Frontera NorteSur Oct - Dec 2009

FNS Special Report: Majors, Militarization and Missing Money

A retired Mexican air force major who served as a police commander in the embattled border city of Ciudad Juarez has assumed the top policing job in the violence-torn, southern state of Guerrero. Major Valentin Diaz, commander of the Delicias precinct for the Ciudad Juarez municipal police from March to September of this year, was publicly named director of the Guerrero State Ministerial Police (PIM) on October 7.

The air force pilot and military lawyer replaced Erit Montufar Mendoza, who directed the PIM during the last six years and oversaw its transformation from the old judicial police force to an ostensibly modernized organization capable of imparting justice.

But Montufar’s tenure was punctuated by numerous controversies, including the arrest of the late environmental activist Felipe Arreaga, an unprecedented upsurge in narco-violence and the unsolved assassinations of numerous politicians, most notably Armando Chavarria, president of the Guerrero State Congress, last August.

Earlier this year, Montufar was drawn into a polemic of sorts with the media-savvy Comandante Ramiro of the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI), a leftist guerrilla organization with a long presence in Guerrero. The revolutionary outlaw and Montufar accused one another of responsibility for violent acts in rural communities of Guerrero.

Montufar’s dismissal was immediately preceded by an October 1 incident in which PIM personnel were accused of assaulting leaders of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), including Chavarria’s son, during a public demonstration in the state capital of Chilpancingo.

In a chat with the Mexican press, Diaz declined to comment on the legal turmoil in Guerrero. He told journalists that time was needed to travel the state and learn its problems. A native of Veracruz, Diaz was a resident of Zapopan, Jalisco, before going to Ciudad Juarez earlier this year as part of a campaign to clean up the local police.

Diaz’s service in Ciudad Juarez coincided with a purge of the police force and the enlistment of new officers, who were dispatched to receive military training at an army base in Santa Gertudris, Chihuahua, before taking on their new duties. According to Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, the new graduates will hit the border city’s streets trained in urban combat and armed with German-made assault rifles.

To complete the make-over, Reyes has been lobbying the Obama administration for more than $4.5 million in funds from the Merida Initiative to equip the police with encrypted digital radios and improved surveillance cameras.

The appointment of air force veteran Diaz to direct a civilian police force in Guerrero, a state with a long history of human rights violations by soldiers, prompted ample commentary. The former ruling and re-ascendant PRI party said it was willing to give Diaz the benefit of the doubt. Juan Alarcon, president of the Guerrero State Human Rights Commission, had a similar posture.

Governor Zeferino Torreblanca, who was elected with the support of the PRD in 2005 but has since fallen out of favor with the party rank-and-file and much of its local leadership, denied that Diaz was appointed at the behest of the Mexican Defense Ministry.

“We selected the person who we believed was the best fit for the job,” Torreblanca quipped to reporters. “We had already talked with him, and it seemed to me that (Diaz) would be able to help in the task of restructuring this agency, which is not easy.”

In his application that landed the Guerrero job, Diaz wrote that he left his job in Ciudad Juarez to pursue a job in a more “tranquil” location.

Guerrero, however, is anything but tranquil these days. In terms of gore, Mexico’s premier international tourist destination now seems to be competing with Ciudad Juarez.

A sampling of recent events include the murder of journalist Juan Daniel Martinez Gil, the slaying of a former treasurer of the Guerrero State Ranchers Union, multiple decapitations of presumed criminals, the murders of two army officers whose bodies were found floating in the polluted Tres Palos Lagoon outside Acapulco, the shooting deaths of five women in Petatlan on the Pacific Coast and, for good measure, occasional grenade attacks.

In Zihuatanejo, six taxi cab drivers are missing after mysteriously vanishing in recent weeks; a cabbie and his passenger from the tourist town were later gunned down October 12 in Petatlan in one of countless murky incidents which are typically linked to a multi-layered war for control of the dope-rich state.

In a three-day span from October 8 to 11, at least 21 people were slain in different sections of the state; in the village of Izoctepec, a pitched battle with automatic weapons erupted after residents resisted gunmen reportedly attempting to kidnap a teenager.

Clearly, Diaz has his hands more than full.

More Militarization?

Diaz’s appointment buttresses a steady trend of placing active duty or retired military personnel in charge of civilian policing in Mexico. In Guerrero, for instance, another military man, General Juan Heriberto Salinas Altes, has run the state’s public safety agency during the Torreblanca administration.

In another key development, the new mayor of Leon, Guanajuato, Ricardo Sheffield Padilla of the National Action Party (PAN), named army Major Maria Guadalupe Anguiano Sanchez as the city’s new public safety director this month. To head the municipal police, Sheffield appointed army Lt. Francisco Javier Martinez Espinosa.

Like Chihuahua and Guerrero, Guanajuato and its state capital of Leon have become a strategic front in the war between competing drug cartels.

Leon’s municipal police department was the object of national scandal after a video was aired last year that showed new recruits undergoing torture apparently to familiarize them with aggressive interrogation techniques.

In 2009, scandal surfaced again in Leon when state police officer Humberto Puga was accused of raping a woman undergoing questioning at the state attorney general’s office.

In announcing Anguiano’s appointment, Sheffield said that the new official would have the “sensibility” to manage with a human rights perspective. The new mayor contended that having two military veterans in charge of the local police would “stamp discipline” on the more than one thousand cops who police the city of 1.5 million people.

As a military prosecutor, Maj. Anguiano was involved in prosecuting the case against the late General Francisco Quiroz Hermosillo and General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro for allegedly aiding the Juarez cartel in the early part of the decade and in the 1990s. In 2007, Acosta Chaparro was absolved of the charges after spending nearly 7 years in military confinement.

In Guerrero Acosta Chaparro was a central figure in the so-called dirty war of the 1970s, when hundreds of people were forcibly disappeared during anti-guerrilla campaigns. Despite numerous testimonies linking the officer and other members of the security forces to the disappearances, no one has been convicted of crimes and the fate of the disappeared has never been fully clarified.

In a move that provoked outrage from human rights groups, Acosta Chaparro retired from the armed forces with full honors last year.

Ties that Bind

The violence raging away in Chihuahua, Guerrero and Guanajuato takes place amid a stormy economic context. All three states suffer from the downturn or collapse of industries tied to the United States and world economies that once provided employment opportunities, however limited and low-paid, to the new generations. Now even the lowliest of jobs are growing scarce.

Mexico’s vanguard state for border assembly plants known as maquiladoras, Chihuahua has seen tens of thousands of jobs in the sector evaporate since late 2007. Dependent on tourism, Guerrero and its world famous resorts of Acapulco and Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo is less and less the choice affluent, foreign tourists.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the decline of legal economic activities has been accompanied by the rise of illegal ones, including small scale drug dealing, product piracy, petty and mass extortion of small merchants, and the kidnapping of anyone who might have money.

The cradle of conservatism and President Felipe Calderon’s PAN party, Leon has undergone a transformation similar to Chihuahua and Guerrero. In Leon’s case, shoe-making was the local industry that was swept up and blown away in the global economic hurricane. Increasingly, Mexico’s historic shoe capital has been hard-pressed by cheaper imports, especially from China.

In 2008 an estimated 54.7 million pairs of 286.2 million shoes purchased in Mexico, or approximately 20 percent of the national market share, were manufactured abroad. As many as 10,000 jobs may have been lost in Leon’s shoe industry since last year. Clouding a dismal economic landscape, Mayor Sheffield declared that he arrived in office only to discover that municipal coffers could be down by about three million dollars because of a bad investment scheme connected to the Metrofinanciera company.

Sources: El Sur, October 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 2009. Articles by Brenda Escobar, Francisco Magana, Zacarias Cervantes, Aurora Harrison, and Agencia Reforma. Despertar de la Costa, October 8 and 13, 2009. Articles by Yamilet Villa Arreola, Marco Antonio Villegas and ANG. La Jornada (Guerrero edition), September 25, 2009; October 8, 9, 12, and 14, 2009. Articles by Rodolfo Valadez Luviano, Margena de la O, Sergio Ocampo, Laura Reyes Maciel, and editorial staff. Lapolaka.com, October 5, 2009.

From Narco War to War of Extermination

While El Pasoans celebrate the festive Labor Day weekend with barbeques and brews, residents of neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, will attend mass wakes and funerals. The slaughter of 18 men at the Casa El Aliviane drug rehabilitation center September 2 pushed the murder toll in the Mexican border city to around 1500 for the year so far.

Only days before the massacre, the Mexico City-based Citizen Council for Public Safety (CCSP), released statistics that showed Ciudad Juarez was the most violent city in the world, registering 130 killings per 100,000 people; since January 2008, more than 3,000 people have been murdered in the Mexican border city. The only comparable violence in Ciudad Juarez’s history occurred during the 1910 Mexican Revolution, when the city was the scene of several pitched battles.

“A murder victim every hour,” read a recent headline in the local press. A more upbeat story commented how the day began in relative calm with “two executions at midnight and a wounded bullet victim” by the morning.

More than 320 people were murdered in Ciudad Juarez and the nearby Juarez Valley during the month of August, now regarded as the most violent in the city’s history.

Thursday evening’s killing, which was carried out by four heavily armed men who lined up presumed crack addicts and shot them El Salvador 1980-style, was the latest indication that Mexico’s narco violence has taken a qualitative leap (or descent) from a struggle for control of drug routes and markets to a generalized war of extermination against anyone deemed a rival or potential rival. Press reports tied the victims to the Juarez Cartel-allied Aztecas gang, but one man who preferred to remain anonymous told a local reporter that other individuals who were genuinely seeking treatment were among the victims.

Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez said a war without quarter between local criminal gangs was the reason for the El Aliviane slaughter.

“These are really terrorist acts that attempt to intimidate the population and acts that are intended, within the criminal groups, to exterminate rivals…,” Gonzalez said.

Although Gonzalez pointed to Ciudad Juarez's proximity to the US consumer culture, the massacre at the El Aliviane drug rehab center was more proof that much of the recent bloodletting has more to do with domination of the local drug economy than export sales to the United States, as is frequently portrayed by Washington and the US press.

Opposition Chihuahua state lawmaker Victor Quintana of the PRD party demanded that authorities clarify the massacre, as well as previous ones at other drug clinics.

“We can’t allow the State and society to view these types of massacres as part of the normal routine,” Quintana said. “Significant, urgent, focused and committed actions are needed from the three levels of government to render public accountability on what is happening to society and to establish time-lines to end the terror in Chihuahua.”

For his part, Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz declared “panic buttons” will be installed in drug rehabilitation centers.

A Sea Change in the Narco War

In the “Good Old Days” of Mexico’s narco-economy, killings were strategically directed at high or mid-level operators, as well as lower-ranking individuals who ere suspected of informing to the police, ripping off bosses or bungling loads. But in addition to the men killed at the El Aliviane clinic, numerous victims in Ciudad Juarez this year could only be classified as “little people” in the bigger scheme of things.

Large numbers of suspected retail drug dealers, addicts, street vendors and clowns, construction laborers, and others who could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered even middle-level players have fallen to bullets this year. From January 2008 to early August 2009, at least 132 people below 18 years of age were murdered. Another 15 people slain traveling to or from work are believed to have been innocent victims caught in cross-fire.

With more than 130,000 people involved in Ciudad Juarez's illegal drug market, the list of potential victims looms large.

To the immediate south of Ciudad Juarez, a valley that once nourished indigenous cultures and later gained international fame as a top-rate cotton producer has now earned the nickname “The Valley of Death” in the Mexican press.

Selective killings have turned into attacks against entire families, with some homes burned down. Hundreds of families have reportedly fled the violence-torn region.

All this has occurred under the noses of nearly 10,000 Mexican army troops and federal police officially deployed to curb violence. Despite the recent arrests of several suspected hit men accused of hundreds of murders, killings continue unabated. The day after the El Aliviane massacre, a man was chased on foot and shot to death before the eyes of hundreds of witnesses in a downtown market located, again, in a place usually teeming with police and soldiers.

The big honchos of the drug trade, meanwhile, remain free.

The late, legendary narco-lawyer Raquenel Villanueva, who survived numerous bullets and explosions before she was finally gunned down in Monterrey last month, lamented the breakdown of longtime criminal codes in an interview published not long before her death. The one time defender of drug lords blamed the rising consumption of illegal substances in Mexico for the loss of “values” in the business.

A Nationwide Social Cleansing?

As the body count mounts, the violence increasingly resembles the “social cleansing” carried out by death squads in Honduras, Brazil and other Latin American nations.

In Ciudad Juarez, many killings have occurred in the downtown area frequented by drug dealers and addicts but also slated for redevelopment under the Santa Fe Plaza project involving magnate Carlos Slim and other investors. The El Aliviane clinic is located in the rough Bellavista neighborhood next to downtown and only blocks from the pedestrian crossing to El Paso.

Whether intentional or not, the murder of longtime, activist street vendor leader Geminis Ochoa earlier this year removed one possible thorn in the side of developers or others with the mind of controlling downtown Ciudad Juarez.

In the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, meanwhile, at least 38 murders this year of suspected highwaymen and car robbers have been attributed to a shadowy group that leaves threatening messages against thieves. The murder spree coincided with the beginning of a special police operation against auto theft.

To one degree or another, the patterns of violence in Chihuahua and Sinaloa are present elsewhere in the Mexican Republic. Decapitations, body mutilations and “crucifixions” are the flesh and blood signposts of violence that’s claimed somewhere between 12,000-14,000 lives since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006.

US Department of Homeland Security border czar Alan Bersin was recently quoted as saying that it might take Mexico 30 or 40 years to get a handle on the narco-fanned violence. Given that hundreds of thousands of people are immersed in the business, the eventual toll of such a conflict could easily take more than 100,000 lives if current rates of violence continue. And that’s a simple projection not taking into account the unpredictable consequences of cross-generational revenge, possible regional conflicts and other unforeseen mutations that could evolve from the current spate of carnage.

Under present circumstances, slain street dealers and other low-level operators are quickly replaced. At a seminar in Mexico City last week, the citizen council of the Office of the Federal Attorney General revealed that the economic crisis was sending at least 300,000 additional young people into the ranks of the narco. Marcos Fastlight, council president, contended that organized crime controls 65 percent of Mexico’s municipal administrations, which govern between 40 and 50 million people.

Other Possible Consequences of a Violent Breakdown

In a context of spiraling violence and wanton murder, many manifestations of meanness are taking hold among sectors of the population. In Tijuana last week, 15 “indigents,” including two individuals in wheel chairs and a one-legged woman, were loaded aboard a police vehicle and unceremoniously dumped in the city of Tecate. After news of the El Aliviane massacre flashed, cyberwriters took to the Internet. An e-mail sent to Mexico City daily La Jornada cheered the killings of “cholos” and other undesirables. Witnesses to the murder of seven men and one woman at Ciudad Juarez’s Seven and Seven bar last month reported seeing gunmen laugh and then mill around the parking lot for 10 minutes after completing their dirty work, while calls to the emergency operator went unanswered.

As the brutality of the narco war escalates, so goes the political and civic scene.

In August, two prominent social activists, bank debtors’ leader Maximiano Barbosa and Sinaloa Civic Front leader Salomon Monarrez were shot and wounded in Jalisco and Sinaloa, respectively, while the president of the Guerrero State Congress, PRD leader Armando Chavarria, was assassinated. Chavarria was a former state secretary for the administration of Governor Zeferino Torreblanca, and considered a leading candidate for the governorship in the 2011 election. Like Chihuahua, Guerrero is a politically strategic place for the underworld. This summer also saw the murder of Guerrero journalist Juan Daniel Martinez Gil.

Routinely, the Mexico City-based Center for Journalism and Public Ethics zaps out communiqués that detail new instances of violence and intimidation against journalists. Most of the denunciations identify government officials as the responsible parties for the attacks against the press. In one of the latest incidents, El Diario de Juarez photographer Silvestre Juarez was allegedly roughed up by Chihuahua state police officers while attempting to cover a protest by Ciudad Juarez
resident Rita Lozoya, who stripped down to her bra and panties in protest of her son’s murder.

Ultimately, the next victim of the narco war-plus could well be Mexico’s much-heralded transition to democracy.

Additional sources: Norte August 7 and 14, 2009; September 3 and 4, 2009. Articles by Herika Martinez Prado, Luis Carlos Ortega, Carlos Huerta, and Nohemi Barraza. El Paso Times, August 17 and September 4, 2009. Articles by Daniel Borunda and Stephanie Sanchez. El Sur/Agencia Reforma, September 1, 2009. Lapolaka.com, July 28, 2009; August 5, 6, 10, 14, 17, 18, 29, 2009; September 1, 2, 3, 4, 2009; La Jornada, August 9, 26 and 31, 2009; September 3, 2009 Articles by Javier Valdez Cardenas, Miroslava Breach, AFP, and Notimex.

El Universal, August 11, 16, 29, 31, 2009. September 1 and 3, 2009. Articles by Juan Alberto Cedillo, Silvia Otero, Javier Cabrera, Julieta Martinez, Luis Carlos Cano, Noemi Gutierrez, and editorial staff. El Diario de Juarez, August 18 and 31, 2009; September 1 and 3, 2009. Articles by Gabriel Simental and editorial staff. Proceso/Apro, July 29, 2009.

International Peace Brigades for Chihuahua?

A well-known Mexican border state politician and social activist called this week for international human rights observers to come to the state of Chihuahua.

Interviewed on CNN’s Aristegui program, Victor Quintana, Chihuahua state legislator for the center-left PRD party and advisor to the Democratic Campesino Front, said the Mexican government’s anti-drug Joint Operation Chihuahua failed to end narco-violence, encouraged human rights abuses and left the citizenry defenseless, as evidenced by the kidnap-murders this month of Mormon community activist Benjamin LeBaron and his brother-in-law Luis Widmar in northern Chihuahua.

“This is a sign of the failed state we are living in,” Quintana contended.

In a 24-hour period from the afternoon of July 14 to 15, seventeen people were reported slain gangland style in Ciudad Juarez and other parts of the state of Chihuahua.

According to the longtime political leader, people uninvolved in the fight between rival drug cartels are increasingly falling victim to bands of criminals on the one hand and Mexican security forces on the other. The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) does not have investigators specifically assigned to monitor Joint Operation Chihuahua, Quintana told host Carmen Aristegui.

“We need peace brigades and people from the international community to act as witnesses,” Quintana said. “It is not a (political) party, ideological question but a profound, ethical one, and the first step is to rescue the principle of the sacredness of life, even the lives of those who don’t respect it.”

Recent developments including the LeBaron-Widmar murders have led many in Chihuahua to urge a rethinking of Joint Operation Chihuahua, Quintana said.

“A generalized clamor exists in Chihuahua to change the model of Joint Operation Chihuahua,” Quintana added. “It’s time that Felipe Calderon render an accounting to the people ofChihuahua.”

The lawmaker’s comments coincide with a rising tide of public opinion in Mexico that views President Calderon’s drug war as literally going down in flames.

Backed by Washington, Operation Joint Chihuahua and similar campaigns rely on massive deployments of army troops and Federal Police, militarization of civilian police functions, restrictions on the constitutional right to free transit, and random searches of the citizenry. The result, according to the CNDH and independent human rights organizations, is the widespread violation of human rights.

Alleged human rights abuses by federal forces prompted the US-based Human Rights Watch this week to request US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suspend 15 percent of the funds destined for anti-drug, binational Merida Initiative, or Plan Mexico as it is called by some, in reference to a similar US aid package for Colombia.

Human Rights Watch’s appeal was seconded by the All Rights for All network, a grouping of leading Mexican human rights groups. Edgar Cortez, executive secretary for the organization, joined others in recommending that the Calderon anti-crime strategy see a “revision.”

Cortez suggested that curtailing money laundering and cross-border arms trafficking could be a more effective strategy than the current one of displaying overwhelming shows of force and making entire communities suspect. “Perhaps there would be more damage to these (crime) groups,” Cortez said.

Recent gun battles and other manifestations of extreme violence in Michocan and other states have likewise encouraged key Mexican lawmakers to call for revamping the drug war strategy.

While agreeing it was necessary to keep the army involved until adequate police forces are available, Sonora Senator Manlio Fabio Beltrones of the PRI party said the anti-crime fight should be subject to constant reevaluation and updating. The success of federal operations, Beltrones said, should not be measured solely on the basis of daily body counts.

Supporters of Operation Joint Chihuahua and the broader drug war were also outspoken in recent days. Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told reporters that the military operation has reduced crimes including auto thefts, commercial robberies and bank heists.

“We have to make adjustments, but there is no radical change in the method of operating,” Reyes said, adding that the municipal government was examining whether to request a six-month extension of the army’s presence until March 2010. “We can’t say the operation has been a failure, because it hasn’t concluded,” the mayor said in separate comments.

Murder is one crime that definitely has not gone down since the initiation of Joint Operation Chihuahua. The latest press accounts report more than 1,000 people murdered in Ciudad Juarez alone during the course of 2009- a rate much higher than in 2008 before the reinforcement of the army and federal presence in the border city.

In multiple declarations this week, President Felipe Calderon vowed to stay the course. Mexico, Calderon said, “won’t take and should not take a step backwards.” The anti-drug offensive, the Mexican president insisted, was touching off “desperate reactions” by crime groups feeling the pressure of the federal boot.

Despite the president’s upbeat assessments, drug cartels significantly escalated their confrontations with Mexican security forces this week. In a broad swath of attacks in Michoacan and other states, La Familia drug cartel in particular demonstrated a sophisticated level of coordination and tactical ingenuity.

As of July 15, at least 15 members of the Federal Police had been slain in Michoacan since the arrests last week of two mid-level La Familia leaders, “La Minsa” and “El Chivo,” in Morelia, Michoacan, and Petatlan, Guerrero, respectively. In one fiery attack, dozens of police vehicles were torched.

Elsewhere, pitched daytime battles that included explosions and resembled scenes from Gaza or Baghdad erupted in Nuevo Leon and Veracruz, leaving at least 8 suspected gunmen dead.

Since President Calderon assumed office in December 2006, more than 11,000 Mexicans have perished in narco-related violence.

Monte Alejandro Rubido Garcia, technical secretary for the National Security Public System, said this week that approximately 90 percent of the victims were delinquents, with the remainder belonging to the security forces. Citizens who are not involved in drug trafficking or other criminal activities should rest assured that they are not “the target of violent actions of delinquent groups,” Rubido said.

The federal official’s body count ignored the growing number of civilians killed or injured in cross-fire, including the man and his 10-year-old daughter who were recently slain in Chihuahua City when the truck they were riding in was strafed by bullets from gunmen blasting away at each other on the street.


Sources: Lapolaka.com, July 15, 2009. Milenio TV, July 15, 2009. CNN en Espanol, July 13, 2009. El Diario de Juarez, July 14, 2009. Articles by Araly Castanon, Orlando Chavez and Luz del Carmen Sosa. Televisa, July 13, 2009. La Jornada, July 8, 14 and 15, 2009. Articles by Miroslava Breach, Ruben Villalpando, Mauricio Navarro, Ernesto Martinez, Elorriaga, Victor Ballinas, Enrique Mendez, Claudia Herrera Beltran, Gustavo Castillo Garcia, Alonso Urrutia,  Carolina Gomez  Mena,  correspondents, and the AFP news agency.

Special Report on Border Security, Civil Liberties and Immigration Reform

Obama’s Cartel Trust Busters

On a whirl-wind tour of the Southwest late last week, senior members of the Obama administration laid out the White House’s strategy for border security, narcotics control and immigration reform. And contrary to the expectations of some border residents and advocates who were betting on a new approach last January, the new administration’s strategic policy thrust mainly follows and even expands on the course long pursued by previous Democratic and Republican administrations. A solid alliance with the Calderon administration in Mexico City is a key component of the Obama border policy.

During the Albuquerque portion of the trip, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano swore in a new 21-member Homeland Security Advisory Council Southwest Border Task Force. The purpose of the new body, Napolitano said in a statement, will be to “present me with concrete recommendations to address the complex challenges we face in this region.”

Chairing the task force is former Director of Central Intelligence and FBI Director William Webster.

Appointed members include James Jones, former US Ambassador to Mexico and a CEO of Mannatt Jones Global Strategies; Jeffrey Davidow, also former US
Ambassador to Mexico and President of the Institute of the Americas; Maria Luisa Connell, CEO of Border Trade Alliance and a former employee of the National Federation of Merchants of Colombia; and Victor Flores of the Arizona Public Service utility company.  Additional members include the chairman of Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Nation, the mayors of San Diego and El Paso, private sector representatives and law enforcement officials, among others.

The generous appointment of law enforcement and private sector representatives to top advisory positions reflects the Obama administration’s goal of relying on technology to tighten up border security while facilitating the flow of commerce between Mexico and the US, a tricky proposition given the long lines of traffic and pedestrians that have been jamming some US ports of entry in recent months.

With the exception of National Council of La Raza Board Chair Andrea Bazan, no individuals from the human rights, civil liberties, labor, environmental or immigrant advocacy fields were appointed to the new advisory group. Physician Evelyn M. Rodriguez, who once worked on pharmaceutical drug safety at the US Food and Drug Administration will serve on the task force, as will Robert Ross, the head of the California Endowment health foundation.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson was not present at the Albuquerque swearing-in ceremony for the new task force. Richardson’s office later told a New Mexico online news service that the governor had prior commitments to attend a US Border Patrol ceremony and a boating officer award event

The Devil is in the Details

On the eve of the Arizona and New Mexico trip, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano outlined her department’s four priorities in a presentation at the Aspen Institute. In order of importance, Napolitano listed anti-terrorism, border security, immigration law enforcement and natural disaster response.

In terms of immigration law enforcement, Napolitano told her audience that the Department of Homeland Security would request more funding for the e-Verify computer system that checks the residency status of job applicants.

On their tour, Napolitano and other administration officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, detailed other planned administration actions. Increased financial assistance to law enforcement agencies, police checks of US citizens headed to Mexico, countering money laundering and stepping up prosecutions of drug traffickers are major elements of the White House border strategy.

Scanners, dog teams and weight scales to detect cash-laden or contraband-laden vehicles will be put to greater use on the border. According to Napolitano, border crime fighting strategies will be applied to communities within the interior of the US as well.

In Albuquerque, Napolitano stressed the importance of controversial“fusion” centers for the success of the US endeavor. A kind of central clearinghouse for intelligence and law enforcement information, the centers were criticized in a 2008 report by the American Civil Liberties Union for allegedly acting as dry, bottomless fishing holes for police agencies casting a wide net of suspicion.

Even before the ink on headlines dried, some critics lashed out against the White House’s drug war strategy.

“The new plan simply calls for rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” said Aaron Houston of the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that claims 26,000 members. Advocating that marijuana be regulated like alcohol, Houston contended that any policy initiative relegating cannabis use to the control of criminal organizations is “nothing but a full-employment plan for professional drug warriors and cartel bosses alike…”

The Obama administration’s prioritization of border security over immediate immigration reform was spelled out in a June 4 interview of border czar Alan Bersin with journalist and KUNM radio News Director Jim Williams in Albuquerque.

Bersin laid out three pre-conditions for comprehensive immigration reform, including border enforcement, workplace enforcement and “interior” enforcement directed at 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The border czar defined interior enforcement as deporting undocumented persons who commit crimes in this country.

“They need to be identified, arrested and removed from this country,” Bersin told Williams. For immigration reform to be politically palpable, Bersin argued, the current focus had to be on law enforcement.

“It’s enforcement, enforcement, enforcement that has to take place for those conditions to exist,” Bersin said.

Securing the border before reforming immigration policy was a policy position staked out by Republican Presidential candidate John McCain during last year’s campaign.

In the KUNM interview, Williams asked Bersin about the issue of corruption within the  ranks of the Mexican army, especially the recent arrests of 12 active-duty Mexican soldiers who were accused of working for the Zetas drug gang in Aguascalientes.

While acknowledging that corruption had “popped up” in the Mexican military,  Bersin differentiated the armed forces from local and state police forces and the judiciary. Mexico’s military, he said, is “the lever on which President Calderon is attempting this historic transformation of Mexico, and it is one in which we are heavily invested and one in which we see are own national security implicated.”

Though recognizing a recent “spike” in violence, Bersin credited the deployment of the Mexican army for significantly reducing violence in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.

Press reports showed a short-lived reduction in violence after the Mexican army was first deployed in Ciudad Juarez in early 2008, but an unprecedented increase in the months afterward. A similar pattern occurred this year, when extra troops were sent in to bolster the anti-drug campaign at the end of February. In recent weeks, however, violence has reached almost unimaginable levels in the embattled border city. On June 5, for example, at least 13 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez.

“Lead Rain Alert!” headlined the Lapolaka Internet news site.

On the day Bersin was in Albuquerque, Mexican soldiers were accused of beating or roughing up a group of journalists in Ciudad Juarez. The journalists were attempting to photograph the aftermath of a traffic accident involving soldiers. Vehicular mishaps caused by soldiers or federal police flying through the streets has have received growing media attention in the tense border city.

Ciudad Juarez’s El Diario newspaper protested the attack on the journalists in an open letter to President Felipe Calderon. Adrian Ventura Lares, president of the Society of Journalists and communicators characterized the incident as an assault on freedom of expression.

“Juarez society is tired of the abuses that are happening because of the military’s illegal searches and transgressions of fundamental principles,” Ventura said. “We are not in a state of siege and the freedom to inform exists.”

Washington’s full-tilt backing of the Mexican military runs the risk of alienating growing sectors of Mexican society that want the army back in its barracks. Ignoring a plea from dozens of prominent Mexican human rights organizations, the US House of Representatives voted last month to grant the Mexican government an extra $470 million in anti-drug assistance, including Blackhawk helicopters.

In Ciudad Juarez alone, more than 200 human rights complaints against the Mexican army have been filed with the official Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission since last year. Additionally, the number of complaints against the army received by a special office of the Ciudad Juarez municipal government grew from 109 in early April to nearly 550 by the first week of June.

The complaints- some of which have been challenged by the army-allege numerous instances of soldiers illegally searching homes and mistreating residents. Serious allegations of murder, torture and robbery have also been made.

Reportedly, the military has opened internal investigations of 162 cases for the period running from March 2008 to mid-April 2009. Responding to an inquiry from El Diario newspaper, Mexican General Cruz Isaac Munoz Navarro was quoted as saying that no criminal sanctions have been levied against military personnel because of the ongoing nature of investigations.

On the US side of the border, meanwhile, Bersin contended drug cartel violence was not significantly spilling into this country as claimed by some recent news headlines. He said immigrant-smuggler violence in places like Arizona was characteristic of long-standing border crime as opposed to cartel-fanned violence. In remarks to the Albuquerque Journal, Bersin rejected proposals for decriminalizing drug use. Such a policy, he said, would be tantamount to “throwing up your hands.”

Overall, the Obama-Calderon anti-drug strategy aims at busting up several large organized crime organizations into smaller, more manageable ones, according to Bersin. The border czar praised a “sea change” in the willingness of both governments to take off the gloves and truly fight the drug war.


Fumbling the Immigration Hot Potato?


With the immigration reform issue creeping back onto the agenda again, the Obama administration’s emphasis on toughened border security is now the controlling variable in the timing and the character of any reform package that might emerge.

At the grassroots level, the newly-formed Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) is mobilizing in communities across the US to pressure the President in keeping to his campaign pledge of a pathway for legalization of undocumented residents.

“I want to tell our Congressional leaders that New Mexico’s immigrant families need some relief,” said Mabel Serrano, a student member of the Somos un Pueblo organization of New Mexico. “We work side by side with US citizens. We go to school together. We go to church together.”

Washington-based Latino rights and immigrant advocacy groups are optimistic the Democrat-controlled Congress and White House will pass favorable legislation. They point to recent Senate hearings and the planned June 17 summit between President Obama and Republican and Democratic leaders as positive signs that action is forthcoming.

How soon action will be taken is the million-dollar question. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said last week that immigration reform would be the third big legislative priority for 2009, preceded by two other thorny and time-consuming issues-health care and energy policy.

Meantime, details of a possible immigration reform package are beginning to appear in the press. Among the measures under consideration on Capitol Hall are proposals to extend guest-worker programs from agriculture to all economic sectors.

Some analysts and observers are skeptical the Obama White House will be able to muster up an immigration reform.

Americas Policy analyst Tom Barry, for example, recently wrote that the emerging border security and immigration enforcement commitments “have come without any persuasive demonstration by the administration of Congress that they are firmly committed to immigration reform.”

The new president, Barry conceded, has a difficult challenge “to lay out a persuasive case for a new immigration policy including legalization measures at a time of economic crisis and little principled resolve among congressional Democrats.”

Calls for immigration reform were echoed at the June 5-6 encounter between Mexican and US legislators in Seattle, Washington. Prior to the Seattle meet, the vice-coordinator of the center-left PRD party in the Mexican Senate said that he held out a few hopes for a US immigration reform but did not expect much to happen.

“I know how negative the gringos are,” said Senator Silvano Aureoles Conejo, “and that they don’t want to go to the root of the problem.”

Sources: Lapolaka.com, June 5, 2009. Albuquerque Journal, June 5, 2009. Article by Sean Olson. KOAT (Albuquerque), June 5, 2009. KLUZ (Albuquerque), June 5, 2009. National Public Radio, June 5, 2009. NewMexicoindependent.com, June 5, 2009. Articles by Trip Jennings. Proceso/Apro, June 5, 2009. Article by Jorge Carrasco Araizga. KUNM (Albuquerque), June 4, 2009. Department of Homeland Security, June 3, 4,5, 2009. Press releases. Marijuana Policy Project, June 5, 2009. Press release.

El Universal, May 29, 2009; June 4 and 5, 2009. Articles by Ricardo Gomez, Jorge Ramos, Javier Cabrera, and the Notimex news agency. El Diario de Juarez, April 6, 2009; June 1, 4, 5, 6, 2009. Articles by Juan de Dios Olivas, Araly Castanon and editorial staff. Norte, May 20 and 23, 2009; June 1 and 6, 2009. Articles by Beatriz Coral Iglesias, Francisco Lujan and Herika Martinez Prado. CEPET, June 5, 2009. Press release. National Council of La Raza, June 1, 2009. Press release. Somos un Pueblo Unido, June 1, 2009. Press release. Americaspolicy.org, May 29, 2009. Article by Tom Barry.

Guerrillas, Narcos, Washington, and the Ghosts of 1910

A new twist with unpredictable political consequences has emerged amid the shifting battle fronts of Mexico’s narco war. Sometime last weekend and somewhere in the mountains of southern Guerrero state, a group of at least 20 armed men presenting themselves as a column of the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI) appeared before Mexican reporters.

Uniformed and armed with AK-47 rifles, the group was led by Comandante Ramiro, or Omar Guerrero Solis, one of the most wanted men in Mexico and an almost folkloric figure who escaped from a prison outside Acapulco more than six years ago and wasn’t publicly seen again until last weekend’s secret press conference.

In comments to reporters, Comandante Ramiro accused the Calderon administration of not only staging the fight against drug trafficking, but of also protecting the interests of alleged drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The masked guerrilla commander charged Guerrero Governor Zeferino Torreblanca, who was elected with the backing of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and social sectors sympathetic with the guerrilla movement, with also protecting Chapo Guzman and an alleged associate, Rogaciano Alba.

A former head of the Guerrero Regional Cattlemen’s Association, Alba also served as the mayor of the Guerrero town of Petatlan for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Gunmen associated with Alba are responsible for about 60 murders in the conflictive Tierra Caliente and Costa Grande regions of Guerrero, Comandante Ramiro said.

“The strategy of combating the narco is phony,” Comandante Ramiro charged. “Here in Guerrero, for example, the narcos participate in meetings that the army and state government hold to strike at one cartel and protect another, but essentially they are the same, because they murder, kidnap and torture,” he asserted. “Here the cartel of Chapo Guzman is serving the army, and vice-versa..”

The fugitive rebel leader likewise accused Erit Montufar, director of the Guerrero state ministerial police, of involvement in criminal activities in the Tierra Caliente region of the state.

Comandante Ramiro said narco-fueled violence was inspiring young people to join the ERPI’s ranks, which had successfully expelled Alba’s men from some mountain zones. The ERPI, he said, is engaged in active armed self-defense, “striking” and “dismantling” paramilitary groups connected to Alba and the state government.

The guerrilla leader said his troops try to avoid confrontations with Mexican soldiers, whom he called “sons of the people” welcome to join the revolutionary movement.

The ERPI first emerged in 1998 as a splinter faction of the leftist Popular Democratic Revolutionary Party/Popular Revolutionary Army (PDPR-EPR). Two top ERPI leaders, Jacobo Silva and Gloria Arenas, were captured by the Mexican army in 1999, but the guerrilla group survived and reorganized.

The EPR, as well as other spin-offs, remains active. As the 15th anniversary of the founding of the organization’s armed wing neared this month, the PDPR-EPR issued a new communique.

In its message, the underground organization addressed the recent flu epidemic, deficiencies in the Mexican healthcare system, human rights, political scandals, labor movements, the suffering of the mothers of Ciudad Juarez femicide victims, and more.

The group also said its members were reviewing the next step to take in its campaign to force a clarification of the fate of two high-ranking leaders, Edmundo Reyes Amaya and Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sanchez, who were allegedly disappeared by the Mexican government in May 2007.

Subsequently, the EPR waged a sabotage campaign against gas pipelines to force the appearance of its two leaders. The guerrillas later declared a truce, and a mediation commission was established between the EPR and Calderon administration. The commission, however, recently broke down, with no word on the fates of Cruz and Amaya.

Now 33 years old, the ERPI’s Comandante Ramiro told Mexican media he first joined the Poor People’s Party, a predecessor group of the PDPR-EPR which
was founded by the late legendary rebel leader Lucio Cabanas in the late 1960s, when he was fourteen years of age.

According to Comandante Ramiro, the ERPI is organized like Cabanas’ old Campesino Justice Brigade, with units going up and down in size. Claiming his organization enjoys broad popular support in the Guerrero countryside, Comandante Ramiro said he spent the last four years year in the mountains, adding with a half-smile, “without a vacation.” Addressing reporters, he personally challenged President Calderon and Defense Secretary Galvan to come fight against him if they had a beef and stop sending “innocents” to die.

Replies to Comandante Ramiro

Reaction to the rebel leader’s bravado was slow in coming from Calderon administration officials and Governor Torreblanca, but other state officials and well-known political figures in Guerrero had quick words of response.

Dismissing Comandante Ramiro’s allegations, State Ministerial Police Director Montufar contended the fugitive was using the name of the ERPI to cover for crimes including cattle rustling, robbery and rape.“How is it possible that someone who escaped from the Acapulco penitentiary, a delinquent of that level, assumes the mantle of defender of social causes?” Montufar responded.

Armando Chavarria, coordinator of the PRD group in the Guerrero State Congress and a former state interior minister under Torreblanca, urged the governor to initiate a dialogue with the ERPI.

“Personally, I don’t justify the armed struggle,” Chavarria said, “but I understand it.” The veteran politician said the ERPI’s public reemergence, arising from a grinding poverty trapping hundreds of thousands of people in the state, “makes the situation graver in Guerrero.”

After news of the EPRI’s reappearance hit the press, residents reported stepped-up Mexican military movements, especially in the Tierra Caliente.While Mexican guerrillas engaged the media this past week, presumed narcos mounted their own publicity campaign by hanging more so-called “narco-banners” in Guerrero, Morelos, Tabasco, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua. Directed at President Felipe Calderon, Federal Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna and other top law enforcement officials, the latest messages were strikingly frank, with the banner signers acknowledging they were not members of a Boy Scout troop but nevertheless protesting alleged Calderon administration retaliations against family members of accused narcos. According the anonymous authors, the global code of conduct mandates that the family “should be respected.”

A New Game for Washington?

Locally, the EPRI column led by Comandante Ramiro adds another explosive element to a multi-faceted conflict underway in Guerrero involving several rival drug cartels, the Mexican armed forces and different police agencies, which often back different crime groups and battle one another. Last month, a fierce battle in the mountains between the army and suspected gunmen from the Beltran-Leyva cartel left at least 15 gunmen and one soldier dead. Along with large-caliber weapons and grenades, 13 suspects were seized by the army.

Politically, the persistence and even growth of the ERPI further signals the collapse of the broad-based political movement spearheaded by Zeferino Torreblanca that swept into power in early 2005 based on promises of change and end to decades of corruption and misrule by the PRI party.

The ERPI’s ability to attract young recruits shows how the guerrilla in Guerrero, like the narco, has become part of the trans-generational landscape. Comandante Ramiro’s column represents at least the third generation of Mexicans to take up arms since the late 1960s.

The existence of a guerrilla group in the heart of the narco conflict zone has national and international ramifications, especially at a time when the Democratic Party-controlled US Congress is considering a $470 million security funding request for the Mexican government, including money for more helicopters, advanced technology and training for the Mexican armed forces. The modern military equipment could used to fight guerrillas as well as narcos.

On May 7, the House Appropriations Committee approved the military assistance package and sent it on for further action. In an action bearing perhaps more than just passing political symbolism, the Mexico aid was approved as part of a larger security outlay for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, even as the new Obama administration retunes its military strategy in Central Asia, Washington could be poised to become more deeply involved in a Mexican civil conflict that has centuries of deep political, social and historical roots.

On the eve of the House committee vote, scores of prominent Mexican human rights organizations wrote the US Congress opposing new military aid. The signatories of a May 6 letter noted that allegations of human rights abuses against Mexican soldiers mainly deployed in anti-drug operations soared 600 percent from 2006 to 2008, reaching 1,230 cases filed with the official National Human Rights Commission last year. In both Guerrero and neighboring Michoacan, complaints against soldiers are on the upswing in 2009.

Juan Alarcon, longtime president of the official Guerrero State Human Rights Commission, said his agency saw an unprecedented 85 complaints against soldiers from last December to the first three weeks of April. The majority of accusations, encompassing alleged violations of search and seizure, arrest and other laws, “have nothing to do with drug trafficking or organized crime,” Alarcon insisted.

Ghosts of 1910

In some respects, the situation in Guerrero and other parts of the Mexican countryside, both south and north, resembles the era before the 1910 Mexican Revolution when armed bands, heavy-handed government forces and insurgent political forces all rose to the occasion. Then, as now, foreign companies commanded key sectors of the economy.

Ironically, the huge copper mine in Cananea, Sonora, which witnessed one of the historic, runner-up battles to the 1910 revolt, has been the scene of a mounting conflict during the last two years between the mineworkers union led by exiled leader Napoleon Gomez on one side and the Calderon administration and owners Grupo Mexico on the other. Internationally, Gomez’s group has received important backing from the United Steel Workers and other labor organizations.

The Cananea strike almost erupted into a bloody showdown just as US President Barack Obama was preparing to visit Mexico last month. Attempting to break the strike, Grupo Mexico announced the firing of more than 1,000 workers. Hundreds of federal police then began saturating the area around the mine defended by miners and a women’s defense force.

In solidarity with the Sonora strikers, mine and metal industry workers blockaded shipments of containers scheduled for export from the Pacific Coast port of Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan, near the border with Guerrero.Back in Sonora, miners took over a highway toll booth. At one demonstration, the Cananea strikers cried out: “If there is no solution, there will be revolution!”

As the Cananea strike approached its second anniversary, Sonora Governor Eduardo Bours appealed on the federal government to find a solution amicable to all parties.

Sources: El Sur, May 12 and 13, 2009. Articles by Zacarias Cervantes, Ismael Flores and Jesus Saavedra. La Jornada (Guerrero). April 17, 2009; May 12 and 13, 2009. Articles by Laura Reyes, Margena De La O, Lenin Ocampo, Rodolfo Valadez Luviano, Marlen Castro, and Francisca Meza Carranza. El Diario de Chihuahua, May 13, 2009. El Diario de Juarez, May 12, 2009. Despertar de la Costa, May 12, 2009. Article by Francisca Meza Carranza.

Cedema.org., May 10, 2009.PDPR-EPR, Communique. La Jornada, April 14 and 16, 2009; May 7, 2009. Articles by Ulises Gutierrez Ruelas, Reuters and
Notimex. El Universal, April 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 2009; May 7, 8, 11,13 2009. Articles by Julian Sanchez, Marcelo Deyliss, Doris Gomora, Adriana Covarrubias Sandoval, editorial staff, EFE and Notimex. Cimacnoticias.com, April 14, 2009. Article by Silvia Nunez Esquer. Letter to the US Congress, May 6, 2009. Mexican human rights NGOs.

Narco Billboards Unlimited

Almost like a public relations blitz rolled out from Madison Avenue, so-called narco banners proliferated throughout the Mexican borderlands and interior in recent days. For four days running last week, narco banners were publicly displayed in numerous cities in at least 14 Mexican states. In some places, banners went back up almost as quickly as they were pulled down by authorities. States where narco banners were posted included Chihuahua, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Aguascalientes, Nuevo Leon, Guerrero, and Veracruz, among others.

Evoking a highly-coordinated campaign, the banners, with slight variations, had essentially the same message. Directed at Mexican President Felipe Calderon and three high-ranking federal law enforcement officials, including Federal Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, the anonymous authors urged officials to respect the sanctity of presumed narcos’ family members.

Alluding to official complicity with rival narcos, the message implored President Calderon to open his eyes to the “class of people” in charge of the narco war. Posted in various cities in Guerrero, a version of the message accused federal police of forced disappearance, murder and the rape of women in Nuevo Laredo and other unnamed places.

As in similar episodes, the modus operandi of the banner posters was the same. Large handmade messages, bearing practically the same wording, were draped across highly transited public thoroughfares under the cover of darkness, with pedestrian overpasses serving as popular, makeshift billboard backgrounds.

In Acapulco, a narco banner was displayed across the Maxi-Tunnel that connects the older and tourist sections of the port city to the heavily-populated working class suburbs on the other side of the tropical hills that ring the Bay of Santa Lucia. In Oaxaca City, a narco banner was posted in front of the headquarters of the PRI party.

As in previous incidents, no one was detained, and there were no eyewitness accounts forthcoming. The geography of the most recent wave of narco bannering corresponded to areas where the Juarez, Gulf and Beltran-Leyva organizations have a strong presence. Mexican press reports this year have contended the three groups are now allied against the Sinaloa Cartel.

The narco banners’ effect on public opinion is not clear, but the ability of presumed crime syndicates to almost simultaneously set up what amount to public billboards across a big swath of the Mexican Republic challenges authorities’ assertions that governmental actions are seriously disrupting cartel operations.

In Ciudad Juarez, the discovery of narco banners preceded the May 14 visit of President Felipe Calderon by mere hours. Accompanied by Defense Secretary Galvan, President Calderon reviewed Mexican troops assigned to Joint Operation Chihuahua, and rendered homage to 83 soldiers killed while serving on anti-drug missions.

During his brief visit to the Paso del Norte borderland, President Calderon announced the children of all soldiers will receive government grants for higher education studies, and soldiers as well as police officers will be protected by tougher laws. The military’s role in the drug war is not “permanent,” President Calderon said, but will continue until reliable civilian police forces are in the field.

“It is worth the trouble to reiterate that our struggle isn’t to just liberate children and youth from the claws of slavery that addictions represent,” President Calderon said in a speech. “It’s also because crime has directed itself against the citizenry.”

Almost comparing himself to Mexican President Benito Juarez, who fought French invaders from internal exile in Ciudad Juarez during the 1860s, President Calderon vowed the narco will be vanquished in Ciudad Juarez.

“With (soldiers) at the front, the citizenry knows that Juarez doesn’t have to be a city destined for impunity, corruption or violence,” the Mexican leader said, crediting the army for what he termed an “important reduction” of violence.

On the occasion of the president’s visit, the local Diario de Juarez newspaper published an open letter reminding President Calderon of a previous commitment he reportedly made to get to the bottom of the murder of reporter Armando Rodriguez, who was shot to death last November in a crime that is still unpunished.

Within a 48 hour-period following President Calderon’s visit, at least 10 people killed in gangland-style slayings in and around Ciudad Juarez. Two men were machine-gunned to death the evening of May 15 in front of a large crowd inside the San Martin Bar, an establishment which is located across the street from the local delegation of the federal attorney general’s office. One of the victims, Roberto Acosta, was reportedly celebrating his birthday.

An evening earlier, two severed heads were found within yards of their bodies near a Mexico-US border crossing south of the city. In other local incidents, a 16-year-old girl was reported snatched from a car in a popular shopping mall parking lot, and a man was shot and wounded while riding aboard a public bus.

Violence continued elsewhere in Mexico. In Aguascalientes, police commander Alberto Collazo Alvarado was shot and killed on May 14, while the body of a woman, Isabel Solano, was found stuffed in a car trunk in Chihuahua City on the same evening.

By Saturday, May 16, Mexican soldiers and police from different agencies were involved in a massive search and seal operation in several central Mexican states after an armed commando disguised as federal policemen busted 54 prisoners loose from the Cieneguillas prison in the state of Zacatecas.

And in the southern state of Tabasco, gunmen did not respect the narco banners’ family integrity message. A bloody attack this past week took the lives of Comalcalco police commander Baldomero Garcia Rodriguez and seven members of his family, including four children.

Sources: Lapolaka.com, May 14, 15 and 16. Diario de Juarez, May 14, 15 and 16, 2009. Articles by Sandra Rodriguez Nieto and editorial staff. El Universal, May 14, 15 and 16, 2009. Articles by Roberto Barboza, Irma Mejia and the Notimex news agency. Norte, May 15, 2009. Article by Felix A. Gonzalez. El Sur, May 15, 2009. Articles by Aurora Harrison, Noe Aguirre and Agencia Proceso. Enlineadirecta.info, May 14, 2009. Article by David Diaz. Frontera/SUN, May 14, 2009.

The “Blue Flu” Strikes a Border Town

Disaffected members of the Piedras Negras police force in the Mexican border state of Coahuila returned to work Wednesday, April 22, after staging an overnight work stoppage. Some 50 officers assigned to the graveyard shift conducted the protest to express opposition to the new policies of a retired Mexican colonel, Arturo Navarro Lopez, who assumed command of the police department two weeks ago.

Dissident officers refused to work in protest of humiliating and abusive policies imposed by the new police chief, according to news accounts. Family members of some officers also supported the protest; an unidentified relative of a police officer complained to a local newspaper prior to the protest about a beating allegedly inflicted by Mexican soldiers.

As a result of the brief police strike, Piedras Negras was left without regular law enforcement coverage the evening of April 21 and the early morning of April 22. Army and state police patrols filled the void left by disenchanted municipal officers.

One version of the dispute reported that officers were afraid they were going to be fired because of weight issues or positive results of pending drug test results. Details of the conflict, however, remained sketchy.

The border “blue flu” provoked reactions from government officials and everyday citizens. After the work stoppage ended, Piedras Negras Mayor Raul Vela pledged to consider the officers’ demands. Coahuila Governor Humberto Moreira condemned the strike as the wrong way to express grievances, adding the officers were giving a bad example to the citizenry.

The web site of a local news publication also drew several comments, most in opposition to the police action. Calling the police “corrupt,” a writer identified as Hector congratulated Piedras Negras’ new police chief for “putting (police) to work.” A writer identified as Aracely agreed the action was incorrect, but said it should be assumed good police exist as well as bad ones and the strikers “should be listened to” and their demands examined.

The sister city of Eagle Pass, Texas, Piedras Negras is located in an historic coal-producing region that later attracted export assembly plants known as maquiladoras. In recent years, Piedras Negras has been the scene of narco-violence allegedly involving members of the Zetas crime organization. Piedras Negras is among a growing number of Mexican municipalities that are turning responsibility for civilian law enforcement over to men with military backgrounds.

Sources: El Universal, April 21 and 22, 2009. Articles by Hilda Fernandez Valverde. Zocalo.com.mx, April 22, 2009. Article by Valentin Valdes.

Border Militarization Deepens

The assignment of Mexican military personnel to civilian law enforcement duties along the Mexico-US border is growing by the day. In Tijuana, Baja California, Mayor Jorge Ramos Hernandez named three military men to key policing positions this week.

Mayor Ramos swore in Captain Francisco Ortega Zamora as operational head of the Tijuana police force, while he gave two other officials, Air Force Captain Victor Manuel de la Cruz and Lieutenant Adrian Hernandez, the titles of commander and assistant commander, respectively, of the strategic central Tijuana sector.

Fulfilling a 2007 campaign pledge to put soldiers at the helm of crime-fighting, Mayor Ramos said the goal of the appointments was to root out deep-seated corruption and break the stranglehold of organized crime on civilian law enforcement authorities.

In comments made at the swearing-in ceremony for the trio of new police officials, Mayor Ramos said he was convinced his administration was on the “right road” to reclaiming the rule of law. Besides swearing in the new police commanders, the border mayor took oaths of service from 225 officers who reportedly passed corruption tests.

An unscientific, online poll conducted by the Tijuana newspaper Frontera found an overwhelming majority of respondents agreed the presence of military police chiefs in central Tijuana would curb crime. As of March 18, 348 respondents, or 84.08 percent of the total participants in the survey, clicked on the yes button in answer to the question if military police participation would reduce criminal activities in a conflictive part of the city.

In Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, meanwhile, local officials, in coordination with Mexico’s Defense Ministry, continued placing 14 retired or active-duty military personnel in the highest police jobs. As in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez’s civilian police force has been the scene of numerous scandals involving police officers and organized crime.

In a surprise but not completely unexpected move, retired General David Julian Rivera Breton, who was appointed as the city’s new public safety chief this week, disarmed an estimated 1,600 local police officers pending corruption tests. Many police officers were then ordered to act as chauffeurs for soldiers patrolling the streets or put on indefinite furlough.

As General Rivera showed an initial firm hand, more details of the new police chief’s  background emerged. In addition to previous service in states well-known for drug trafficking, General Rivera was part of the government campaign against the indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army in the state of Chiapas 15 years ago.

Since thousands of new troops began streaming into Ciudad Juarez late last month, violence has significantly dropped. Armed commandoes, who roamed the streets at will in recent months, have mysteriously melted from the scene. Instead of confronting cartel gunmen, soldiers are carrying out routine police and customs duties. In recent days, army personnel have ticketed motorists for driving older, polluting vehicles or have checked the import/export bays at international bridges.

In US Senate testimony this week, General Victor E. Renuart, Jr., head of the US Department of Defense’s Northern Command, confirmed the US military is collaborating with the Mexican armed forces. General Renuart said efforts to strengthen military capabilities on the border were a positive step.

While the dispatch of fresh troops and the appointment of military personnel to direct civilian law enforcement operations in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez significantly expand the breadth and scope of the Mexican armed forces’ role in public life, military involvement in anti-drug and other law enforcement campaigns is far from new, even though the Mexican Constitution does not allow for the type of activities currently performed by soldiers on the border and in the interior of the nation.

For decades, Mexican soldiers and marines have been assigned the jobs of uprooting drug plantings and seizing narcotics on highways and sea lanes. In various states of the Republic, retired or on-leave military men are often the choice picks to lead local or state police departments.

A big difference between the current round of border deployments and military appointments and earlier anti-drug campaigns undertaken by the Mexican armed forces is the shift away from rural areas to urban ones.

An official 2008 military document obtained by the Reforma News Agency via Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act provides some details of the change in strategy. According to the news service, the Mexican military plans this year to significantly decrease drug crop elimination programs, which often target poor farmers, and instead focus on high-impact, urban crime areas.

The armed forces intend to more than double the number of personnel assigned to urban zones in at least seven states from 13,000 to 27,000 soldiers during 2009, according to Reforma.  Currently, 45,000 troops are active in the drug war across the country, with nearly one-fifth of the total now stationed in Ciudad Juarez alone.

The urban troop “surge” in Ciudad Juarez and other cities takes place less than four months before voters go to the polls to elect a new federal Congress. Aside from a highly visible security presence, a sensationalistic media atmosphere helps defines and shape the 2009 election year.

The two main television networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, generously fill their broadcast time with stories of narco-violence, decapitations and kidnappings, while a small political party, the Mexican Green Party, plasters the country’s streets with expensive, large billboards and bus banners urging the death penalty for murderers and kidnappers. And to make sure everyone gets the message, the Mexican Greens zap robo-calls into homes and offices.

To put the overall political-social situation in a broader historical context, civilian authorities frequently call on the military during crises. Sometimes, the results are far different than what was officially proposed.

In 1997, for example, a huge scandal erupted after General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, head of the National Institute to Combat Drugs and a darling of Washington, was jailed and charged with being on the payroll of the Juarez drug cartel.

Later, another military man highly praised by the Bush administration, General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, served as federal attorney general during the first few years of the Fox administration. With the assistance of the FBI and other US law enforcement agencies, General Macedo de la Concha embarked on a drive to professionalize Mexico's federal police, the main civilian police force responsible for enforcing drug laws.

Yet many analysts agree that drug trafficking and other organized criminal activities flourished to new heights during the Fox years.

“The depth of the penetration of the agenda of the Fox administration by the Sinaloa Cartel was being investigated,” recently wrote prominent columnist and political analyst Raymundo Riva Palacio. “But a leak from Los Pinos (Mexico’s White House) to a journalist caused the failure of this operation.

Despite previous scandals tainting the Mexican military, most Mexicans still view the armed forces as far more resistant to corruption than are civilian police.

By putting men in uniform in charge of the law in Mexico’s two principal centers of the narco war, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, the Calderon administration, in collaboration with local and state elected officials from both the PRI and PAN political parties, is embarking on a high-stakes gamble that the public security crisis can be calmed with the threat of or the actual application of the iron fist promised by presidential Felipe Calderon candidate during the 2006 presidential campaign.

The policy not only puts the reputation and institutional integrity of the military on the line, but it creates new sets of circumstances that contain uncertain outcomes for the futures of constitutional law and civilian governance.

Additional sources:  Frontera/Sun, March 18, 2009. Diario de Juarez, March 18, 2009. Norte, March 18, 2009.  Article by Francisco Lujan. Lapolaka.com, March 18, 2009. El Universal, March 17, 2009. Articles by Luis Carlos Cano and Julieta Martinez. El Sur, February 5 and 18, 2009. Articles by Agencia Reforma and Raymundo Riva Palacio.

All Not Quiet on the Southwestern Front

A glance at Mexico’s ongoing narco war reveals a low-intensity civil conflict that rises, subsides and then rears up again in various geographic locations. For example, the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo was torn by intense violence from 2003 to 2006 but is relatively quiet today in comparison with other places.

In 2009, one of the hottest zones is what might be termed the Southwestern Front covering the states of Michoacan and Guerrero, especially the Tierra Caliente and Costa Grande regions. Currently, three or four cartels are fighting for control of areas that encompass opium poppy production, cocaine shipment corridors, methamphetamine maquiladoras, and increasingly important local, retail drug markets. Almost daily, murders, kidnappings and shoot-outs disturb the peace of numerous towns.

On Saturday, February 28, the body of an official working for the municipal government of La Union, Guerrero, was found stuffed in the back of a stolen taxi. So-called “narco-messages” were spray-painted on the exterior of the vehicle and left inside the car.

A former member of the center-left PRD party, Rolando Landa Hernandez had bolted the organization last fall to run on the ticket of the rival PRI party in the October 2008 local elections. Reported kidnapped days earlier, Landa was found tortured and shot to death on the outskirts of La Union. The “narco-messages” were purportedly directed against “Los Pelones,” or the reputed gunslingers of the Beltran-Leyva brothers, and conveyed death threats against 8 individuals.

On February 25, travelers on the Acapulco-Zihuatenejo highway got a first-hand taste of the narco war at the junction to San Miguelito, a village located about 15 minutes from Zihuatanejo. Approaching the turn-off, bus travelers saw a truck in flames as heavily-armed police scoured a mango orchard off the highway.

Only minutes before the arrival of the passenger bus, witnesses reported seeing three SUVs carrying a many as 20 armed men ambush a patrol of the Zihuatanejo municipal police. Two grenade explosions and heavy automatic arms fire rattled the late afternoon quiet of the rural area, according to eye-witness accounts, Halted by police for more than two hours, travelers in both directions watched as the bodies of four slain officers burned in the truck’s wreckage.

“It feels like this is a real bad television program. I’m sitting here watching this, which has never happened to me in my life before and it just seems so unreal,” said Gail Robertson, a Canadian national who was traveling to Zihuatanejo by bus. “People are very calm and collected and watching this horrible tragedy that just happened. There are four men dead and their widows are going to be knowing shortly that their husbands have just been shot to death,” Robertson told Frontera NorteSur.. The tourist said the incident wouldn’t immediately change her plans to stay in Zihuatanejo for one month.

The slain officers were identified as Mateo Gutierrez Vejar, Virginio Flores, Gregorio Villafuerte Hernandez and Adrian Martinez Zarco. Like clockwork, the tabloid newspaper El Alarmante was back on the streets of Guerrero the next day. The sensationalistic publication featured gruesome images of the burned officers’ corpses. At presstime, no suspects in the San Miguelito attack had been reported arrested.

On the same day of the San Miguelito ambush, seven men were shot to death the Tierra Caliente region that straddles Guerrero and Michoacan.The area between Zihuatanejo and the town of Petatlan about thirty minutes away was the scene of intense disputes between organized criminal gangs during 2006-07, but later calmed down to an extent. However, violence has been escalating since last spring, a period of time which coincides with the reported rupture within the Sinaloa cartel between Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Arturo Beltran Leyva and his “pelones.” Policemen, many of whom are widely presumed to be on the take of one group or another, are frequently the target of attacks.

Last December 23, Mexican soldiers arrested Zihuatanejo’s deputy police chief along with 22 other policemen and civilians at a cock fight in Zihuatanejo. The detainees were accused of providing protection to the Beltran Leyva group. Following a Christmas season break, Zihuatanejo heated up again in January after federal police and soldiers searched private businesses and confiscated property that included motor boats, a form of transportation popular with cocaine smugglers who use ocean routes. Since the late January raids, shoot-outs and murders have intensified in both Zihuatanejo and Petatlan.

On February 21, a two-time municipal president of Petatlan was shot to death in broad daylight in front of scores of people. Only hours before his murder, former mayor Javier Rodriguez Aceves, who had represented both the PRI and PRD parties during his political career, had staged a press conference in Zihuatanejo in which he denounced the Mexican army for arresting his son, Ricardo Alejandro Rodriguez, for alleged involvement in the Beltran-Leyva crime underworld.

Also on the weekend of February 21, two policemen and three civilians were injured after two grenades were tossed at the main Zihuatanejo police station. The Monday following the grenade attack, 345 Zihuatanejo municipal police staged a 10-hour work stoppage for better protection, higher wages and improved working conditions. Days later, police headquarters is sand-bagged and resembles a military outpost.

Although violence is on the upswing and many locals are unnerved, the narco-war has not significantly altered nightlife in the tourist destination of Zihuatanejo so far. Large numbers of people attend evening mass, turn out to nightclubs and restaurants, and show off at the Cultural Sundays program on the main beach.

A young man who returned to Mexico last year after working 10 years in the US construction industry, Rogelio Gabino lives near the scene of the San Miguelito ambush.. Gabino said he and his neighbors were accustomed to the violence, but acknowledged residents were mulling over the idea of convening a meeting with authorities to demand better security.

“I think I hear so many incidents like (San Miguelito) in Mexico. I think it is part of this place. It is normal. You hear guns, people killed,” Gabino said. “But I kind of think about where I am living…”

As on the US-Mexico border, the narco-violence in Guerrero and Michoacan is providing a convenient cover for other types of crimes and human rights violations. On February 13, Jean Paul Ibarra Ramirez, a photographer for El Correo newspaper, was shot to death in Iguala, Guerrero, in an incident that could involve a homicidal mixture of personal and professional motives. A reporter for the Diario 21 newspaper, Yenny Yulian Marchan Arroyo, was also seriously wounded in the shooting.

The international community was shocked by the February kidnapping and subsequent murder of two indigenous leaders, Raul Lucas Lucia and Manuel Ponce Rosas, in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero. Less than two months before the twin assassinations, Homero Lorenzo, a former mayor of the town of Ayutla and a 2008 candidate for the Guerrero state legislature, was murdered in the same region where Lucas and Ponce were active.

Leaders of the Organization for the Future of the Mixtec People (OPFM), Lucas and Ponce were detained in Ayutla February 13 by three men claiming to be police officers. Despite an urgent appeal from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to the Mexican government, Lucas and Ponce were later found dead with signs of torture on their bodies.

The OPFM and Lucas, in particular, have had a long-running series of conflicts with the Mexican government and army. In 1998, members of the OPFM were among the 11 people killed in El Charco, Guerrero, when Mexican soldiers opened fire on a school where indigenous farmers were meeting with rebels from the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI).

In 2006, Lucas filed a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) after he was detained and interrogated by the Mexican army. In 2007, the Mixtec activist was wounded in a shooting he barely survived. Alleging new abuses in the Mixtec region, Lucas filed more human rights complaints last year against the Mexican army. Now, Lucas himself is the subject of a post-mortem investigation by the CNDH.

The murders of Lucas and Ponce were condemned by the Mexico office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Guerrero state and federal lawmakers, and numerous human rights advocates in Mexico and abroad. Hipolito Lugo Cortes, investigator for the official Guerrero State Human Rights Commission, called the kidnap-murders “a crime against humanity.” Supporters of the slain activists suspect government complicity in the crimes.

Spurred on the chaos of the narco war, Guerrero could be rapidly slipping back into the brutality, impunity and repression characteristic of the 1970s Dirty War when the Mexican state disappeared hundreds of suspected guerrillas and dissidents, observers warn. More than thirty years later, a deadly combination of political and criminal violence threatens to put a damper on any meaningful movements toward democratic governance, respect for human rights and the rule of law.

How Clean is Operation Clean-Up?

When Mexican President Felipe Calderon and US President-elect Barack Obama meet this coming week, Mexico´s drug war will be high on the agenda of items up for discussion. President Calderon might even bring up Operation Clean-Up, the Mexican government´s declared campaign to cleanse federal law enforcement of corruption by organized crime.

The latest name to be associated with the probe is that of the late Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, who served as head of the federal attorney general´s elite anti-organized crime squad, SIEDO, during the Fox administration. By most accounts, Santiago Vasconcelos was also the Bush administration´s man in Mexico. From the vantage point of the Potomac, he was viewed as an uncorruptable ally in a common war against drugs and vice.

But according to an account published in the Mexican press, Santiago Vasconcelos presided over a $35 million payment to SIEDO from the Beltran Leyva drug cartel in 2006 and 2007. The accusation was made in a legal declaration to the Office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR) by a protected witness called “Emiliano.”

Of course, Santiago Vasconcelos cannot defend himself from the serious accusation in the Mexican press; he was killed in a strange plane accident last November 4, US election day, along with Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino, President Calderon´s right-hand man.

If Emiliano´s statement is true, it could greatly help explain the lack of progress in clearing up many of the Ciudad Juarez femicides in addition to the forced disappearances of numerous men in the same city.

When Santiago Vasconcelos was at the helm, SIEDO was in charge of investigating the fates of nearly 200 men, including dozens of US citizens, whose disappearances in Ciudad Juarez were suspected of being engineered by drug traffickers. SIEDO, which was portrayed early on as Mexico´s version of “The Untouchables,” was once put in charge of investigating about a dozen of the Ciudad Juarez women´s murders, including the emblematic 2001 cotton field case.

A SIEDO case against three men for the cotton field crimes later fell apart amid unproven stories of human organ traffickers harvesting the body parts of young women. Not a single femicide or forced disappearance investigated by SIEDO in Ciudad Juarez was ever solved.

If Emiliano´s accusation is untrue, it would add more confusion to the scandal swirling around Operation Clean-Up, which so far has resulted in the detention of 10 former officials from the PGR, Mexican army and Interpol. Additionally, 35 SIEDO investigators have been sacked from their jobs since last summer.

The legal cases rely heavily on the statements of at least a half-dozen protected witnesses, whose credibilities are questioned by some.

For example, Miguel Colorado, the former tecnical coordinator for SIEDO, who is now sitting in the maximum security Puente Grande prison accused of protecting Sinaloa drug traffickers. Known as the “Old Man of the Heavens” because of his reported Bible-reading affinities, Colorado is facing extradition to the United States.

Unlike other alleged traffickers, however, Colorado is looking forward to his day in US court, according to the accused man´s son, Miguel Colorado Luke. Calling the charges against his father baseless, Colorado Luke told Proceso magazine that his family had faith in the US justice system.

“Given this reality the family has decided to face trial in the US, where we are going to win,” Colorado Luke said. “Later we will file a counter-suit against the PGR, which will be exposed internationally as an institution that, with dirty methods, plans to move forward with its Operation Clean-Up.”

For both Mexico City and Washington, the stakes are high in regards to the outcome of Operation Clean-Up. Successful prosecutions of Colorado and other officials would bolster the current drug war strategy of the Calderon administration, which is the recipient of increased US military and security assistance under the Merida Initiative, a program unlikely to immediately change under the incoming Obama administration.

On the slip side of the coin, the failure of Operation Clean-Up could cast more doubt on the viability of a binational drug war that now counts decades and tens of thousands dead on both sides of the border.

Additional sources: Agencia Reforma, January 10, 2009. Proceso, January 4, 2009. Article by Ricardo Ravelo.

Guns Galore

A man arrested in connection with the largest reported weapons seizure in recent Mexican history remains jailed in a maximum security prison outside Mexico City.
Jaime Gonzalez Duran, alias “The Hummer,” was arrested November 7 along with two other men in the northern border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, by the Mexican army and Federal Preventive Police.

In the Reynosa raid, federal authorities confiscated 428 guns, 287 grenades and more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition. A rocket launcher, fourteen sticks of TNT and other explosive material were also recovered. A military deserter, Gonzalez is alleged to be a co-founder of the Zetas crime gang, which hatched as the armed wing of the Gulf drug cartel but reportedly later branched out on its own to at least 17 Mexican states and the Federal District.  

In the aftermath of Gonzalez’s detention, the Mexican press quoted a document attributed to federal security agencies and the armed forces that detailed weapons confiscations from December 1, 2006 to October 30, 2008, the first 23 months of the administration of
President Felipe Calderon.  

Mexican officials purportedly seized 25,657 guns- including 13,807 assault and other rifles- 1,642  grenades and 2.4 million rounds of ammunition.

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the arms were seized in the states of Tamaulipas,  Michoacan,  Jalisco, Sonora, and Chihuahua, all entities with high degrees of  narco-violence. The Gulf Cartel was the organization hit hardest by the law enforcement actions, according to the report. Authorities linked seizures of M72 and AT-4 anti-tank rockets, RPG-7 grenade launchers and other military weaponry to the criminal organization.

The Reynosa bust and subsequent revelations of weapons confiscations raise important questions. Mexican and US law enforcement authorities routinely pin the soaring levels of narco-violence in Mexico on gun-smuggling from the United States, where firearms are much easier to legally obtain. Legal gun shops and gun shows are frequently cited as sources for the deadly contraband, and sometimes arrests are made.

To stem the flow of weapons across the border, proposals are or in place or in the air to tighten sales at US gun shows, increase vehicle checkpoints at border crossings and improve data bases of  weapons purchases by US citizens so guns could be better traced if they wind up in the wrong hands south of the border.

Recently, Mexican military police randomly stopped and searched pedestrians on one of the international bridges between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Yet many of the weapons confiscated in Reynosa and elsewhere in the Mexican Republic are not run-of-the mill guns for sale at the corner store or weekend show. In the US, it is simply not legal to sell grenades and anti-tank missiles alongside deer rifles. And AK-47s, the preferred weapon of the narco gunslinger, are manufactured in many different countries.

So, what then is the origin of the bulk of illicit weapons used in Mexico? Are significant numbers of US gun dealers maintaining legal fronts just to run an illegal cross-border business? Are crates of automatic weapons from throughout the world somehow sneaking by Mexican port inspectors? Are government officials in both the US and Mexico with access to military weaponry operating a bloody but profitable business? Unfortunately, few answers to these questions have been forthcoming.  With respect to grenades, for example, Mexican authorities have yet to publicly reveal how so many of the devices are floating around and exploding across the country. 

Meanwhile, guns and bombs continue to blaze across Mexico. In one 24-hour period in Ciudad Juarez earlier this week, at least 11 people were slain gangland-style, including two men and two women who were gunned down during broad daylight in front of a hospital. A headless body was dumped in front of a police station, while another couple was machine-gunned while driving on a busy street in the center of the border city.  

In the Baja California cities of Tijuana and Playas de Rosarito, 9 killings initiated a bloody week that continued to get bloodier. The victims included Omar Rodriguez, an ex-state police agent and a former bodyguard for world boxing champ Erick “El Terrible” Morales, and 33-year-old Alejandro Esquivel Baez, who was shot in his home by assassins as he ate dinner with his wife and two young daughters.

In Sinaloa, between 50-100 armed men traveling in 15 pickup trucks kidnapped 27 men identified as agricultural laborers November 10 from La Guajira tomato and cucumber farm, a property linked to an in-law of the Carrillo Fuentes family of Juarez Cartel fame. And in Chihuahua City, also the scene of numerous executions, firebombs scorched the chic Maria Chuchena restaurant and El Dorado seafood diner in an upscale section of the city. On November 11, bomb threats prompted the closure of one university campus and the evacuation of the Plaza del Sol mall.

According to a story in El Universal, nearly 4,500 people have been murdered in narco-related incidents during 2008 so far-a record high.

Sources: Norte, November 11, 2008. Article by Carlos Huerta. Frontera, November 11, 2008. Univision, November 11, 2008. Lapolaka.com, November 10, 11 and 12, 2008. La Jornada, November 8, 10 and 11, 2008. Articles by Gustavo Castillo, Miroslava Breach, Antonio Heras, editorial staff, and the Notimex news agency. El Universal, November 11 and 12,  2008. Articles  by Javier Cabrera and the EFE news service.

The Joy and Sorrow of November 4, 2008  

The historic 2008 US election that catapulted Barack Obama to the White House was fast on its way to becoming the top story in Mexican media. As the afternoon of November 4 wore on, stories began appearing of voting in Chicago, El Paso and other cities. “US citizens of Mexican origin are going out to vote in large numbers, and even when long lines are not observed in their neighborhoods, the precincts register a constant flow,” observed a dispatch from the Notimex news agency carried on La Jornada’s web site.

Then it happened. A small plane went down in the middle of Mexico City, killing at least 13 people and injuring 40 others.  Among the victims killed in the still-mysterious crash were Mexican Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino and Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, a high-ranking federal law enforcement official who once headed an elite anti-organized crime fighting unit, SIEDO, now embroiled in a scandal over top officials’ alleged links with drug traffickers.  

When he was in charge of SIEDO during the administration of former President Vicente Fox, Santiago Vasconcelos oversaw investigations of the Ciudad Juarez  femicides and the disappearances of numerous men in the border city. No real progress was made in either of the investigations.

When they were killed on November 4,  Mourino, Santiago Vasconcelos and other officials had just returned from San Luis Potosi after participating in an anti-organized crime meeting.

The Interior Ministry’s web site had just posted what turned out to be Mourino’s last public speech, but quickly yanked the statement and replaced it with a sober message from President Felipe Calderon. A rising young official, Mourino was a key promoter of President Calderon’s controversial Pemex reform and militarized drug war.

“Mexico has lost Mexican patriots who worked at the service of the Mexican state; Mexican men and women, who with their tireless and daily work, were constructing a better country for all,” President Calderon said. “(Mourino’s) death causes me enormous pain, but at the same time it is powerful motive for me to continue struggling without rest and more than ever for the ideals that we shared.”

Although causes of the crash are still under investigation, speculation of foul play is rampant in the Mexican press.

A longtime law enforcement official with experience in the Office of the Federal Attorney General, Santiago Vasconcelos had been involved in extremely sensitive probes involving drug lords, political donors and Pemex, among others. The career lawman reportedly was the target of death threats in recent weeks, and his family was put under military and police protection.

In a news analysis, Mexico’s El Universal daily compared Mourino’s death in the November 4 plane crash to a still-mysterious fatal helicopter crash that claimed the life of  federal public security chief Ramon Martin Huerta during the Fox administration. 

“The two cases have certain similarities,” El Universal noted. “Both (men) were an important part of the fight against drugs and both were men who were very close to the president.”

In its trademark style of hyperbolic, cutting commentary, Ciudad Juarez’s Lapolaka Internet news site assessed a day that will go down in history on both sides of the border.

“A black President reaches the White House for the first time since the founding of the United States, violence in Ciudad Juarez reaches horrific levels and the Interior Minister of Mexico, Juan Camilo Mourino,  dies in an air accident that smells of criminal terrorism,” Lapolaka declared. “It is the end of the world as we know it. The construction of a new, unknown one begins, which rises amid the ruins of a political, economic, social and moral system that’s still not finished falling to pieces.”

Sources: El Universal, November 5, 2008. El Diario de Juarez, November 5, 2008. La Jornada, November 3, 4 and 5, 2008.  Articles by Alfredo Mendez, Gustavo Castillo and the Notimex news agency. CNN, November 5, 2008. Lapolaka.com, November 4, 2008. Gobernacion.gob.mx.

The Narco War Spreads Inside Prison Walls

The scene is becoming depressingly familiar. Emotionally distraught families, usually numbering in the hundreds, gather outside the gates of a violence-torn Mexican prison in the hopes of hearing any tidbit of information about the fate of loved ones inside. The latest such drama was restaged early this week in the northern Mexican border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, as relatives anxiously waited to find out the names of survivors and victims of an early morning October 20  riot that left at least 21 inmates dead and another 17 hospitalized.

Many of the victims of the Reynosa violence were burned beyond immediate recognition, killed in a fire apparently set by inmates before police and Mexican army troops retook the state prison facility. Fifty one prisoners were later transferred to other prisons in Tamaulipas, and the warden of the Reynosa penitentiary, Carlos Hernandez Vega, was fired and put under investigation. The prison uprising was preceded by the mass escape of 17 inmates on October 9.

Reynosa was not an isolated incident in the increasingly explosive world of Mexican prisons. Since the beginning of the year, 62 inmates have been killed and more than 100 injured in prison disturbances registered in 9 Mexican states. On repeated occasions, Mexican federal police and soldiers were dispatched to quell violent outbreaks.

While overcrowding and staff mistreatment of inmates are factors in some of the upheavals, a good deal of the violence can be traced to conflicts between rival gangs fighting for control of prisons.

Andres Castro, an investigator for the official National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), blamed drug gangs for sparking riots and armed confrontations at prisons in the states of Baja California, Nuevo Leon, Sinaloa and Zacatecas in recent weeks. In some cases,  battles escalated to the point where military weapons were employed. On October 17,  for instance, two fragmentation grenades wounded 10 inmates of the Sinaloa state prison in Culiacan. Since 2005, 50 prisoners have been killed and another 44 have escaped from Sinaloa jails. The Pacific Coast state is the scene of a war between followers of reputed drug lords Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Arturo Beltan Leyva and his allies.

Mexican prisons are important drug “plazas” in their own right, places where contraband trafficking and protection rackets rake in serious dollars. Control of a prison, with its literally captive customers and clients, could even prove more lucrative than dominating markets on the outside.

Prison staff  are frequently implicated in the black market and subsequent violence. Whether due to complicity or non-cooperation, guards and other prison officials are sometimes the targets of gangland-style executions both inside and outside the walls. On October 15, three guards assigned to the Chihuahua state prison were gunned down at a bus stop on a heavily-traveled street in Ciudad Juarez while waiting for transportation to take them to work. Several other guards who had not yet arrived escaped possible death.  

For decades, violent and corrupt conditions have festered in Tamaulipas and other Mexican prisons amid soaring inmate populations. In 1991, for example, 17 prisoners belonging to one drug trafficking gang were killed by rivals in a Matamoros prison. In 1992, seven more inmates were killed in a similar dispute that rattled the Tamaulipas state prison in Ciudad Victoria.

Besides lax security and overcrowding, the CNDH’S Andres Castro blamed the practice of mixing inmates from antagonistic gangs in the same cell blocks or living quarters for fanning much of the most recent violence. Castro recommended that federal and local authorities practice better information-sharing  to avoid placing enemies within strike distance of one another, and suggested the  establishment of more maximum -security prisons for “dangerous” individuals.

Sources: La Jornada, October 21 and 22, 2008. Articles by Julia Antonieta Le Duc, Martin Sanchez Trevino and correspondents. Enlineadirecta.info, October 21, 2008. Article by David Diaz.  Proceso/Apro, October 20 and 21, 2008. Articles by Gabriela Hernandez and editorial staff. El Universal, October 19, 2008. Article by Liliana Alcantara. El Diario de El Paso, October 16, 2008. Article by Armando Rodriguez.

Wars, Elections and Human Rights  

A few lyrics from an old Bob Marley song went like this:

War in the east
War in the west
War up north
War down south

Although Marley’s tune spoke about a different place and different circumstances, it captured the situation in Mexico during the last days of September and the first days of October. Across the country, more bodies piled up, more grenades were tossed and more  psychological warfare banners were displayed in a murky battle for public opinion.

The worst carnage was centered in Tijuana where drug cartels are battling for control of the local market bordering the United States. Anywhere from 53 to 61 people were found gruesomely murdered in a period of nine days, according to various press reports. In one case, two victims were hanged from a public overpass, and in another instance a dozen bodies were dumped in front of an elementary school.

Like a similar massacre in the state of Mexico last month, reports tied some killings to botched or planned efforts to build tunnels for moving contraband underneath the US-Mexico border.

Several of the Tijuana murders were accompanied by messages directed against “El Ingeniero,” an individual identified as Fernando Sanchez Arellano, who allegedly is the current head of Arellano Felix family that’s long dominated the Tijuana drug trade. 

According to media accounts, a new set of challengers consisting of dissident Arellano Felix members supported by Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel is attempting to wrest control of the Tijuana “plaza” from the old organization, which in turn is supported by an alliance of the Juarez Cartel, the Beltran-Leyva organization and the Zetas.

Four months ago, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, a high official with Mexico’s Office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR), declared that the federal government had paralyzed Chapo Guzman’s operations.

Closely following two local prison uprisings that left at least 23 people dead last month, the Tijuana violence is another sign that the war between rival cartels which escalated in Ciudad Juarez earlier this year has moved west. In between Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, the border city of   Nogales, Sonora, has become another battleground. From January to August of this year, 67 killings blamed on drug trafficking were counted in Nogales. Cited in the Mexican press, a Colombian newspaper, El Tiempo, reported that the the Mexican violence was connected to events in Colombia, where US-supported anti-drug campaigns and cartel restructurings have created power vacuums and competition for control of the international cocaine trade.

As summer turned into fall, violence showed no let-up in Mexico, with Friday, October 3, recorded as the bloodiest day in the year so far. At least 42 people were reported murdered across the country on Bloody Friday alone. 

In Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, prominent individuals like Francisco Sagrero Villareal were among the slain. A 43-year-old Ciudad Juarez resident who had been in the public limelight for posting signs asking that bodies not be dumped in his neighborhood, Sagrero was killed as bullets riddled his home on October 3.

In Chihuahua City, Aldo Arenivar Serna, a former deputy state attorney general, was gunned down in a shopping center parking lot. At the time of his murder, Arenivar was a member of a law firm associated with Fernando Rodriguez Moreno, the current head of the PRI political party’s fraction in the Chihuahua state legislature.

To the south, in the state of Durango, three people were reported killed in an October 3 clash between Mexican soldiers and suspected drug traffickers that was punctuated by automatic weapons fire and a grenade explosion. 

Meanwhile, six individuals from Durango were arraigned by the PGR for allegedly participating in recent violent attacks in the Juarez Valley bordering the US.

The incidents included the burning of a ranch and several homes, the kidnappings of at least two people and the murder of one. Reports of numerous families fleeing the rural zone continued to appear in the Mexican press.

Violence reared in many other areas including Sinaloa, Puebla and Nuevo Leon, where 9 patrol cars belonging to the Federal Preventive Police were torched. On October 3, the mayor of the town of Ixtapan de la Sal in the state of Mexico , Salvador Vergara, was gunned down.  

As the first week of October drew to a close, an estimated 3,000-3,500 people had been killed in narco-related violence in Mexico this year.

Arriving in Mexico City October 6 for meetings with high-ranking Calderon administration officials, US Attorney General Michael Mukasey declined to characterize the overall security situation as a crisis.  “There is no reason to be pessimistic,” Mukasey was quoted in the Mexican press. The Bush administration’s top law enforcement official said anti-narcotics assistance approved by the US Congress as part of the so-called Merida Initiative should begin flowing within the next couple weeks. Mukasey expressed  confidence that the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels were losing ground and would “fall over the long-term.”
 
On the streets, however, unknown individuals claiming the Gulf Cartel showed no intention of giving up anytime soon. So-called narco-banners purportedly signed by the group were displayed in Tamaulipas, Puebla, Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Durango, Sonora, and Veracruz states on the same day Mukasey touched down in Mexico.

The messages were similar to banners previously displayed in Reynosa, Cancun, Oaxaca and Mexico City that blamed a rival organization, La Familia, for the September 15 Independence Day celebration grenade attack in Morelia, Michoacan, that killed eight innocent bystanders. The banners offered rewards of millions of dollars for anyone helping to capture the alleged perpetrators of the attack.

In a bizarre twist to an already extraordinary situation, one of the messages claimed that members of La Familia, crazed by methamphetamines, had moved from being simple drug traffickers to Islamic-inspired terrorists.

In southern Guerrero state, meanwhile, issues of party politics, drugs, insurgency and counterinsurgency came together to create a volatile backdrop for the October 5 state and municipal elections. In the days leading up to the elections, several candidates and representatives from different political parties were killed or attacked, reports of attempted vote-buying circulated and several organizations called on citizens to boycott the political exercise. 

On October 1, El Sur reporter Karina Contreras wrote that she and three colleagues from other Acapulco newspapers were briefly detained by the Mexican army at a checkpoint set up on a road leading to land slated for the construction of the planned La Parota dam.
Facing the loss of their homes, many rural residents have organized stiff opposition to the project. According to Contreras, the journalists refused soldiers’ requests to erase film. 

Three days later, on October 4, Francisco Santos Arriola,  a federal deputy from the center-left  PRD  party, narrowly escaped what was reported as an attempted kidnapping by 15 armed men outside the Holiday Inn in the tourist resort of Ixtapa.

In a communiqué posted on the Internet, the leftist Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI), urged citizens to refrain from casting ballots. Born as an offshoot from the Popular Revolutionary Party in 1998, the ERPI accused the state’s major political parties of being in league with drug traffickers and repressors.

“How can (people) vote for candidates for public office when they are representatives of drug-trafficking groups?” the ERPI asked.

The guerrilla organization said paramilitary groups headed by military officials were responsible for murdering and disappearing people in the Costa Chica, Costa Grande and Tierra Caliente regions of the state.

In an interview with the Mexican press, a researcher from the Autonomous University of Guerrero credited counterinsurgency motives for the promotion of drug trafficking in different regions of his impoverished state during the 1960s and 1970s.

“Now we can see the consequences of this stupidity just by looking at the wave of executions in the these regions and especially in Tierra Caliente,” said Arturo Miranda Ramirez.  Calling Guerrero a “laboratory for repression,” Miranda said the state has suffered massacres, counterinsurgency campaigns and low-intensity warfare for decades now.

For whatever reasons, a majority of eligible voters, perhaps as many as 60-65 percent, did indeed boycott the October 5 elections.

The preliminary results gave the former ruling PRI, which lost many offices including the governorship and state congress in Guerrero in recent years, a solid victory. If upheld, the vote reconfirms the tendency of the PRI to win elections where voter turnouts are low, and it augurs well for the party in the upcoming 2009 federal congressional elections.  Irregularities were reported in Sunday’s Guerrero elections, including vote-buying and widespread delays in opening the polls on time.

In a serious outbreak of political violence, members of a rural community in the state of Chiapas near the Guatemalan border accused state and federal police of killing six people, injuring 10 and detaining an undetermined of number of others in a conflict over the future of the  Chinkultic archeological ruin. Members of the Ejido Miguel Hidalgo in the municipality of La Trinitaria had earlier seized the old Mayan city after contending that authorities were allowing a tourist-dollar generating enterprise to fall into disarray.

The dispute culminated in a police raid on the ejido in which counter-attacking residents captured scores of officers and their weapons. On October 3, police responded with a tear-gas laden assault that resulted in the deaths and injuries. Chiapas’ state justice minister was later quoted as saying that five policemen are under investigation for four deaths.
 
The nationwide violence coincided with Mexico’s unofficial observance of the 40th anniversary of the massacre of students in Mexico City. Different accounts hold the army responsible for killing anywhere between 26 and 300 students during a pro-democracy demonstration on the eve of the 1968 Olympic Games held in the Mexican capital. Although subsequent government probes linked members of the military, former President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz and former Interior Minister and President Luis Echeverria to the massacre, no one was ever held accountable for the killings.

The memory of October 2 was raised during a Ciudad Juarez protest staged by relatives of individuals accused of drug offenses last week. Gathered outside federal court offices, scores of people accused the army of torturing suspects and fabricating legal charges. “We don’t want another Mexico 1968,” read one protest placard.

Sources: El Universal, October 3, 4, 5, 6, 2008. Articles by Julieta Martinez, Francisco Meza-Carranza, Rafael Rivera, Silvia Otero, Notimex, and correspondents. Univision, October 6, 2008. Norte, October 3, 2008. Articles by Pablo Hernandez Batista and Angel Zubia Garcia. Lapolaka.com, October 1, 3 and 5, 2008. Frontenet.com, October 1, 2008. Article by Sergio Valdes. El Sur, October 2 , 5 and 6, 2008. Articles by Karina Contreras,  and editorial staff.

NARCO 101

The news from Mexico does not cease to startle, with the latest story seemingly outdoing the previous one. Two dozen execution victims are found slain in a rural field. Grenades are tossed into crowds celebrating the country’s Independence Day in Morelia, Michoacan, a colonial city designated a world heritage site. A long-imprisoned kingpin launches a website with cool photos like any other star .

In the Yucatan, a privately-owned airplane that crashes with more than three tons of cocaine aboard was once connected to the CIA’s “rendition” flights of suspected Middle Eastern terrorists, according to European Union investigators.  And just like the plane that dropped from the sky, the story quickly vanishes from the radar screen.

What ties these stories together, of course, is their connection to the murky world of illegal drug trafficking.

Mexican media feature sensational stories about drugs and some of the people involved in the business. Yet there is little systematic reporting and analysis about the breadth and scope of the trade, the political economy of drug trafficking. Given the clandestine nature of the narco-world, as well as the risks entailed in covering the beat, the dearth of hard-nosed business reporting is not surprising. But pressing questions simmer beneath the ferocity of the conflict that is turning Mexico upside down. How much money is at stake? How many people are involved? Who benefits and who doesn’t? Who controls what? Why are drugs seemingly everywhere?

Now and then, fragments of an admittedly elusive truth filter out into the press. Mexican Defense Secretary Guillermo Galvan Galvan, for example, reportedly told a group of Mexican congressmen recently that about 500,000 people were involved in Mexico’s narcotics trade.

According to the account, the largest group, 300,000 people, is made up of farmers who cultivate prohibited crops, which in Mexico’s case means marijuana and opium. The second biggest group numbers about 160,000 people who operate as street dealers, transporters, distributors and look-outs. A smaller stratum consists of approximately 40,000 individuals who occupy different leadership positions within the drug cartels.

Virtually every nook and cranny of Mexican society is touched by the narco. To one degree or another, the financial, manufacturing, agricultural, construction, retail, popular entertainment, and tourism sectors of the economy are all magnets of narco-dollars.

Earlier this year, Mexican Senator Santiago Creel, a former Interior Minister during the presidential administration of Vicente Fox (2000-2006), triggered polemics when he contended that Mexican banks were money-laundering outlets.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Creel quipped.  “Money from drug trafficking isn’t traveling all over the country in suitcases. It is deposited in banks.”

On a recent visit to Ciudad Juarez, former Mexican UN Ambassador and leading opposition politician Porfirio Munoz Ledo, offered his analysis of the narco-phenomenon. Insisting that drug traffickers operate from high spheres of power,
Munoz Ledo expounded on the social and economic hierarchy.

“At the bottom there are assassins, dealers, collaborators, dirty cops, extortionists and murder victims,” said the historic co-founder of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution. “But above them, there is a zone, which is neither legal nor illegal, and which exists thanks to the inter-woven complex of institutions recognized by the law- stores, banks, customs and politicians.”

Munoz Ledo said the drug cartels owe their power to the prevalence of an informal economy pumped up by the corruption and the weakness of the Mexican state. 

Eight or nine major crime syndicates purportedly control the production, distribution and sale of illegal drugs in Mexico. Their disputes and pacts are fluid, changing with the political circumstances and market conditions. Flashed on television or carried in the newspaper, the names and faces of the supposed bosses are well-known in Mexico, Reputedly wildly wealthy outlaws, the capos are legends in their own time. But given the corruption and involvement of political actors and government officials in the business, the narrative that depicts drug lords as belligerent criminals challenging a moral but besieged state is a questionable one.   

Virtually all Mexican institutions, including the Roman Catholic Church, are tainted by the narco.  It was probably no accident that a “narco-manta,” or propaganda banner, was wrapped around the historic Cathedral in Aguascalientes this year. 

“(Drug traffickers) are very generous with the public of their habitual towns, and they generally put in electricity and establish communication systems, highways and roads on their own account,” Carlos Aguiar Retes, president of the Mexican Episcopal Conference, told the Mexican press this year. “They are very generous and many times construct a church or temple there.”

Insisting that the church does not accept direct donations from drug traffickers and attempts to put lawbreakers on a spiritual path, Aguiar nonetheless acknowledged that narcos fill a social and economic void in poor communities. “I am not justifying it, I am simply recounting the evidence,” he added.

NARCO NAFTA

In a 2007 interview with Proceso magazine, Ricardo Garcia Villalobos, president of Mexico’s agrarian reform court, credited the expansion of the drug economy on the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 

According to Garcia, NAFTA favored rural drug production as government subsidies for legal crops were reduced; guaranteed prices for crops like corn were eliminated with the disappearance of the government-owned CONASUPO buying and distribution system; energy supports were slashed; and a government-owned fertilizer company, FERTIMEX, was privatized.

Implemented by a coterie of US-educated “technocrats,” the NAFTA-inspired agricultural reform mirrored in striking ways policies put into motion in the United
States decades earlier, when the Steagall  Amendment expired and the 1953 Farm Act was passed. Price guarantees to farmers were reduced, and a group called the Committee for Economic Development (CED) caught the United States Department of Agriculture’s ear.  Largely successful, the CED’s objectives were to eliminate the US’ “surplus” rural population, encourage corporate farming and let the marketplace work its magic.

In Mexico, the surplus agricultural population slated for elimination in NAFTA was supposed to find work in the factories that assemble goods for export to the United States.  The consequences of the free trade accord were felt in places like the state of Veracruz, a bountiful land known for its coffee, vanilla, sugar, and citrus crops. Barely registering a blip on the national migrant registry in 1993, Veracruz became the fifth largest contributor to Mexico’s migrant stream by 2000. Hundreds of thousands of   Veracruzanos slipped across the US border or landed minimum wage jobs in the export plants of Ciudad Juarez. Back at home, drug cartels, especially the Gulf Cartel, expanded their hold on the populace.

In the Mexican countryside, meanwhile, cultivating contraband became a strategy of personal and economic survival for many small growers.  

Prior to NAFTA’s passage in 1993, the Salinas de Gortari administration pushed through an important reform of the Mexican Constitution’s Article 27 that allowed collectively-owned farm lands to be sold off. An undetermined amount of former ejido land has been since converted into drug plantations. Perhaps coming up with an exaggerated number, Mexican agrarian official Garcia contended that 30 percent of Mexico’s arable land was dedicated to drug production.

Cruz Lopez Aguilar, leader of semi-official Mexico’s National Farmers Confederation,  charged  this year that drug traffickers were extorting or pressuring rural producers to sell or rent their lands. Lopez cited the case of Diaz Ordaz, Tamaulipas, where he said traffickers pay $1,300 per hectare to grow dope-far more than farmers receive in subsidies from the Procampo program to grow legal crops.   

“This situation,” Lopez added, “has occurred in the traditional mountainous zones, including Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa.

Gringo Habits Go South

For a long time, Mexico’s drug crops were grown to feed an insatiable, hedonistic gringo appetite north of the border. Speaking in New York on September 23, Mexican President Felipe Calderon spun an old story. Mexico, President Calderon insisted, is “paying a high price because of the consumption of drugs in the United States.”

But the old pattern is no longer exclusively the case. Official statistics reveal a sharp increase in both drug experimentation and addiction in Mexico between 2002 and 2008. Based on the 2008 National Drug Addiction Survey administered to 50,000 households, the Secretariat of Health estimated 4.5 million Mexicans had used some kind of illegal drug in 2008. The estimate represented a 29 percent increase from the 2002 survey.

For comparison’s sake, a National Drug Policy Survey in the US estimated that 19.7 million US residents used illegal substances in 2005.

The vast majority of Mexican users are young men, the 2008 survey reconfirmed, but  females aged 12-25  represented the fastest growing segment of illegal drug users, more than doubling their presence from 0.9 percent to 2.0 percent of the demographic group in question. Of all illegal drug users, 465,000 were classified as addicts in 2008-up from 307,000 in 2002.  

Perhaps overstating his case, Jose Carlos Hernandez Aguilar, a Chihuahua City-based criminal researcher, recently warned that 50 percent of the northern border state’s population could be addicted to drugs by 2020.

“Look, if you walk through the Plaza del Voceador al Pasito, you will easily bump into 10 indigents,” Hernandez said. “Of those (10), least 9 of them are addicts of some kind of substance…the problem is growing a lot.”

Mexico still lags behind the United States in terms of the percentage of its population that abuses drugs, but the catch-up trend is clear for all who care to look.

Drugs and Policy Solutions of Choice

Mexicans prefer using marijuana, cocaine, inhalants, methamphetamine, hallucinogens and heroin in that order, according to the nation’s official 2008 drug survey.

Derived from the coca leaf, cocaine is not produced in Mexico. Yet by most accounts, the Mexican drug cartels have taken over the international distribution of a South American product that was once dominated by Colombian mafias.  Nowadays, tons of cocaine are even transported north to Mexico in submarines.

Mexican drug cartels control the shipment of cocaine into the United States and increasingly into Europe as well.  An estimated market of 4.5 million European coke consumers assures a steady flow of blow to the Old World of Columbus and the other conquistadors. And this month’s exposure of alleged Mexican methamphetamine traffickers in Argentina only underscores the ability of drug organizations to carve out new niches.

As Mexican cartels diversify their international market and consolidate their internal one, a lot of funny money is circulating on the streets and in the suites. Again, because of the illegal and secret character of drug trafficking, no hard, publicly accepted number for the overall value of the Mexican drug business exists. Various estimates range widely from $10 billion to $50 billion yearly, the lower number comparable to annual revenue from international tourism and the higher one roughly equivalent to the country’s combined income from migrant remittances and direct foreign investment in 2007.   

The impact of the drug business is even greater than the revenues from illegal substances suggest, since many drug traffickers have also branched out to other types of illicit activities, including pirating DVDs, illegally harvesting timber and kidnapping-for-ransom.
 
Income from drugs and the wider underground economy are never considered in official sets of economic indicators, though more than a few analysts have contended that the Mexican economy would collapse without the infusion of easy money.  

Drugs and the Dilemmas of Political Choice

The illegal drug business in Mexico boasts decades as a major economic activity, but the first decade of the 21st century could well go down in history as watershed years for the business. Riding to office in 2000 on a platform of good government and democratic reform, President Vicente Fox, the first opposition politician elected in 71 years, promised anxious Mexicans many changes.

Seven years later, at the beginning of the Calderon administration, Coahuila Governor Humberto  Moreira, a member of the former ruling PRI party,  joined with others in openly blaming the explosion of the drug business on the shortfalls of the Fox administration.

“With the government of change, many things changed,” Moreira said. “Among them drug trafficking grew exponentially.”

Moreira, nonetheless, was initially confident that President Felipe Calderon’s drug control program, centered on law enforcement by the Mexican military, would bear fruit.

As the Calderon administration nears its second anniversary in office, many are skeptical that a law-and-order crackdown will have any real success. Taken to its full logic, emphasizing law enforcement implies locking up or processing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in an already dysfunctional justice system. 

Amid drug-driven violence and terror, proposals to reexamine alternatives to Mexico’s current drug control policy are gaining ground. In recent congressional testimony, federal public safety czar Genaro Garcia Luna conceded that drug legalization merits study and debate. On the other hand, Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos affirmed the idea is off the table.

Pointing to studies that show a connection between drug usage and memory retention difficulties in young people, Cordova said legalizing drugs could have an adverse public health effect. “From a health point of view, it would be totally pernicious, totally negative,” Cordova said. “I am not in agreement.”

Still, as in the United States, drug control policy in Mexico is an urgent matter that will demand fresh approaches in the years ahead.

Sources:  El Universal, September 15, 19, 22, 26, 2008.  Articles by Rebeca Jimenez, Alejandro Jimenez, Maria Teresa Montano, Juan Velediaz, and the EFE news service. Cimacnoticias.com, September 19, 2008. El Sur/Agencia Reforma, September 19, 2008. Common Dreams/Agence France Press, September 5, 2008. Frontenet.com, August 9 and 25, 2008. Articles by Enrique Corte Barrera and editorial staff. 

El Diario de Juarez, August 8 and September 23, 2008. Articles by Gabriela Minjares and El Universal.  Proceso/Apro, August 25, 2008. Article by Patricia Davila. Tribuna de la Bahia/Agencia Reforma, April 5, 2008. La Jornada, November 11 and 22, 2007; September 17, 19, 20, 25, and 26, 2008. Articles by Angeles Cruz Martinez, Jorge Durand and news agencies. Common Dreams, September 24, 2008. Article by Willie Nelson and Eddie Albert. Albuquerque Journal/Associated Press, September 8, 2006.

Massacre in the Sierra Tarahumara

Gangland-style killings have spread to a new front in Mexico: the tourist town of Creel in Chihuahua’s Sierra Tarahumara. In the trademark fashion of drug cartel death squads, masked gunmen with automatic rifles opened fire at a social gathering in Creel on the evening of August 16, killing 13 persons and wounding an undetermined number of others, according to the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office (PGJE). An infant was among the dead, the law enforcement agency said.

The motive behind the attack wasn’t immediately clear, but the PGJE revealed most of the victims belonged to a single family. One media dispatch reported that return gunfire erupted from the attacked group, possibly resulting in casualties among the aggressors.

Until now, Creel has escaped the narco-violence that’s shaken much of the rest of the state in 2008. Situated on the railway to the famed Copper Canyon, Creel is a popular stop-over for backpackers and eco-tourists. The small town is located in a region known for its cultivation of illegal marijuana and opium poppy crops. Home to indigenous Tarahumaras, or Raramuris, the Sierra Tarahumara also hosts clandestine air strips used to transport drugs, including South American cocaine moved from the Pacific Coast.

After hearing the gunshots that disturbed the evening of August 16, workers at Creel’s Best Western Hotel warned tourists to stay inside.

The Creel attack could be the latest example of the “Iraqization” of Mexico’s narco-war. Massacres, multiple kidnappings, mass graves and gang-installed checkpoints have been registered in Chihuahua and other parts of Mexico throughout the course of the year. On August 11, a woman on her way to work at a maquiladora plant in Nogales, Sonora, was shot to death at checkpoint set up by individuals reportedly disguised as policemen.

With growing frequency, the number of people reported murdered or kidnapped in single incidents is similar to stories emanating from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. On August 13, assassins gunned down 8 people during an evangelical service at a drug rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. The border city has borne the brunt of Mexico’s 2008 drug violence, with a 42-year-old woman, Cruz Mendoza Pichardo reported as the 800th murder victim in Ciudad Juarez this year. Mendoza was shot to death at her home on Friday, August 15.

Violence in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua escalated after the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon deployed troops as part of Operation Chihuahua Together last March.

Supported by business, political and social leaders, Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza recently requested that the army refocus its mission and go after organized bands of criminals with “precision.” The military operation, Governor Reyes contended, has “fallen short.”

The PGJE sent investigators to Creel after the weekend’s bloody attack. No arrests were immediately announced.

Sources: El Universal/AP, August 17, 2008. La Jornada, August 17, 2008. Article by Ruben Villalpando. Lapolaka.com, August 17, 2008. El Diario de Juarez, August 17, 2008. Norte, August 16, 2008. Article by Arturo Chacon. Cimanoticias, August 14, 2008. Article by Silvia Nunez Esquer.

Mexico’s Drug Dilemma

In the run-up to the recent passage of President Bush’s anti-narcotics Merida Initiative, high-ranking Mexican officials repeatedly scolded the United States, the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs, for stoking their country’s growing problem of narco-violence. Appealing for shared responsibility, Mexican officials urged the US to crack down on drug consumption at home and curb the illegal trafficking of arms across the border.

A growing number of reports from Mexico, however, paint a far more complex picture of the drug problem than the one conveyed by Mexican authorities. Nowadays, Mexico is an important consumer of illegal drugs.  

“We are not just a transit country for drugs,” said Jose Antonio Ortega Sanchez, president of the Mexico City-based Citizen Council for Public Safety and Legal Justice, “but also heavy producers and consumers as well, since we are tripling on average the production of drugs including marijuana and heroin.”

According to Ortega, marijuana production in Mexico grew 44 percent between 2004 and 2006, a period of time when the US government was publicly praising the Fox administration for its anti-drug war and photos of Mexican soldiers busting illicit pot plantings graced the Internet.

Regarding another popular drug, cocaine, Ortega estimated that Mexico internally consumes between 70 and 80 tons of the substance per year, with as many as 20,000 sales outlets scattered across the country. About 50,000 pounds of the white powder goes up the noses or down the lungs of users in Mexico City alone every year, he said.

Ortega’s statements coincided with other reports of increased use in Mexico of illegal drugs like methamphetamine. While Mexican officials point to the United States as the cause of the drug violence ripping apart regions of their country, a close reading of many incidents reveals that much if not most of the ongoing slaughter has more to do with competition over internal markets than external ones. The recent execution of “El Caracol,” a street dealer in Ciudad Juarez’s Azteca neighborhood, is a story repeated thousands of times across the country.

Drugs of Tradition and Fashion

A popular substance, especially in the northern border region, is heroin. While use of the drug in Mexico is nothing new, the heroin sub-culture continues to seduce new generations.

Recently, a journalistic team from the Mexico City weekly Proceso toured
“picaderos,” or shooting galleries, in Ciudad Juarez to get a first-hand look at the world of processed poppy dreams. Thousands of picaderos, some serving as many as 100 customers a day, are said to exist in Ciudad Juarez.

In the Alta Vista neighborhood above the banks of the Rio Grande, lookouts were everywhere as members of the Aztecas gang went about their business running the heroin trade. Many customers encountered by the reporters were young, including an
18-year-old woman who  shared her thoughts about the addict’s life. “The drug transforms us,” she said. “I am capable of killing anyone for it.”

Researchers have detected another disturbing trend: the mixing of different illegal drugs into one dose or the invention of new drugs. “Yaba,” for example, is a mixture of meth and caffeine. “Palitos mojados” are marijuana cigarettes dipped in ether. In a cyber-age twist to the old practice of inhaling paint thinner or gasoline, huffing compressed air used to clean computers is the in-thing among some youths.

“The kids use drugs at the same time, in the same event and in the same entertainment space,” said Alfredo Nateras, a researcher with the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City. “They make a mixture and suddenly don’t know what they are consuming, and this is very risky,” Nateras said. “They are recycling old drugs while new ones are on the market, and a very frequent modality is the consumption of mixtures.”

LSD, which figured so prominently in the lives of Mexico adventurer and US novelist Ken Kesey and his friend Neal Cassady, who died after being found unconscious on the railroad tracks near San Miguel de Allende, is a staple at some Mexican youth parties these days.

The Social Backdrop

Current social indicators give a strong hint why drugs are becoming more popular in Mexico. The Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OCDE) recently reported that 60 percent of Mexican jobs are in the informal sector-without labor contracts, benefits, pensions or long-term job security. Many of the “jobs” consist of spending endless, mind-numbing hours selling goods of all kinds at street side stands. Perhaps it’s no accident that the hot dog seller on the corner also retails crack or pot.

For young people, unemployment is a significant problem. “Youth unemployment exceeds 6 percent, which is a reflection of a serious problem in the linking of school with the job market,” said Stefano Scaretta, senior OCDE analyst.  “It’s also clear that the rigid nature of the federal labor law does not encourage the hiring of young people; on the contrary, it discourages and stops it.”
 
If Mexican youths find decent job prospects slim, many also discover they are blocked from even getting an education. In 2008, the nation’s 12 largest public universities rejected 363, 161 applicants. Although academic criteria are used to determine admissions, virtually all observers of the Mexican educational system readily acknowledge that limited resources and space are the real reasons legions of young people are turned away at the door of higher education every year. Slapped with a rude awakening, some youths have formed a new movement to demand the right to higher education.

Fifteen-year-old Gilda Yarza Covarrubias considered herself lucky. A music lover whose high test score landed her a spot in high school, Yarza said overcoming poverty and resisting drugs are two of the biggest challenges confronting her generation.
The Mexico City adolescent would like to see more educational opportunities and security for those who are “left outside” the system.

Alternatives

Current Mexican anti-drug policy mirrors that of the United States. Treatment programs are very limited, and control of illegal substances is viewed as a law enforcement issue. Increasingly, however, influential voices advocate other approaches. Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza recently suggested Mexico should debate decriminalizing certain drugs. A decriminalization law passed the Mexican Congress several years ago, but it was blocked by the Fox administration after Washington protested.  

Writing in La Jornada, Jorge Carrillo Olea, a retired Mexican general and ex-governor of Morelos state, contended Mexico has lacked a long-term drug control strategy since at least 1992, opting to follow the path of Washington rather than pursuing “effective control over the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs.” During Carrillo’s governorship, drug cartels gained a big foothold in Morelos.

A recent socio-economic study of Ciudad Juarez, “The Social Reality of Ciudad Juarez,”  could be an important contribution toward understanding and controlling the drug problem plaguing the border city and other parts of Mexico.

Published by the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez and partially funded by the Ford Foundation and the Chihuahua Business Sector Foundation, the study examined questions of economic growth, development, crime, and social services.

Although Ciudad Juarez has grown tremendously due to the expansion of the maquiladora export industry, the authors noted that many young people live in a state of anxiety in which there is no “certainty of the permanence of work, of the permanence of income.”

In such circumstances, the temptations of momentary, drug-induced bliss and easy money are everywhere.

Clara Judisman, a former director of social development for the Mexico City government and coordinator of the study, urged the establishment of a broad social pact that involves the business sector, non-governmental organizations and academia. The goal, said Judisman, should be to cultivate “human beings capable of confronting the risks of organized crime.  Special emphasis should be centered on building up the capacity of young people to “resist the invitation of drugs,” she added.  

Contrasting simple anti-poverty programs with genuine social development, Judisman asserted that any effective strategy must address psycho-social, public safety and cultural development needs. The social activist urged different sectors to “sit down,” compare notes and get to work on a joint plan.  

Sources: La Jornada, July 24, 25 and 26, 2008. Articles by Karina Aviles, Laura Poy and Jorge Carrillo Olea. El Universal, July 23, 2008. Article by Jorge Alejandro Medellin. Agencia Reforma, July 21, 2008. Article by Karla Portugal.  Proceso/Apro, July 2 and 6, 2008. Articles by Patricia Davila and editorial staff. Lapolaka.com, July 13, 2008. El Diario de Juarez, May 21, 2008 and June 19, 2008.

Civilians Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Hemmed in by warring drug gangs and one side and the operations of the
Mexican army on the other, civilian populations in Mexico’s northern borderlands are stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. In a possible response to Mexican army operations, hooded men dressed in the uniforms of soldiers and federal police have been  terrorizing and robbing customers en masse in bars and restaurants located in the state of Tamaulipas in recent weeks. Shadowy gunmen have also been behind a  number of selective kidnappings.

In an unusual and unsigned piece, the Mexican news weekly Proceso detailed some of the incidents in this week’s edition of the publication.  Proceso reported a pattern of  violent events in the Tamaulipas municipalities of Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros and Miguel Aleman, among others. In Reynosa, restaurant-bars where armed raids reportedly occurred included Chili’s, Applebee’s, El Papolate, Sierra Madre, Rico’s Bar, and La Fogata. The news article cited two possible explanations for the new intimidation tactic allegedly employed by organized crime. First, the raids could be a message to society that the army is incapable of protecting it. Second, the crimes could be a response to army operations that have made it more difficult to pass illegal drugs through the international bridges. In the latter scenario, Proceso hypothesized, drug traffickers are compensating for lost income by engaging in other money-making activities. The article did not explore the possibility that the operators of bars and restaurants who might be laundering money could be the real targets of  
raids conducted by rivals.   

Coverage of the events reported in Proceso is almost non-existent in a local press forced into self-censorship by multiple murders and kidnappings of reporters, grenade attacks and other acts of intimidation.

At the same time, protests and human rights complaints against the Mexican army’s anti-organized crime offensive in Tamaulipas and elsewhere continue to mount. In Tamaulipas, business in the restaurant and entertainment industries has plummeted to such an extent that Mexican youths are now crossing into Texas border cities for weekend entertainment. The suds-seeking migration reverses a long-established tradition of US youths going to Mexico for party purposes. Complaining of lost business and harassment, taxi drivers, waiters, sex industry workers and colonia residents have staged demonstrations in Reynosa and other places against the army’s presence. Sharing the Mexican army’s view of the demonstrations, Jorge Pensado Robles, the regional director of the influential Mexican Employers Confederation, said the “great majority” of complaints and protests were manipulated by forces desiring a withdrawal of the troops from the streets.

Nonetheless, human rights complaints against the army are on the rise outside Tamaulipas as well. Four civilians and two soldiers died in disputed circumstances on March 28 in the state of Sinaloa.  In Michoacan, meanwhile, the statewide edition of La Jornada reported that 400 human rights complaints against the army have been registered since the beginning of the year, when troops stepped up their activities.  Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has decided to investigate the case of Maria Auxilio Birruete Monroy and companions who were detained on weapons and marijuana possession charges by the army on March 25 in the city of Zinapecuaro. Published in Michocan media, photos displayed Birruete Monroy and a male companion with severe wounds to their bodies allegedly afflicted by soldiers. “The woman was brutally beaten, and she showed injuries in the eyes, on her back, on her arms and legs, and over 70 percent of her body,” said Victor Manuel Serrato Lozano, president of the official  Michoacan  State Human Rights Commission.

Events in Michoacan, Tamaulipas and other states where the Mexican army has been active have great implications for Ciudad Juarez, where troops began a major operation and took over law enforcement functions last week. Reports of alleged abuses are already surfacing in the border city.  Human rights advocates charge that four female members of the Chihuahua state police force were improperly detained by the army, with two of the women forced to undress and wear blindfolds in front of soldiers. On a separate but related note, Jose Luis Soberanes, CNDH president, accused the army  of not allowing his investigators into Ciudad Juarez detention centers where suspects were being held.

The army’s latest deployment, which followed months of escalating violence, triggered  debates among government officials, social activists, media commentators and the civilian population in general.  Driving the controversy is the fact that the Mexican army has no constitutional authority to carry out civilian law enforcement duties, but  President Felipe Calderon and other government leaders justify troop deployments against organized crime by pointing to widespread narco-violence that state and local police are either unable or unwilling to contain. Indeed, police officers are frequently involved in the gangland confrontations as combatants for one side or the other. Under the Bush Administration’s proposed Merida Initiative, or Plan Mexico, the Mexican army is slated to receive training assistance and hardware upgrades to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.   

“We regret that things had to reach this extreme,” said Marisela Ortiz, Ciudad Juarez spokeswoman for Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, an organization made up of relatives of murdered women. “It’s very hard on a community we love to see it turn out like this, but we are going to have to endure (military deployments) as a necessary evil, and we will have to give a vote of confidence to the army with the hope it comes through and doesn’t incur in excesses.”

Julio Almanza, vice-president the Border Chamber of Commerce Federation in Tamaulipas,  also gave a qualified endorsement of the army’s anti-organized crime role. But Almanza contended that the clock was ticking for the Calderon administration’s military deployments, which are in their second year. “Logically, social problems are going to crop up if the federal government maintains its military presence in a permanent fashion,” Almanza said. “If the operations are prolonged, society is going to sacrifice a great part of its freedom and its tranquility, and it will be the border economy that will feel the effects later on.”

Sources: Lapolaka.com, April 3, 2008. Norte, April 3, 2008. Article by Luis Carlos
Ortega. La Jornada, April 3, 2008. Articles by Victor Ballinas. Proceso, March 30, 2008. La Jornada/Michoacan edition, March 29, 2008. Article by Antonio Aguilera. El Sol de Morelia, March 28, 2008. Article by Jose Luis Diaz Perez.

No Easter Truce in 2008
 
Narco-violence in Mexico showed no let-up during the Easter holiday season. Press reports from just the three days between Holy Thursday, March 21, and Easter Sunday, March 23, registered at least 59 homicides connected to organized crime. In some ways, the news leads were very similar to the headlines coming out of war-torn Iraq during the same period of time. Widespread in nature, slayings were reported in the states of  Baja California, Sonora, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Quintana Roo, Mexico, and Chihuahua. Once again, the geographical pattern of killings demonstrates how organized crime has extended its violent reach to virtually every nook and cranny of the country.

The victims included former and current policemen, four soldiers, used car salesmen, street-level drug dealers, and a Cuban-American, Humberto Febles Santana, who was murdered in Cancun.  At least four of the victims were women. In Tijuana, the corpse of a female estimated to be between 15 and 20 years of age was found wrapped in a blanket. In the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, the body of 47-year-old Araceli de la Cruz, who was kidnapped on March 13 of this year, was dumped in front of an army installation. Blindfolded and with a mutilated hand stuck in the mouth,  de la Cruz´s body was accompanied by a message to a Mexican army general that warned of the fate awaiting alleged informers. De la Cruz was the 11th woman murdered in Tamaulipas state this year so far.

Bordering Texas and New Mexico, Ciudad Juarez and  the state of Chihuahua accounted for a disproportionate share of the violence, with nearly two dozen slayings reported from March 21 to March 23. Four of the victims were found burned on the ironically-named Los Lamentos (“The Regrets”) ranch near  Palomas. In recent days, violence in and around the small town on the New Mexico border got so bad the entire police department resigned and the police chief requested political ayslum in the United States.

In Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, the narco-violence is threatening to trigger a larger crisis. ”Tourism in Juarez has plummeted drastically, not even the countrymen  pass through here during Holy Week,” wrote Jorge M: Torres Pares for Ciudad Juarez´s Lapolaka website. Fed up with the carnage, the Del Rio, Superette and Farmacias Latino business chains  announced an investment strike. Company executives said they will  not open new outlets as long as violence rages.

What stands out about the Ciudad Juarez violence is the weak response, until now, of the Mexican armed forces. Unlike in Baja California or in Tamaulipas, states where the army has been visibly deployed with decidedly mixed results,  the military has stood largely on the sidelines as warring drug gangs shoot it out for control of Ciudad Juarez.

By all accounts, Ciudad Juarez´s citizens are terrified by the seemingly endless string of killings. Shootings have occurred on main streets, in front of comercial malls and other businesses and in bars and motels. As many as 218 executions were reported in Ciudad Juarez and different regions of Chihuahua from January 1 to March 25 of this year.

“These types of events, which were isolated within the ranks of organized crime, are now seen by everyone, at any hour, in broad daylight, and worst of all, in 100 percent family places,”wrote Ciudad Juarez reporter  Gamaliel Carrasco Arjon.    

At presstime, the violence showed no signs of abating. In Ciudad Juarez, at least nine more murders were reported  on March 24 and March 25.

Sources, Lapolaka.com, March, 22,  23,  24,  25, 2008. Norte, March 22 and 23, 2008. Articles by Herika Martinez Prado, Gamaliel Carrasco Arjon, Antonio Rebolledo and Antonio Flores Schroeder. La Jornada, March 22, 24 and 25, 2008. Articles by Ruben Villalpando and M. Breach. El Sur/Reforma, March 24, 2008. El Diario de Juarez, March 22 and 23, 2008. Articles by Alejandro Quintero and editorial staff. Enlineadirecta.info, March 22, 2008. Article by Benny Cruz Zaota. El Sol de Morelia/DPA, March 22, 2008. El Universal, March 22 and 23, 2008. Articles by Luis Cano, Xochitl Alvarez, and the Notimex news agency. Frontera.info, March 22, 2008. Proceso/Apro, March 21, 2008. Las Cruces Sun-News, March 21, 2008. Article by
Kevin Buey.

War Booty of 2007

Mexican authorities have reported confiscating enough weapons to supply a small army. Cited in the Mexican press, unnamed sources with the Office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR) said more than 45,000 weapons were seized from 2001 to 2007. According to the PGR, the firepower included 17,361 assault rifles, 27, 461 small arms and 711 grenades. In the same time period, more than 3 million bullets were confiscated. According to Mexican Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino, 4,447 assault weapons and 4,451 small arms fell into the hands of the Mexican government in 2007. 

The latest figures don't include the February 7 seizure of four tens of weaponry from a ranch in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. In the latest raid, authorities discovered more than 89 assault rifles and other military-style weapons at a property in Miguel Aleman, a municipality located across the border from Texas. Officials suspected the ranch could have served as a training facility for the Zetas, the paramilitary arm of the Gulf drug cartel.

Five coastal or border states led the list of hot spots for illegal arms confiscations in recent years. In order of importance, Tamaulipas, Michoacan, Chiapas, Veracruz and Sonora were the states with the richest troves of guns, grenades and ammo.  Perhaps not coincidentally, all the states are zones where the Zetas either dominate or have a significant presence.     

In multiple comments to the media over the past year, many Mexican officials have blamed arms trafficking from the United States for a "river of lead" flowing into Mexico, a country where sales and ownership of guns is strictly limited-at least on paper. Nonetheless, Mexican officials rarely if ever publicly disclose the exact origin of confiscated weapons.

In addition to acquisitions from the United States and other countries, Mexico supplies its own arsenal from local production. Some of the weapons confiscated from the Miguel Aleman ranch this month reportedly had the initials of the Mexican Defense Ministry stamped on them. As is routine practice, the most recent numbers released to the press did not shed light on the origin of illegal grenades. 

In other revelations, Interior Minister Mourino, who recently took over the cabinet-level post after the resignation of Francisco Ramirez, told reporters in Mexico City that the first year of the Calderon administration was a highly successful one in terms of  disrupting the illegal drug business and seizing dirty money.

According to Mourino, Mexican law enforcement seized 50.7 tons of cocaine, 2,262.5 tons of marijuana, 312 kilos of opium gum, 103,000 pills, 298 kilos of heroin, and 37.5 tons of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in 2007. Nearly half the cocaine recovered came from a single shipment busted in the Pacific port of Manzanillo last November.

As a result of Mexico's actions, Mourino contended that street prices in the United States for cocaine and methamphetamine rose 44 percent and 73 percent, respectively, last year. Mourino estimated the US retail value of cocaine seized in Mexico last year at slightly more than $7 billion.

On the cash front, Mexican authorities confiscated currency valued at almost $228 million in 2007, Mourino said. A review of earlier reports indicates that more than 90 percent of the money came from a single, joint US-Mexico operation linked to the detention of Chinese-Mexican businessman Zhenli Ye Gon, who is accused of importing large quantities of precursor chemicals used to make methamphetamines. 

"We've damaged the structure of organized crime," Mourino said. "(Mafia) presence is no longer significant in places where it was, which are now no longer under its control."

Mourino added that more than 20,000 people "linked to organized crime" were detained in 2007, but he did not detail how many were legally processed or convicted of a crime.

Sources: El Universal, February 9, 2008. Article by Silvia Otero. La Jornada, Feburary 9, 2008. Article by Gustavo Castillo Garcia. El Diario de Juarez, February 4, 2008. 

Sushi, Sensimilla and Slaughter

 Saulo Reyes Gamboa was apparently a very busy man. The border entrepreneur owned  Ciudad Juarez's Silver Streak hamburger franchise, Japanese eateries, Subway sandwich outlets, a shoe business and the Epicentro radio station, among other enterprises.  According to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), the 36-year-old Reyes was also an exporter of intoxicating products. In a January 16 sting, US federal agents arrested Reyes in El Paso on charges of bribing an ICE undercover agent masquerading as a border inspector to allow pot into the United States.

In a region where some locals say that every family has at least one member in "the business," Reyes' arrest might have gone down as just another entry into the police blotter. But Reyes has another feather in his cap that's making his bust a top news story: he is a former Ciudad Juarez police chief.   

First serving as an administrative  commander in the Ciudad Juarez municipal police department during 1998-2001, Reyes, who is a public accountant, reemerged on the city police force when he was appointed operational commander early last year
by the administration of former Mayor Hector "Teto" Murguia. Besides working as a police official, Reyes had racked up public sector experience as a financial administrator  for alternating state and municipal governments that were dominated by either the PAN or PRI political parties. Reyes’ Kinsui restaurant branch on the busy Paseo del Triunfo de la Republica thoroughfare was the scene of the notorious 1997 murder of Jose Loya Lopez, a man with police and political connections, during business hours.

Alerted to Reye's arrest, Ciudad Juarez reporters pressed former Mayor Murguia about his appointment of the suspected drug dealer to a high law enforcement position. Expressing surprise,  Murguia insisted that his administration was always committed to the “firm combat of drug trafficking.”

Murguia   ignited a controversy when he declared that Reyes had been named to the police post because of a recommendation by Ciudad Juarez's influential Coparmex employers' organization.

"(Reyes) was a successful businessman,  he was a businessman with many enterprises," Murguia said, "a man with a master's degree who was participating in various business organizations." Murguia denied receiving even a "nickel" from Reyes for the former mayor's successful 2004 election campaign, and he professed no knowledge about reports that Reyes’ myriad businesses benefited from city contracts during his administration
which ended last October.   

Local Coparmex head Ernesto Anaya quickly refuted  Murguia’s statements about the business organization’s role in the return of Reyes to law enforcement. Last weekend, Coparmex published a large, attention-grabbing statement in Ciudad Juarez newspapers that disassociated the organization from Reyes’ appointment.

"We categorically reject that we would have influenced such a decision," Coparmex declared, "since it is public knowledge that the appointment of top and middle level public officials is made directly by the municipal president."

Coparmex acknowledged that Reyes had been a member of the group until August 2007

Reyes' arrest inspired fiery comments by Ciudad Juarez business leaders, elected officials and citizen activists, and it rekindled debate about the nature of the relationships between organized crime, politicians, policemen, business and the media in the borderlands.

Andres de Anda Martinez, a state legislator for the PAN, said he would prod the Chihuahua state legislature to demand a state and federal investigation of the links between Reyes and Murguia. 

"(Reyes) participation says that he left an agency in the hands of organized crime," De Anda contended.  On January 23,  several  PAN legislators held a demonstration in the Chihuahua State Congress in support of an investigation. But Jorge Gutierrez, a PRI legislator, defended Reyes’ record as ”impeccable” during the suspected drug dealer’s stint as a police official.  

Questions arose about the relationship between Reyes and his former
boss, Marco Antonio Torres, who worked as communications director for Mayor Murguia before being appointed as public safety secretary last year.  Both Torres and Reyes have an interest in the Epicentro radio station.  According to one report, Reyes attended a ceremony last year where the US-based National Crime Insurance Bureau honored the crime-fighting efforts of the Murguia/Torres administration. Reportedly, last April's event was attended by numerous US police officials including representatives from the El Paso Police Department, UTEP police, Albuquerque Police Department, Bernalillo (New Mexico) County Sheriff's Department and, ironically, the Department of Homeland Security.

Reyes, of course, is innocent until proven guilty. Jailed without bond, he is next scheduled to attend court on Monday, January 28. A young woman linked to Reyes, 27-year-old Karina Tarango, is also in hot water with the law. Tarango was arrested last week at a home in Horizon City, Texas, outside El Paso allegedly with almost a half-ton of marijuana in her possession. An El Paso judge ordered Tarango confined to house arrest. Both Reyes and Tarango are staring at up to 40 years in prison if convicted of marijuana possession and conspiracy. In Mexico, the Office of the Federal Attorney General has initiated a preliminary investigation of Reyes for illicit enrichment and criminal association.

A Turbulent Year with the Boys in Blue

In January 2007, Reyes assumed his new policing responsibilities as internal strife and scandal simmered and boiled in the department. Worse yet, more than a few officers were implicated in extortion, rape, murder and other crimes. Members of his Reyes’ department, for instance, were accused of the fatal shooting of 16-year-old Raul Lara in the back, and of allowing the "escape" of a suspect from a police station who was later found handcuffed and dead in an irrigation ditch.

Prostitutes and transvestites who work downtown Ciudad Juarez’s streets repeatedly accused policemen of shaking them down in return for allowing the sex workers to continue luring clients. In 2007, the official Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission accepted 46 complaints against members of the Ciudad Juarez Municipal Police Department for various, alleged abuses. 

In separate  cases, six officers were charged with  domestic violence and sex crimes,  including the sexual abuse of two 12-year-old girls. In yet another case,
an 18-year-old woman complained that two men wearing Ciudad Juarez municipal
police garb and driving a truck resembling a police vehicle raped and severely beat her on an isolated property, leaving the victim for dead. Then there were the five officers accused of fabricating a scapegoat in last April's murder of Monserrat Morales Arellenes in order to protect an alleged drug dealer. Blamed on a dispute over a dead dog, the Morales murder led to a confrontation between the Chihuahua Office of the State Attorney General (PGJE) and city policemen who tried to prevent the arrests of their brethren.

What’s more, local policemen were suspected in the murders of two young women, Samantha Elizabeth Martinez Gutierrez and Blanca Guadalupe Sanchez Villalobos, whose naked bodies were dumped on public streets in the Insurgentes neighborhood during May and June of last year. Assigned to investigate the case, a  PGJE investigator
 charged that municipal policemen attempted to kidnap her. Long-time women's activist Vicky Caraveo,  a former director the Chihuahua State Women's Institute, said the Insurgentes murders weren’t surprising.

"The accusation by the state attorney general against municipal police isn't anything new," Caraveo said ,  “because the mothers of (femicide) victims have always said so, and they have been ignored."
 
Prior to leaving office last October, public safety head Torres acknowledged that organized crime had infiltrated the police department. Individual officers were widely suspected of protecting as many as 1,000"picaderos," or illegal drug outlets, in the city. Last summer, Torres claimed that hooded and heavily-armed persons disarmed his bodyguards and threatened him in a restaurant while he was dining.  

Efecto Saulo?

In Ciudad Juarez, meanwhile, the local press is speculating about a possible "Saulo Effect" related to Reyes' arrest. On January 20 and 21, roving gunmen shot to death two municipal police commanders. Additionally, three men were reported kidnapped by armed commandoes on January 21. On the evening of the same day, an important commander for the Chihuahua State Investigations Agency, Fernando Lozano, was critically wounded by gunfire. Lozano is a brother-in-law of Sergio Belmonte, the press spokesman for the current Juarez city government.

In a development that revealed the gravity of the situation unfolding in Ciudad Juarez,  Lozano was moved across the border January 22 to El Paso’s Thomason Hospital, where he was guarded by heavily-armed US local and federal police. On more than one occasion in the past, assassins have stormed Mexican hospitals to complete an unfinished job.     

Fifteen police officers from different agencies have been slain in Ciudad Juarez since January 2007. After the most recent shootings, Mexican soldiers in Hummers were reported patrolling and searching a central Ciudad Juarez neighborhood.

Reyes's arrest was the second major law enforcement action this month against alleged organized crime elements in the borderlands. In El Paso, the FBI and other police agencies arrested several reputed leaders of the Barrio Azteca gang, an organization with members in both the US and Mexico. Previous press accounts have linked Chihuahua state cops and Ciudad Juarez policemen to the gang.

It is not yet clear whether this week's attacks against police in Ciudad Juarez have anything to do with either the Reyes or Barrio Azteca cases.

An unconfirmed version attributes the upsurge in violence to an attempt by followers of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to conquer the Ciudad Juarez drug “plaza.” According to one account,  narco-corridos in honor of the Sinaloa drug kingpin have been transmitted on local police radio frequencies in recent days.  In other Mexican cities like Nuevo Laredo, similar clandestine deejay broadcasts have signaled war.

Sources:El Paso Times, January 11, 18, 22, 23, 2008. Articles by Daniel Borunda, Louie Gilot and editorial staff.  El Diario de El Paso, January 18 and 19, 2008. Articles by Lorena Figueroa, Horacio Carrasco and Luz del Carmen Sosa. Lapolaka.com,
March 9 and 11, 2007; April 13, 2007; July 20, 2007; January 20, 21, 22, 23 2008. Frontenet.com, April 12 and 17, 2008. October 9, 2007; January 22, 2008. Norte, July 13, 2007; January 18, 19 and 22, 2008. Articles by Jorge Chairez Daniel, Luis Carlos Ortega, Carlos Huerta, Antonio Rebolledo, Francisco Lujan, A. Chacon, and Felix A. Gonzalez.El Universal, April 11 and August 22, 2007. Articles by Luis Carlos Cano and the Notimex news agency. La Jornada,  July 12, 2007; September 4 and 6, 2007; January 20, 2008. Articles by Ruben Villalpando and the AFP news agency.  El Diario de Juarez, April 17, 19 and 21, 2007; July 12 and 27, 2007; September 5 and 18, 2007; October 16, 2007; January 17, 20, 21, 23, 2008.

Drug War Militarization Proceeds

Concerned that violent drug traffickers had infiltrated the police force, Mexican soldiers disarmed 149 local policemen assigned to the municipality of Rosarito, Baja California, on December 28. Besides stripping local policemen of their weapons, the Baja California State Office of the Attorney General ordered all its Rosarito personnel reassigned to other posts including Tijuana and Ensenada.

“We recognize that the enemy is within and that’s why we are purging the ranks,” said Daniel de la Rosa, state public safety director. “We need to have police who are trustworthy.”

Reminiscent of the Mexican army’s temporary disarming of Tijuana municipal police at the beginning of the year, the Rosarito action came after a December 18 attack against the city’s police chief, Jorge Eduardo Montero,left the official’s bodyguard dead. Rosarito Mayor Hugo Torres has also denounced death threats lodged against him.

In Baja California, persistent violence during 2007 including hundreds of kidnappings, forced disappearances and robberies of foreign tourists and businessmen, stoked calls for stepped-up federal military intervention in the fight against organized crime. At the state and local levels, new law enforcement administrations are bringing in Israeli anti-kidnapping instructors, restructuring key police units and adding new armament.

Still, as the Rosarito events demonstrate, the Mexican army remains the linchpin in the battle against drug traffickers and organized criminal elements. In 2007, the Calderon administration deployed upwards of 25,000 soldiers and federal police (frequently soldiers on leave) in the drug war. As the year drew to a close, Mexico City could claim some historicsuccesses in the battle, including the record seizures of nearly 35 tons of cocaine at the ports of Manzanillo and Tampico. According to the US Embassy in Mexico, Mexican authorities seized money, drugs, airplanes, vehicles and airplanes valued at hundreds of millions of dollars during the course of the year.

Narco-violence also broke records in 2007, with 2,561 murders attributed to organized crime registered in the January-November time frame-a 14.2 percent leap over 2006’s homicide numbers for the same months. In addition to large numbers of policemen, the victims included 42 soldiers and five marines. On Friday, December 28, seven policemen were slain in the centralstate of Zacatecas by suspected drug gang gunmen.

The Zacatecas killings are the latest example of how previously quiet areas of the country are now hot spots in the war for control of the lucrative Mexican drug business. Indeed, virtually the entire country is afflicted by violence, with the Pacific Coast state of Colima considered the only relative exception. In border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, drug-related murders are so common as to practically warrant their own section in daily local newspapers.

Reliance on the armed forces as the front-line agency in the drug war is likely to deepen in 2008. Patricio Patino Arias, an undersecretary for strategic intelligence with Mexico’s Federal Ministry of Public Safety, announced December 28 in Culiacan, Sinaloa, that 2,500 soldiers and federal police will be deployed in a new operation in the state beginning the first week of January.

Sources: La Jornada, December 28 and 29, 2007. Articles by Gustavo Castillo Garcia and the Reuters news agency. Frontera, December 26, 27, 28, 29, 2007. Articles by Ana Cecilia Ramirez, Fausto Ovalle and news agencies. El Universal, December 17 and 28, 2007. Articles by Julieta
Martinez and Javier Cabrera Martinez. Proceso/Apro, December 28, 2007.

House of Death Cops Back on the Force?

Four former cops once charged in connection with Ciudad Juarez's notorious "House of Death" case have won a court order that could allow them to rejoin the Chihuahua State Investigations Agency (AEI). After spending more than three years in a federal prison outside Mexico City, the four men, Simon Lopez Ruiz, Ricardo Parada Palma, Jesus Lorenzo Herrera Romo and Eduardo Lopez Amaya, were absolved of crimes by two Ciudad Juarez courts earlier this year.

Together with nine other members of the old Chihuahua State Judicial Police (PJE) and five civilians, Lopez and his fellow, acquitted agents were detained by federal police for their suspected involvement in the murders of 12 men who were found buried in the yard of a home located in the middle-class Las Acequias subdivision of Ciudad Juarez in January 2004.

In the latest legal development, a judge in Toluca, Mexico state, recently ruled that Lopez Ruiz, Parada, Hererra and Lopez Amaya had been improperly dismissed from the PJE and should be returned to work and compensated.

"We are going to ask that the agents be reinstalled, that they are paid their salaries from 2004 to now and that their seniority be respected inside the institution," said Jesus Torres Macias, a Ciudad Juarez lawyer for the men. "The state attorney general's office violated the law by firing the men without a hearing and an opportunity for a defense."

In early 2004, "The House of Death" scandal erupted in Ciudad Juarez after two US Drug Enforcement Administration agents and their families were almost kidnapped and murdered by policemen working for the Carrillo Fuentes drug cartel. A subsequent search of a residential property in the Las Acequias neighborhood produced the bodies of 12 men who had been tortured and executed by the drug trafficking ring.

Miguel Angel Loya Gallegos, who commanded the state police's night shift in the border city, was fingered as one of the leading executioners.

Another man implicated in the crimes, former Mexican policeman Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, was an active informant for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency at the time of Las Acequias scandal.  Also known as "Lalo," Ramirez allegedly participated in the some of the murders with the knowledge of his superiors.

Imprisoned in the US, Ramirez is fighting attempts by the US federal government to deport him to Mexico. A US immigration judge in Minnesota sided with Ramirez in a decision this fall, reiterating an earlier ruling that a deportation to Mexico would expose the former US informant to torture and possible murder.

According to lawyers for the four ex-PJE officers, the Chihuahua State Office of the Attorney General (PGJE) received notice of the Toluca court’s resolution on December 1; the state law enforcement agency has 10 days to appeal the decision. Mario Ruiz Nava, spokesman for the PGJE, said the matter was in the hands of the agency’s human resources department. 

Of the 12 bodies recovered from the Las Acequias home, nine were eventually identified. Three of the corpses stayed unclaimed before being buried in Ciudad Juarez's common grave in 2006. Of the original 18 "House of Death" suspects arrested, only three former PJE officers and four civilians remain in prison. Never brought to trial, former PJE agents Loya, Lorenzo Ramirez Yanez, Erick Cano Aguilera and Alvaro Valdez Rivas are officially considered fugitives.

The Las Acequias site was among several “narco-graves” which have been unearthed in Ciudad Juarez since late 1999.

Sources: El Diario de Juarez, December 11 and 12, 2007. Narconews.com, October 11, 2007. Article by Bill Conroy.

The Border, Terrorism Tales and the 2008 Election

Time will tell if the now-discredited story of Afghan and Iraqi terrorists sneaking across the US-Mexico border to storm Fort Huachuca, Arizona, will quietly fade away or later be recycled as polemical darts in the debate over border security. In case you missed the original tale first published by the Moonie-founded Washington Times and then picked up by major media outlets like Fox News in recent days, the basic story went like this: working in tandem with Mexico's Gulf Cartel, a squad of 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists, armed with weapons including anti-tank missiles smuggled through Mexican narco-tunnels, would slip into the United States and launch an assault on strategic Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona.

According to the explosive story, information altering to the plot came from secondary US Drug Enforcement Administration sources, or informants, within the Gulf Cartel. "A thorough investigation was conducted, and there is no evidence showing that the threat was credible," Manuel Johnson, a Phoenix FBI spokesman, told the Arizona Daily Star this week.

Prior to Johnson's refutation of the Washington Times piece, the story got wide media play in the United States and Mexico. Most media accounts did not probe details of the story that made little sense to anyone familiar with border geography or the current security situation in the region. For example, an important part of the story contended that foreign terrorists would move from the border town of Laredo, Texas, to the Arizona desert hundreds of miles away in order to stage their bloody attack on Fort Huachuca.

News reports did not mention that Laredo-based terrorists would either have to possess a private air force or pass through multiple US Border Patrol highway checkpoints on their way to Arizona. None of the stories explained the means by which scores of assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and even anti-tank missiles would be moved from the Mexican border to the proximity of Fort Huachuca. Did the would-be attackers intend on utilizing SUVs? How about ATVs or pack mules? Despite the presence of illogical elements, the Washington Times’ story initially was treated as a serious news item.

The purported plot against Fort Huachuca wasn't the first time US and Mexican media outlets have reported on possible plans of Middle Eastern terrorists to attack the US from Mexican soil. As early as 1999, two years before the 9-11 attacks, Ciudad Juarez Mayor Gustavo Elizondo declared that a joint US-Mexican plan had been drafted to prevent terrorist attacks. According to Elizondo, the FBI had information that Frankfurt-based terrorists could send letter bombs to the US, and that some members of terrorist groups might cross the border at Ciudad Juarez.

In response to allegations that Al-Qaeda could have infiltrated the US from Mexico in early 2005, Hector Rodriguez, then head of the Mexican federal attorney general’s office in Chihuahua state, denied that Mexican authorities had detected terrorists lurking in Ciudad Juarez. Two years later, in early 2007, top law enforcement officials from both sides of the border, including representatives of the agency responsible for monitoring internal security in Mexico, publicly discounted a purported Internet threat by Al-Qaeda to attack energy-producing installations of US oil-supplier nations like Mexico.  

While little or no evidence ultimately supported the Fort Huachuca or earlier stories, the specter of Middle Eastern terrorists crossing the US border from Mexico has become a recurrent image in the debate over border security raging away in Washington and the US heartland. The most recent terrorist tale comes at a time when border security and illegal immigration are re-emerging as hot button issues in the 2008 US presidential election. Increasingly, heated talk on the topics is defining US television and radio talk shows, from Lou Dobbs on the "right" to Ed Schultz on the "left." Callers and hosts on the shows frequently use warfare-related words like "unprotected" and "invasion" to characterize the situation on the US-Mexico border.

Sources: Arizona Daily Star, November 27, 2007. Article by Aaron Mackey. Washington Times, November 26, 2007. Article by Sara A. Carter. El Universal, March 6, 2007. Article by Jose Carreno. El Imparical/EFE, February 20, 2007. El Diario de Juarez, March 17, 2005. La Jornada, December 28, 1999; November 26 and 27, 2007. Articles by Ruben Villalpando, Jesus Aranda and news agencies.  

A Prison Gang War Unsettles the City

Law enforcement authorities have reestablished control over the city's sprawling prison (Cereso) that exploded in bloody combat on Thursday, November 1. In an all-too-familiar scene, hundreds of inmates armed with guns and sharp objects battled for control of the overcrowded facility. The fighting erupted as 300 relatives of inmates were visiting their loved ones. Caught in a cross-fire of rocks, bullets and tear gas, visiting families feared for their lives.

"The prisoners wanted to kill us," said a terrified, 7-year-old Miguel Betancourt. Some relatives credited prisoners for saving their lives from rampaging inmates while prison guards stood by without intervening. Called to the scene, municipal police were able to evacuate some of the trapped visitors.

"It was obvious that relatives were stuck between the two gangs and one of them was threatening to open fire on the visitors, including dozens of children and women." said city police spokesman Jaime Torres Valadez. "If this had been put down by force instead of by dialogue, we would have had a greater number of dead people." 

When the battle was finally over, two inmates, Humberto Hermelano Aguirre Candelario and Octavio Vargas Chavez lay dead, and 70 others were injured.
 
 Rebellious inmates held sections of the prison for 63 hours. An early Sunday morning assault on November 4 by nearly 500 state and municipal police officers led by Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez regained control of the Cereso. Authorities confiscated three firearms, 33 Molotov cocktails and more than 600 other weapons. However, two shotguns and a fully automatic AR-15 rifle that were supposedly used by the Aztecas were not reported found. Video cameras captured inmates toting the still-missing weapons during the melee. 

The uprising was the first crisis to test the new city administration of Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, who took office last month. Amid reports that prison guards allowed inmates to riot, Mayor Reyes fired Warden Jose Grajeda Almaraz and prison guard commander Anastasia Gallegos Gonzalez.  State Attorney General Gonzalez's office quickly filed negligence charges against Gallegos and another prison employee. But Grajeda leaped  to  Gallegos’ defense. "He's honest, a worker, and has dignity and respect," Grajeda said.  "It's unjust that people dedicated to their work are made to look like devils, and all of this because they give more credence to the bad apples, who are the ones that criticize Anastasio.”  

Grajeda maintained that he inherited a disastrous, explosive situation when he took over the job running the prison. The sacked warden added that he requested municipal and state officials transfer 101 inmates one week before the Cereso blew up,

The November 1 violence pitted members of the Aztecas street gang against their longtime rivals from the Mexicles gang. The two groups have long struggled for control of the lucrative illegal drug business inside the prison. A third gang, "Killer Artists," also has a presence in the Cereso.  State Attorney General Gonzalez said witnesses have accused former prison guard commander Gallegos of protecting the Aztecas.

Since late 2005, the Cereso has been the scene of violent power struggles between inmate gangs. With the latest violence, at least 18 inmates have been killed and more than 100 injured during the last two years. In the worst incident, nine prisoners were killed during a March 2006 fight. Earlier this year, two tunnels under the prison were discovered by authorities. Built to hold 1,500 inmates, the Cereso housed more than 3,000 prisoners when it erupted in violence last week. 

It's not publicly known what sparked the latest clash, but a reported Aztecas member and former Chihuahua State Judicial Police officer,   Prisciliano Martinez Herrera, was murdered gangland-style on the streets of Ciudad Juarez two days before the prison violence erupted.  Other alleged links between the Aztecas and former and current state policemen have been reported in the local press.  According to State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez, events inside the prison are controlled from the outside by gang leaders who live in Ciudad Juarez or neighboring El Paso, Texas.  

Mayor Reyes appointed a veteran ex-state police official, Salvador Barrendo, as the new Cereso warden.  Previously associated with the administration of former Governor Patricio Martinez (1998-2004) and his top cop, "Chito” Solis, the new warden immediately fended off criticism from some inmates about alleged corruption on his record. Barrendo said he would "dialogue" with prisoners, but ruled out formal negotiations.

In a press conference, State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez confirmed that her office will probe the background to the November 1 violence.  “We are looking at the probable responsibility and participation of authorities that were at the Cereso earlier, but these are preliminary investigations separate from the ones having to do with November 1,” Gonzalez clarified.

As immediate steps to head off further bloodshed, authorities announced the transfer of some inmates and the construction of a concrete wall to separate members of the Aztecas and Mexicles gangs inside the prison.

"The root problem won't be resolved until we build a new Cereso," said Mayor Reyes. "The situation is very complicated. We received a prison in grave condition. Without having the certainty  (violent outbreaks) like this one aren't going to happen, we are taking measures to control them."

Legislators Jorge Neaves Chacon and Antonio Andreu Rodriguez of the Institutional Revolutionary Party announced they will seek support from Mexican President Calderon’s administration to construct a new federal prison in Ciudad Juarez. Although the Cereso is set up to incarcerate local and state lawbreakers, about half its current inmate population consists of individuals charged with federal offenses, which typically involve drug law violations.   

Business and social leaders condemned the November 1 bloodletting, with some also urging federal intervention as well as an end to the widespread corruption which has allegedly characterized management of the prison. Gabriel Flores Viramontes, president of the local branch of the Canacintra business association, urged the construction of a new federal prison to hold problematic inmates. Laurencio Barraza Limon, a representative of the Independent Popular Organization, contended that a long overdue revamping of the prison system should include therapeutic treatment programs and rehabilitative activities.

Sources: Norte, November 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 2007. Articles by Nohemi Barraza, Carlos Huerta, Salvador Castro, Pablo Hernandez Batista, and Jorge Chairez Daniel. La Polaka.com, November 2, 3, 5, 6, 2007. Frontenet.com, November 4, 2007.  El Diario de Juarez, October 31, 2007; November 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 2007. Articles by Armando Rodriguez and editorial staff.

Death of a Border Queen

She might not have a hit ballad crooned in her name, but Rosa Emma Carvajal Ontiversos was something of legend in the Mexican border town of Palomas across the New Mexico line.  Called "La Guera Polvos," or "The Blonde Powder Woman," Carvajal was reputedly the "mera mera," or "big boss woman" in blues lingo, of the small town. Allegedly, she was in the business of selling dope and smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States. Well-known to the local cops, Carvajal reportedly led a crowd that stormed and ransacked the offices of the Palomas police station during a 2004 dispute with the boys in blue. More recently, she supposedly shot a young woman in a fit of jealously over a young lover.

Early on the evening of October 6, Carvajal was driving through the streets of Palomas when she was suddenly ambushed. Witnesses said that a pick up pulled alongside Carvajal's vehicle and riddled the 53-year-old woman with bullets. Carvajal's gangland-style murder was among the latest acts of violence to unnerve Palomas, a seemingly sleepy small town where US residents travel to get their teeth fixed or to buy a cheap Mexican souvenir. Palomas is also an important hub of organized crime. 

Murders and kidnappings have long disturbed the peace in ironically-named Palomas, which in Spanish means "doves." Occasionally, the violence spills over to New Mexico. Last month, a wounded Oklahoma man arrived at the Columbus Port of Entry after suffering a gunshot wound on the other side of the border. In a bizarre incident earlier this year, a car sped through the port of entry transporting a dead driver, whose face had been disfigured by bullets, while a passenger struggled to steer the vehicle. A third passenger was also dead and a fourth one was wounded. Minutes prior to the chaotic scene, US Customs and Border Protection officers listened to automatic gunfire rip the early morning calm of Palomas.

On another level, the murder of "La Guera Polvos" presented another instance of women in the annals organized crime. Far from being just girlfriends of drug traffickers or simple "mules" who transport drugs, women are moving up in the ranks of the business. Tijuana's Arellano-Felix drug cartel, for instance, is headed up by Enendina Arellano Felix, according to some reports.

For weeks Mexican media have been captivated by Sandra Avila Beltran, the so-called "Queen of the Pacific,". Recently detained by Mexican federal police, Avila is allegedly a major connection in the international cocaine business. The 46-year-old woman is part of the third generation of a Sinaloa-based family that counts iconic traffickers including Rafael Caro Quintero and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo.

Sexy and sassy, and enjoying the poise of a big screen star, Avila is accused of moving tons of Colombian cocaine through Mexican ports. The sagas of Avila and other reputed narco-women have inspired songwriters and novelists. Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte's acclaimed novel, The Queen of the South, tells the story of an Avila-like drug lord. Always on the cutting edge of popular events and culture, Los Tigres del Norte sang a 1987 tune,  Camelia la Texana,  that’s about a woman drug smuggler who shoots a man and disappears with the dough. As part of its song list, Los Tucanes de Tijuana performs a narco-corrido about none other than Sandra Avila Beltran. It remains to be seen if the tale of "La Guera Polvos" is one day heard rising from a cantina jukebox.    

 
Sources: El Diario de Juarez, October 8, 2007. Lapolaka.com, October 8, 2007. El Universal/EFE September 28, 2007. October 1 and 3, 2007. El Sur, October 1, 2007. La Jornada/Notimex, September 28, 2007. Deming Headlight, September 17, 2007. Article by Kevin Buey. El Paso Times, May 8, 2007. Article by Louie Gilot.

Gun-battles, Kidnappings Jolt Tijuana

The Mexican federal government began dispatching an additional 650 federal police to Tijuana after an upsurge in suspected narco-violence left the border city reeling this past week. In the worst incident, gunmen firing automatic weapons from various vehicles attacked a post manned by the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) and Baja California State Preventive Police late on the evening of September 24.

The 10-minute firefight in the Francisco Villa neighborhood left one civilian dead, two others wounded and two PFP agents injured. The windows of seven government vehicles and the metal fence of a nearby school were destroyed by the storm of bullets. Walking with his girlfriend in front of the targeted building, car washer Alfredo Luna Reyes was killed when he entered the line of fire as the attack got underway. Luna's girlfriend was wounded in the gunfire. No suspects in the shooting were immediately detained.

Two hours before the Francisco Villa assault, 20-year-old state police officer Ricardo Rosas Alvarado, who was assigned to a special intelligence unit, was murdered in a parking lot situated in another section of Tijuana.  Rosas' murder followed the September 23 killing of Baja California state policeman Carlos Horacio Morales Mendez.

In yet another incident bearing the signature of organized crime, the body of Miguel Angel Ramos Pintado, a cousin of former Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, was discovered September 23 in the Baja border city of Tecate. Ramos had been reported missing since September 14. Ramos' daughter, Nadia Karina Ramos, who was a Baja California contestant in the Miss Mexico beauty contest, quickly withdrew from the pageant competition after hearing the news of her father's death   

Tijuana's violence, which has claimed at least 218 lives in the border city this year, erupted as Tijuana Mayor Kurt Honold was attending a hemispheric mayors' conference in Chicago, Illinois. Honold was scheduled to talk about purported, local law enforcement advances in Tijuana. "We are on the level of London, England, not because I say it but because the International Association of City Centers affirms it," Honold was quoted as saying before leaving for Chicago. 

It is unclear who or what is behind the most recent bouts of violence in Tijuana. A city long-dominated by the Arellano-Felix drug cartel, and plagued with high rates of methamphetamine and other drug abuse, Tijuana has been a key battle-ground for control of both the domestic and export (US) drug markets in recent years.

Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, the chief of the Federal Office of the Attorney General's anti-organized crime squad, recently contended that the Arellano-Felix organization, whose alleged former leader, Francisco Javier Arellano, was sentenced to life in a US prison this month, had ceased to exist. Other analysts challenge the contention that the cartel is on its last legs.

Outgoing Baja California Governor Eugenio Elorduy blamed the latest violence on reactions by organized crime to law enforcement crack-downs. "Let there be no doubt. We aren't going to be intimidated, we aren't going to retreat," Governor Elorduy said. "This is a war and we accept it as being one."

Despite the enhanced police presence in Tijuana, an armed commando kidnapped five persons, four men and a woman, in broad daylight September 26 in front of the city’s Pacific Industrial Park. The names of the victims were not immediately made public.   

Sources: El Universal, September 26, 2007. Article by Julieta Martinez. El Sol de Tijuana, September 26, 2007. Proceso/Apro, September 25, 2007. La Jornada/PL/AFP, September 26, 2007. Frontera, September 23 and 27, 2007. Articles by Manuel Villegas and Fausto Ovalle.    

Mexican Army Drug War Role Debated

Hauled out as the shock troops of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's declared offensive against drug trafficking, the Mexican army is under increasing criticism for alleged human rights violations in its recent campaigns. As charges swirl around multiple incidents involving soldiers across the country, controversy simmers over possible, new troop deployments.  

In Ciudad Juarez, Ernesto Anaya, the head of the Coparmex and CCE business organizations, recently petitioned for the deployment of the army on the border city's streets. Anaya's appeal, which sparked a polemic across the political spectrum, came after shadowy, armed groups linked to organized crime re-appeared and killed or kidnapped victims with impunity.

Taking issue with Anaya's proposal was Cipriana Jurado, director of the non-governmental Center for Research and Worker Solidarity, who pointed to previous cases of soldiers implicated in human rights violations while manning checkpoints. In a criticism frequently voiced by other opponents of drug war militarization, Jurado contended that soldiers were not trained or prepared to interact with civilians in law enforcement functions.

Instead, Jurado urged greater coordination between the three existing levels of law enforcement, which she insisted was very weak. The labor activist criticized the Office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR), the primary agency responsible for tackling organized criminal activity, for not "taking over cases" in which individuals are suspected of violating federal laws like firearms possession. 

Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza and Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez both staked out a middle ground in the debate, endorsing the continued deployment of the army in rural areas while disagreeing that soldiers were needed in violence-torn Ciudad Juarez.

"We believe that the events that have happened are matters of a local nature that could be easily controlled by state and local police," Gonzalez said. 
 
Contrasting opinions about the military's deployment have emanated from the powerful Roman Catholic Church. Jose Guadalupe Torres, auxiliary bishop of Ciudad Juarez, said circumstances required the military. "Personally, I don't like it, but if it is for everyone to be more secure, then it is necessary to support (military deployment,)" he said. 

Coahuila Bishop Raul Vera, who previously served in Chiapas state, has a different view. Comparing the current national situation with the post-1994 Zapatista uprising atmosphere in the southern state, Bishop Vera warned that militarization threatens to yield further corruption and even dictatorship.

"They send soldiers to pursue corrupt police, but they are focusing on the lower ranks, not on those who manage the cartels, people who are in high positions" Bishop Vera said. "The military is overwhelmed, because somebody always protects drug trafficking from high on up."  

Since ordering more than 24,000 soldiers into the field last December, the Calderon administration's drug control strategy has become an international issue. Both Amnesty International and the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico strongly question the move, while the European Union's foreign representative, Javier Solana, backs it. Tacitly, the Bush administration supports the Mexican army's key role in the drug war.

In its latest report, the Mexico’s Ministry of Defense (SEDENA), takes credit for significant advances against drug production and trafficking since last December. According to SEDENA, soldiers eradicated more than 45,000 acres of marijuana and nearly 20,000 acres of opium poppies, confiscated about 2 million pounds of marijuana, seized more than two tons of cocaine and seventeen tons of heroin, and recovered 2,472 arms. More than 2,000 individuals were detained, according to the tally.

Although the Calderon administration contends that the army's deployment has wrested back entire zones of the country previously controlled by organized crime, little evidence exists that the increased troop presence has diminished overall violence. In Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, a violence-plagued city where Mexican army patrols were ordered into the streets after a rash of narco-executions this year, a state legislator from the PRI party, Mario Cesar Rios Gutierrez, was slain gangland-style June 12 in broad daylight.

Use of the army as the bulwark in the drug war is nothing new. In addition to human rights and appropriate law enforcement training concerns, militarization critics raise constitutional issues about the legality of the Mexican army enforcing civilian law, and warn of the exposure of military personnel to the temptations of corruption, an issue which has already rocked   the armed forces.

General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, a former Mexican drug czar, and General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, an officer linked to numerous forced disappearances in Guerrero state during Mexico's Dirty War of the 1970s, were jailed in 1997 and 2000, respectively, for their alleged ties to the Juarez drug cartel.  Nonetheless, the army is still widely perceived by public opinion and politicians as less vulnerable to the vices that have stained civilian police forces. 

Joining in the drug war debate have been factions of Mexico’s small but increasingly vocal leftist guerrilla movement. Many of the groups operate in the same zones where illegal drug cultivation and trafficking are rife. In a June 11 statement circulated in the Mexican media, the Clandestine Revolutionary Committee of the Poor/June 28 Justice Commando, an offshoot of the Popular Revolutionary Army, declared its members were “inconvenient witnesses” to the complete “failure” of the Calderon Administration’s “supposed struggle against drug trafficking.”

The group contended, “In hundreds of small farm communities of Guerrero, the narco continues planting, cultivating and harvesting opium poppies and marijuana without any problem. The only thing that the ‘anti-crime’ campaign has achieved is to restructure and strengthen the structures that it is supposedly combating…today, the Mexican state vainly confronts the metastasis of the narco within its own body.”

A Return to Dirty War Tactics? 

Overshadowing the military’s deployment are mounting accounts of scandalous behavior, human rights violations and possible criminal activity by soldiers assigned to the drug war. A group of soldiers near the El Millon Ranch in the Juarez Valley reportedly engaged in a drunken brawl June 10 that ended with shots fired and the whereabouts of one soldier in doubt. 

Several incidents in Tamaulipas state have prompted popular indignation and led to a formal request from the Governor's office for the intervention of the official National Human Rights Commission (CNDH). In a pair of separate shootings blamed on soldiers, the first one on April 29 and the second on June 3, two young men were killed while possibly speeding past army checkpoints on Tamaulipas border highways. Earlier, on May 11, Mother's Day, soldiers were accused of shooting up an auditorium during a community festival in the municipality of Miguel Aleman. Two women were reported injured, and 400 residents staged a protest outside the local military garrison days later. 
 
In a still-mysterious episode, two sisters employed by the police were forcibly disappeared from their Nuevo Laredo home by armed men on June 4. Claudia Ivette and Laura Esther Gonzalez, who both worked in key positions in the C-4 command and control center, were carted off along with two male visitors. Witnesses described the culprits as men dressed in military uniforms, but it wasn't immediately clear if the kidnappers were genuine soldiers or imposters wearing stolen or counterfeit army uniforms. 
 
Grave accusations against the Mexican army have been documented in Sinaloa and Michoacan states, the scenes of bloody fighting between different drug organizations. Nineteen soldiers have been jailed in a military prison for allegedly shooting to death five members of a family in the Sinaloa countryside on June 2. The soldiers face charges for the killings of 25-year-old Griselda Galaviz and her 19-year-old sister-in-law, Alicia Esparza, as well as the Galaviz woman's three young children: Edwin, 2; Leonel, 4, and Juanadiomirely, 6. Again, alleged checkpoint running surfaced as an issue.

By mid-May, the CNDH had received 52 complaints of illegal searches, arbitrary detentions and torture in four Michoacan municipalities. Ten people were allegedly injured and at least two tortured by Mexican army units in the Tierra Caliente region of the state. In the town of Nocupetaro, four teenage waitresses at the La Estrellita restaurant, together with the female owner of the business, were supposedly accosted May 2 by soldiers who accused the women of working for the Zetas drug gang. The women charged that they were then raped by the soldiers.
 
Some accounts report that the young women, aged 16 to 17, were beaten on helicopter flights during which soldiers threatened to toss the detainees into the sea, a common practice in the Dirty War against guerrilla suspects and dissidents during the 1970s.  Ironically known as "the cradle" of the Mexican army, Nocupetaro, is historically connected to Jose Maria Morelos' uprising against Spain in 1810.  

"We are for strengthening policing institutions and taking the army off the streets as soon as possible," said CNDH President Jose Luis Soberanes, who insisted that the army should be defending national independence and not chasing criminals.

On June 14, Soberanes confirmed that at least two of the young women from Nocupetaro had been raped. The Michoacan scandal erupted even as 8 soldiers faced trial for the gang rape of 14 dancers in Coahuila state last year, and controversy brewed about the alleged rape and murder of an elderly indigenous women, Ernestina Ascencio, by another group of soldiers in Veracruz state on February 26 of this year. In a widely denounced decision, the CNDH claimed that the woman's death stemmed from natural causes. 

Reportedly, events in Sinaloa and Michoacan have encouraged an internal government review of the military’s current drug war strategy and could lead to redeployments, though it is not expected that soldiers will be withdrawn from the front. True to form, the army itself has largely remained tight-lipped about most of the controversial events involving its troops.

Support for the Army against Narco Towns

 Despite the scandals, large sectors of the public continue supporting the army's leading role in the drug war. In a recent column, Mexico City journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio quoted an e-mail he said that he received from a writer who claimed to be from the narco-dominated town of Apatzingan, Michoacan. According to Riva Palacio, the writer supported the army taking firmer actions against narcos who are committing massive human rights violations. 

"You speak about the CNDH having 8 complaints of violations," Riva Palacio quoted the cyber messenger. "As you will see, we could have 500 in one day." The purported Michoacan resident charged that criminal gangs in the Tierra Caliente region operate curfews, erect illegal checkpoints, levy taxes on honest merchants, and murder opponents.

According to Riva Palacio, the e-mail contained the following statement: "If you were out and about Coalcoman at 9 in the evening, armed groups (narcos), arrested you, asked you what you were doing, gave you a little kick and hit you. They let you if you convinced them that you were only an idiot who didn't know the local laws"

Quoted in the column, the e-mail writer accused the municipal president, town officials, local and federal police, taxi drivers, auto parts dealers, journalists, and numerous other residents of Apatzingan of being in cahoots with the narco.

While debate rages over the army's participation in the drug war, Mexican soldiers continue seeing action in the field. On June 6, soldiers took control of the Mexicali international airport in Baja California after 18 members of the Federal Preventive Police, which itself is largely made up of military personnel, were busted in Mexicali and Tijuana for alleged complicity with drug traffickers. In another section of the Mexico-US border region, soldiers reportedly clashed with narcos in the Chihuahua border town of Palomas across from New Mexico on June 12.  No injuries were reported.

Sources: Frontenet.com, June 13, 2007. Article by Sergio Valdez. LaPolaka.com, June 13, 2007. Norte, June 11, 2007. Article by Francisco Lujan. La Jornada, April 1, 2007; May 16, 2007; June 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 2007. Articles by David Carrizales, Victor Ballinas, Gustavo Garcia Castillo, Martin Diego Rodriguez, Fabiola Martinez and the Notimex news agency. Proceso/Apro/Cimac, May 18, 2007; June 4, 11 and 12, 2007. Articles by  Gabriela Hernandez, Soledad Jarquin Edgar, Miriam Ruiz, and Veronica
Espinosa. El Universal, May 11, 18, 23, 25, 2007; June 3 and 7, 2007. Articles by Raymundo Riva Palacio, Jorge Teheran, Javier Cabrera Martinez, Sergio Javier Jimenez, and the AP, EFE and Notimex news agencies. El Diario de Juarez, June 10, 11 and 12, 2007. Enlinea Directa.info, June 5, 2007. Article by Nora Morales. Cimacnoticias.com, March 7 and 14, 2007; April 13, 2007; May 9, 2007. Articles by Laura Castro Medina and Soledad Jarquin Edgar.  Cedema.org. Sedena.gob.mx

Narco-Violence Reaching New Heights

Four months into the administration of President Felipe Calderon, narco-related violence in Mexico is on the verge of surpassing last year's record levels. Mexico City's El Universal daily recently reported that at least 535 suspected narco-murders were registered in the country between January 1 and March 23 of this year. Added to a spate of murders in the last days of March and first days of April, the numbers are well on their way of equaling or beating the toll for 2006, the last year of the Fox Administration, when narco-violence reached a bloody crescendo. Different Mexican press accounts report that between 1800 and 2,231 people were murdered last year in gangland violence. 

Indicating little-if any-change on the ground, the highways of this year's bloodletting are both well-worn and newly-treaded. Nuevo Leon, Baja California, Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Morelos, Guerrero, Michoacan, Tabasco, and Veracruz states remain hotspots, while Mexico City and even once-tranquil Aguascalientes are also reporting slayings.  

"According to the information that we have in the state and according to the information the federal government has given us, there is the possibility, the high possibility, that we could have another round of violence," warned Aldo Fasci Zuazua, assistant state attorney general of the northern border state of Nuevo Leon.

Police as Sitting Ducks

Distinguishing the latest outbreak of violence is the large number of policemen-at least 78 as of April 1-who have been murdered in gangland style slayings since the start of the year. Other common victims include taxi drivers, ranchers, businessmen, women, teenagers, and politicians like German Adame, the former PRI mayor of Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, who was gunned down along with his mother last February. Atoyac is the municipal seat of a region famous for its opium poppy crop.

In Nuevo Leon, Governor Jose Natividad Gonzalez Paras acknowledged that some of the slain policemen were linked to organized crime, but he insisted that many others were honest officials who were just trying to do their jobs.

"It is not a coincidence that in the last 20 days the majority of the executed victims have been policemen," Gonzalez said. "This is a strategy of drug traffickers to scare off the authorities, but we are not taking any steps backward."

Regardless of the true circumstances surrounding the police murders, significant numbers of law enforcement officers are abandoning the profession. Press reports indicate that at least 80 policemen have voluntarily turned in the badge just in Nuevo Leon and Guerrero states in recent weeks.  

Marking the violence is the brazen, public nature of many of the executions.  In the Costa Grande community of Tecpan de Galeana, Guerrero, gunmen strolled into the public market during peak business hours and shot to death two policemen who were dining. In Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, a car carrying four men was riddled with bullets in front of an elementary school that was beginning the late shift classes on the afternoon of March 26. Reportedly terrified students cried and were forced to find cover. Scenes of the mayhem were broadcast on the Internet via the Lapolaka website. Earlier, on March 19, an unexploded grenade was found outside an Applebee's restaurant in Ciudad Juarez's Golden Zone.

Occasionally, innocent bystanders fall victim to the violence. On February 22, for instance, 45-year-old Gabriel Contreras Quevedo was killed by a stray bullet in Tijuana while he was eating tacos.  

Draped with written, threatening messages, castrated or fingerless bodies are now frequently left outside television stations, on public roads, near the homes of politicians and even in front of army posts. Last weekend, the bodies of a father and his son were dumped near separate army installations in the northern border state of Tamaulipas. A message left on the body of the younger victim, 45-year-old Mario Pena Pena, was directed at three Mexican army lieutenants.  It read in part, “Is this how you protect your informants?”

Numerous theories are floating around the Mexican press to explain the seemingly unstoppable violence, especially in light of the Calderon Administration's deployment of the Mexican army to curb violent crime groups. Significantly, the violent wave has not subsided in the aftermath of the extradition of previously imprisoned drug lords to the United States.

According to some analysts, Mexico City's anti-crime operations have disrupted the regional networks of drug organizations and forced some into a desperate posture. Others cite the ongoing turf war between the Sinaloa Cartel and Zetas, the armed enforcers of the Gulf Cartel, as well as internal strife within the latter group. Punishment for lost loads of contraband,  collections of unpaid debts, hits against informers, tit-for-tat attacks,  revenge against bought-off cops who did not deliver as contracted, and the  of prevalence of plain old impunity are other explanations for the violent surge. There are probably kernels of truth in all of the above.

The Lurid Narco-Drama Plays On

First premiering in late 2005 with the release of a video that showed the execution of a Zeta in an Acapulco safe house allegedly by federal police, the gruesome narco telenovela plays on in new episodes for public consumption. An Iraqi-style decapitation of an alleged Zeta that was conducted with the music of Mexican crooner Joan Sebastian playing in the background was briefly posted on YouTube last week before it was yanked from the web portal.

Only days earlier, TV Azteca broadcast a short video of two men surrounded by four heavily-armed men outfitted in black hoods and clothing. In what appeared to be a rehearsed session, one of the men was questioned by one of the armed captors, a man who appeared to be familiar with interrogation techniques.

Creating an instant scandal, the captive on the video mentioned the names of Veracruz state police commanders and a murdered journalist who allegedly had been allegedly on the Zetas' payroll. Later identified as Victor Perez Rocha of Oaxaca state, the captive confessed to personally killing 10 people as well as supervising 600 drug distribution outlets in Veracruz state.

Perez, and his unfortunate companion, Jesus Arano Servin of Tamaulipas, were found murdered on a public street in the port city of Veracruz on March 28. False credentials from the Federal Office of the Attorney General and the Federal Agency of Investigations were found with the men's corpses, which also contained an anti-Zeta message. Claimed by a previously unknown group, the self-proclaimed "New People," the double-murder raises the possibility that a vigilante group or death squad of unknown origin and loyalty is a new element in the spreading, violent mess.  

Sources: El Diario de Juarez, February 11, 2007; March 26, 2007; April 1, 2007. Articles by Guadalupe Garcia, Ricardo Ravelo/Proceso and the Notimex news agency. Proceso/Apro, April 2, 2007. El Diario de El Paso/Proceso, April 1, 2007. Articles by Luciano Campos and Arturo Rodriguez. El Universal, January 1, 2007; February 9 and 23, 2007 March 15, 24, 27, 28, 29, 2007; April 2 and 3, 2007.  Articles by Laura Reyes Maciel, Rafael Rivera Millan,  Andrea Merlos, Juan Cedillo, Justino Miranda, Raymundo Rivas Palacio, Edgar Avila Perez, Luis Carlo Cano, and Juan Cervantes Gomez.

Mexico's Meth War Booty

Mexican officials have an unexpected windfall on their hands. Discovered in a spectacular Mexico City raid on March 15, more than $205 million dollars in suspected narco-cash awaits spending by different branches of the Mexican government. Under Mexican law, the drug war booty will be divided three ways among the courts, law enforcement and the public health sector. The monetary sum is roughly equivalent to the annual municipal budget of the sprawling border city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua.

A photo released by Mexico's Federal Office of the Attorney General (PGR) reveals the magnitude of the money lot in question. In a scene that resembles an assembly line in a maquiladora export plant, two lines of uniformed women are shown processing the money on the shop floor.  The PGR said that it has requested the US Treasury Department to trace the origin of the seized bills.   

The cash stash was traced to a suspected, large-scale methamphetamine manufacturing ring that shipped precursor chemicals from China via Long Beach, California, to
the Mexican Pacific port of Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan. Two earlier seizures of chemicals in Lazaro Cardenas and the neighboring state of Colima are linked to the same crime syndicate.

According to Tony Garza, US ambassador to Mexico, a tip from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) helped lead Mexican federal police to the house in Mexico City's exclusive Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood where the $205 million dollars, along with other currencies that included Chinese bills bearing the picture of Chairman Mao, were confiscated. Ambassador Garza labeled the police score "historic" in the drug war.  

 
The PGR suspects that the transnational meth organization was in the process of establishing a huge laboratory, or methamphetamine maquiladora, in the city of Toluca outside Mexico City. Six men and one woman were arrested in the March 15 raid, while a seventh person, Zenli Ye Gon, a Mexican resident of Chinese origin, is a fugitive in the case. Accused of using the Unimed pharmaceutical chemical company as a front business for the operation,  Zenli Ye Gon is wanted by Interpol in 180 countries, according to the PGR.

The Unimed case sheds new light on the size and scope of global drug trafficking organizations, changes in the methamphetamine market and the strategic role of the port of Lazaro Cardenas and the state of Michoacan in the illegal business. Once controlled by biker gangs, amateur "cooks" and other home-based organizations, the US meth market is now largely supplied by Mexico-based organizations that boast sophisticated international connections. The DEA estimates that as much as 80 percent of the methamphetamine consumed in the United States is now produced in Mexico.

It remains to be seen exactly how the confiscated Unimed money will be spent. The Ministry of Health's share, nearly $70 million dollars, is supposed to be spent on rehabilitating drug addicts. Similar to the United States, Mexico is witnessing a problem with methamphetamine addiction, especially with younger people in cities like Tijuana.

Sources: La Jornada/Notimex, March 21 and 23, 2007. El Universal, March 24, 2007. Article by Silvia Otero. Federal Office of the Attorney General, March 22, 2007. Press release.

Violent Surge Signals End of Fox Era

Blood flowed generously on the streets of Mexican border and other cities during the last days of President Vicente Fox's term. From Ciudad Juarez to Acapulco , and from Reynosa to Toluca , gang-land style ambushes, executions and kidnappings jolted society and filled the press with more gruesome headlines. Standing out in the latest bout of bloodletting was the professional affiliations of many victims. Entertainers, politicians, law enforcement agents, lawyers, and former government officials ranked high in the list of the apparent targets.

Easily grabbing the most attention was the early-morning November 25 murder of singer Valentin Elizalde minutes after he finished a concert in Reynosa across from McAllen , Texas . Known as the "Golden Rooster," the 27-year-old Elizalde was a rising star in the "Grupero" genre of popular music. Horrified fans witnessed the entertainer's vehicle ambushed by two car loads of killers as Elizalde was leaving the concert grounds; two of Elizalde's companions were also killed. Provoking revulsion -and vows of revenge- Elizalde's wake and funeral in Sinaloa state were attended by crowds estimated from 10-20,000 people.

Two days after Elizalde was slain, Reynosa was the scene of more violence when almost two dozen bullets were fired into 32-year-old lawyer Cynthia Indira Castro Gonzalez. The young attorney was killed near the very spot where her brother was murdered last March.

In Tijuana , the city was once again shaken on November 28, when three local enforcement officers, including Gerardo Santiago Prado, the chief the Mesa de Otay division, were killed in yet another attack bearing the signs of organized crime. In Guerrero state on the Pacific Coast , at least 10 men have been killed and as a many as 6 people have been kidnapped in separate, gangland-style incidents reported in various regions of the state since November 24.

Among the victims were two men previously associated with local and state intelligence and police agencies. Identified as Horacio Gutierrez and Fidel Sanguillan, the pair fell in a burst of AK-47 rifle fire in Acapulco on Tuesday, November 28, during mid-day, rush hour traffic only yards from the city's police headquarters and near an Estrella Blanca bus station that serves large numbers of tourists. The next day, November 29, Acapulco was the scene of an afternoon shootout between gunmen and police. The gun battle left three people wounded.

To the north, in Michoacan state, gun battles and executions continued without any let-up. By November 28, at least 471 people have been killed in narco-tainted violence in Michoacan during 2006.

Individuals from Ciudad Juarez who were formerly or currently associated with the Office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR) have also been among recent victims. Jose Hernandez Aguirre, a former PGR who was dismissed last year over corruption allegations, was shot to death in broad daylight on November 28 in Ciudad Juarez . Antonio Sanchez Medina, a PGR prosecutor who recently served in Ciudad Juarez before being assigned to Nuevo Leon state, was murdered on November 25 in Monterrey .

In another high-profile crime, federal Deputy David Figueroa Ortega, a member of incoming President Felipe Calderon's National Action Party (PAN), was shot and wounded November 27 while driving on the highway between Toluca and Mexico City . The former mayor of Agua Prieta , Sonora , Figueroa was Calderon's campaign coordinator for Sonora state during the presidential campaign. The federal deputy has been mentioned as a possible Sonora gubernatorial candidate.

Accompanying Figueroa was another PAN federal deputy, Maria Mercedes Corral, who was apparently uninjured in the shooting attack. Figueroa, Corral and others had just deplaned at the Toluca airport and were headed back to Mexico City after returning from a trip to Sonora when they were attacked. Figueroa's father, 62-year-old David Figueroa Coronado, was shot and wounded in another mysterious ambush in Agua Prieta last May.

Located on the Arizona border, Agua Prieta is a known hot-bed of narco-traffickers and immigrant smugglers. The Figueroa attack is but the latest in a growing list of violent incidents involving elected officials or persons close to them. Spanning the political spectrum, the victims have included persons associated with the PAN, PRI and PRD political parties. In mid-November, for instance, a business belonging to the PAN mayor of Nogales , Sonora , Marco Antonio Martinez Dabdoub, was firebombed.

In Veracruz , Cirilio Vazquez Lagunes, a prominent rancher, was ambushed and killed November 17. Vazquez was the boyfriend of Deisi Valencia , the mayor of San Juan Evangelista , Veracruz . Two days before the Vazquez murder, on November 15, Walter Herrera, the PRD mayor of Huimanguillo , Tabasco , was shot to death outside his ranch. Reportedly, Herrera had been investigated by the PGR during the governorship of former PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo for drug trafficking and abetting prisoner escape.

Earlier, on September 9, Omar Alberto Amaya Nunez, the former mayor of Guadalupe Bravo, Chihuahua , was shot to death. Days prior to Amaya's murder, an armed commando of about 15 men kidnapped four men from the rural municipality bordering Texas . South of Ciudad Juarez, Guadalupe Bravo has the reputation for being a narco's no-man's land. Guadalupe Bravo was the scene of a well-publicized, international incident between Mexico and the US after Border Patrol agents allegedly crossed into Mexico without in permission on November 10 while in hot pursuit of suspected drug traffickers. Employing only 18 policemen to patrol 99 rural communities with a population of about 15,000 people, Guadalupe Bravo was occupied November 19 by Mexican soldiers and Chihuahua state policemen, who set up highway checkpoints.

No suspects have been reported in the latest wave of suspected narco violence that marred the final days of Vicente Fox's presidency. A recent tally of narco-killings in Mexico by the El Universal newspaper put the toll at 2,012 victims for the period from January 1 to November 29 of this year. According to the newspaper, 1,395 people were murdered gangland-style during the same period in 2005.

Sources: Enlineadirecta.info, November 29, 2006. Univision, November 28, 2006. El Sur, November 28 and 29, 2006. Proceso/Apro, November 28, 2006. Article by Ricardo Ravelo. La Jornada/Notimex, November 28, 2006. Frontera/SUN, November 28, 2006. El Imparcial/SUN, November 28, 2006. El Diario de Juarez, November 15, 26 and 28, 2006. Articles by Cecilia Guerrero Ortiz, Notimex and the SUN news agency. El Universal, November 15, 27, 28, 29, 2006. Articles by Roberto Barboza Sosa, Javier Cabrera Martinez, Julieta Martinez, and other correspondents. Lapolaka.com, November 25, 2006.

Mayors Mobilize Against Border Walls

Mayors in Texas and the northern Mexican border state of Coahuila are mobilizing their opposition to the new series of border walls planned by the Bush Administration. Supported by Mexican mayors and representatives of non-governmental organizations, a 3-day march against the walls commenced November 7 in the Coahuila border city of Ciudad Acuna . Evaristo Lenin Perez Rivera, the mayor of Ciudad Acuna, said the action was directed against both Washington and Mexico City because of the two national governments' "incapacity to resolve common problems while trying to divide a community of neighbors with a mud wall."

Drawing the support of Coahuila state labor, educational and commercial groups like the Canacintra and Canaco business associations, the march is expected to culminate at a November 10 rally in Piedras Negras, which is also on the Mexico-US border. The Coahuila anti-border wall march moved forward as incoming Mexican President Felipe Calderon flew to Washington this week for meetings with US Latino leaders and President Bush. A critic of the border wall plan, Calderon has called for "bridges for progress and not walls that isolate and divide."

Back on the protest march, meanwhile, Mayor Perez, who was joined by Mayor Francisco Trujillo of Jimenez, Coahuila, said he was uplifted by the results of the November 7 election in the United States that saw President Bush's Republican Party lose control of Congress. Mayor Perez said he was confident the new US Congress would cut the budget for the planned series of walls that will extend 700 miles along Mexico 's northern border.

On the US side of the border, Richard F. Cortez, the mayor of McAllen, Texas, said in a recent interview with the Mexican press that he and other Texas mayors from "El Paso to Brownsville" hope to meet soon in Laredo, Texas, with United States Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in order to convey their rejection of the fencing plans.

" Washington politicians should understand that for us, the citizens of Texas , crossing the Rio Grande is like crossing the Potomac . We have friends and cousins on the other side.." Cortez said. "The people of the United States are uninformed. They think that immigrants come to carry out crimes."

While criticizing Washington , Mayor Cortez also scored Mexico City for not doing enough to curb emigration. Calling on both countries to seek the "path" of dialogue, Mayor Cortez said that the Texas border economy depends on the dollars spent by Mexican consumers who shop in McAllen and other cities. "Between 35-45 percent of the sales of businesses in McAllen depend on Mexican customers," Mayor Cortez added. "This is a very serious situation," Mayor Cortez said. "As neighboring countries we should not be just cousins," he added. We should get along as brothers."

Sources: Zocalo.com.mx, November 9, 2006. Article by Enrique Gonzalez Correa. El Universal, November 6, 2006. Articles by Juan Cedillo and Hilda Fernandez Valverde. Albuquerque Journal/Associated Press, November 9, 2006. Article by George Gedda.

The Battle for Mexico 's Narco Jewel

Long viewed as the gleaming jewel of Mexico 's industrialized north, the city of Monterrey and the state of Nuevo Leon have joined the list of locales bloodied by narco-violence. Since the beginning of the year, at least 40 murders attributed to organized crime feuds have been logged in the border state, while brazen kidnappings, popularly known as "levantones," have shaken the peace. As in other regions of Mexico , policemen, businessmen and lawyers figured high on the list of victims. Marco Garza, the commander of the State Agency of Investigations (AEI), was one of the prominent victims slain this year.

A purported report from the Office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR) blames the violent upsurge in part on the breaking of old narco-rules that respected the lives of traffickers' family members.

Like other places hard-hit by narco-violence, all evidence indicates that law enforcement authorities are either infiltrated or overwhelmed by well-armed and organized criminal bands. "The advance of drug trafficking can't be understood without the complicity of some persons invested with authority," said Roman Catholic Archbishop Francisco Robles Ortega of Monterrey.

Monterrey 's security climate has deteriorated to such an extent that police and gang members imitate each other in order to cover their tracks. For instance, three active-duty or former policemen were recently arrested by the AEI for allegedly passing themselves off as members of the Zetas paramilitary group and extorting highway travelers on their way to the Monterrey International Airport .

Persistent reports place Nuevo Leon state as the meeting site of a a reported 2001 "narco-summit" that united the Sinaloa Cartel with other crime organizations, but Monterrey largely escaped the episodes of violence that have torn apart cities like Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez for many years, though different drug trafficking gangs reputedly used the city for money laundering in real estate and other economic sectors and as a safe haven for family members.

In mid-October, personnel from the elite SIEDO anti-organized crime squad of the PGR searched a Monterrey-area branch of the Body Works Gym in a money-laundering investigation with possible ramifications in the Guadalajara region and in the United States . Four persons were reportedly detained as a result of the raid in an upscale neighborhood.

Various reports now point to Nuevo Leon 's strategic location along drug-smuggling corridors; the growth of the street-level narco business, and the importance of arms trafficking in the northern border state.

Four main groups-the Zetas, Gulf Cartel, Sinaloa Cartel and Valdez family-are widely believed to be involved in the violent war for the Nuevo Leon "plaza." More than 12 men were reported kidnapped during the month of October in Monterrey and the municipalities of Marin and Allende. Lately, public "levantones" from restaurants are in fashion.

In one incident registered on the morning of October 24, a group of 10 armed men burst into the Pirate's Island dining establishment in Monterrey , forcing customers to the ground and making off with three men. In another incident on the weekend of October 28, about a dozen black-clad gunmen invaded the Los Arcos seafood restaurant in an upscale Monterrey neighborhood during the peak dining hour. Invoking terror, they threatened customers and violently snatched 31-year-old Carlos Maldonado who had been dining with two of his sisters. A police mobilization did not succeed in finding Maldonado or his captors.

Reportedly a resident of Allende, Jacinto Catalan, popped up far to the south in the Guerrero state city of Ciudad Altamirano on October 18. In a violent encounter, Catalan was beaten but narrowly escaped would-be kidnappers after finding refuge in a bank. Responding to the chase, the police shot it out with the gunmen, who escaped. Startled tellers, who suffered nervous attacks, were treated by emergency response personnel. After questioning, Catalan was allowed by the police to depart for the neighboring town of Huetamo , Michoacan.

Nuevo Leon's law enforcement authorities and elected officials have announced a series of measures designed to curb the narco-violence, including helicopter over flights and street checkpoints. A bill in the state legislature would prohibit the use of tinted windows in vehicles (a regulation currently in effect in varying degrees in Sinaloa and Michoacan states), develop a data base of hotel guests who stay in Nuevo Leon , create the status of protected witnesses, and offer more protection to judges and officials who act against organized crime interests.

"It's a common practice to bring tinted windows into our region," said state Deputy Gregorio Hurtado Lejia of the PAN party, "but these types of actions must be taken to fight the narco."

Sources: El Universal, October 4, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 29, 2006. Articles by Juan Cedillo, Luciano Campos Garza and the Notimex news agency. Proceso/Apro, October 16 and 19, 2006. Articles by Ricardo Ravelo and Luciano Campos Garza. El Sur, October 19, 2006.

War Report

The news reports are graphic: "7 Bodies Found," "Attack with Grenades," "Three Kidnapped and Others Murdered," "Two De-Quartered Bodies Found." Iraq ? Afghanistan ? Guess again. The death toll and motives might be different, but the newspaper headlines in question actually hail from Mexican newspapers that print daily stories about narco-violence that's extended from northern border states to the central and southern parts of the nation. Depending on the estimate, anywhere from 1200 to 1400 Mexicans have been slaughtered in violence connected to organized crime since the beginning of the year, but it is widely suspected by the press and other close observers that the real number of victims is higher. If current murder rates continue, the body count will equal or surpass the figure for 2005.

While much of the recent attention on Mexico has focused on the post-electoral conflict in Mexico City or the popular uprising against Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz, violence attributed to wars between drug cartels and to organized crime shows no signs of abating. Nor does the Mexican state show any new ability or desire to put a halt to the carnage.

"It's an all-out battle that's become more visible, above all because the violence has come to zones where the drug traffickers didn't regularly move around in," said Mexican criminologist Rafael Ruiz Harrell. "Regrettably, we're talking about an all-out war in which the authorities seem only to be witnesses."

Flashpoints include the capital of Mexico City , as well as the states of Baja California , Sonora , Sinaloa , Chihuahua , Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon , Michoacan, Guerrero, Quintana Roo and Yucatan , among others. The tourist resorts of Cancun, Acapulco and Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo continue being hot spots. Indeed, the major part of the nation is now embroiled in organized crime feuds. Violence is reaching such levels that some "narco-families" are reportedly fleeing their home bases and seeking refuge in the few remaining tranquil spots of the country or attempting to relocate to the United States and Canada .

While certainly not new, gangland violence is evolving in new ways, ranging from the military-style ferocity of the bloodletting to the changing geographic origins and demographic profiles of both the victims and victimizers. Alongside the AK-47 rifle, grenades and bazookas now are popular weapons of choice. Recurring government reports claim that Central Americans, including members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, have been employed to do the cartels' dirty work. Few, however, have been detained.

A LOST GENERATION?

A review of episodes of suspected narco-violence in recent weeks confirms several trends. More of the victims are young, a growing number are female and a good percentage are somehow connected to the police or military. A disturbing number of the casualties are made up of by-standers who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. A high-noon shoot-out between two gangs on August 31 in Ciudad Altamirano, Guerrero, left two young boys wounded, 11-year-old Daniel Yair Vega Felix and his 6-year-old brother Felix. Other school children were present at the scene of the gun battle but were not injured.

In early August, residents of the Ciudad Juarez neighborhood of Tierra Nueva witnessed the abductions of two teenagers by a band of armed men who were driving a truck with Texas license plates. The youths, 16-year-old Hector Moncayo Gomez and 17-year-old Alonso Prieto, were later found executed and dumped in an empty lot near the city's airport. Shocked and angered neighbors insisted the young men never caused trouble. "We know who is trouble here in the colonia, who takes drugs, one is not blind," said an unidentified woman amid tears. "They didn't take drugs or do bad things. They were just boys!"

Independent of whether or not Moncayo and Prieto were involved in criminal activities, Mexican academic researchers report that more youth are being lured into the fast-money temptations of the narco-world. According to Guillermo Alonso Meneses, a researcher with El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, many youths from marginalized backgrounds do not have problems at all with committing violent crimes if it means earning an income.

"Nowadays, youths say they want to become politicians, work in the United States or get involved in drug trafficking to have money and power," added Luis Garcia, coordinator of the criminology faculty at the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon.

Another trend involves the increasing number of women who are victims of narco-executions. Since late July, for example, at least 8 women in several states have been kidnapped or murdered in incidents reeking of the involvement of organized crime. Two of the victims, Viviana Mendoza Chavez and Lorena Gallardo Rosiles, were shot to death inside an Internet cafe and cell phone sales outlet in the violence-wracked port of Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan.

THE PRESS UNDER FURTHER SIEGE

In his last report before leaving office, outgoing President Vicente Fox stated on September 1 that freedom of press is a reality in Mexico . What President Fox did not mention was that Mexico now ranks only second to Colombia in terms of murdered journalists, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. For many Mexican journalists, covering the news about organized crime is practically akin to being a Middle Eastern war correspondent.

Just hours before President Fox delivered his upbeat report, a grenade exploded at the offices of the Por Esto! newspaper in Merida , Yucatan , wounding three workers. The attack occurred within 180 feet of a school that had just begun classes for the day. It was the second grenade attack suffered by a branch of the newspaper in recent days. Known for its audacious reporting, recent stories of Por Esto! have discussed the smuggling of undocumented Cubans and the involvement of law enforcement officials in drug trafficking.

Yucatan state law enforcement authorities detained a collaborator of Por Esto!, Ricardo Delfin Quezada, for questioning, but according to Miguel Menendez Camara, the newspaper's assistant editor, serious leads pointed to organized crime. Menendez complained that state and municipal authorities did not immediately contact the newspaper after the explosion to express their concern. “This shows their interest in what's going on in Yucatan and in a city like Merida ,” Menendez said.

At the same time they physically intimidate the press, narco-gangs are also getting craftier about using the media to spread threats against their rivals and send messages to the government. Especially gruesome are the messages left alongside decapitated heads or mutilated corpses by presumed members of Zetas and Pelones gangs against each other and the government. Fueled by revenge and counter-revenge, strong indications exist that the narco wars are escalating beyond simple economic turf battles and acquiring a life of their own.

Mexican Federal Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca blames the upsurge in violence to the “success” of the Fox Administration in arresting major traffickers and disrupting criminal organizations. According to Cabeza de Vaca, detentions have delivered major blows to drug cartels, leaving the golden cookie jar open to second or third-level operators who fight over the spoils.

Nonetheless, many leading, alleged traffickers like Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman have yet to be captured. For criminologist Rafael Ruiz Harrell, all levels of the Mexican government have let whatever control they might have had over drug trafficking "slip from their hands."

A tiny sampling of the firepower available for use in the narco wars was revealed by the Mexican army recently after its soldiers seized three vehicles-one of which was armored-in Sinaloa state. Eugenio Hidalgo Heddi, the commander of 9 th Military Zone, reported that his soldiers confiscated several AK-47 and G-3 rifles, ammunition, dynamite, cell-phones, radios, camouflage clothing, and a bullet-proof vest. No suspects were reported detained, however.

Sources: Frontera, September 3, 2006 . Article by Manuel Villegas. el Mexicano, September 2, 2006 . Article by Jacinto Segura Garnica. Enlineadirecta.info, September 1, 2006 . El Universal, July 20 and 31, 2006. August 1, 2, 6, and 31, 2006. September 1 and 3, 2006. Articles by Yazmin Rodrgiuez, Nayeli Cortes, Jorge Herrera, Jaime Marquez, Rafael Rivera, Adriana Varrillas, Rosa Maria Mendez Fierros, Monica Perla Hernandez, Juan Cedillo, Laura Reyes Maciel, other correspondents, and the Notimex news agency.

La Jornada, July 20, 2006 ; August 16, 2006 ; September 1 and 2, 2006. Articles by Misael Habana de los Santos, Hugo Martoccia, Julia le Duc, Antonio Heras, Sergio Ocampo, Alfredo Valadez, Ruben Villalpando, Rodolfo Villalba, Cristobal Garcia Bernal, Nelda Anzar, Ernesto Martinez, Javier Valdez, Angeles Mariscal, Laura Poy, and the Notimex news agency. El Sur, July 26, 2006 ; August 1 and 25/26, 2006. September 1, 2006 . Articles by Israel Flores, editorial staff and the AFP news agency. Proceso/Apro, September 2, 2006 . Article by Jose Palacios Tepate. El Diario de Juarez , August 5, 2006 and September 3, 2006 , Articles by Mauricio Rodriguez and the Notimex and SUN news agencies.

Behind the Retail Narco Business

Fighting the illegal drug trade was one of the questions addressed by Mexico 's five presidential candidates during the televised debate held on June 6. In today's Mexico , the narco trade is not only an issue of export. A recent study by the Federal Preventive Police ( PFP ) estimated that street-level sales of illegal drugs to Mexican consumers rake in about $1.5 billion dollars per year. The PFP calculated that at least 35,000 retail outlets, or tienditas, where users can purchase illegal drugs exist throughout Mexico .

Besides “stores,” illegal drugs are also delivered by motorcycle or bicycle, much like a take-out pizza order.

Not surprisingly, Mexico City has the most tienditas, estimated by the PFP to number about 10,000. Counting a far smaller population than Mexico 's capital city, the border states of Baja California and Chihuahua nevertheless host significant numbers of tienditas, with Baja California having more than 2,000 and Chihuahua anywhere from 1-2,000.

In the Baja California city of Tijuana, another recent study detected the presence of tienditas in between 90-100 neighborhoods, or colonias. Sponsored by two civil society groups, the Public Safety Citizen's Council and Graffiti Busters, the study examined the structure of the retail narco trade. According to the report's authors, the business functions like a hybrid between the nightclub and convenience store trades. “Promoters” lure customers to a storefront that offers drugs for sale. A manager is in charge of operating the store, which is characterized by round-the-clock activity. Cash is constantly moved off the premises to another stash house, and only relatively small amounts of merchandise are maintained on the premises to guard against losses in the event of a bust.

David Solis Jusaino, the study's coordinator, contended that the structure of the narco street trade renders it almost immune to serious disruption. “There is never going to be a big confiscation of money or drugs in (tienditas)…” Solis said. “They are constantly taking them out, every half hour. It doesn't suit them to have a lot stocked-up…”

Like a big corporate retail chain, Tijuana 's drug houses are reliably supplied by regular wholesalers, in this case, by four large warehouses. Alleging that the businesses enjoy protection from different police agencies, the Tijuana study suggests how public subsidies also help the retail narco trade thrive. “The warehouses that supply (tienditas) are as untouchable as always,” Solis added. “This is an important point. Arresting or killing a seller is insignificant.”

Sources: El Universal, May 28 and June 6, 2006 . Articles by Maria de la Luz Gonzalez and editorial staff. Frontera, May 31, 2006 . Article by Daniel Salinas.

The Cross-Border Narco-Drama

Accustomed to wielding power from the shadows, elements of Mexico 's drug cartels are increasingly going public in apparent bids to win mass sympathy, strike public relations blows against their rivals and gain clout during the nation's political transition. For two days last week, television station KRGV of Weslaco, Texas, ran an interview with two purported former members of the Zetas, the notorious hit squad linked to the Gulf Cartel of Osiel Cardenas Guillen. In a chat with reporter Tony Castelan, the two men, whose faces were not shown, claimed they had been active-duty members of the Mexican army but deserted to the Zetas because of economic necessity. One man claimed to have been trained by the United States ' special military forces.

During the interview the two men contended the heavily-armed Zetas operate freely on both sides of the US-Mexico border and maintain an isolated base camp in Camargo, Tamaulipas, where they dispose of their enemies. According to the men, whose stories could not be independently confirmed, the Zetas have a presence in the Tamaulipas cities of Miguel Aleman, Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa . The pair maintained they had abandoned the paramilitary squad because of their revulsion over the group's targeting of innocent people for kidnapping, robbery and murder. "They cross (the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo), and do their work here (in the US )," said "Zeta 1." "They kill, kidnap, disappear people and return to the Mexican side," he said. Reportedly video-taped in the United States , the Zetas' interview reached an audience concentrated in the south Texas border cities of Harlingen , McAllen and Brownsville .

An anti-Zeta line also was the central message in a statement reportedly from alleged US drug trafficker Edgar "La Barbie" Valdez Villareal published last Sunday, May 28, in the Mexico City daily El Milenio. In a paid ad directed at Mexico 's business leaders and five presidential candidates, as well as the governor of Nuevo Leon state, Valdez fulminated against the Zetas, whom he characterized as a group of "narco-kidnappers and murderers of women and children." Valdez accused the Zetas of mounting a campaign of defamation and distortion against him, falsely tying the Laredo-born fugitive to violent episodes like the recent, bloody grenade attack on a Monterrey-area bar.

In a series of explosive statements, Valdez charged that the Zetas, in their drive to monopolize the illegal drug trade, have converted numerous Mexican states into a "zone of death." He accused the group of luring Colombian drug traffickers to the port of Veracruz , where the unsuspecting traffickers are then disappeared and their shipments valued from $40 to 50 million dollars stolen. Valdez charged that the Zetas have bought protection from local officials in Nuevo Leon and from the elite anti-organized crime enforcement unit attached to Mexico 's Office of the Federal Attorney General ( PGR ). Proclaiming that he does not pretend to be an angel, or is out to clean his image, Valdez added, "I am sure of what I have done and what I am responsible for..”

The 32-year-old Valdez appealed to the next Mexican president to uphold the law in an equal manner and eliminate "the cancer" of the Zetas. There was no immediate comment from Mexican officials (or the Zetas) about Valdez 's statements. . Nicknamed "La Barbie" because of his blonde, good looks and flamboyant lifestyle, Valdez is the reputed head of the Sinaloa drug cartel's hit squad variously known as "Los Negroes" or "Los Pelones." On the lam, Valdez faces a 2003 indictment in Louisiana on two charges of conspiracy with intent to distribute marijuana. He was once reportedly picked up in Missouri on drug charges but released. Labeling Valdez "a significant trafficker," US Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Steve Robertson said, "We definitely want to get our hands on him."

Since his scraps with US law, Valdez has publicly emerged as the reputed commander of the Sinaloa Cartel's bloody battle with the Gulf Cartel over large sections of Mexican and US territory used to import, transport and export drugs. The PGR has linked Valdez to the filming of last year's gruesome "narco-video" in Acapulco that showed 4 tortured Zetas under interrogation; at the conclusion of the video, one of the men is executed with a pistol shot to his head.

According to a PGR document, Valdez helped buy protection for the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels from a former PGR official, Domingo Gonzalez Diaz, who was allegedly paid $1.5 million dollars in March 2003 to ensure that the Zetas were expelled from their Nuevo Laredo stronghold and free reign given in the border city to the Juarez organization of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. Despite the deployment of new PGR forces, 2003 was the year that the violence between rival drug cartels in Nuevo Laredo dramatically escalated. Gonzalez has since vanished from public sight.

Valdez 's Milenio statement is not the first time the fugitive has made a public pitch. Purchasing a full-page ad in the Monterrey newspaper Norte in September 2004, Valdez declared himself a persecuted businessman and requested justice from President Vicente Fox .The anti-Zeta declarations on US television and in the Mexican press follow scandals that erupted earlier this month in Reynosa and Piedras Negras, Coahuila, in which individuals allegedly associated with Osiel Cardenas and the Zetas organized well-attended public events held in honor of Children's Day.

Sources: enlineadirecta.info/Proceso, May 28, 2006 . Article by Alejandro Gutierrez. El Diario de Juarez/ Notimex, May 24, 2006 . La Jornada, May 2, 2006 . Article by Leopoldo Ramos and Martin Sanchez. Dallas Morning News, March 20, 2006 . Article by Lennox Samuels.

Father of PAN Campaign Coordinator Shot in Border Town

Key details are still not known about the reported May 10 shooting of 62-year-old David Figueroa Coronado in the Sonoran border town of Aguas Prieta . Figueroa is the father of former Agua Prieta Mayor David Figueroa Ortega, who currently serves as the Sonora state coordinator for the campaign of conservative National Action Party (PAN) presidential candidate Felipe Calderon.

According to Gaudencio Orduno Herrera, chief of the Sonora State Judicial Police (PJE), the elder Figueroa was driving in his 2003 Dodge Ram pick up at 8:30 in the morning last Wednesday when a white Chevy Suburban suddenly pulled up alongside the Dodge Ram. Shots rang out from the Chevy Suburban, striking Figueroa three times and reportedly killing his security guard. The shooting supposedly happened about four blocks from Figueroa's home.

In another unconfirmed account of the shooting, a police officer supposedly found Figueroa wounded but still walking near his Agua Prieta business. After the shooting, Figueroa was then reportedly transported to Agua Prieta's Latino Hospital . Reportedly, the shooting victim will survive. Figueroa's slain security guard was not identified.

The Figueroa shooting prompted an intense police mobilization that involved the Sonora State Preventive Police and PJE agents from Cananea, Santa Cruz and Naco. At least three helicopters and an airplane belonging to Figueroa's son were used in the search for the shooters, but no arrests were immediately made. The possible motive of the shooting has not been revealed.

Marco Antonio Martinez Dabdoub, the PAN's mayoral candidate for Nogales , condemned the attack. Calling mounting violence worrisome, Martinez declared that “gangs should not be able to act like they are playing ball.”

Source: Nuevo Dia ( Nogales ), May 11 and 12, 2006.

The Cocaine Clown Scandals

Even from his federal prison cell, accused drug lord Osiel Cardenas could still wield considerable power and public influence. In Piedras Negras, Coahuila, and Reynosa , Tamaulipas, Cardenas ' name surfaced in twin scandals that surfaced this week after public celebrations in honor of Children's Day were held in the northern border cities and supposedly sponsored by the alleged chieftan of the Gulf drug cartel.

In Piedras Negras, an April 30 event publicly sponsored by a group called "The Piedras Negras Anonymous Altruist Syndicate" attracted hundreds of working-class children who were handed free food and gifts. Musicians and clowns performed for the youngsters at the dance hall event. Taking the microphone during the celebration, an unidentified person then solicited applause for a Tamaulipas drug trafficker who supposedly made the fun and games possible.

As the bash was concluding, federal agents from the Office of the Attorney General's SIEDO anti-organized crime squad suddenly arrested four men and hustled them off in an airplane to Mexico City for questioning. Emir Mendez, the owner of the El Cortijo dance hall where the Children's Day celebration was held, and Jose Luis "El Doc" Hernandez, the owner of the musical group that played at the party, were among the detainees.

Press accounts of the alleged narco-sponsored fiesta played up the use of the letter "z" in publicity that preceded the big party. The replacement of the letter "z" for "s" in the words "sindicato" (syndicate) and "alturista (altruist) " in a newspaper ad announcing the event was interpreted by the media as a lexical allusion to the Zetas, the armed enforcers of the Gulf Cartel. Media stories about the planned event prior to April 30 suggest the authorities got wind of it.

The April 30 celebration wasn't the first time Cardenas ' name has been associated with a mass children's gathering in Piedras Negras. Thousands of children attended a 2004 event in a Piedras Negras bull-fighting ring where they were given food, drinks, gifts, and even fancy bicycles. A tape recording praised Cardenas as the sponsor of the give-away.

Meanwhile, the National Action Party-controlled city government of Reynosa swiflty denied any involvement in another April 30 celebration that was held in the Tamaulipas city's Adolfo Lopez Mateos baseball stadium. Like the Piedras Negras celebration, children were treated to gifts, music, clowns and a wrestling performance. Cards distributed to the estimated 17,000 adult and child attendees credited Osiel Cardenas as the celebration's sponsor. Los Payasonicos, a group of musical clowns from Monterrey , Nuevo Leon , helped produce the show.

Horacio Ortiz Renan, the secretary of Reynosa 's municipal government, said a businessman requested the use of the baseball stadium for a non-profit event, but denied the city government had any prior knowledge that Cardenas was associated with the celebration. Unlike Piedras Negras, no immediate arrests in the Reynosa scandal were announced.

Sources: La Jornada, May 2, 2006 . Article by Leopoldo Ramos and Martin Sanchez. El Universal, April 28, 2006 .

The Cocaine Clown Scandals

Even from his federal prison cell, accused drug lord Osiel Cardenas could still wield considerable power and public influence. In Piedras Negras, Coahuila, and Reynosa , Tamaulipas, Cardenas ' name surfaced in twin scandals that surfaced this week after public celebrations in honor of Children's Day were held in the northern border cities and supposedly sponsored by the alleged chieftan of the Gulf drug cartel.

In Piedras Negras, an April 30 event publicly sponsored by a group called "The Piedras Negras Anonymous Altruist Syndicate" attracted hundreds of working-class children who were handed free food and gifts. Musicians and clowns performed for the youngsters at the dance hall event. Taking the microphone during the celebration, an unidentified person then solicited applause for a Tamaulipas drug trafficker who supposedly made the fun and games possible.

As the bash was concluding, federal agents from the Office of the Attorney General's SIEDO anti-organized crime squad suddenly arrested four men and hustled them off in an airplane to Mexico City for questioning. Emir Mendez, the owner of the El Cortijo dance hall where the Children's Day celebration was held, and Jose Luis "El Doc" Hernandez, the owner of the musical group that played at the party, were among the detainees.

Press accounts of the alleged narco-sponsored fiesta played up the use of the letter "z" in publicity that preceded the big party. The replacement of the letter "z" for "s" in the words "sindicato" (syndicate) and "alturista (altruist) " in a newspaper ad announcing the event was interpreted by the media as a lexical allusion to the Zetas, the armed enforcers of the Gulf Cartel. Media stories about the planned event prior to April 30 suggest the authorities got wind of it.

The April 30 celebration wasn't the first time Cardenas ' name has been associated with a mass children's gathering in Piedras Negras. Thousands of children attended a 2004 event in a Piedras Negras bull-fighting ring where they were given food, drinks, gifts, and even fancy bicycles. A tape recording praised Cardenas as the sponsor of the give-away.

Meanwhile, the National Action Party-controlled city government of Reynosa swiflty denied any involvement in another April 30 celebration that was held in the Tamaulipas city's Adolfo Lopez Mateos baseball stadium. Like the Piedras Negras celebration, children were treated to gifts, music, clowns and a wrestling performance. Cards distributed to the estimated 17,000 adult and child attendees credited Osiel Cardenas as the celebration's sponsor. Los Payasonicos, a group of musical clowns from Monterrey , Nuevo Leon , helped produce the show.

Horacio Ortiz Renan, the secretary of Reynosa 's municipal government, said a businessman requested the use of the baseball stadium for a non-profit event, but denied the city government had any prior knowledge that Cardenas was associated with the celebration. Unlike Piedras Negras, no immediate arrests in the Reynosa scandal were announced.

Sources: La Jornada, May 2, 2006 . Article by Leopoldo Ramos and Martin Sanchez. El Universal, April 28, 2006 .

Violence Stains Easter Celebrations on the Southern Front

Marring the Easter season, a new spate of violence linked to organized crime has broken out in Guerrero, the southern Mexican state famous for the sunny tourist resorts of Acapulco and Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo. Since late March, executions and grenade attacks in the two internationally known port cities and the adjoining Costa Grande region have left at least 12 people dead and 39 injured. Standing out as victims of the bloodbath are current and former policemen, businessmen, lawyers, government employees, taxi drivers, and innocent bystanders. Adding to a growing popular alarm is the brazen nature of many attacks, some of which have been carried out on the Costera main drag of Acapulco where tourist hotels and eateries abound.

During the last three years, Guerrero has emerged as the southern front of a war between the Tamaulipas-based Gulf Cartel associated with Osiel Cardenas and purported followers of Sinaloa capo Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman for control of the lucrative cocaine market. Acapulco and Zihuatanejo also have become important internal markets in their own right, hosting large numbers of so-called “narco-tiendas,” stores where locals can purchase small amounts of cocaine and other drugs for consumption.

Acapulco Mayor Felix Salgado Macedonio, who took office on the PRD political party ticket last December, acknowledged that some of the latest bouts of violence bore “the stamp” of the narco.

Some observers note that the narco-violence escalated during a state government political transition away from the long-ruling PRI party to the now-governing PRD party, and picked up during the federal presidential and congressional election campaigns that culminate on July 2. Additionally, the latest carnage occurs on the eve of Zapatista Sub-Comandante Marcos's scheduled April 15 visit to the region, although no evidence at the moment exists to show the violence and the Zapatista's “Other Campaign” is somehow connected.

The worst incident this week happened on Wednesday, April 12, when an unknown assailant or assailants tossed two grenades into a cantina at the annual Petatlan fair near Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo. The bar is owned by the driver of Petatlan's new PRD municipal president. Held in honor of “Father Jesus,” or “Papa Chu” as he is locally known, Petatlan's Roman Catholic church and fair are well-known Easter season destinations that attract many visitors from across Mexico , as well as returning migrant workers from the United States .

A regional market for gold jewelry, the municipality of Petatlan is also a producer of marijuana and opium poppies, an economic attribute absent from citation in the tourist brochures. The April 12 cantina attack killed two men and injured 30 other people, 10 of them seriously. Many of the wounded party-goers were later transported to a hospital in nearby Zihuatanejo for treatment. In the 48-hours surrounding the Petatlan incident, two other grenade attacks against different targets were reported in Zihuatanejo.

In Acapulco , meanwhile, the city that never sleeps was fidgeting over its own round of violent episodes. On March 30, lawyer Napoleon Guevara Lacuzna, who was married to a former state attorney general's office (PGJE) functionary from the PRI administration of ex-Governor Rene Juarez Cisneros, was shot to death on a well-traveled public street. In 2001, Guevara was reportedly fired from the internal affairs section of the PGJE for freeing a group of men from San Luis La Loma, a narco-infested town situated in the Costa Grande municipality of Tecpan de Galeana , who had been detained with a shipment of marijuana. Guevara was later detained by the old Federal Judicial Police for allegedly picking up a shipment of marijuana at a bus company.

At the time of his slaying, Guevara was defending several suspected hit men, including residents of San Luis La Loma, who were arrested for weapons violations by the Mexican army on January 26 and 27 in Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, respectively. He also represented one party in the dispute over the ownership of the Aca Bay tourist hotel in Acapulco , a conflict that reportedly escalated to the drawing of weapons several days prior to Guevara's murder.

One week after Guevara was gunned down in Acapulco , Jose Luis Herrera Cevallos suffered the same fate. A PGJE investigator, Herrera was the son of controversial PGJE commander Tomas Herrera Basurto, the current commander of the state police detachment in Tecpan de Galeana. Three of Jose Luis Herrera's brothers, who served under the command of their father in Tecpan de Galeana, were quickly transferred to another post in Guerrero after the murder.

Yet another public servant may have been the target of an April 10 grenade attack in Acapulco on a two-story home featuring a swimming-pool and owned by city official Blanca Ascencio Villasenor. The explosion injured five people, including Ascencio's 19-year-old daughter, Maria Teresa, but Asencio escaped injury. Acsencio is a supervisor in the city department that inspects and regulates permits for bars, night clubs and strip joints.

Finally, more popular indignation followed the April 13 murder of Honda motorcycle dealer Roberto Herrera Luna in Acapulco , especially after it was revealed that the two suspected killers were videotaped hiding their faces in a business right before the crime. It was not immediately known if businessman Herrera was related to the Herreras of state police fame.

Business associations, political parties and the Roman Catholic Church all expressed varying degrees of outrage at the violent upsurge. Calls are mounting for the greater intervention of the Mexican army. No one has been arrested for any of the most recent crimes, despite the declared involvement of the Federal Attorney General's Office in some of the investigations. At the same time, confusion reigns over the true extent of the previously announced federal deployment for the Easter vacation break under the Safe Mexico program, a national anti-organized crime fighting campaign that was recently dismantled and replaced in Nuevo Laredo , because of its poor results in curbing narco-violence in the Tamaulipas border city.

Abelardo Luna David, the president of the Acapulco branch of the Canaco business association, said local residents are growing weary of the “inefficiency of the authorities” in stemming the violent tide. “How regrettable and absurd that in the middle of the tourist season the newspaper headlines are about grenade attacks and executions,” Luna said.

Sources: El Sur, March 31, April 7, 11 , 13 and 14, 2006. Articles by Jorge Nava, Roxanne Ibarra, David Espino, Monica Martinez Garcia, Magdalena Cisneros, Brenda Escobar, and editorial staff. La Opinion ( Los Angeles ), April 13, 2006 . Article by Francisco Robles Nava. La Jornada, March 31 and April 12, 2006 . Articles by Misael Habana de los Santos and Gustavo Castillo. El Universal, April 11, 2006 . Articles by Silvia Otero and the Notimex news agency.

That Heavenly Sound of Pesos and Pennies

Legal or not, commercial gaming is spreading on both sides of the US-Mexico border. In a continued crackdown on illegal gambling, law enforcement authorities in the Texas border county of Cameron seized 70 video slots and $8,000 dollars in cash from a Port Isabel business this month. Supposedly set up as an Avon promotion, the Pennies from Heaven business was located on property registered to Justice of the Peace Bennie Ochoa but operated by one Ovidio Guevara. Cameron County sheriff's deputies booked Guevara and Lucila Castillo on charges of promoting gambling, while 45 clients of the business were cited on minor charges. Guevara and Castillo face up to one year in jail and a $4,000 dollar fine.

Commenting on conflicting claims of who really owns Pennies from Heaven, Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos said authorities will deepen their probe of the raided business. "It's very important to find out the truth about the property, because we suspect that the majority of these machines are from a select group of people who tend to use others as (front) operators," District Attorney Villalobos said.

On the Mexican side of the border, meanwhile, the Federal Office of the Attorney General confiscated 30 slot machines in the coastal resort of Acapulco , Guerrero, last week. Attracting children, the machines were set up in convenience stores and candy shops in working-class neighborhoods. Offering users a chance to win up to $20 dollars, the machines were reportedly installed by a man known only as "The Lord of the Games," who paid store owners a commission in return for allowing the slots on their premises. Resident Maria Higinia Cortes complained that many children were left without money for food after squandering their meager pesos on the gaming devices. Similar machines were confiscated by the authorities in Ciudad Juarez last year.

Despite initiatives to legalize slots and casino-class gambling in Mexico , casinos are still prohibited by law-with some important loopholes and exceptions. The federal government routinely grants temporary permits for casinos to operate during a number of annual fairs. In Cancun , a quasi-casino that boasts table games was given the go-ahead for the city's international fair that's scheduled to run through March 2 of this year. The federal Ministry of the Interior granted the permit to Enrique Mabuh, who also operates temporary casinos at several other Mexican fairs. The quasi-casino was approved for the Cancun Convention Center , a site managed by prominent Quintana Roo businessman Issac Hamui.

Seasonal casinos got another boost recently when Aguascalientes ' popular San Marcos Fair was extended by almost one week this year. Undergoing a major facelift for the opening-day in April, the now nearly month-long fair features a large casino that draws crowds from throughout central Mexico .

Advocates of fulltime casinos contend the gaming palaces will aid tourism in US-Mexico border cities and Mexican coastal resorts. But Carlos Valverde Rubizewiski, the operations director of the large Grupo Caliente gaming company associated with Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, said recently that locals, not tourists, make up the bulk of the gaming clients.

Sources: El Quintanarooense, February 17, 2006. Novedades de Acapulco, February 15, 2006. La Frontera, Febuary 13, 2006. Article by Emma Perez-Trevino. La Jornada, February 11, 2006. Article by Miriam Posada.

Federal Police Post a Balance Sheet, Come Under Questioning

Senior officials of Mexico's Federal Preventive Police (PFP) have reported results from operations and investigations this year. According to the PFP, its officers seized 51 tons of marijuana, 789 kilos of cocaine, 62 kilos of crystal methamphetamine, and 23 kilos of opium between the months of January and November of this year. The federal police agency said it detained 11,210 people on various charges. What's more, high-ranking PFP officials said their investigations detected heroin and human smuggling routes spanning the hemishpere.

Ardelio Vargas Fosado, the PFP's chief of staff, said 23 bands of human traffickers operate from Chiapas state in the south to Sonora state in the north. His superior, PFP Commisioner General Eduardo Martinez Aduna, said the PFP has identified three routes of South American-produced heroin that pass through Central America and Mexico on their way to New York. According to General Martinez, the routes have important hubs in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Tijuana.

In a press conference, General Martinez's boss, Federal Public Security Minister Eduardo Medina, admitted that federal police, including PFP personnel, were involved in some of the illegal activities identified by the agency. Medina, who has a long record of law enforcement experience from his stint as an official with the CISEN, Mexico's equivalent of the CIA, declined to name suspected individuals or disclose how many PFP personnel might be involved in organized crime.

Sources: El Sur/El Universal, December 6, 2005. La Jornada, December 6, 2005. Article by Alfredo Mendez Ortiz.

Video Bombshell Raises a Thousand Questions

If every picture is worth a thousand words, then the Mexican narco-video released by the Dallas Morning News raises a thousand sticky questions. Widely aired on television on both sides of the border, the video, if authentic, not only seriously questions the ability of Mexican law enforcement officials to control organized crime but also exposes possible cover-ups of many explosive events surrounding the filming of the video.

The narco-video, in which four presumed members of the Gulf Cartel-linked Zetas (an armed gang founded by US-trained deserters from the Mexican armed forces) are shown tortured and being interrogated by alleged members of the Mexican Federal Agency for Investigations (AFI) before supposedly being executed, is more evidence of how narco-violence has spread from the US-Mexico border region to the Mexican interior, especially to the states of Michoacan and Guerrero along the strategic southern Pacific cocaine import corrdior.

Current information points to Acapulco, Guerrero, as the place where the video was filmed, probably last spring. Family members of 8 men from Tamaulipas state, as well as Elizabeth Olguin Servin, the girlfriend of one of the Zetas shown in the video, filed legal charges in Acapulco last spring over the disappearance of their loved ones in the old Pacific resort at the hands of alleged AFI agents. In total, 27 individuals from Tamaulipas state were reportedly disappeared by AFI agents in Acapulco last May and June. Family members of disappeared men in Acapulco accuse the AFI agents of working on behalf of a rival drug cartel headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Without fanfare, 8 AFI agents were detained for the disappearances and jailed in Mexico City last June. Citing lack of evidence, a Mexico City judge later released 5 of the officers; the case continues open for investigation.

Yet the narco-video provides more likely evidence of how the bloody gangland purges staining Mexican streets are only possible with the participation of different police agencies in the pay of one group or another. At least 37 suspected narco-executions have shaken Acapulco alone so far this year. As in neighboring Michocan state and Tamaulipas state on the northern border, the involvement of police in violent crimes, either as victims or suspected victimizers, has been particularly prominent in Acapulco and Guerrero state.

Another outstanding characteristic is the blatant nature of the crimes, often committed in visible public places without anyone ever detained. In one of the latest murders, an individual associated with Guerrero's State Ministerial Police, Homero Alcaraz Lopez, was executed on November 28 in broad daylight on a heavily traveled street in downtown Acapulco. Shot to death in front of his cell phone repair shop, Alcaraz was killed in a spot that is less than a two-minute walk to a municipal police sub-station. No suspects have been arrested in the killing.

Alcaraz's past immediately raised possibilities of connections to other, turbulent crimes taking place in the rough time period when the narco-video was probably filmed. Alcaraz was a former chofer for Jose Ruben Robles Catalan, the former Guerrero state government secretary during the 1993-96 administration of former Gov. Ruben Figueroa Alcocer. Murdered last July in another Acapulco slaying bearing all the hallmarks of organized crime, Catalan was widely accused of helping orchestrate the notorious Aguas Blancas Massacre of 17 unarmed farmers in 1995.

A previously unknown guerrilla group touting socialism, the Popular Revolutionary Commando/The Country is First, claimed responsibility for Catalan's murder as an act of vengeance, but some non-governmental activists consider the group a front for right-wing paramilitaries. The same group later claimed responsibility for the murder of prominent campesino activist Miguel Mesino.

In the context of other slayings having the same modus operandi, the claims surrounding Catalan's murder point to a possible kindling of obscure Sendero Luminoso-type armed groups, narco-politics and corrupt security personnel on the eve of Mexico's presidential election year. It should be mentioned that the mayhem unleashed in Guerrero this year coincided with a state government transition away from the long-ruling PRI party to the opposition PRD.

In aftermath of the narco-video's leak, Mexican authorities are hard-pressed to answer numerous questions about events surrounding the filming of the gruesome footage. Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos Santiago, Mexico's assistant attorney general for organized crime, earlier confirmed that AFI agents were involved in the filming of the video and the kidnapping of invidividuals. Vasconcelos' comments were later contradicted by his boss, Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, who said this past weekend there was no proof that AFI was involved in the video.

"The tape and the diffusion of this material seek to undermine the prestige of institutions that, together with the support of the Mexican army, have pursued groups of delinquents that traffic with the health and security of our society," Cabeza de Vaca said.

Still, numerous questions remain unanswered. For example: What happened to the men from Tamaulipas kidnapped in Acapulco last spring? Why hasn't the investigation of Acapulco disappearances made more progress in the nearly 7 months since the first reported kidnappings? And why are high-level authorities making contradictory statements about the video and its producers?

Meanwhile, if previous experience is any indicator, even more turmoil along the Pacific import corridor could break out in the coming days. The Mexican navy just reported the seizure of 6 tons of cocaine off the coast of Manzanillo, Colima, a bust that is likely to leave some shadowy investors upset and seeking to recuperate the value of their shipment.

Additional Sources:
El Sur/Agencia Reforma November 25, 29, 3/4, and 5, 2005. Articles by Jorge Nava, Rolando Herrera, Antonio Baranda, and Ezequiel Flores Contreras El Universal, December 5, 2005. Article by Carlos Aviles. Televisa, December 5, 2005.

U.S. Soldiers Charged with Running Cocaine

 For years Mexican drug cartels have used Ciudad Juarez as the final transshipment point for smuggling South American-produced cocaine into the United States. According to military prosecutors, a group of U.S. soldiers bypassed the middlemen and regular land route by obtaining cocaine at the source and then flying it directly into El Paso. Charged with possession and distribution of cocaine are four officers and enlisted men assigned to the United States Army’s 204^th Military Intelligence Battalion, which is stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso. The accused soldiers are Staff Sgt. Daniel Rosas, 23; Staff Sgt. Victor J. Portales, 24; Spc. Francisco Rosa, 25, and Staff Sgt. Kelvin G.  Irizarry Melendez, 26. A fifth soldier who was arrested last March with the other four men apparently has not been charged with crimes.

 Military court documents cited by the El Paso Times state that the four defendants, who were deployed at times in Colombia, purchased cocaine in the South American nation and then used military aircraft to fly cocaine shipments totaling about 200 pounds into El Paso’s Biggs Army Airfield. The cocaine was then sold in Texas and Louisiana.  Two of the soldiers are also accused of taking more than $300,000 dollars back to Colombia, presumably to pay for the cocaine. The smuggling operation allegedly operated between early 2003 and March 2005. Six unidentified civilians were also allegedly involved in the ring.

 Jean Offlutt, a spokeswoman for Fort Bliss, described the accused soldiers’ official mission in Colombia as one of “surveillance and detection of drugs within the country.” More than 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are in Colombia as part of the Bush Administration’s Plan Colombia to combat drug trafficking and leftist rebels. Colombia ranks as the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, behind Israel and Egypt.

  The El Paso case isn’t the first time U.S. citizens connected to anti-drug missions in Colombia have been accused of having their hand in the proverbial cookie jar. In 1999, Laurie Anne Hiett, the wife of the U.S. Army officer in charge of the U.S. anti-drug program in Bogota,  was arrested for using diplomatic mail to ship heroin and cocaine into the United States. Hiett later was slapped with five years in prison, while her husband, Colonel James Hiett,  received five months in jail money laundering. 

 Most of the accused Ft. Bliss soldiers will face courts-martial in September or October. In addition to possession and distribution charges, the GIs face trial for conspiracy, wrongful use, lying, and damaging the good order and discipline of  the armed forces. Following last spring’s arrests of the four soldiers, some Colombian legislators called for the extradition of the suspects based on the bilateral extradition treaty between the U.S. and Colombia, but U.S. Ambassador William Wood quickly ruled out such a legal prospect.

Sources:  El Paso Times, July 30, 2005. Article by Chris Roberts.  BBC News, April 7,  2005. CNN/Associated Press, August 27, 2000. Baltimore Sun, May 9, 2000. Article by Eric Sterling. CNN, August 5, 1999. Article by Jamie McIntyre.

Terrorist Blasts Lead to Border Crossing Tie-Ups

 Last week's terrorist bombings in London, England, reverberated in the lives of Sonora-Arizona border crossers. Long vehicular traffic and pedestrian lines were reported at the border crossing from San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, to San Luis, Arizona, after the United States Department of Homeland Security decreed a heightened terrorist alert. For vehicles, the average wait time to cross into the United States was two hours. For pedestrians, is was twenty minutes at an entry point where many usually zip right through the initial security screening.

 In addition to the regular questions of "Where are you going?" and "What are you bringing from Mexico?," crossers were confronted with a series of probing interrogations about their reasons for entering the United States. U.S. border guards employed both metal and explosive detectors to scan pedestrian crossers. Besides the hazardous materials detectors, inspectors also used video cameras and specially-trained dogs to examine vehicles. In an apparent bid to forestall a possible vehicle-launched attack, extra barriers were installed at the entrance to the U.S.

 Moreover, the number of secondary inspections increased, with the average detention time estimated at 10 minutes. Secondary inspections are typically called when U.S. customs and immigration personnel target a suspect vehicle and passengers. They usually involve thorough vehicle searches by inspectors and dogs.

 Source: La Cronica de San Luis, July 9, 2005. Article by Santiago Barroso Alfaro.

The Northern Border War's Southern Front, Or The Rise of a New Cartel?

 Government officials, law enforcement officials, and plain old folks of all stripes are alarmed at a series of violent incidents in the southern state of Guerrero. In the month of June alone, three policemen were shot to death in separate incidents in Acapulco, several kidnappings were reported in Zihuatanejo, and grenades were tossed at local police outposts in both Acapulco and Zihuatanejo. In Acapulco, hundreds of rounds of ammunition for AK-47 and AR-15 automatic rifles were discovered in a truck after it crashed with a taxi and the occupants of the first vehicle fled. At least 13 narco-style executions have been registered in Guerrero's largest city since the beginning of the year.

 Press and government sources attribute the bloody upsurge to organized crime, but are cautious about laying exact blame. However, suspicion is falling on with suspicion falling on "El Chapo" Guzman and the Tamaulipas-based Los Zetas, whose followers are are slugging it out for control of the northern drug export corridor along the U.S.-Mexico border. Guerrero Governor Zeferino Torreblanca assessed the violence as "a clear provocation to create a climate of uncertainty in the muncipality of Acapulco," but he did not point the finger at any responsible party. Torreblanca assumed office as Guerrero Governor on April 1 at the helm of an opposition ticket elected elected after decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Currently, Guerrero is readying for state and local elections in October that will replace the present state congress and municipal governments. 

 Violence intensified following the Mexican navy's seizure of  4.5 tons of cocaine and the arrest of 13 fishermen, most reportedly from Oaxaca, off the coast of Zihuatanejo in early June. While cocaine has long been smuggled into the coastal area surrounding Zihuatanejo and the nearby port of Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan,  the latest bust noticeably raised the stakes in the drug war. Usually laid-back navy personnel in Zihuatanejo were visibly ready for further incidents, such as an attempt to retake the seized white gold, and deployed snipers on the naval headquarter's rooftops.

Another jolt to the tourist port came in late June when individuals fired AK-47 rifles and tossed a grenade at a municipal police post on the outskirts of town, wounding three officers. In comparison to their attackers, Zihuatanejo's municipal police are armed only with M-2 rifles, Uzi sub-machine guns and pistols.

Two alleged attackers were subsequently detained, Albertano Rojas Moreno and Pedro Gonzalez Alcorza, lending some evidence who might be behind the turmoil. Rojas told a local reporter that a man from Tamaulipas named El Alebrije paid him $800 dollars to participate in the attack.  The same day Rojas and Gonzalez were arrested, local police in Acapulco arrested 23-year-old Antonio Esteban Lopez Lopez from Sinaloa state for possessing a pistol. The young man, who was allegedly driving a stolen vehicle, tried to pass himself off as a federal and then a state agent, using his cell phone in an attempt to contact a state police commander and call for reinforcements. Unsuccessful, he later threatened photographers with death. The detentions of the three men suspected of being connected to the latest violence buttress speculation that the U.S.-Mexico border war between "El Chapo" Guzman and Tamaulipas-based narcos has opened a southern front, increasingly drawing in places like Guerrero into the cycle of violence. 

 Considering that all the targets of attacks were locals, another interpretation of the violence has a regional spin. Long a raw production zone of opium poppies and marijuana having the characteristics of a classic colonial export economy, indications exist that both Acapulco and Zihuatanejo are becoming "plazas" in their own right similar to Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juarez. Reports of heroin laboratories in the region suggest a shift from raw production to processing, and the correspondent rise in profits which need to be invested somewhere. Satellite-carried internet communications also permit once-isolated rural producers to facilitate their business in a speedy manner. 

 While the northern border cities serve as the final staging points for the export of drugs to the U.S. market, Guerrero stands as a key entry point for South-American-produced cocaine. Export opportunities have recently grown because of the improvement of a road between Morelia, Michoacan and Zihuatanejo which has cut down travel time considerably. As one local commented, Zihuatanejo now has "a lot of narcos." 

 A confluence of  import abilities, highway infrastructure, technological improvements, and weapons superiority all provide the basis for the rise of a new force in the illegal drug market which has the capability of any large corporation that has mastered vertical integration: namely, the control of the market from importation and/or production to processing to export. As the northerners battle it out for control of the U.S. border region, newer forces in the south could well be gathering strength and reconfiguring the equation in the current state-wide political transition and mayhem over the market. 

 Additional sources:  El Sur, 2005 editions of June 17, 18/19, 20, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, and July 1. Articles by Jorge Nava, Brenda Escobar, Citlal Giles Sanchez, Magdalena Cisneros, Teresa de la Cruz, and editorial staff.  

All Against the Mara Nation

 An inter-hemispheric meeting which wrapped up this weekend near the Mexico-Guatemala border resolved to take additional steps against U.S. and Central American-based street gangs known as maras. Gathered in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, Chiapas, representatives from Canada, Mexico, the United States, and Central America decided to open an anti-mara training academy in El Salvador, the country with the largest concentration of maras. Estimates of the number of mara members surpass 100,000 in Central America, the United States, Mexico, and even Canada. Originating in the United States among Central American refugees from the wars of the 1980s, maras have been reported in 33 of the 50 U.S. states. In Mexico, maras have been linked to immigrant smuggling on the southern and northern borders, drug trafficking and violent crimes. 

 The Tapachula meeting discussed the security, social, political, economic, and cultural ramifications of maras. Patricia Olamendi Torres, the undersecretary for multilateral affairs and human rights for Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Relations, said the youthful make-up of the gangs demands a broader approach to the mara phenomenon beyond narrow law enforcement and security perspectives. Olamendi called for international norms such as the United Nations' convention against transnational organized crime to be followed in the anti-mara struggle.

 Some media reports have suggested a link between maras and Osama Bin-Laden's Al Qaeda organization. However, Steven Monblatt, an interim security director for the Organization of American States (OAS), referred to such reports as "a simple hypothesis," adding that intelligence agencies nevertheless are ready for any eventuality. Monblatt affirmed that maras are a threat to society, but cautioned against militarizing borders or constructing walls to combat the gangs. The event in Tapachula was sponsored by the Inter-American Commission for the Control of Drug Abuse of the OAS, and was held as a follow-up to an anti-gang resolution approved during the 35th session of the OAS. Besides larger meetings like the one in Tapachula, a flurry of sub-regional meetings, visits and law enforcement operations directed against the maras  has happened in recent months. U.S. congressmen, for instance, have visited El Salvador to learn about the maras. In another vein, the U.S. FBI conducts anti-mara investigations in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala from an office in the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador. 

 Sources: El Sur (DPA), June 18 and 19, 2005. Proceso/Apro, June 17, 2005. Univision, May 3, 2005.

Gang War Spilling Over to U.S.?

 It was a scene all too familiar on the border. Three vehicles box in a victim, men get out and try to kidnap the person, who in this case, resists and is shot to death. Such incidents are routinely reported these days on the Mexican side of the border, but the occurrence described above happened on the U.S. side, in Laredo, Texas, last Wednesday. Hours later, 28-year-old Cesario Antonio Carrera was waiting for a Mercedes at an auto dealership in Laredo when he was shot to death. Laredo law enforcement authorities later said they believed both incidents were drug-related, but didn’t find any immediate link between the two cases.

 In the first murder, which occurred in broad daylight near an industrial park, the victim was tentatively identified as a possible, onetime Mexican policeman and bodyguard of a former Nuevo Laredo police chief, but authorities did not immediately release the dead man’s name. Two young men, 19-year-old Gabriel Cardona and 18-year-old Richard Guerrero, were later arrested by Laredo police on murder, organized crime and aggravated kidnapping charges. An arrest warrant has been issued for 20-year-old Wenceslao Tovar. Laredo police downplayed the murder as having a connection to events across the border. “What happened is something out of the ordinary, but we can never be too careful,” said Agustin  Dovalina III, the Laredo police chief.

 In another violent crime having a possible U.S.-connection, witnesses observed an apparent kidnapping in broad daylight at an international bridge connecting Matamoros-Brownsville on June 2. Witnesses, who included customs officials and startled tourists, reported seeing a chase that began from the Brownsville side of the bridge and ended when two pickup trucks corralled another vehicle and made off with a victim. Police reportedly were present but did not intervene. Only hours after the first Laredo slaying, the new police chief of Nuevo Laredo, Alejandro Dominguez Coello, was shot to death by automatic weapons fire. He had been on the job for several hours. Dominguez once worked for Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR), and was a cousin of Javier Coello Trejo, a top PGR official in  the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gotari. More recently, Dominguez served as the president of the Nuevo Laredo Chamber of Commerce. He maintained residences in both of the two Laredos. Dominguez’s murder came hot on the heels of the execution-style murders last week of 7 former and current policemen in Nogales, Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City. Just days prior to the slayings, Mexican President Vicente Fox remarked on his weekly radio program that he thought it was “an exaggeration” to say an ungovernable situation prevailed on the border. However, Fox pointed to other states in central and southern Mexico as having good public security situations. In contrast, Tamaulipas Governor Eugenio Hernandez labeled the situation in his border state a matter of national security requiring greater federal intervention. Meanwhile, a tense situation in Nuevo Laredo grew tenser by the weekend when federal officials accused Nuevo Laredo municipal police of opening fire on a convoy of agents from the Federal Agency of Investigation, wounding one federal officer. Sixty-one local police were reportedly detained after Saturday’s shooting. 

Sources: El Manana, June 11, 2005. El Universal, June 11, 2005. Laredo Morning Times, June 11, 2005 Laredo Morning Times, June 10, 2005, article by  Celina Alvarado. Laredo Morning Times, June 9, 2005. Articles by Celina Alvarado, Miguel Timoshenkov and Vicente Rangel. enlineadirecta.com. Article by Nora Morales and Gaston Monge. El Universal, June 4, 2005. El Bravo, June 4, 2005.

Wave of Killings Targets Ex-Policemen

Two former Sonora state police officers and a one-time coordinator of the Nogales municipal police were found shot execution-style near the Mexico-U.S. border line late Sunday and early Monday. Inspecting the scene of the crime, state police investigators found the bodies not far apart in two separate locations. Numerous shell casings from 9 millimeter and .45 caliber bullets were discovered. Two of the victims were identified as 49-year-old Jesus Martinez Luna, a former operational commander of the Nogales Municipal Police, and Jose Heriberto Garcia Valenzuela, 28, a former agent of the Sonora State Judicial Police. The third victim may have been Pablo Ruben Gracia Noriega, 34, a former PJE liason with Arizona law enforcement.

Gracia was indicted in 2003 by a federal grand jury in Tucson for being part of an alleged  cross-border arms smuggling ring involving PJE Commander Carlos Pereyda and Nogales, Arizona, police officer Frank Mahomar. According to the indictment, Pereyda and Gracia paid Mahomar $2,200 dollars each time he purchased weapons in the United States for the two men, who would then illegally transport the guns back to Mexico and sell them on the black market. Current or former law enforcement officers have been a frequent target in the wave of gangland-style slayings jolting the border region. In another case, a former commander of the Chihuahua State Judicial Police and the federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR)  was discovered tortured and murdered in Ciudad Juarez less than 48 hours after the Nogales slayings. The body of Jesus Buil Issa, a member of the Torreon family that owns the Issa furniture store chain, was found stuffed in the back of a pick-up with Sonora license plates which had been parked near the Ciudad Juarez home of Jesus Macias, a representative of Chihuahua Governor Jose Reyes Baeza.  Two of Buil Issa’s fingers were severed, and he was missing shoes.

Besides Buil Issa, two other narco-style murder victims were reported found in Juarez on Tuesday. Buil Issa was a commander with the Chihuahua State Judicial Police in the 1990s during the administration of former governor and current presidential hopeful Francisco Barrio. He later served with the PGR in the states of Guerrero and Sonora,  including a stint with the anti-drug unit FEADS, which was later dissolved because of widespread corruption exposed in its ranks.

 Members of the El Paso-based Association of Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons (AFAPD) allege that Buil Issa was implicated in the “levantones,” or forced disappearances of men, which have terrorized Juarez since the early 1990s. Association member Patricia Garibay, whose missing brother Jorge Garibay was last seen in public in Juarez being detained by men identified as police officers in 1998, remarked that Buil Issa was a “old-timer” who had “too many enemies.”  Buil Issa was a prime suspect in the disappearance and murder of former Chihuahua state police agent Felipe Javier Lardizabal Hernandez, whose body was found in 1994 in the Lote Bravo area on Ciudad Juarez’s outskirts, the same place which later became internationally notorious as the dumping ground for the mutilated bodies of murdered young women.

Early Wednesday morning, less than 24 hours after Buil Issa’s body was found, gunmen burst into a clinic in Chihuahua City and gunned down two former Chihuahua state police officers and an active-duty member of the Federal Agency of Investigations. Like Buil Issa, two of the Chihuahua City victims also were police agents during the Barrio administration. AFAPD Director Jaime Hervella told Frontera NorteSur that the killings of veteran state police officers worries him as it might complicate the search for hundreds of missing men from previous years. “When I see some of these guys killed, I feel like these bastards had knowledge where our loved ones were, (how) they were killed, and now we don’t have information,” said Hervella.  “In none of these (recent murders), even by coincidence, is there the presence of a patrol car. Vehicles are abandoned downtown and nobody sees anything,” said Hervella.

The 9 killings in Nogales, Juarez and Chihuahua City brought the official number of murders in Mexico linked to organized crime close to 600 so far this year.

 Additional Sources: Norte, June 8, 2005. Articles  by Salvador Castro and Sonia Aguilar. El Unviersal, June 8, 2005. Diario de Juarez, June 8, 2005. Article by Armando Rodriguez. Frontenet, June 8, 2005. El Diario de Sonora, June 7, 2005. Article by Cesar Barron N. El Imparcial, June 7, 2005. Article by Ruben A. Ruiz. El Universal, June 7, 2005. Frontenet, June 7, 2005. Article by Felix Gonzalez. Lapolaka, June 7, 2005. Office of the United States Attorney for the District of Arizona, March 27, 2003. Press release. Associated Press, March 11, 2003.

Security Shake-Up; terror continues

 A shake-up of key public safety personnel in the violence-torn border state of Tamaulipas continues. Ives Soberon Tijerina, Tampaulipas’ new head of state public safety, confirmed the resignations of 11 high state officials, including the chiefs of internal affairs, police operations, state preventive police, and prisons. Soberon replaced General Roberto Gutierrez Flores, who left his post on May 5. The shake-up follows months of mounting narco-related violence, a period bloodied by the murders of 8 inmates at the Nuevo Laredo jail;  the multiple shootings of police officers, numerous street side executions; and the murder of radio journalist Guadalupe Garcia. 

 Despite public outrage, new violence riveted Nuevo Laredo. On May 11, an unknown individual or individuals tossed a Molotov cocktail at the parked car of Pedro Perez Natividad, the editorial director of Nuevo Laredo’s Primera Hora newspaper. Also, officials confirmed at least 60 kidnappings were carried out in Nuevo Laredo since the beginning of the year, with 13 of the cases occurring in an 8-day period in early May alone. So far 51 murders have been registered in Nuevo Laredo this year.  

 In one of the latest kidnappings, carpenter Omar Hernandez was whisked away from his home by masked, armed men on May 11 after the assailants threatened to kill his two young children. Hernandez’s wife, Veronica Hernandez, then fled with her children and asked for help from an officer in a nearby police car. According to Hernandez, the policeman told her he had no jurisdiction in the matter and that, besides, the police too, were terrified. “Look, ma’am,” he allegedly said, “They’re killing us.” Hernandez said she had better luck with a patrol of Mexican soldiers, who quickly began a search for the woman’s kidnapped husband but came back empty-handed. Hernandez and her children  found refuge on a neighbor’s roof, but the distraught woman said that from her hiding place she spotted the masked men returning to her home some hours later.

 Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza warned in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, that violence in Tamaulipas was bound to have international repercussions if not brought under control, threatening tourism and economic stability.

 Sources: El Manana, May 15, 2005. Article by Joaquin Soto. La Jornada, May 14, 2005. Article by David Carrizales. Laredo Morning Times, May 13, 2005. Article by Miguel Timoshenkov.  Proceso/Apro,  May 12, 2005. Article by Gabriela Hernandez. El Universal, May 11, 2005. Article by Roberto Aguilar Grimaldo.

 Juarez Leaders Slam U.S. Plea Deal in Narco-Graves Case

 Opinion leaders in Ciudad Juarez criticized the United States government this week for a  plea bargain that allowed a reputed Juarez drug cartel figure to escape murder charges in return for pleading guilty to conspiring to smuggle drugs into the U.S. In a deal struck with U.S. federal prosecutors in San Antonio last April,  Heriberto Santillan Tabares was sentenced to 25 years in prison but avoided a potential death sentence when murder charges were dropped.  Santillan had been accused of carrying out 5 Juarez killings while conducting  a criminal enterprise in the United States. The 51-year-old, self-proclaimed “farmer” was linked to the house in the middle-class  Las Acequias neighborhood where the bodies of  12 men were unearthed in January 2004. The victims, all presumed to have run afoul of the Juarez cartel, were brutally tortured and killed. Santillan’s plea bargain prevented a public trial, which was set for San Antonio in early May. 

 In comments to the Diario de Juarez newspaper, representatives of the Chihuahua governor’s office,  the Juarez city council , a lawyers association, and the Roman Catholic Church reproached the U.S. government for preaching about the rule of law and human rights while permitting Santillan to get off the hook on murder charges. “That country proclaims itself as the champion of truth and justice, but justice has to begin at home,” said Hesiquio Trevizo Bencomo, a spokesman for Juarez’s  Catholic Church.  Juarez City Councilman Sergio Raul Natividad Garcia (PRI) said that critical U.S. statements about Mexican law enforcement lose credibility in light of the Santillan deal. “This comes from a country that says it is the least corrupt and, nevertheless, this type of situation happens. Let them investigate their own agencies,” quipped Natividad. The web site of Proceso magazine, Mexico’s most influential weekly, ran a series about the Santillan-Las Acequias case this week entitled “Saved by Corruption in the United States.”

 The controversy over the Santillan case comes amid the ongoing polemic about U.S. State Department  warnings of public insecurity and corrupt police in Juarez. The border city’s mayor and other business, civic and political leaders contend that Juarez is being unfairly painted with the brush of danger. Critics of how the U.S. government handled the Las Acequias affair maintain that Santillan’s plea bargain was reached because of the risk of acquittal, and the possibility that embarrassing details about U.S. anti-drug operations and an explosive lawsuit resulting from them might be aired in a public courtroom. But Johnny Sutton, the U.S. attorney for the western district of Texas, defended the deal. According to Sutton, the guilty plea “takes (Santillan) off the street and removes him from the drug organization and the drug trade for the rest of his life.” Sutton also noted that all the murders were committed in Ciudad Juarez by Mexicans. Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office arrested 11 individuals for the murders, but 4 state police officers wanted for their alleged participation in the slaughter are missing.

 A wrongful death lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau and other federal agencies and officials is pending in El Paso federal court on behalf of the family of Las Acequias victim Luis Padilla.  The lawsuit charges that an ICE informant known as “Lalo” actively participated in several of the Las Acequias torture-murders with the knowledge of his supervisors. According to plantiffs’ attorney Raul Loya, some El Paso ICE officials even listened to a live cell phone feed of one of the sessions. Quoted in the Diario newspaper, Loya contended that the human rights atrocities committed at Las Acequias  were greater “than in the prisons of Abu Gharib.”

 ICE spokespersons have previously declined to comment on the Las Acequias episode or the Padilla lawsuit.  

Sources:: El Diario de Juarez, May 5, 2005.  El Diario de Juarez, May 5, 2005. Article by Alejandro Quintero. El Diario de Juarez, May 5, 2005. Article by Javier Saucedo Alcala. Proceso/Apro, May 4 and May 5, 2005. Articles by Jesus Esquivel and Alejandro Gutierrez. El Mexicano (Ciudad Juarez), May 5, 2005. Article by Jacinto Segura Garnica.  El Mexicano, April 5, 2005. Article by Moises Villeda. El Mexicano, May 5, 2005. Article by Joel Edgardo Gonzalez.  El Paso Times, April 20, 2005. Article by Louie Gilot.  Laredo Morning Times (Associated Press), April 21, 2005.

Mexican Army to Step Up Law Enforcement

 Sonora Governor Eduardo Bours announced this week increased deployments of  Mexican soldiers in the northern region of his state bordering the United States. In a press conference, Bours said the Mexican army will open new bases in the coming months in Nogales and Caborca. The governor explained that the main purpose of the military’s enhanced presence will be to combat drug and human trafficking . Said Bours,  “The problem in the mountains of Sonora, Alamos and Yecora is a problem of cultivation, and the problem in the north, basically Nogales and Caborca, is a problem with the trafficking of drugs.” The army’s new deployments will follow recent the introductions of more than 1,600 troops in crime-ridden zones like Alamos. Bours underscored that organized crime activities in his state pose a risk to Mexico’s  national security, contending that “Bulgarians and Russians” were present in the immigrant trade, while in other countries guerrilla groups have united with drug traffickers. He added that diverse sectors of society were demanding a greater push against organized crime. “It’s our responsibility to complicate life for organized crime, expel them from  the state,” said Bours. “We’ve been achieving this with a greater presence of members from the different levels of government.”

Although the Mexican army has been long involved in anti-drug activities, Bours’ announcement indicates how the military is stepping up its role in combating illegal immigration,  traditionally the legal  responsibility of the National Migration Institute  Since the early days of the Fox administration, Mexican soldiers have taken over highway checkpoints throughout Mexico where travelers’ immigration status is sometimes checked. The Sonora governor did not disclose how many extra troops will be stationed in his state. His announcement was preceded by a March meeting  between Defense Secretary General Gerardo Clemente Vega Garcia and the governors of Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua and Durango. At the meeting, Defense Secretary Vega pledged his full cooperation with the civilian governors in the drug war. A recent controversy erupted in the Mexican Senate after National Action Party Senator Hector Osuna proposed legislation that held out the possibility of involving the Mexican military in closing off border zones deemed high-risk

 Sources: El Imparcial (Hermosillo), May 3, 2005. Article by Luis Alberto Medina. El Universal, May 2, 2005. Article by Francisco Arroyo.  La Jornada, April 24, 2005. Article by Cristobal Garcia Bernal. La Jornada, April 17, 2005. Article by Andrea Becerril.

Mexico Travel Advisory Sparks New Criticisms

 A renewed warning for U.S. travelers in northern Mexico touched off another round of criticism by Nuevo Laredo businessmen. Prompted by continued drug-related violence, the U.S. State Department renewed its advisory on April 26 cautioning U.S. visitors to northern Mexican border cities. The warning highlighted the deteriorating security situation in Nuevo Laredo, where more than 30 U.S. citizens have been kidnapped and/or murdered during the last 8 months. While Arturo Salgado, vice-counsel for the Mexican embassy in McAllen, Texas, expressed understanding of the advisory, some Nuevo Laredo residents were less diplomatic.  “It’s a slap in the face,” said Nuevo Laredo businessman Pablo Jacobo Suneson, the owner of Marti’s store. Suneson blamed State Department alerts and U.S. press coverage of  the narco-violence in his city for driving away U.S. tourists in favor of  destinations like San Antonio, Texas.  Members of the Nuevo Laredo business community had earlier cited the first State Department travel advisory issued last January 26 for resulting in a dramatic economic plunge.  

Betty Flores, the mayor of neighboring Laredo, Texas, said that violence across the international boundary was beginning to undermine her city’s economy. Flores said that the loss of business income in Nuevo Laredo’s tourist quarter was thinning the money which is  recycled in Laredo’s strip malls where Mexicans shop. She added that drug gangs were “destroying a very vibrant city” and hurting another one across the river. “We are one economy,” said Flores. “We are one dependent on the other.”

 The travel advisories also applied to Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez as well as Reynosa, Tamaulipas,  all places where daytime kidnappings, public executions and police extortions of U.S. motorists have been recently reported.  In Reynosa, an armed band in the service of presumed drug traffickers ambushed a convoy of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) last week. Residents reporting hearing two loud explosions and automatic weapons fire in the subsequent clash which left at least one PFP officer wounded. In Nuevo Laredo, meanwhile, business and civic leaders plan a community march for peace on Sunday, May 1, in rejection of the violence that is afflicting their city.

 Sources: El Manana (Nuevo Laredo), April 29, 2005. Article by Jaime Orozco Tey. El Universal, April 29, 2005.  Article by Roberto Aguilar Grimaldo. El Manana, April 28, 2005. Article by Lesy Mendoza. El Diario de Juarez, April 28, 2005. Article by Lorena Figueroa. Laredo Morning Times/Associated Press, April 28, 2005 and, April 26, 2005.  Articles by Lynn Brezosky.