of Mexico City. The Mexican government estimates that 6,000 Mexican police will receive training there annually.[22] The new police academy is built of modular housing, snapped together on freshly bulldozed land that was once part of the lightly forested rolling hills of rural Puebla. It includes dorms for men and women, firing ranges, mess halls and entertainment areas, a command and control center, among other facilities. There, Mexican police can receive shooting lessons, tactical fitness and combat technique training, lessons in high-risk prisoner transportation, courses in police investigation and the protection of high-ranking dignitaries, and a class in “Human Rights and the Rational Use of Force.”[23] It must have slipped their minds that in life, the academy’s namesake, Ignacio Zaragoza, fought the United States after the annexation of Texas—certainly not the kind of behavior they’re promoting. A US-funded “tactical village” for police officer training was opened at the police academy in Puebla in late 2013.[24] American police are also training their Mexican counterparts at a similar center in the state of San Luis Potosí, and there are plans to open more US-funded and -staffed policing centers.