Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  The drug war in Colombia provided a model for Mexico, and security officials and police from both nations have worked increasingly closely since 2006. “Colombia and Mexico are more united than ever in the fight against transnational organized crime and are also ready to collaborate with third countries in the region to combat this scourge, particularly with our brother nations in Central America,” President Calderón said in 2011.[25] In 2012, Colombian police trained 12,000 Mexican police in specialized subjects ranging from anti-kidnapping to anti-drugs and civilian security.[26] French and Colombian police will train the 390 commanders of Mexico’s new gendarmerie.[27] Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, appointed Colombian police officer Oscar Naranjo as an advisor during his presidential campaign, and stated that Colombia provided him and the world with a successful model of how to achieve peace and security.[28] Naranjo returned to Colombia in early 2014 after the surge in self-defense groups in Michoacán.

  The deployment of over 50,000 soldiers, as well as thousands of federal police and over 2,200 state and local police officers, in the name of combating drug trafficking, has resulted in an increase in violence throughout Mexico. In some states, like Tamaulipas and Veracruz, local police have been completely replaced by soldiers, marines, and military police. According to a 2011 report by Human Rights Watch, Calderón’s militaristic security policy “resulted in a dramatic increase in grave human rights violations, virtually none of which appear to be adequately investigated.”[29] The report documented “39 ‘disappearances’ where evidence strongly suggests the participation of security forces,” and “credible evidence in 24 cases that security forces committed extrajudicial killings, and in most of these cases took steps to conceal their crimes.”[30] It also pointed out that Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission “received 691 complains of human rights abuses committed by soldiers against civilians from 2003–2006; the number increased to 4,803 complaints in the 2007–2010 period [precisely the same period as the Mérida Initiative]. And while the commission issued five recommendations concluding federal authorities had committed torture from 2003–2006, it issued twenty-five from 2007–2010.”[31] These numbers represent but a fraction of the total number of abuses; according to the same report, “National surveys have found that nearly 90 percent of crimes in Mexico go unreported.”[32]

  US support to the police and army has not prevented corruption or the collaboration of these organizations with organized crime. Relations between state forces and organized crime groups in this hemisphere go back to earlier days of the narcotics trade. For example, following the Cuban revolution in 1959, anti-Castro drug runners moved their operations to Miami. “On occasion, the capos were protected by the CIA, since they represented an important bulwark in the anti-Castro struggle.”[33] In Mexico, enough books have been written on the subject of government cooperation with cartels to fill a small library. One of the classics is Terrence Poppa’s Drug Lord, which shows how the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for seventy years straight, worked with drug runners. Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández’s book, Narcoland, takes on the task in another way, using detailed documentation to show how the National Action Party (PAN), which ruled Mexico for twelve years after the break with the PRI in 2000, came to agreements with the Sinaloa Cartel. Without getting embroiled in the details, it is easy to demonstrate how small the dichotomy between governments and traffickers really is. Professor William I. Robinson of the University of California–Santa Barbara puts it bluntly: “There’s no Mexican Army and police war against narcotrafico.” Rather, he says, what is taking place is a rearrangement of power among groups involved in the drug trade, which includes government officials and members of state forces.

  In thinking about the artificiality of this binary, one has to wonder in what other battle situation are as many high-level state, army, and police forces exposed as collaborators working for groups that supposedly belong to the “other side”? In the war on drugs, there is no shortage of examples. “The army is part of the Mexican state, and the police are part of the Mexican state, and PRI and PAN and the political parties are at least in some way articulated to the Mexican state, and a good portion of them are so deeply involved in it themselves that it’s really a war for who will control drug profits,” said Robinson in an interview in Mexico City in 2011. “We know the army and the police actually give protection to the cartels in return for payments, that’s so widespread.” Moves to flush out politicians or police involved in criminal activity are often stopgap strategies to clean up the government’s image. They can also be a way of taking privileges from one group, which are quickly redistributed to others.

  In Narcoland, Anabel Hernández fingers Genaro García Luna, the head of the Public Security Secretariat during Felipe Calderón’s term, as an active participant in drug trafficking, and it’s not unusual to read of high-level officials being caught participating in the drug trade. In 2012, the Mexican and US governments opened investigations of three governors of Tamaulipas for their alleged money laundering and links with the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas.[34] Or, take for example the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), a political police force responsible for repressing guerrilla movements throughout Mexico in the ’60s and ’70s: “Using their DFS credentials as shields, agents regularly escorted narcotics shipments, frequently even selling seized narcotics to favored organizations.… Later intelligence showed that the DFS embarked on an ambitious project to organize protection on a national scale, bringing as much of the nation as possible under a unified system.”[35] Heads of policing organizations and anti-narcotics groups are routinely suspected of collaborating with organized crime,[36] and anti-kidnapping units of the Mexican police have been outed for running kidnapping rings. In 1990, President Carlos Salinas fired the head of the navy and fifty marines for their links with narcotrafficking.

  It is widely known that rank-and-file police officers take state paychecks while working for criminal groups in cities and towns throughout Mexico’s northeast.[37] Meanwhile, deserters of the Mexican special forces (GAFEs) formed the most feared paramilitary group in Mexico, Los Zetas.[38] Though they were among the last units to receive such instruction, units of GAFEs also received group training in the United States between 1996 and 1998.[39] Members of the Kaibiles, Guatemala’s elite special forces, also US-trained, have turned up among Los Zetas, some while listed as active service members. [40] Many drug traffickers identified by the United States and Mexico are retired soldiers or police officers, some of whom have benefited from international training.

  The binary between state and criminal forces is further undermined by the US connection to the drug business. The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let 2,000 high-caliber weapons “walk” out of US gun shops in the hands of known cartel members and killers, supposedly to gain information in order to make arrests, but instead these same weapons turned up at crime scenes where over 150 civilians were injured or killed.[41] In Mexico and elsewhere, the DEA and the CIA facilitate the movement of narcotics among clandestine groups on the premise of eventually netting high-profile arrests. For example, in 2011, a son of one of the top-ranking members of the Sinaloa Cartel testified in US court that prior to 2004, the US government entered into an agreement with the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel. “Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel, through [Mexican attorney with Sinaloa Cartel links Humberto Loya Castro], was to provide information accumulated by Mayo, Chapo, and others against rival Mexican drug trafficking organizations to the United States government. In return, the United States government agreed to dismiss the prosecution of the pending case against Loya, to not interfere with his drug trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel, to not actively prosecute him, Chapo, Mayo, and the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, and to not apprehend them.[42]” Government deal-making with segments of drug traffickers illustrates how the drug war is also used to attack a segment of traffickers and the polit
ical class, while others are given a free hand in ensuring their product makes it to market.

  Ciudad Juárez is a devastating example of what can happen when thousands of police and soldiers are sent into an urban environment to fight the “drug war.” The backdrop to the violence in Juárez, as in other violent border cities, is the manufacturing industry. According to one report, “The municipalities with the highest inequalities among the [northern] border states of the center and east of the Mexican Republic are those with the most developed maquila sector, that receive the highest flows of migrants and also contain important reserves of hydrocarbons or other natural resources.”[43] In late March 2008, thousands of soldiers and federal police officers arrived in Juárez as part of a state surge against drug traffickers. Shortly after, the murder rate skyrocketed, violence increased, and kidnappings spiked. “What we’ve seen here in [Ciudad Juárez] is that the city was militarized on the last day of March of 2008, when federal forces arrived here, thousands of troops from the army and the federal police,” Carlos Yeffim Fong, an activist and student, told me in an interview in late 2011.[44] At the peak of the militarization of Juárez, between 2009 and 2010, at least 5,000 federal police and 5,000 soldiers were in the city (one source in Juarez puts the combined number at 13,000).[45]

  “Generally, before the soldiers came, there was an average of two murders a day, and when the soldiers arrived, that number began to rise, to five, and later to ten,” recounted Fong, running a hand over his beard when he paused to reflect. “We’ve seen various cases where the army and federal police killed minors, as well as police and soldiers directly involved in robbery.”

  Over time I would run into Fong again and again, interviewing him a second time in a house being squatted by local anti-poverty activists near the city’s downtown. Hyperaware of his surroundings, he moves carefully, watching the oncoming traffic and ensuring someone knows where he is at all times. These security measures are a minimum precaution when one is as publicly outspoken as he in a place like Ciudad Juárez. Locals also link Federales to kidnapping, which provides relatively low-risk access to cash through extortion. “When the wave of kidnappings grew, it was because of the arrival of the federal police,” said Leobardo Alvarado, who runs the alternative news outlet JuárezDialoga. Just two months before our interview in Juárez, ten Federales deployed there were imprisoned for extorting and kidnapping civilians.[46] In early 2014, eighteen soldiers were charged and imprisoned for their role in a 2008 torture and murder during the Operacion Conjunto Chihuahua, in a rare case of investigation and persecution of soldiers for their crimes.[47]

  In the ten years before the region was militarized, the state averaged 586 homicides a year, and never went above 648. Between 2008 and 2013, Chihuahua became one of the most violent states in Mexico. There were 2,601 homicides in the state in 2008; 3,671 in 2009; 6,407 in 2010; and 4,500 in 2011, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).[48] More than 10,000 people were murdered in Juárez following the troop surge between 2008 and early 2012. Officials often assert that the dead were involved in the drug trade, but murders are rarely investigated. “Yes, there have been standoffs of hitmen versus hitmen, as they say, or hitmen against soldiers who stopped them and detained them and they opened fire, but there’s very few events like that. Most of the killings are between people.… Well, the people who died were unarmed,” said Dr. Hector Padilla, a professor at the UACJ, with a dry chuckle. When I met Padilla, a father of two who splits his life between Juárez and El Paso, he was hard at work on a research project to qualitatively and quantitatively understand the violence in the city. “The majority [of the victims] are people who were in transit, or who were working, or in their homes and someone arrives and pluck,” he said, making a gun with his fingers and pulling the trigger.

  It’s extremely difficult to understand the events in Juárez since the beginning of the drug war. One evening in 2011, while we drove through the deserted streets of the city, Alvarado offered his version. He described extreme violence in Juárez taking place in waves, which are discernible from media coverage of the killings. In 2007 and early 2008, a wave of assassinations targeted lawyers, owners of currency exchanges, and other middle-class residents. In January 2008, a wave of killings against police officers—particularly those in middle management with historical links to the drug trade—took place. “Then, in May 2008, what for me is the biggest episode of social cleansing started. They started killing many people from the lower classes. These folks were characterized as being inside the system of gangs, they lived in peripheral neighborhoods and in areas that have been conflictive historically in the city. It was incredible how they killed people then, in a massive and systematic manner. When we look at the statistics, we can see with clarity that at first the victims were over twenty-five years old, then, as time passed, the killings were against young men, in particular those who were under twenty-five, sometimes even younger than fifteen years old.” Alvarado, who has lived in Juárez since his teens, explained that gang membership grew in the city toward the end of the 1990s, and clarified that not all gangs are involved in the local drug market, though part of the gang system is dedicated to small-time trafficking. He says another wave of killings targeted kidnappers and extortionists who were working outside of organized crime groups—non-unionized criminals, he calls them—people who take advantage of the overall climate of insecurity and try their hand at kidnapping or extortion. “Because they were not inside the structures of organized crime as it’s called, these people were easy targets for this social cleansing, which served to nourish the discourse that something was being done.” Alvarado’s explanation, based on careful study of newspapers and dozens of formal and informal sources in the city, is but one approximation of what has taken place in Juárez over the past years. But it is an explanation that captures the crux of what took place in the beleaguered border city after it became ground zero for the drug war in 2008: the extrajudicial elimination of particular criminal, police, and popular sectors tragically expanded, transforming into massive social cleansing against poor young people in marginalized communities. The perpetrators were often police and soldiers, the killings serving as proof that, as Alvarado said, something was being done to combat crime.

  Over the same time period, the level of police involvement in the drug trade in Juárez is believed to have deepened. “There’s always been a really close line, or, well, they’re the same,” said journalist Julián Cardona, who has lived in Juárez for over thirty years. “The police and the entire state apparatus, all of the institutions of the state, have always been the guarantors of the drug trade.” As drug markets inside Mexico grew following an increasingly closed US border after 9/11, according to Cardona, police began to sell drugs themselves, to execute people, and even to move bodies in patrol cars, all of which meant they earned more money. Instead of wiping out these occurrences, the militarization of the city seems to have exacerbated them. “What happens is that when the Federales arrive in Juárez, and the army, they basically displace local state or municipal police from their markets,” Cardona told me in 2011. Tall and thin as a rail, Cardona has worked as a fixer for some of the most high-profile journalists visiting Juárez. When we met in the Starbucks on the Panamerican highway (which he, half jokingly, calls his office) it was just to talk, but he later insisted on taking me to see the city’s highlights, including a nearly empty “narco bar” where he reminisced about what it was like in the city when there was ample money being spent. Another day, he took me to a historic downtown district once home to table dancing clubs, now half torn down. He was obviously nostalgic for old times, but deeply affected by the violence in the city. The last time I met with Cardona, in late 2013, he joked that now that police and soldiers had left the city, violence had dropped off and there was no longer much work for him there.

  None of the reports of police and army involvement in criminal activity are particularly surprising, but what is astou
nding is that the majority of media reports and so-called expert commentary on the violence in Juárez and elsewhere didn’t link the increased number of police and soldiers and the spike in violence. Take the work of Steven Dudley—who works for US-funded think tank InSight Crime, and moonlights for the Woodrow Wilson Center—for example: In early 2013, he wrote, “Last year was the least violent 12-month stretch since 2007, with the state government registering 740 murders. Homicide levels are a fifth of what they were at the beginning of 2011. Naturally, some analysts and authorities have focused on the criminal groups to explain why homicides have dropped so quickly.”[49] This report ignores the link between the surge of police and army and the spike in killings in Juárez, and that when police and soldiers were withdrawn from Juárez and sent to other parts of the country, violence in Juárez dropped.

  What Dudley missed is deadly obvious to Juárez residents. I’ll always remember how, when I asked Cardona who I should interview about the role of police in the murders and the violence in the city, without giving it a moment’s thought, he told me to ask anyone, anyone I met on the street. Over repeated visits to Juárez I took his advice, and he was bang on. His suggestion is confirmed by the statistics: a 2010 study carried out by UACJ found an average of one in four residents of Juárez were direct victims of police violence.[50] Your blinders must be security fastened in order to miss the connection between the mass deployment of police and soldiers in order to fight against internal enemies and systematic murders among poor and marginalized populations.