Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  Later, Solorio and Solís helped form the Barzón movement (a barzón is the yoke-ring on a plough), whose members captured the attention of the nation when they entered the country’s national Congress on horseback after riding fifty-four days from the US-Mexico border crossing in Ciudad Juárez to Mexico City. The bold tactics of the Barzonistas brought back memories of Mexican revolutionaries at the turn of the twentieth century. They successfully forced the first change in the rural budget anyone can remember, and later secured electricity subsidies for rural farmers whose livelihoods were under threat following the unequal terms of the North America Free Trade Agreement. In the last years of his life, Ismael Solorio, who was known to his friends as “Chops,” continued to grow chili peppers and raise cattle, while devoting his spare time to water and mining issues in the region. A far cry from a full-time activist, Solorio devoted most of his time to working on the land, speaking out when he felt outside forces threatened the future of his community. First was a host of off-the-books deep wells drilled by Mennonite farmers, which sapped the Carmen River of the flow that had long provided water for farming in Benito Juárez and other desert communities. Then there was MAG Silver, which was carrying out a controversial drilling program at its “Cinco de Mayo” project to explore for silver, gold, copper, molybdenum, and tungsten in lands locals claim are communal.

  Ismael and his wife Manuela, a primary school teacher and ardent supporter of her husband’s activism, had faced off against many powerful forces: banks, governments, and wealthy well drillers, but something was different this time. Tensions rose quickly; the conflict heated up, and in a matter of months Manuela and Ismael were dead. In the months before he was killed, Solorio denounced death threats he received and aggression by people he said were paid by the mining company, and demanded the government provide protection. His requests were ignored.

  “Since 1985 we have been involved in different actions and mobilizations as part of social resistance,” said Solís, who spoke to me at El Barzón’s Chihuahua City headquarters. “We always confronted the government, and we had never confronted organized crime.” The decision to kill Manuela and Ismael didn’t come from the head of a drug cartel, Solís emphasized. Far from drug lords, the killer and his accomplices were local men who had been involved in carrying out the dirty work for a crime group known as the Juárez Cartel: “Hit men, armed men, people who previously had threatened Ismael related to the actions he was taking against the mining company,” Solís told me, confidently and steadily.

  Dozens of statements collected by police in the months following the murders make it plain that MAG Silver’s exploration program was a source of conflict in Benito Juárez. Testimonies included in the state investigation of the murders, which I reviewed, include references to men claiming to be plainclothes federal police without badges or a legitimate arrest warrant threatening Ismael, and fights between mine exploration workers and those who didn’t support the mining project. A geologist working for the company was also questioned. The man believed to be Solorio’s assassin was murdered by police on January 19, 2013, but Solorio’s friends and family refuse to stop their quest for accountability. “We have maintained that justice must be done and the other material authors must be detained, but so must the intellectual authors of this crime,” said Solís.

  Today, instead of working in the fields or sitting around a table talking with friends and family, Manuela and Ismael are gone. Their bodies are buried under the desert earth they once farmed. Their names, along with dozens of others, grace a rebel monument erected to remember victims of violence in Chihuahua state, among them other activists, Indigenous community members and young women.

  Instead of calling for a proper investigation and denouncing the murder of the highest-profile community opponent of its “Cinco de Mayo” exploration project in Chihuahua, Dan MacInnis, president and CEO of MAG Silver, chalked the killings up to the government’s fight against organized crime. “It was kind of an odd situation considering that 60,000 to 100,000 people have been killed in Mexico in the last six years by organized crime in the so-called drug war,” MacInnis told Canadian online magazine ipolitics.ca. “And rather than the obvious being reported, it was everything but that was being reported.”[32] When I asked him to clarify, MacInnis responded: “It is currently a very sad reality in Mexico that between 60,000 and 100,000 deaths have occurred over the past six years due to the country’s ongoing struggles with organized criminal activity. We remain puzzled why certain groups made assumptions about the involvement of mining companies, utility companies, or farmers.”[33] Essentially, the company’s position is that it is normal for civilians to be killed in the country where they are operating. When 100,000 people may or may not have been killed over six years, one or two more deaths by firearm are a drop in the bucket. This position would have been far more difficult to maintain before the drug war was launched in December 2006.

  The police investigation into the murders also said that it was a community dispute that triggered acts of violence ending in Ismael and Manuela’s murders, but it also makes clear that the prospect of well-paying jobs MAG Silver would bring to Benito Juárez was at the heart of the dispute. “That’s what is so painful for us, you know, the fact that members of the community handed over Ismael and Manuelita. That’s something we know, that here in Benito Juárez the deal was made and everything so that they would be killed,” said Siria Leticia Solís, a long-time resident of the community and a member of the Barzón, in an interview. “We blocked the company, and because of that people are being killed.”

  Since the killings, mining exploration work in the community has stopped, but tensions haven’t fallen off. “[MAG Silver] never showed up to a general meeting of ejido members. The paperwork that they did with the corresponding authorities were fictitious because they never went before the assembly, which is the maximum authority here,” said Fausto Albión Jiménez Holguín, president of the ejido of Benito Juárez. Following the murders, an assembly was held with more than half the members present, and the ejido of Benito Juárez voted in November of 2012 to ban mining activity on its lands for the next hundred years. The company acknowledges its exploration program in Benito Juárez is currently inactive, claiming it is “working through delays in the exploration permits for its Cinco de Mayo project.” The murders of Ismael Solorio and Manuela Solís took place at the crossroads of environmental activism and organized crime, in a region where all armed groups act with almost total impunity. Ismael and Manuela’s three orphaned sons and their extended family will live with the loss for the rest of their lives. Their community, Benito Juárez, is deeply divided over the prospect of future mining activity in the territory. Despite the hundred-year ban, MAG Silver plans to pick up again as soon as possible. More violence seems like a likely outcome should the company attempt to have workers restart exploration.

  As word of October’s double murder made its way through anti-mining networks around Mexico, Manuela and Ismael’s names were added to a growing list of activists killed. The list already included Mariano Abarca, who was killed in Chiapas by hitmen connected to Blackfire, a Calgary-owned mining company, in November 2010, and Bernardo Vásquez, murdered March 15, 2012, because of his activism against Vancouver-based Fortuna Silver in Oaxaca state.

  Today the existence of the local mining project is something that residents of San José del Progreso, Oaxaca, couldn’t ignore if they tried. The main access road into the town passes directly in front of Fortuna’s operations, complete with its own power station, offices, and a huge stockpile of ore, all surrounded by high chain link fence. Vásquez was murdered gangland style, in a spray of bullets aimed at his vehicle. His cousin Rosalinda and his brother Leovigildo were both wounded in the gunfire. When the company first came around, locals saw the mayor meeting with people who were not from the community. “There were various meetings between the ejidal commission and the mayor, and the people asked, ‘Who were those people?’ until the ejidal
commission finally realized it was a mining company that wanted to exploit the minerals.” This is what Bernardo Vásquez told me approximately one month before he was murdered. “[The company] went after the folks in the ejidal commission individually,” ignoring the assembly process, he explained. Before he was killed, threats against him were spray painted on the wall of a dam, and signed “Los Zetas.”

  Paramilitary violence is taking place in resource-rich areas across the country. Violence has also been wrought against members of the ejidal commission in Carrizalillo, Guerrero, whose president was murdered in May 2013.[34] His murder came after years of protests by the ejido, including blockades against a local subsidiary of Vancouver’s Goldcorp Inc. A couple of months later, two workers at the same mine in Guerrero were murdered when their vehicle was sprayed with more than a hundred rounds from AK-47s.[35] Other incidents in Guerrero include the July 2013 displacement of 300 people—most of them children—from seven villages of San Miguel Totolapan and Coyuca de Catalán after they’d received threats from organized crime groups.[36] Approximately 2,000 people have been displaced from the region.[37] “It is said that there are mining concessions, but most of the territory consists of ejidos. The state leaves the dirty work of depopulating the area to organized crime, and when the mining companies arrive, there will be no one to oppose them,” Manuel Olivares from the Guerrero Network of Civil Organizations for Human Rights (RGOCDH) told Desinformémonos.[38]

  In February 2014, I traveled to Tlapa de Comonfort with Miguel Ángel Mijangos Leal, an activist with Holistic Processes for Community Management (PIAP) in Guerrero state. Mijangos draws a clear line between the arrival of large mining companies and the exercise of territorial control by organized crime groups. “There is a new logic that organized crime groups are imposing, they are establishing themselves but in such a distorted way that they are not controlling territory for the purposes of arms or narcotics trafficking, rather for the purposes of extortion,” he said. He explained how two crime groups, one protected by the army and the other by the marines, control the territory between Iguala and Chilpancingo, which is traversed by the Balsas River. “These areas are extremely well cared for; there are marines from the river to Iguala, and soldiers from the river to Chilpancingo,” he told me. A crime group linked to the Beltran Leyva Cartel or a splinter group known locally as Los Rojos extorts community members in these areas. “If you are in the middle and you are part of a process of extortion by, for example, Los Rojos, but you have to take your child to the hospital on the other side [of the river], you are unprotected.… [Forms of territorial control] including kidnapping, disappearances, and killings are carried out simply because you are considered to be supporting the other group, even though your support for them is more of an exercise of fear because it is based on ‘either you pay me, or I kill you or I fuck you over.’”

  For Mijangos, it is no coincidence that Goldcorp operates its Los Filos-Bermejal mine near the Balsas River, in the middle of this contested region. Mijangos is active in the Mexican Network Against Mining (REMA), and part of his work is helping community and ejido members trying to prevent the entry of mining companies. But the paramilitarization of the region, with the presence of organized crime groups, has prevented activists from being able to reach out to local communities. He gave me an example of this: “In an area called El Limón [not far from Goldcorp’s Los Filos-Bermejal project], we were trying to do an informative process in order to prevent the entry of the mine. Well by the time we went for our first visit there were already four people murdered [by crime groups]. There simply were not conditions for us to carry out an assembly. That was in 2010, and the company has since entered,” he said.

  “What company?” I asked. “Goldcorp, through a local subsidiary.”

  Controlling local protest against mining is but one form of cartel/paramilitary involvement in mining. There are also examples of criminal groups extracting minerals and commercializing them themselves, specifically in Michoacán and Coahuila. According to Humberto Moreira, the former governor of Coahuila and head of the national PRI party, Zetas steal coal from mines in the northern state and sell it to third parties, who then resell it to the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE).[39]

  The Knights Templar in Michoacan have been involved in events that appear quite similar to those linking the Zetas to US companies accused of buying stolen condensate. In Michoacán, the Knights Templar steal iron ore and export it via third parties to China. Britain’s Channel 4 interviewed a man who they said worked in one of the iron ore mines operated by the cartel. “The companies that actually export the mineral are Chinese, they know that the mineral is illegal but, well, they have found their little gold mine here, as the saying goes, and the companies that you call illegal are the ones that export … they sell [the mineral] to companies that are legal in order to be able to export the mineral. It’s worth US$13 million per boatload.… We’re talking about more or less thirty boats a year, so you can imagine the quantity of money that brings in,”[40] said the miner, who was not identified. He estimated that between 50 and 75 percent of the iron ore shipped out of the port of Lázaro Cardenas, Michoacán, was taken from mines operated by Knights Templar affiliates. The journalist then asked the mine worker if mineral sales would bring in more money than drugs, and he responded “of course.”

  In 2013, leaders of a self-defense group in San Miguel de Aquila, Michoacán, told Mexico City–based alternative news website SubVersiones: “They are exploiting our natural resources, primarily iron. The day that the state government arrived, we told them the community’s mine was being exploited by organized crime. The government, instead of going after them, actually protected them and even more people came to work at the mine. We no longer believe in the state government, that’s why we want the federal government to intervene and give guarantees for our families, for the natural resources in our community.… We have so many natural resources in San Miguel de Aquila; we are very rich in resources but at the same time we are among the poorest, because transnationals are those who take advantage of the resources of the community.”[41]

  In 2014, the group wrote another communiqué, which stated: “The period of July 24 to August 13, 2013—when the indigenous community guard from the community of San Miguel Aquila was active in the area—was one of immense calm. The rapes, kidnappings and payments of protection fees disappeared as the criminals fled. Seeing the results of the community movement, we were inspired to support the community’s cause. However, on August 14, a joint state and municipal government operation, together with the Marines, entered Aquila and dismantled the community movement. They took forty-five prisoners. The Special Operations Group (GOES) and State Judicial Police killed two and also beat women, children, and the elderly who called for them to return the men who were defending them from organized crime. When the community guard was dismantled, the Knights Templar, under the auspices of the state and municipal governments, decided to ‘exterminate’ all the residents of San Miguel Aquila.”[42] Following the state incursion, three men from the community were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered; another three were disappeared; and the Knights Templar again began to exert control over iron ore extraction, extorting the community for the royalty payments they received from the company Ternium, a Luxembourg-based transnational steel company.

  Displacement and Real Estate

  According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, “Evidence of forced displacement in the localities of El Porvenir and Práxedis G. Guerrero in Valle de Juárez is unquestionable: virtually all houses are empty, burned out, and vandalized.”[43] But exact figures are difficult to come by: “In the small towns of Guadalupe, Praxedis G. Guerrero, Porvenir, Esperanza and the even smaller hamlets that dot the valley, there’s been no official census in recent years, so no one knows exactly how many people have left, or how many residents have been killed or forcibly disappeared,” wrote journalist Melissa del Bosque.[44] She was sure to point out that the violence
and displacement did not fall neatly at the feet of drug cartels. “The official story is that the army was sent in to protect residents and drive out the cartels, but townspeople tell a different story. They say the soldiers, working in league with the Sinaloa cartel, perpetrated much of the violence.”

  Just as paramilitary displacements in Colombia depopulated lands which were later used for palm oil and extractive projects, the displacement of thousands of residents in the Juárez Valley has not transformed the region into a land of ghost towns, cemeteries, and cartel free-for-alls. On the contrary, the Juárez Valley area is currently slated for redevelopment, and plans include the construction of a $400 million housing and industrial park project in San Agustín, which is about thirty kilometers from downtown Ciudad Juárez. The housing project, which will cover 2,470 acres of ejidal land in San Agustín, is being developed by Fortune 500 corporation Prudential Financial, together with one of its local partners in Mexico.[45] “It is a complete, ambitious project, almost like a new city,” Leopoldo Canizales, a city official in San Agustín, told El Diario.[46] The housing project will be built just over ten kilometers from a new border bridge between Tornillo, Texas, and Guadalupe, also in the Juárez Valley.[47] The San Agustín development is being erected in anticipation of a boom in the maquila industries, as massive expansions in Mexico’s manufacturing sector will be necessary should analysts’ predictions about the sector come true. “[Mexico] has the enormous advantage of bordering the U.S., which means that goods can reach much of the country in a day or two, as opposed to at least 21 days by ship from China.… In addition, by 2015, wages in Mexico will be significantly lower than in China.”[48] More maquilas are certainly not something all of those who reside in the area are keen on: “It is exactly because of the maquila industry that things are how they are; what the maquilas have left is nothing but criminality; they obliged parents to leave their children home alone,” said San Agustín resident Ignacio Ibarra.[49] “Right now things are calm here but if they bring maquilas and all the new housing, well, then we’ll see what the good life was.”