Drug War Capitalism
Page 19
The notion of drug cartels presented in the media is very simplistic, and could be said to hide more than it obscures. Julián Cardona, the journalist who explained to me how in Juárez the police carried out the functions of a drug cartel, had the following to say to journalist Ed Vulliamy. “It simply doesn’t make sense, as the media and government think, to draw lines between cartels in Juárez. Along the smuggling corridors into the U.S., maybe, but not on the streets. The cartels cannot even see those lines themselves anymore. Of course the drug cartels exist, they are players, but they are no longer the main reason for the violence here. You have a product and a production line. There are bosses, managers, middle management, line workers, accountants, bankers, shippers—they are all part of the process but they never meet each other and most of them are not directly employed by the corporation. We’ll have counted seventeen hundred dead in this city by the end of the year [he predicted, rightly, in September 2008] and in most cases, the executioners don’t even know which cartel, if any, they’re working for. If they change sides, from someone far from here who is in the Juárez cartel to someone far from here in the Sinaloa cartel, they won’t know it. All they have is their assigned task, their piece of turf, and maybe an order to do this, do that, or kill someone. Not why or who for. They have no idea about the big money, or who their bosses are.”[4]
There are, of course, differing views on this matter and there are people who don’t believe drug cartels are functioning as paramilitary groups, carrying out the bidding of corporate or other sectors. In an interview, National Autonomous University researcher Gian Carlo Delgado hesitated at the idea of classifying cartels as paramilitary groups. “Paramilitaries have always existed, they’ve always been here, since there have been armed resistance movements or armed movements, there have been paramilitaries.… For my part, it is difficult to link or to say that organized crime is paramilitarism; if we included the armed elements of organized crime under the category of paramilitaries generally, I still have a hard time making a clear link to the state.”
Violence and Small Business
The violence in Mexico has decimated local economies, especially in the north. According to a priest I interviewed in Tamaulipas—who preferred to remain nameless for fear of being targeted—extortions and insecurity have undermined the entrepreneurial spirit of the people in northern Mexico. “The economic situation has destroyed the border [area], especially taking into account the situation of insecurity that people are living through in the city, which has meant there are less jobs, and the people are fearful and are not able to be entrepreneurs, which is characteristic of people from the north.”
“The businesses that are most affected by the violence are the smallest and those that are located in the states of northern Mexico.… The lack of security hurts small and medium producers, businesses and vendors to a larger degree, due to the fact that organized crime has ‘a higher ease of penetration with them than with the directors of large companies, which, in many cases, operate from outside the country.’”[5] According to COPARMEX, a Mexican business association, 160,000 businesses closed because of security concerns in 2011. “There is a reconversion of the economy taking place at the national level that is favoring [large companies], and it is making more [Mexicans] into employees instead of entrepreneurs,” said Dr. Correa-Cabrera during a presentation in Baja California Sur in February of 2012.
Correa-Cabrera’s observations were made plain on my first visits to Reynosa and Ciudad Juárez, both in 2011. Unlike other cities I’d visited in Mexico, here I was surprised to find large, popular areas in these cities without the food stands or little corner shops that are usually ubiquitous. Between 2009 and 2011 in Ciudad Juárez, “almost 6,000 small grocery stores were closed down, out of 7,000 such stores that were formally registered. The reason: an increase in robberies, extortions, and kidnappings.”[6]
The disappearance of local businesses meant that when I visited Juárez the only place with an open patio was Starbucks. The patio looked on to the parking lot of a Walmart, built over top of one of the city’s historic bullfighting rings. Activists held their press conferences at Sanborns, a cookie-cutter restaurant chain owned by the country’s richest man, because it was one of the few safe places open later into the evening. Those who can afford it use their cars more, shop in big department stores, and eat at restaurants, which are generally considered safer areas further outside the reach of organized crime. It is more difficult for criminal groups to operate with total impunity and threaten and extort owners and workers at transnational food and beverage chains than it is for them to do the same to a local business whose owner has lived his or her entire life in the area.
The experience of Carlos Gutierrez is one of the most public examples of how extortion can ruin someone’s life. And it’s public for two reasons: first, because he survived a bloody attack against him, and second, because he was able to leave Mexico and gain temporary legal status in the United States. These factors are what enabled him to speak out about what happened. Gutierrez ran a successful concession stand in Chihuahua City until extortionists began to demand monthly payments of up to US$10,000 a month. After about a year, Gutierrez could no longer make the payments, and one night, while he was hanging out in a park with friends, four armed men attacked him and cut off both his feet, with either a machete or an axe.[7] Those responsible for the extortions and attack were never publicly identified or captured, and Gutierrez has tried to start a new life with his family in Texas.
Correa-Cabrera notes that attributing the violence in Mexico only to narcotics trafficking is no longer a useful way to understand the conflict. “The new organized crime corporation in Mexico has a transnational character and includes various divisions or key areas, which include: drug trafficking (buying and selling); money laundering (which would be part of the financial division); human trafficking; paid assassins (which operate as a kind of marketing area, with the task of generating terror and sending messages to various actors so as to negotiate with or to threaten them); a more recently created division, which is dedicated to extortion, kidnapping, and charging rents (which represents a diversification of the traditional activities of so called drug cartels); among others.”[8]
When drug trafficking patterns eventually shift away from Mexico, which history indicates that they are bound to do, those who can afford to pay members of paramilitary groups will be people connected to the state and the so-called legal economy. But the extortions carried out by these groups with impunity will likely continue, meaning that ironically it will be the poor, working, and middle-class Mexicans who are forced to pay for the ongoing survival of these paramilitary groups, chief among them Los Zetas.
Tamaulipas state is a crucial node in understanding the drug war in Mexico. There the lines between the PRI and criminal organizations are blurred to the point that there is no longer any way to differentiate between them. “[Cartels] have all the control, they monopolize the legitimate use of violence, and they are performing activities that are of the state,” said U of T professor Correa Cabrera when we spoke in 2011. According to a 2010 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, “It’s hard to be sure when the Gulf cartel gained the power over the city [Reynosa] that it has now; it didn’t happen in a single blow, reporters said. Most traced the change to three or four years ago. Before then, the cartel ran a kind of parallel government from which it strongly influenced institutions such as the police and the city government.… Journalists say the cartel is fully embedded in the government and gets nearly whatever it wants.”[9] The Gulf Cartel got its start running liquor across the border during alcohol prohibition in the United States in the 1920s. In the 80s, its main business was marijuana trafficking, by the 1990s, official estimates held that the Gulf Cartel was responsible for 30 percent of the cocaine moving through Mexico.[10] Through that time, some of the highest-ranked members of the Gulf Cartel were former police officers, and traffickers had links to the highest echelon
s of PRI officialdom.
In 2010, Reynosa was home to the clashes that gave birth to a new armed group, Los Zetas. The emergence of Los Zetas has proven to be a transformative element in the reconfiguration of Mexico’s military and paramilitary forces under the rubric of the war on drugs. The official story has it that the very first Zetas were men recruited from the GAFEs, an elite airborne unit of the Mexican Army originally created to provide security at the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. French Special Forces from the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group trained the first GAFEs, and after the Zapatista uprising in 1994, they went on to carry out counterinsurgent activities against the EZLN, the Zapatista army. According to a US State Department cable released by Wikileaks, GAFE-turned-Zeta Rogelio López Villafana was trained in the United States, possibly at Fort Bragg.[11]
Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who took over the Gulf Cartel in 1999, was able to broker the participation of Mexican Special Forces in the narcotics-funded protection market. In 2003, the Mexican Army arrested Cardenas Guillen, accusing him of threatening to kill an undercover US sheriff, and threatening FBI and DEA agents in broad daylight.[12] He was jailed at La Palma, near Toluca in Mexico state, and in 2007 he was extradited to the United States.[13] That same year the relationship between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas began to sour, as Cardenas Guillen was jailed and could no longer negotiate between them, creating the initial split between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas that would eventually tear wide open.
By the time Cardenas Guillen was put in jail, the Zetas had appropriated protection rackets long held by municipal police in Nuevo Laredo.[14] It is said that, around that time, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel agreed that the Gulf Cartel would continue to control trafficking routes through Tabasco, Veracruz, and Tamaulipas (along Gulf Coast), and the Zetas would control Nuevo Laredo (the busiest commercial land crossing on the US-Mexico border), as well as exercising influence in other parts of Tamaulipas, including Ciudad Victoria and San Fernando. Their pact was totally broken in January of 2010, with the assassination of El Concord, a representative of Los Zetas in Reynosa.[15] After the break, other Mexican crime groups, including La Familia Michoacana and the Sinaloa Cartel, under the name “La Nueva Federacion” declared that they would unite in a war against the Zetas.
Part of the reason the Zetas are perceived and presented as being so powerful is because their members often have military training superior to those in other cartels, which are portrayed as recruiting inexperienced eighteen-year-olds—although ex-police and ex-soldiers play an important role in the paramilitarized element of every drug cartel. The Zetas did not emerge as a traditional drug trafficking organization, and thus do not exercise the same kind of territorial control as the other groups. This is because, since their inception, the Zetas have been involved in extortion and other ways of making money—including trafficking in migrants.
Following Correa Cabrera’s conception of cartels as corporations, the Zetas are sometimes described as a kind of franchise operation, where local criminals can access weapons and branding in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. Affiliating with the Zetas brand gives criminals the potential to extort greater sums of money from kidnapping and other forms of extortion, including charging derecho de piso, and trafficking in migrants. Greater amounts of money can be extorted based on the reputation of the group one associates with, and, in the case of the Zetas, that reputation has been established through mass graves and terrible murders.
People who associate themselves with the Zetas have taken over the edges of the economy, including the so called “illegal economy” of human trafficking (of women and migrants), as well as forms of informal commerce like pirated DVDs. Colonizing these informal segments of the economy has created a new pattern of territorial expansion for the Zetas, one that is different from what other organized criminal groups have traditionally done (control a series of plazas and physical transshipment routes). With these methods, the Zetas have extended their zone of influence along, within, inside, and around territories previously of little interest to drug traffickers, areas that have little to no strategic value in terms of moving product. The Zetas also exercise their own form of control in regions monopolized by other criminal organizations (for whom movement of product has traditionally been the key focus of activities, requiring contiguous territorial access). In San Fernando, Tamaulipas, for example, it is known that local police actually assisted in training Zetas.[16] In Monterrey, state police looked on as Zetas hung banners from the State Congress.[17] Police cooperation locally, and active impunity granted by higher levels of government and reinforced by world powers willing to turn a blind eye, give the Zetas, and other paramilitary groups, a free hand to enforce and fulfill the desires of their higher-ups.
The Zetas are not simply some kind of warped end-product of transnational capitalism, nor are they an organization beyond comprehension or logic. Instead, there has been an active transnational-state-media role in their formation. As mentioned earlier, Los Zetas were allowed to flourish and consolidate when the United States supported Mexico’s decision to make Juárez a focus of the fight against cartels, instead of interrupting Los Zetas in Nuevo Laredo. The killing off of many of the Zetas’ original members has resulted in an increasingly fractured and dispersed group of trained killers, each of whom could easily recruit and train others to carry out the orders of those who can pay them, in order to do what was required to make a profit once the group is out on its own. One of the innovations of Los Zetas, which could come from the model of Central American gangs, is that they create and maintain zones of total silence: journalists do not publish stories about them, and on every street corner someone on the Zeta’s payroll keeps an eye on the neighborhood. The intense surveillance of urban areas by Los Zetas and their workers, combined with the terror generated through their actions, is enough to smother not only dissent but also mobility and communication about life under occupation.
The structure and style of Zeta control has been copied and applied outside of their original area of influence. Groups who rebelled against Zeta leadership in the state of Michoacán would later take on many characteristics of Los Zetas as they formed La Familia Michoacana, which later splintered to form Los Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar). Events in Michoacán have proven that the model of Los Zetas is one that can be copied and applied elsewhere, so long as authorities guarantee impunity.
“The Zetas are a paramilitary force,” said William Robinson, the professor and author whom I interviewed in Mexico City in 2011. “Basically it’s the creation of paramilitarism alongside formal militarization, which is a Colombian model.”[18] One barometer of paramilitary activity is the level of displacement experienced in areas where these kinds of groups are active. Those most strongly impacted by paramilitarization in Colombia are primarily poor people in urban and rural areas, and the same generally holds true for Mexico. According to the Mexican Human Rights Commission (CNDH), 120,000 people were displaced in Mexico between 2006 and 2014, especially from the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sinaloa, and Baja California. “In Sinaloa alone 30,000 people have fled their homes, and in Guerrero, according to the CNDH, over 7,000 people have changed their places of residence due to the fear created by criminals in diverse areas of the region.”[19]
Paramilitarized Migration
Where paramilitary groups and cartels go, a strikingly similar brand of terror follows. In Colombia an important variable in counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts is the presence of guerrilla groups, but in Mexico it is the presence of migrants that is probably the largest variable. The men and women moving through the country are not necessarily organized or ideologically driven; the presence of migrants from Central America, and also from South America and elsewhere, is a significant occurrence in certain parts of the country. Controlling the flow of migration through Mexico is a key concern for Washington, and paramilitarized cartels are playing an increasingly import
ant role in doing it. The mass kidnapping of migrants took off over the same time period as Calderón’s war on drugs spread around the country. During a six-month period between late 2008 and early 2009, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission documented 198 cases of mass kidnappings, in which 9,758 migrants were kidnapped. A later study by the organization found that between April and September of 2010 there were 214 documented mass kidnappings, resulting in 11,333 victims.[20] The ransoms associated with these kidnappings provide a new revenue stream for organized crime groups, and the kidnappings lessen the flow of migrants, effectively extending border control to the Mexico-Guatemala border, something the US government has thus far not objected to.