Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  Some of today’s narcocorridos certainly celebrate the exploits of drugs traffickers, but most offer a more nuanced interpretation of the smuggling life, one more inclined towards the tragic than the epic. ‘Los Tres de la Sierra’ by Los Norteños de Ojinaga, for example, includes the lines: ‘You damned Americans don’t know what we go through / To get you the drugs you like so much.’ Drug dealers can be simultaneously proud and ashamed of their actions, a sentiment apparent in much of the music about the drugs trade on both sides of the border. In border cities like El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, where drug smuggling is pervasive, most traffickers do not regard themselves as criminals, anti-heroes or victims of poverty, but as regular citizens trying to make a living. The services they provide may be welcomed and reviled in equal parts, but this contradiction, as familiar to the migrant as it is to the smuggler, is one that many residents see as just part of the rough-hewn fabric of border town life. Many have attitudes akin to those of the illegal poachers in Africa described by James Siegel. ‘If a poor schmuck who is a subsistence hunter has bad luck outside a park area and then crosses into the national park hoping for better luck, he knows that he is breaking some central government law, but he doesn’t see himself as a poacher per se. The common person sees the game warden as some stupid policeman for the state, not looking out for the community’s interest at all. It becomes a game of cat and mouse, a silly and destructive contest.’11

  Although there are nearly a dozen drug-trafficking organizations in Mexico, four are especially powerful. The biggest cartel is el Sindicato, the Sinaloa cartel, which is run by Joaquín ‘el Chapo’ Guzmán. The Sinaloa cartel operates cells in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and its leaders have also established a presence in Colombia and Peru.12 Mexico’s second largest cocaine-smuggling organization is the Gulf cartel, though its influence is on the wane. Its current capo is Osiel Cárdenas, who runs the business from the maximum-security La Palma prison near Mexico City. The Tijuana cartel, whose home city lies over the border from San Diego, California, has been run by the Arellano Félix family for many years, but its leaders are currently in prison in the United States, and it too is losing ground to the Sinaloa cartel. The fourth major drugs-trafficking organization is the Juárez cartel, based in El Paso-Ciudad Juárez.

  Mexico’s current wave of cocaine trafficking-related violence began when Osiel Cárdenas, the leader of the Gulf cartel, bribed his way out of a maximum security prison in 2001. He then bought himself an elite army regiment, known as the Zetas. This is not as hard to do as it might sound. Between 1994 and 2000, 114,000 conscripts deserted the Mexican army, and the cartels pay former soldiers much better wages than most legal employers. The Zetas were once a division of the GAFE (Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (Special Forces Airmobile Group)), where it is believed they received training in weaponry, intelligence gathering and surveillance techniques from the United States Army, before being sent to the border to combat drug trafficking. With the Gulf cartel’s recruitment of the Zetas, acts of brutality usually not seen outside Colombia have become standard business practice for the Mexican cartels. Members of rival organizations have been tortured, executed and their corpses burnt in barrels. Severed heads have been set on stakes in front of public buildings and in one especially horrifying incident, the heads of five rival soldiers were sent rolling across the dance-floor of a nightclub in Michoacán.

  In 2005, the ranks of the Zetas were augmented by soldiers from the Guatemalan Kaibiles, one of the most gruesome military forces in all Latin America, responsible for many of the massacres of civilians committed during Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war. Inter-cartel violence has reached such levels that even in cities like Monterrey—one of the most affluent and, until 2006, one of the safest cities in Mexico—people talk of children’s birthday parties having to be protected with metal detectors, and of security guards hired to inspect the guests’ presents for explosives.

  Former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III was a key witness of the cocaine-Contra affair described in chapter 2. He has become a keen observer of the drugs war since retiring to his border hometown of McAllen, Texas. He told me how extreme violence and good pay were drawing increasing numbers of mercenaries into the conflict. ‘A few months ago, thirty US Iraq veterans came through from all over the country. They had just got out of the Army. They’d had two or three tours of Iraq so they’re fucked up already, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. All they want to do is kill, so they just go out looking for a bullet with their name on it. They were hired by the Mexican government to kill members of the cartels. They went down there, and they got into big fire-fights. Every single one of them was killed and buried somewhere in Mexico. Now they’ve got another fifty going down.’

  In July 2005, explosions and gunfire rocked downtown Nuevo Laredo’s main shopping complex as drug traffickers spent half an hour battling each other with machine guns and grenade-launchers. The Gulf and Sinaloa cartels were fighting for control of the Nuevo Laredo plaza, a term that refers not to the city’s main square, but to a cartel’s right to smuggle drugs through a city. Since anything the security forces did that might have benefited one side would only have made them the target of the other, they did nothing. The laws against drug trafficking might just as well not have existed.

  To defend such a lucrative business, traffickers have to be able to resort to terrific violence when necessary. The ability to dispense violence is an intrinsic part of running any illegal business that is both highly profitable and highly criminalized. Such lucrative cargoes, transiting such poor countries, generate fierce competition. Being illegal, and therefore unbound by any legally enforceable contract, that competition can all too easily turn vicious. Eliminating rivals and reaping the benefits can be preferable to dividing up territory and settling for less. Much of the violence of the cocaine trade through Mexico is caused by the fight for the right to run drugs through key border cities like Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez and Nuevo Laredo. In the late 1990s, when the Tijuana cartel and the Juárez cartel were battling for dominance of Mexico’s drugs trade, one of their main battlegrounds was Ciudad Juárez, and their war generated the same violence and corruption seen in Nuevo Laredo today. Ciudad Juárez is still a dangerous city, but nothing like it was when control of the drugs trade was being disputed.

  Violence is also the product of personal vendettas between traffickers, who strike at each other’s organizations to avenge the murders of family members or close associates. Once these reprisals get underway, they can quickly spiral out of control. The fight between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels is a good example: Osiel Cárdenas was allegedly responsible for the murder of Chapo Guzmán’s brother, and Guzmán’s vengefulness set off a chain reaction of retaliatory killings.

  Employees in the drug economy can only pray that they escape the violence. Some pray to Catholic saints, others to La Santa Muerte or Jesus Malverde, the patron saint of smugglers. Malverde was a railroad worker who was hanged in 1909 in Culiacán, the Mexican city most associated with the drugs business, after making a name for himself by robbing the rich to give to the poor. He has since become a sacred guide for all those skirting the edges of the law. The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t recognize him as anything of the sort, but that has not diminished the esteem in which the ‘narco-saint’ is held. In 2007, a brewery in Guadalajara began producing a new beer for sale in northern Mexico’s border states; they called it Malverde.

  ‘This is not an easy task, nor will it be fast,’ Mexican President Felipe Calderón told an assembly of army officers shortly after assuming office in December 2006. ‘It will take a long time, requiring the use of enormous resources and even, unfortunately, the loss of human lives.’13 In October 2007, US President George W. Bush offered President Calderón a $1.5 billion aid package to help his government in its struggle with the drugs traffickers over the next three years. There would be funding for a witness protection programme, sophisticated scanning equipment to be
installed at the border crossings, and $500 million for transport and surveillance planes. This was in addition to the $7 billion that Mexico planned to spend on ‘security measures’ over the following three years.’14 Bush and Calderón’s package still needs the approval of their respective Congresses, and is currently mired in Washington. Even if their aid package is approved, the Americans know that they can’t count on the Mexicans to give them the kind of compliance they get from the Colombian government. For much of the 1990s, Mexico refused Washington’s offers of assistance in tackling the cartels, and Calderón won’t allow the United States armed forces, military advisers or private contractors to carry out operations on Mexican soil.

  So for the time being at least, the Americans are dependent on the Mexican army and police to do the fighting. This reliance brings other problems. Violence might be the most eye-catching aspect of the drugs trade, but by and large it is only used when local officials and policemen won’t accept the cartels’ bribes. The drugs trade works so well in countries like Jamaica and Mexico because all too often the very people charged with fighting the drugs trade are corrupted by drugs money. In 2002, a corruption scandal in Tijuana revealed that key officials charged with fighting the traffickers, including the city’s police chief and the assistant state attorney-general, were in the pay of the Tijuana cartel.15 In 2005, prosecutors charged twenty-seven state, federal and city police officers in Cancún with running a drugs ring and murdering fellow officers. That year, the efforts of the city police in Nuevo Laredo were so corrupted by collusion with gangsters that the Mexican government suspended the city’s entire police force and sent in the federal police to patrol the streets. Forty-one city policemen were later arrested for attacking the federal police when their units arrived in the city. Even with the city police in handcuffs, the federal police had no impact on the violence in Nuevo Laredo. The number of drug-related killings actually rose, as once again the delicate balance of power between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels was upended.16 The connections between police and criminals run so deep that many cartels have come to be seen as franchises of the Mexican police, and vice versa. To counter police corruption, the Mexican government has become more dependent on the army to go after the capos. But as soldiers have joined the front line, they too have succumbed to bribery. In 2002, more than 600 members of the Mexican army’s 65th infantry battalion were found to have been protecting opium poppy and marijuana crops. Corruption was so pervasive that the authorities dissolved the entire battalion.

  According to a report by Transparency International, an international non-governmental organization that monitors corruption around the world, Mexican judges are also particularly susceptible to bribery by drug traffickers. It cited a case from 2004, in which a group of eighteen hit men from the Sinaloa cartel was detained by soldiers in Nuevo Laredo. They were found to be carrying 28 long guns, 2 short guns, 223 cartridges, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, 12 grenade launchers, and 18 hand grenades, yet Judge Gómez Martínez set them free, ruling that they were innocent of charges of involvement with organized crime. A judge in Guadalajara, Amado López Morales, decided that Héctor Luis ‘El Güero’ Palma, one of Mexico’s best-known drug traffickers, was in fact an ‘agricultural producer’, despite the fact that he too had been detained in possession of a battery of weapons. Another memorable judge is Humberto Ortega Zurita from the southern state of Oaxaca. In 1996, he presided over the case of two men detained in a car with six kilos of cocaine. The judge absolved them, declaring that no one could be sure that the cocaine was theirs. Hearing a case of a woman who had been stopped on a bus with three kilos of cocaine taped to her stomach, Ortega Zurita ordered that she be set free because ‘she did not carry the drugs consciously’. Shortly afterwards, Judge Ortega Zurita ‘committed suicide’, by stabbing himself several times in the heart.17

  There have even been allegations that the Catholic Church in Mexico has accepted contributions from drug traffickers. In 2005, Ramón Godinez, the bishop of the central state of Aguascalientes, caused uproar when he conceded that donations from traffickers were not unusual, but argued that it was not the Church’s responsibility to investigate the source of donations. ‘Just because the origin of the money is bad doesn’t mean you have to burn it,’ the bishop said. ‘Instead, you have to transform it.’ He insists that the money was ‘purified’ once it passed through the doors of his church.18 In considering how best to tackle the cocaine trade, Bush and Calderón neglected to address the fundamental corruptibility of Mexico’s institutions of state. They would have done well to heed the warning intoned by Mexico’s biggest narcocorrido group, Los Tigres del Norte: ‘Don’t waste your money buying more radars / or tearing up my landing strips / I’m a nocturnal bird / that can land in any cornfield / And besides, the day I fall / plenty in high places will fall with me.’19

  Since the earliest days of the drugs business in Mexico, official reports have linked drug traffickers to high-ranking politicians, who have long been suspected of being directly involved in the illegal trade and even of controlling it.20 The monolithic Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) ruled Mexico from 1928 until 2000, a reign quite unprecedented in what was, in name at least, a democracy. Under the PRI, politicians, police and intelligence agencies regulated, controlled and contained the drugs trade, as they did all aspects of business, protecting certain drug-trafficking groups from the law and mediating conflicts between them. To persist in seeing a neat division between legal state, society and economy, and illegal drugs cartels, counting on the former to support a war on the latter, is naive. The only governments that have ever been able to suppress the drugs trade effectively have been extremely authoritarian: the anti-drugs efforts of China and the Soviet Union spring to mind.21

  An anonymous PRI official’s lament to a journalist from the Washington Post illustrates the point well. ‘In the old days, there were rules,’ he told a reporter. ‘We’d say, “you can’t kill the police, we’ll send in the army”. We’d say, “you can’t steal thirty Jeep Cherokees a month. You can only steal five.”’22 Impunity was granted to certain cartels, while others were persecuted to satisfy the politicians in Washington. In return, the cartels ensured a steady flow of cash remittances from abroad, and financed the election campaigns of prominent PRI politicians. One such grandee was Mario Ernesto Villanueva, who is currently serving a thirty-five-year prison sentence for cocaine smuggling. Between 1993 and 1999, while he was governor of the southern state of Quintana Roo, Villanueva helped the Juárez cartel smuggle between 17 and 27 tons of cocaine a month through his state. The Gulf cartel rose and fell with the fortunes of Raul Salinas, the elder brother of Mexico’s then-president Carlos Salinas. Raul is suspected of shielding the cartel’s former head, Juan Garcia Abrego, and his takings from the cocaine business, estimated to run to more than £5 billion a year.23 Raul Salinas is thought to have made at least £500 million in the six years that his brother was president, though no wrong-doing on his part has ever been established.

  For as long as anyone could remember, this collusion between Mexico’s politicians and criminals was a fait accompli, but as the PRI began to lose political power, culminating in its defeat in the presidential elections of 2000, its grip on the smuggling business slackened. The election of Vicente Fox of the Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) as president in 2000 was hailed as a turning point in Mexico’s development as a democracy. For years, the DEA had been telling the Mexican authorities that the root of the problem was the cartels and the official protection they enjoyed. Since the election of Vicente Fox as president in 2000, the Mexican authorities have arrested more than 36,000 drug traffickers, including senior members of nearly all the cartels.24

  Fox was determined to reassure the Americans that he would be a dependable partner in their war on the drugs trade. Fox also wanted to show Mexicans that the cartels could and would be brought to book. He raised the military’s profile in the anti-drug effort, gave more top soldiers positions in the judiciary
, and extradited traffickers to face justice in US courts. Fox also made several valiant attempts to purge law enforcement agencies of corrupt officials, most notably the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI), the Mexican version of the CIA. Since its creation in 2001, more than 800 AFI agents have been investigated for drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, torture and murder.

  Vicente Fox had swept aside the corrupt but cosy web spun by the PRI, but he failed to create a workable alternative. This became clear in the course of 2006, Fox’s last year in office, when drug-related violence skyrocketed. Targeting the capos left a power vacuum; suddenly drug-trafficking corridors and territories worth billions of dollars were up for grabs, which the capos’ lieutenants rushed to secure. The ensuing struggle for control unleashed terrible violence, which rival cartels vied to exploit and Fox’s successors have proven unable to put an end to.25 The problem is that aggressive drug enforcement only increases the violence it purports to put an end to. Yet such is the authorities’ faith in the law and its enforcement that they see the disputes that their policies give rise to as a positive development, however counter-productive they prove to be.

  The abject failure of Mexico’s anti-drug policies has yet to be fully addressed because the truth about the drugs trade has been kept hidden. The complicity of Mexican police officers, judges and politicians and their corruption by the illegal trade in drugs are rarely discussed in public because the cartels bribe and intimidate journalists, much as they do the police and public officials. In both Colombia and Mexico, ‘to disappear’ has become a transitive verb, not something you do, but something that other people do to you. Those who don’t toe the line laid down by the cartels face execution. As a result, Mexico is second only to Iraq as the most dangerous country in the world in which to work as a journalist. In 2006, nine Mexican journalists were murdered and three were disappeared. The following year was worse.26 In February 2007, gunmen opened fire on the staff of the daily El Mañana in Nuevo Laredo, seriously wounding one person. Two journalists were killed in March for covering stories about the cocaine trade. In July, traffickers kidnapped Rafael Ortiz Martínez of the daily Zócalo in Moclova, a town in the northern state of Coahuila, after he reported on drug smuggling in the region. In August, Enrique Perea Quintanilla, editor of the monthly Dos Caras, Una Verdad, was shot dead in the northern state of Chihuahua after the Juárez cartel put a contract out on his life. In November, Misael Tamayo Hernández of the daily El Despertar de la Costa was found dead in a motel in the southern state of Guerrero, having been killed by a lethal injection. Later that month, Roberto Marcos García, deputy editor of the weekly Testimonio in the eastern state of Veracruz, another drug-trafficking centre, was shot dead in the street.27