To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (4 page)

And then there are the guns. In Mexico, federal law prohibits open gun sales and the permits granted directly from the Secretary of Defense are extremely rare. In the U.S. border states of Texas and Arizona, one can purchase AK-47 and AR-15 machine guns, 9mm handguns, and even Barrett .50-caliber rifles in an over-the-counter cash transaction. Calderón’s “drug war” has apparently created a boom for the 7,000 or so legal mom-and-pop gun stores in the U.S.-Mexican border region. According to a report published by the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Mexican government’s seizures of illegal firearms more than tripled between 2007 and 2008, from 9,553 to 29,824. The
Washington Post
reported in September 2010 that 62,800 of the more than 80,000 illegal guns confiscated between December 2006 and February 2010 were traced back to gun stores in the United States. (In 2008, U.S, agents confiscated only 70 guns at border crossings.) And those are just the guns found and reported by Mexican police and soldiers. In January 2011, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence released a report using data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to show that since 2008 more than 62,000 firearms have “gone missing” from U.S. gun store inventories. Since the ATF only inspects 20 percent of gun stores, the number is most likely much higher. Similarly, the number of weapons seized, traced, and reported by Mexican authorities is surely only a fraction of all those guns still in use. The National Rifle Association says that Mexican drug gangs get their weapons from Central American arms traffickers and army deserters who take their guns with them. While that is not disputed, the number of guns seized in Mexico and traced back to legal U.S. dealers is staggering. Wherever they come from, all these machine guns and automatic pistols make up another booming side industry made possible by the murder spree in Mexico. Ironically, Calderón often blames U.S. gun laws and the easy availability in the United States for the violence in Mexico. (U.S. laws are largely to blame, but not the gun laws.)

Illegality also requires that one back up the moral discourse of prohibition with massive infusions of funds into armies and law-enforcement agencies. These infusions in turn require the production of arrests and drug seizures. Competitors in the drug economy use this need as a way to eliminate opponents and rivals, tipping off federal authorities to the whereabouts of one’s enemy’s stash and bedroom.

And in this context, illegality leads to a third complication: all disputes within the industry must be settled outside the law. The most popular method of conflict resolution in an illegal business culture where cash is so abundant as to be a kind of burden is contract murder. Betray, snitch, steal, mess up, forget, offend the boss, or say too much, and your transgression will likely lead to your death. The rule makers of the drug business do not impose fines, jail time, or community service, just death. And death is also good business. The Brookings Institution estimates that on average two thousand guns—ranging from cop-killer pistols to AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles—are legally purchased in the United States and then smuggled across the border into Mexico
every day
.

This is what you cannot say: death is a part of the overhead, a business expense in a multibillion-dollar transnational illegal industry; the Mexican army and federal police are on the take, waging a war of extermination against suspected drug dealers and traffickers aligned with organizations that the federal government considers unruly or threatening, principally the Beltrán Leyva gang and the Zetas. That war of extermination provides cover for political assassinations, paramilitary executions, vigilante justice, and everyday extortion, abduction, and murder. That war of extermination has also fueled a coordinated, armed, and indescribably cruel counter-wave of murder as the Beltrán Leyva, Familia Michoacana and Zetas cartels scramble to maintain control of their territory and trafficking routes.

Death is everywhere.

In Ciudad Juárez, Francisco María Sagredo Villarreal, 69 years old, got tired of finding dead bodies discarded outside of his house. One day in November 2006, he nailed up a sign that read:
PROHIBITED: LITTERING AND DUMPING CORPSES
. He denounced the roaming bands of killers terrorizing the city and the complete impunity with which they always commit their crimes. He would find four more destroyed bodies there until October 2008 when a group of men shot Sagredo on his doorstep a little before noon. Two months later armed men killed his daughter Cinthia Sagredo Escobedo and dumped her body under the sign. The following day a group of men fired some twenty AK-47 bullets into his other daughter, Ruth Sagredo Escobedo, and a friend of hers as they drove in Cinthia’s funeral procession. Both died.

The headlines assault.
El Universal
, July 25, 2010: “A Total of 70 Bodies Found in Narcograves in Nuevo León.”
CNN México
, June 11, 2010: “Armed Group Kills 19 Inmates at Rehabilitation Center in Chihuahua.”
Milenio
, May 1, 2010: “55 Thousand Pesos to Kill a Family.”
Notimex
, April, 9, 2010: “Two Bodies Found Hanging from a Bridge in Cuernavaca.”
La Jornada
, March 29, 2010: “10 Youths Between 13 and 19 Years Old Executed in Mountains of Durango.”
New York Times
, February 2, 2010: “Gunmen in Mexico Kill 15 in Attack on a Teenagers’ Party.”
Associated Press
, January 8, 2010: “Mexico Cartel Stitches Rival’s Face on Soccer Ball.”

Of the 22,000 executions carried out between December 2006 and April 2010, the Mexican federal attorney general’s office (Procuraduría General de la República, or PGR) had investigated 1,200 cases. Meaning the Mexican government did
not
investigate 95 percent of the drug war murders. (By May 2011, the known death toll had reached over 38,000 people, and the dismal level of arrests and convictions stayed the same. Some 30,000 murders were not even under investigation, their perpetrators thus guaranteed impunity.) The Mexican national daily
El Universal
first reported this story on June 21, 2010, after the 22,000 number became part of the public record in the Mexican Senate. The story quotes Jorge Chabat, a well-known drug-trafficking analyst and professor at the nonprofit Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City. Chabat says, “The small number of serious homicide cases being investigated by the PGR is a reflection of the incapacity to investigate those crimes.” Incapacity? Ninety-five percent is too overwhelming a number to reflect incapacity. Ninety-five percent indicates an astonishing success rate, where the objective is not justice, but impunity.

Federal police make scores of arrests across the country every day. Those arrests lead to a minuscule number of convictions. According to Mexican federal reports analyzed by the investigative newsmagazine
ContraLínea
, of the 121,199 people that soldiers and police had detained in three and a half years of Calderón’s war, prosecutors brought charges against only 1,306 for having links to one of the eight cartels presumed to operate in Mexico. Judges sentenced 735 to prison for organized crime. In 2009, federal police arrested, amidst great fanfare, eleven mayors and twenty-four other officials in Michoacán state for alleged links to drug traffickers. By late September 2010, prosecutors dropped the cases and judges ordered all but one set free for lack of evidence. The mayors and officials all belonged to the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and had been arrested six weeks before the midterm federal elections. In the drug war, detentions and arrests produce results on the television screen, not in the courtroom.

And this is what they tell us: if you are found dead, shot through the face, wrapped in a soiled blanket, and left on some desolate roadside, then you are somehow to blame. You must have been into something bad to end up like that. Surely you were a drug dealer, a drug trafficker, or an official on the take. The very fact of your execution is the judgment against you, the determination of your guilt.

Mexican political cartoonist Antonio Helguera published a drawing in
La Jornada
, in March 2010, that captures this official logic of death in Mexico’s and the United States’ drug war. The title of the cartoon is
Morir en México
, To Die in Mexico. Eight asymmetrically aligned gravestones fill the frame and read, clockwise from the left: “She must have been into something; It was a gang feud; They murdered amongst themselves; What was he doing at that hour?; It was a settling of accounts; She dressed provocatively; Who knows what he was getting into; She was a whore.”

The official logic of death seeks to safeguard the legitimacy of the army and federal police, and through them Calderón and his enforcers, to cloak them in a layer of discursive Kevlar that deflects all scrutiny. In the drug war, the dead are guilty, ipso facto, of their own murder. And whosoever would seek to argue otherwise confronts the likelihood of looking, briefly, at an AK-47.

But the drug war death squads make mistakes. And names wait with the dead.

ONE SHOULD NOT FORGET
that the United States invaded Mexico in 1846 and conquered half of its national territory. Mexicans do not forget this; many in the United States never learn it.

The United States later invaded the port of Veracruz in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution to aid Venustiano Carranza in his war against Pancho Villa’s Northern Division and Emiliano Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South. U.S. intervention in Mexico is simultaneously a grounded historical fear-and-loathing in the population; a rhetorical device employed by all sectors of the political class to rally nationalist sentiment; and a brutish daily fact of Mexican life. The North American Free Trade Agreement and the drug war are examples of the latter.

The blood and chaos that accompany drug trafficking from Mexico into the United States are inextricably related to the simultaneous demand within the U.S. population for the classic illegal products one can use to get high or seek oblivion, and the insistence of U.S. politicians on an ideological commitment to prohibition that seeks to veil prohibition’s use for social control.

Social control? Might that be exaggerating, or conspiracy theorizing? Civil rights advocate and litigator Michelle Alexander recently published a study of the drug war’s impact on people of color, particularly African Americans, called
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
. She argues that slavery evolved through Reconstruction into a caste system based on racial discrimination that in turn evolved during the era of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond into the drug war politics of mass incarceration of people of color. “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it,” Alexander writes. Felony convictions, she reminds us, open the door for all manner of legal discrimination: denial of the right to vote, serve on a jury, or access public education benefits; subjection to employment and housing discrimination. “Quite belatedly,” Alexander writes, “I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control that functions in a manner similar to Jim Crow.” That emergence came through the drug war.

President Ronald Reagan declared his War on Drugs in February 1982, a time when drug use in the United States was in decline, prisons seemed to be on their way out, Miami was awash in cocaine money and blood, and Central America was in the throes of left-wing revolutions. The drug war would radically alter all of that. Between 1980 and 2005, the number of people in U.S. prisons and jails on drug charges increased by 1,100 percent. By 2010 there were 2 million people in prisons and jails across the country. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation in the world. In 2009, Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project wrote, “The number of people incarcerated for a drug offense is now greater than the number incarcerated for
all
[other]offenses in 1980.” And how is this a racialized form of social control? Again, according to the Sentencing Project, African Americans alone make up 14 percent of regular drug users and 56 percent of persons in state prison for drug offenses; African Americans serve almost as much time in federal prison for drug offenses (58.7 months) as whites do for violent offenses (61.7 months). More African Americans are behind bars now than were enslaved in 1850. In addition to racial profiling on the street, for twenty years possession of five grams of crack carried a mandatory five-year prison sentence; there was a 100:1 crack-to-powder-cocaine sentencing disparity, meaning that it took possession of 100 grams of white powder cocaine to require the same mandatory minimum sentence as possession of one gram of crack. (This law was revised on August 3, 2010, to require possession of 28 grams of crack to trigger the mandatory five-year sentence.)

The use of prohibition for racialized social control is the genesis of the modern drug-prohibition era. The first drug-prohibition law ever passed was an 1875 city ordinance in San Francisco banning opium, and with it, criminalizing working-class Chinese immigrants and attacking their local economy. The law came after more than two decades of discriminatory laws passed in California against Chinese workers, and six years before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The drug war has its deepest roots in racism.

In 1900, people in the United States could purchase opium, morphine, heroin, marijuana, and cocaine over the counter at drugstores or direct from producers through mail-order catalogues. Within twenty years that would change. Even though upper-class whites consumed opiates, cocaine, and marijuana, the prohibitionist fervor linked each drug with working-class people of color: opiates with Chinese, cocaine with African Americans, and marijuana with Mexicans. Historian Richard Davenport-Hines writes in
The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics
, “The fantasy of cocainised blacks from plantations and construction sites going on sexual rampages among white women soon raised a racist panic. A writer in the
Medical Record
, for example, warned that ‘hitherto inoffensive, law-abiding negroes’ were transformed by cocaine into a ‘constant menace’ whose ‘sexual desires are increased and perverted.’”