Drug War Capitalism (19 page)

In addition to organized crime, large corporations and public officials also participate in money laundering in Mexico and elsewhere.[106] A key aspect to any corruption scandal, where public officials steal money from government accounts, is money laundering or offshore bank accounts,[107] which corporations like Walmart have been accused of taking part in.[108] Narcotrafficking organizations are suspected of bankrolling candidates via campaign financing (in Mexico, the US, and elsewhere).[109] In addition, it has even been documented that large establishment media organizations like Mexico’s Televisa have been involved in international organized criminal activity.[110]

Mexico is an important player in the world economy, and if the analysts’ predictions are correct, it will have an even more important role as manufacturing continues to shift from China. A small transnational elite in Mexico, led by Carlos Slim, stands to make good off financial and other reforms, as do other important sectors, including the oil and mining industries, among others. The stakes are high, and the reforms brought in alongside the drug war are intended to reinforce and empower transnational capitalism in an increasingly stratified and unequal society.

Chapter 5:
Plan Mexico And Militarization

On February 23, 2012, forensic authorities delivered the remains of Jessica Leticia Peña García to her mother. Her bones were bleached and dried. She’d been murdered three years before and her body left under the desert sun in the Valle de Juárez, east of Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua state. Coming up on what would have been the Jessica’s eighteenth birthday, February 5, 2013, her mother, Maria García, asked Justice for Our Daughters (Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas), an organization led by mothers of missing and murdered women, to help her get permission to lay a wreath in the place where her daughter’s body was found.

Norma Ledezma, founder of the group, submitted an official request in writing for access the site. “Our request was strongly questioned.… First they said yes, then no, and they made a bunch of excuses,” she said, in an interview in her office in Chihuahua City. Ledezma kept the pressure on, something she had become an expert at since her daughter Paloma disappeared in March 2002. When Paloma’s body was found, sixteen days after her disappearance, Ledezma swore on her daughter’s remains that she would dedicate her life to finding her murderer. At the time, she admits, she thought it would be a matter of a few months. “Eleven years have passed this month, and I still don’t know who killed Paloma,” she told me. Eventually, Ledezma went all the way up the ladder to the state’s top official, insisting that a grieving mother have the right to lay flowers and a cross where the killers dumped her daughter’s body, and finally she got consent. On February 4, the day before Jessica’s birthday, a convoy including García, Ledezma, and other families of disappeared and murdered women, together with police officers, psychologists, archaeologists, and officials, pulled out of Ciudad Juárez toward the Valle de Juárez to visit the exact site where Jessica’s bones were found.

The cars pulled off to the side of the dusty desert road connecting Juárez with the valley. “They told us that to get to this creek, Arroyo el Navajo, we would have to leave the vehicles behind, and walk between four and five kilometers,” Ledezma told me. As the delegation walked, the mothers speculated about how the dead women found in Arroyo el Navajo were brought here by their killers: by donkey, helicopter, or four-wheeler. After laying flowers and crosses with Jessica’s name on it, the team started back to the vehicles. At one point, not far from where women’s bodies were found, Ledezma refused to continue. “They tried to confuse us, they walked us up and down, but when we arrived at the spot where the bodies were I realized that although they had us all turned around, there was a path.”

Ledezma’s instinct turned out to be correct: there was a direct pathway to the highway less than ten minutes walk from where Jessica’s body was found. “I said to them all, I’m not moving from this spot. I’m not walking back to the cars, I’m not moving until they figure out where this path leads to,” she recalls. Finally, the officials and experts accompanying the group agreed to take the women out to the highway on the shorter path. As they walked along, single file, Ledezma noticed a human bone on the trail, in an area authorities claimed to have combed time and again. The bone Ledezma found would lead to a male skeleton and a female skeleton, both fully exposed, and with their bones showing signs of having been there for an extended period of time. “It was so intense, so intense for us mothers, I couldn’t move my head at all for days afterwards,” said Maria García, Jessica’s mother, who also saw the skeletons not far from where her own daughter’s remains were recovered.

Finally, the delegation followed the path out to a collection of houses on the highway. “The most, how can I say it, the most incredible thing was that the soldiers had a military checkpoint right there,” said Maria García. The checkpoint, which stopped every vehicle coming in and out of the area, was there from approximately 2008 to 2012, during the federal government’s military surge in the Juárez area. Over the same time period, the Juárez Valley became one of the most dangerous places in the country, with mass displacements and locals forced to seek asylum in the United States. “The Valle de Juárez is very large, and it is held by organized crime, but it is supervised by the army, the army supervises the entrances,” said Ledezma. The earlier walk had been an attempt to throw off the families; the authorities, archaeologists, investigators, and police were complicit in covering up the killers’ tracks. I met with Ledezma in 2013, just as Felipe Calderón began his tenure at Harvard University: “I was with him three times, and I personally told him,” she said, lowering her voice down to a near whisper, “The Federales took [our daughters], the soldiers took [our daughters].”

It was the arrival of federal police and soldiers in Ciudad Juárez and the surrounding region that caused murder rates to take off. Missing person posters, many featuring the faces of young girls, punctuate lampposts and public spaces throughout Juárez and Chihuahua City, the state capital. Juárez became synonymous with violence and tragedy during Felipe Calderón’s term. As what officials called drug-related violence dominated the headlines, more and more young women began to disappear. “Beginning in 2008, when president Felipe Calderón, with the consent of the governor and the mayor, decided to implement operation Conjunto Chihuahua, which is a military confrontation against drug cartels, the assassination of women increased, but above all the disappearances of young women [increased],” said Dr. Julia E. Monárrez Fragoso, a professor and researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Ciudad Juárez.

Indeed, the act of laying flowers on the tight dry earth where Jessica Leticia Peña García’s body was found is just one of the harrowing stories her mother Maria García shared with me when I visited her residence on the extreme edge of Ciudad Juárez. García, who lives in a single, uninsulated room in the corner of a cold, empty warehouse with her partner and son, shivered and cried as she told me how her life has come apart since her daughter was disappeared and murdered in 2011. The warehouse faces the highway, and from the garage-style door hangs a plastic banner with her daughter’s smiling face and a red rose in her memory. “I can’t take it down, it is what keeps me going,” she said. “I don’t want to admit to myself that she’s no longer here.” Jessica Leticia was a beautiful young woman, which I point out in an attempt to put Maria García at ease. “That’s what the police told me when I filed the report. They said, ‘No wonder she was kidnapped, she was very beautiful.’ Those were their words,” she said, with anger in her voice. Like other mothers, including those who make up Justice for Our Daughters, García took the search into her own hands, going from cantina to cantina, from corner to corner, with a photo of her daughter. She was eventually directed toward a hotel, where she saw two young women, who were being held hostage, pulled out of their hotel room by armed men. When she called the police, they ignored her complaint. “They thought I had gone crazy,” she tells me. The case of Jessica Leticia is far from an isolated incident involving a few bad apples, instead it is a manifestation of a form of structural violence that put Ciudad Juárez on the map, with a wave of women murdered in 1993. A word for the killings of women because of their gender was created:
feminicidio
in Spanish, or femicide, and eventually it was adopted by lawyers and activists around the world to describe the murders of young women for the simple reason that they were young women.

In the course of every work day, Itzel González scans local newspapers, looking for mention of violent attacks on women. More often than not, she turns to the whiteboard behind her desk and updates the previous day’s total of women murdered in Juárez, the largest city in Chihuahua. Her makeshift tally is one of the few adornments in the understated, second-floor office of the Women’s Coordinating Network (RMM), near the city’s downtown. Gonzales is the coordinator of the RMM, a coalition of groups that work, among other things, on behalf of the rights of women in what has long been considered Mexico’s most violent city.

“In the last few years the official discourse is that femicide has been eradicated, that it is a thing of the past and that it doesn’t happen anymore,” she said. In 2011, 196 women were killed in the city of approximately 1.3 million. “The situation continues to be very serious.… the problem has worsened.… Another one of the discourses or things that the state attorney’s office here says is that the majority of, or a high percentage of, these women are being assassinated because they are part of organized crime. But the reality is that these crimes are not being investigated; 98 percent of these crimes don’t even have an investigation file.” Between 1993 and the end of 2011, 1,344 women were murdered in Juárez. A whopping 844—63 percent—of those murders took place after 2008, the year police and soldiers arrived to fight the war on drugs. The stories of the women whose daughters were taken from them are among the most heartbreaking I heard during my research, but to focus solely on the fate of these young women without talking about what has happened to men is to paint an incomplete portrait of violence along this small stretch of the Texas-Mexico border. Over the past decade, for every woman killed in Juárez, nine men were murdered. Molly Molloy, a librarian at New Mexico State University who keeps tabs on murders in Juárez, notes that “female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women.”[1] Queer and transpeople in Chihuahua and throughout Mexico have also been murdered based on their gender and sexual preference.

It is difficult to make sense of the violence in Mexico, and it’s hard to know if Jessica Leticia’s killer(s) were after anything beyond cheap thrills. Their actions and the impunity granted them, however, goes beyond an isolated act and reinforces an overall climate of rampant sexism, racism, and classism. The actions of those responsible for Jessica’s murder have impacts that permeate society as a whole, and were carried out in part because impunity is the rule, not the exception, in Mexico. When I asked Norma Ledezma how she defined impunity, she went much farther than to finger the state for complicity. “Impunity has been like an invitation from the authorities to the criminals,” she said. They tell them: ‘
Es la tierra de no pasa nada
,’ this is the land where nothing happens
.”
After our interview she left with her bodyguard, who protects her throughout her busy workday.

The state’s initial response to the femicides upheld what geographer Melissa Wright interprets as a gendered version of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, by which the threat of violent death is used a governance tactic. She writes that the governor of Chihuahua “assured Mexican families that there was nothing to fear as long as they knew where their female family members were. The discourse of the public woman normalized the violence and used the victims’ bodies as a way to substantiate the politics based on patriarchal notions of normality. Normal Mexican families, with normal, private women safely at home, had nothing to worry about.”[2] This discourse criminalizes the victims of femicide, many of whom were working women without access to safe, accessible transportation to and from their workplaces. It is as though they are responsible for their own deaths. Similar discourses are at work in areas of Mexico that are impacted by the drug war, where one is made to understand from media and government reports that victims of violence linked to the war are blamed for their own demise.

“Juárez and a good part of Chihuahua are—and this should be made known nationally and internationally—truly in a situation of humanitarian emergency. The almost 4,000 assassinations that have occurred in the state in the last two years would be worthy of international attention in any other country, except this one, where the government continues to play dumb, thinking that they’re winning a ‘war’ that increasingly has the characteristics of social cleansing,” wrote Mexican activist and columnist Victor Quintana in late 2009.[3] Waves of killings of youth, small-time drug dealers, street-involved people, and the poor aren’t just happening in Juárez. According to Gustavo de la Rosa, the former Chihuahua state human rights officer, “The majority of those killed … are
malandros
… people of no value in this war … no use to any cartel … people below poverty whose death has no explanation except as part of … social cleansing … the extermination of the lowest of the low. There are execution squads, another breed forensically killing
malandros
, planned assassinations of the unwanted. And if we look at exactly how they are done, they are experts in killing characteristic of training by the army or police.”[4] One crucial difference in Juárez is that there are functioning activist groups and organizations that rally together to denounce and document what is taking place because of militarization, and a culture of journalism that has led writers take greater risks to report the news than they do elsewhere. Jessica Leticia’s kidnapping in Ciudad Juárez in 2011 and the subsequent events that would test her mother’s faith in Mexico’s authorities are recounted here in order to provide a sliver of context for how—and why—Juárez residents have more reason to fear state security forces than to seek shelter from them. Writer Charles Bowden declared Juárez a “laboratory of the future.” The city is without a doubt Mexico’s most well documented test case for what takes place when federal police and soldiers are sent
en masse
to patrol the streets in the name of fighting organized crime.