To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (3 page)

The so-called “drug war” in Mexico is really two wars, a war between disciplined, organized, and intensely well-funded trafficking organizations in which the state also participates, and a media spectacle that presents combat and arrests as the product of diligent law-enforcement operations. The current, overlapping drug wars in Mexico date to the so-called democratic transition period between 1994 and 2006. During the six-year term of Carlos Salinas (1988–1994), the Gulf Cartel bloomed from a loosely organized group of runners into one of the most powerful transnational criminal enterprises in the hemisphere, and one capable of competing with the longer-standing Sinaloan cartels based in Tijuana, Guadalajara, Culiacán, and Ciudad Juárez. Salinas’s successor, Ernesto Zedillo, furious with Salinas for leaving him with the 1994 peso crisis that battered the Mexican economy, attacked the Gulf Cartel. His administration arrested and extradited to the United States the Gulf capo Juan García Ábrego. Zedillo also imprisoned Salinas’s own brother, Raúl, for “illicit enrichment” (Swiss banks froze almost $100 million in accounts that Raúl had opened under false names) and involvement in the murder of José Francisco Ruiz Massieu. Then chair of the PRI and set to become the PRI majority leader in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, Ruiz Massieu was also Raúl and Carlos Salinas’s ex-brother-in-law. When the PRI lost the 2000 presidential elections and Vicente Fox and the PAN took control of the presidency, Fox and the PAN also favored the Sinaloa Cartel over the Gulf Cartel. El Chapo—the presumed head of the Sinaloa Cartel—escaped from a maximum-security prison in a laundry basket six weeks after Fox’s inauguration. The Fox administration orchestrated the capture and extradition to the United States of García Ábrego’s successor, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the capo and mastermind who created the paramilitary Zetas unit in 1997 by recruiting from within the Mexican army’s Special Forces units created by Zedillo as counterinsurgency shock troops, and then sent to kill Cárdenas. But by 2004 the Sinaloan trafficking organizations loosely allied as The Federation began to fracture, and former allies turned upon each other, vying for territorial supremacy and thus initiating a drugland civil war that began to rage throughout the country. By the end of Fox’s six-year term in 2006, the war was full on, and literally, heads were rolling. Calderón entered office in December 2006, after widespread accusations of electoral fraud that led to months of huge protests. Calderón refused to agree to a full recount of the votes and had to sneak into Congress at midnight for his inauguration in order to avoid protester blockades. The electoral protests were not isolated. Mexico in 2006 was gripped with powerful social mobilizations such as the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign and the teachers’ rebellion in Oaxaca. Calderón staked his presidency on sending the army into the streets to wage “war” on drug traffickers and send an unequivocal message of military might to the massive protest movements that had surged throughout the country in the preceding months.

Calderón’s “war,” however, has mostly targeted the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas, the Carrillo Fuentes, or Juárez Cartel, the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, and the Familia Michoacana, and has left the Sinaloa Cartel more or less alone. A National Public Radio analysis of 2,600 drug-related federal arrests between December 2006 and May 2010 found that members of the Sinaloa Cartel accounted for only 12 percent of arrestees. According to Mexican federal government statistics the Sinaloa Cartel is responsible for 84 percent of the recent drug-war murders. In November 2008 federal police arrested Noé Ramírez Mandujano, the director of Mexico’s national counter-narcotics agency, for accepting a bribe of $450,000 from the Beltrán Leyvas’ Pacific Cartel, then the archenemy of the Sinaloa Cartel. In December 2009, navy commandos stormed the high-end Cuernavaca apartment complex where Arturo Beltrán Leyva, leader of the Pacific Cartel, was hiding out. The soldiers killed him, stripped his body naked, and carefully laid out his money and jewelry over the bullet-ridden corpse.

His war has also created a climate of such overwhelming violence and impunity that assassinations of political opponents—indigenous rights leaders, human rights advocates, anti-mining activists, guerrilla insurgents—are quickly swept into the ever rising body count without much attention or outcry. Paramilitaries shot and killed Beatriz Cariño and Jyri Jaakkola in broad daylight as they participated in a human rights caravan taking food and medical supplies to the besieged Triqui indigenous community of San Juan Copala in the state of Oaxaca. No one has been arrested; the federal government did not send police to break the paramilitary barricade on the highway leading to Copala. Raúl Lucas Lucía and Manuel Ponce Ríos, two indigenous rights activists in Guerrero state were tortured an executed in February 2010. No arrests were made. Activists have been murdered in Chiapas, Sinaloa, Baja California, and Chihuahua states; all the cases remain unsolved.

In the United States, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have sent money, arms, and military aid to Mexico’s army and federal police to help them “combat” drug trafficking. U.S. officials and most of the major U.S. press outlets forget the long list of federal police and generals who later became known as top-level narcos—Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, Amado Carillo Fuentes, Osiel Cárdenas, Guillermo González Calderoni, Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo—when approving or covering U.S. aid to the Mexican federal government, such as the $1.4 billion Mérida Initiative. U.S. officials and the press routinely neglect to mention that the Mexican army and federal police very often
are
drug traffickers.

Drugs are big business. The United Nations 2010 World Drug Report estimates that the global cocaine and opiates markets generate $153 billion a year. The U.N. estimates the global drug industry to generate between $300 and $500 billion. Cannabis is the most widely consumed illegal drug, but it is more difficult to estimate its annual revenues since it can be grown and sold locally worldwide in small amounts. The quasi-legal marijuana crop in the State of California alone was worth an estimated $17 billion in 2008; the value of all of California’s legal field crops in 2008 was $4.19 billion. The 2010 U.S. Department of State’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report estimates that Mexican drug-trafficking organizations move up to $25 billion in earnings across the U.S. border into Mexico every year. The Mexican federal government estimates that drug traffickers earned over $132 billion between December 2006 and June 2010. Mexico’s “most wanted”
capo
—El Chapo Guzmán—is now a recurring figure on the
Forbes
list of billionaires. The first year Guzmán appeared on the list, 2009, the magazine editors listed the source of his fortune, as “shipping.”

Estimates are suspect. The government numbers for how many billions of dollars are earned in the business, how many tons of product are successfully moved across borders, how many people get high on a regular basis, and how many people only briefly experiment with illegal drugs are mostly guesses, some perhaps intelligent, some driven by ulterior motives, and some just wild. The United Nations 1994 estimate that the global illegal drug market was worth some $500 billion a year is really just conjecture. No one knows. Drug barons do not submit (accurate) income tax returns. But these numbers, whether they are a bit high or a bit low, do indicate the sheer scale of both the marketplace for illegal narcotics and the failure of interdiction efforts.

Drugs are commodities. People have been consuming cannabis and coca for at least two thousand years. Poppies were first domesticated some eight thousand years ago, and in 1552
BCE
Theban physicians had more than 700 medicinal recipes for the use of opiates. Successive United States governments have spearheaded and imposed a global prohibition regime banning the consumption of these and other plants and chemicals for the past hundred years. Along with coffee, tea, tobacco, and sugar, these plants were essential commodities in the formation of Western European capitalism over the past five hundred years. The fact that they are now illegal is what makes the business of shipping and selling them so amazingly profitable. Illegality is now a part of their commodity form. A Colombian farmer will take in no more than $1,000 for the 100 kilograms of coca leaves used to make a kilogram of basic coca paste. Three kilos of paste will make one kilo of processed cocaine. Once that kilo of cocaine hits the streets in the United States of America, it will be worth $100,000, or about $100 a gram. In the Colombian countryside the exact same substance is worth no more than $3,000. Arriving in Mexico, it is worth about $12,500. By the time it reaches Seattle or Columbus or Baltimore, its value will increase by over 3,000 percent. Growing the plant used to make cocaine is not good money. Moving cocaine into the United States is insanely good money.

The business of transporting cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamines is so profitable precisely because those drugs are illegal. Legalization would slash the massive profit margin that illegality creates. As California voters faced a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in the summer of 2010, the right-wing RAND Drug Policy Research Center released estimates that marijuana prices would fall by 90 percent upon legalization and regulation: a $375 ounce of medical marijuana could be worth $38 an ounce upon statewide legalization. But medical marijuana is grown in California and already quasi-legal (legal under state law and illegal under federal law). The price for illegal drugs from Mexico and South America might plummet even further. Legalization would put the traffickers as they exist today out of business.

Illegality creates complications as well as spectacular profits. First, one has to do something with the mass of cash, the sheer bulk of paper money. Drug lords need banks.

A glimpse:
Bloomberg Markets
magazine’s August 2010 issue reported that drug traffickers who used a DC-9 jet to move cocaine from South America to Mexico had purchased the jet “with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp.” The Mexican newsweekly
Proceso
reported that the Mexican banking industry finds itself with an “extra” $10 billion in cash every year. The Mexican Treasury Secretary said in a press conference on June 15, 2010, that the forty-one banks operating in Mexico have “ten billion dollars that cannot be explained within the proper dynamics of the country’s economic activity.”

But banks also need drug lords. In 2008, drug money saved the major global banks from collapse and thus, stretching just a bit, saved capitalism from a devastating internal crisis when the speculative capital markets imploded. Drug money—truckloads of cash, actual physical money—would appear to be one of capitalism’s global savings accounts. In December 2009, Rajeev Syal at
The Observer
in London reported, “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, told Syal that he had seen “evidence that the proceeds of organized crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse [in 2008]. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

Christian De Brie wrote in
Le Monde Diplomatique
in April 2000 that over $350 billion of illicit cash is successfully laundered and reinvested globally
every year
, nearly $1 billion a day. Here is his math, “The annual profits from drug trafficking (cannabis, cocaine, heroin) are estimated at $300–500bn (not to mention the rapidly mushrooming synthetic drugs), that is 8% to 10% of world trade. Computer piracy has a turnover in excess of $200bn, counterfeit goods $100bn, European Community budget fraud $10-15bn, animal smuggling $20bn, etc. In all, and counting only activities with a transnational dimension, including the white slave trade, the world’s gross criminal product totals far above $1,000bn a year, nearly 20% of world trade.” He writes that if half of that goes to overhead, that leaves $500 billion in profit. If one-third of that amount goes to the laundry services of banks and investors, that would leave $350 billion in profit fully integrated into the “legal” capitalist economy every year.

Black market entrepreneurs also like to diversify their investment portfolios. Besides laundering their cash through myriad businesses in the legal economy, today’s transnational drug barons are expanding, for example, into oil. A report in the
Washington Post
in December 2009 details how the Zetas and other cartels stole more than $1 billion of oil from the Mexican national oil company Pemex between 2008 and the end of 2009. In the cases described in the
Washington Post
, the Zetas tapped directly into federal pipelines and siphoned the oil off to stolen tanker trucks, which they then used to sell the fuel to a range of Texas-based oil companies like Y Gas and Oil and Trammo Petroleum. Pemex officials said they detected $715 million of stolen oil in 2008 alone. And apparently the Zetas are not the only ones working the stolen oil market: company officials found 396 illegal taps throughout all of Mexico’s thirty-one states. In 2010, oil theft increased by another 75 percent. In December 2010, an oil pipeline in Puebla state exploded, killing twenty-eight people, including thirteen children. Pemex director Juan José Suárez Coppel blamed the blast on an illegal tap.

Those in the illicit drug business add to their profits with income from human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, and even cattle rustling. Edmundo Ramírez Martínez authored a report for the Mexican legislature on the perils Central American migrants face while crossing Mexico en route to the United States. He estimated that the drug organizations’ control over human trafficking along the border brings them another $3 billion a year. Another report from the Mexican legislature states that kidnapping has increased 300 percent in the past five years. The report calculates that drug gangs participated in 30 percent of the recent kidnappings while soldiers and police made up 22 percent of the nation’s kidnappers. On one balmy day in August 2010 in Tamaulipas state, gunmen executed seventy-two Central and South American migrants in a barn. Soon after, the National Human Rights Commission reported having received 198 witness accounts of kidnappings involving nearly ten thousand migrants, all in the first six months of 2009. In Ciudad Juárez, extortion and kidnapping have driven thousands of small and medium-sized businesses to ruin, prompting the closure of ten thousand businesses in the past three years. Under the headline “Crime steals cattle and sells on the formal market,” the daily newspaper
El Universal
wrote in September 2010 that at least eleven states show an increase of 30 to 50 percent in cattle rustling. Ranchers “attribute the increase to the growth of organized crime and the fact that the drug-trafficking cartels are expanding their field of activities.”