Drug War Capitalism (21 page)

It is widely known that rank-and-file police officers take state paychecks while working for criminal groups in cities and towns throughout Mexico’s northeast.[37] Meanwhile, deserters of the Mexican special forces (GAFEs) formed the most feared paramilitary group in Mexico, Los Zetas.[38] Though they were among the last units to receive such instruction, units of GAFEs also received group training in the United States between 1996 and 1998.[39] Members of the Kaibiles, Guatemala’s elite special forces, also US-trained, have turned up among Los Zetas, some while listed as active service members. [40] Many drug traffickers identified by the United States and Mexico are retired soldiers or police officers, some of whom have benefited from international training.

The binary between state and criminal forces is further undermined by the US connection to the drug business. The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) let 2,000 high-caliber weapons “walk” out of US gun shops in the hands of known cartel members and killers, supposedly to gain information in order to make arrests, but instead these same weapons turned up at crime scenes where over 150 civilians were injured or killed.[41] In Mexico and elsewhere, the DEA and the CIA facilitate the movement of narcotics among clandestine groups on the premise of eventually netting high-profile arrests. For example, in 2011, a son of one of the top-ranking members of the Sinaloa Cartel testified in US court that prior to 2004, the US government entered into an agreement with the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel. “Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel, through [Mexican attorney with Sinaloa Cartel links Humberto Loya Castro], was to provide information accumulated by Mayo, Chapo, and others against rival Mexican drug trafficking organizations to the United States government. In return, the United States government agreed to dismiss the prosecution of the pending case against Loya, to not interfere with his drug trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel, to not actively prosecute him, Chapo, Mayo, and the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, and to not apprehend them.[42]” Government deal-making with segments of drug traffickers illustrates how the drug war is also used to attack a segment of traffickers and the political class, while others are given a free hand in ensuring their product makes it to market.

Ciudad Juárez is a devastating example of what can happen when thousands of police and soldiers are sent into an urban environment to fight the “drug war.” The backdrop to the violence in Juárez, as in other violent border cities, is the manufacturing industry. According to one report, “The municipalities with the highest inequalities among the [northern] border states of the center and east of the Mexican Republic are those with the most developed maquila sector, that receive the highest flows of migrants and also contain important reserves of hydrocarbons or other natural resources.”[43] In late March 2008, thousands of soldiers and federal police officers arrived in Juárez as part of a state surge against drug traffickers. Shortly after, the murder rate skyrocketed, violence increased, and kidnappings spiked. “What we’ve seen here in [Ciudad Juárez] is that the city was militarized on the last day of March of 2008, when federal forces arrived here, thousands of troops from the army and the federal police,” Carlos Yeffim Fong, an activist and student, told me in an interview in late 2011.
^[44]
At the peak of the militarization of Juárez, between 2009 and 2010, at least 5,000 federal police and 5,000 soldiers were in the city (one source in Juarez puts the combined number at 13,000).[45]

“Generally, before the soldiers came, there was an average of two murders a day, and when the soldiers arrived, that number began to rise, to five, and later to ten,” recounted Fong, running a hand over his beard when he paused to reflect. “We’ve seen various cases where the army and federal police killed minors, as well as police and soldiers directly involved in robbery.”

Over time I would run into Fong again and again, interviewing him a second time in a house being squatted by local anti-poverty activists near the city’s downtown. Hyperaware of his surroundings, he moves carefully, watching the oncoming traffic and ensuring someone knows where he is at all times. These security measures are a minimum precaution when one is as publicly outspoken as he in a place like Ciudad Juárez. Locals also link Federales to kidnapping, which provides relatively low-risk access to cash through extortion. “When the wave of kidnappings grew, it was because of the arrival of the federal police,” said Leobardo Alvarado, who runs the alternative news outlet
JuárezDialoga
. Just two months before our interview in Juárez, ten Federales deployed there were imprisoned for extorting and kidnapping civilians.[46] In early 2014, eighteen soldiers were charged and imprisoned for their role in a 2008 torture and murder during the Operacion Conjunto Chihuahua, in a rare case of investigation and persecution of soldiers for their crimes.[47]

In the ten years before the region was militarized, the state averaged 586 homicides a year, and never went above 648. Between 2008 and 2013, Chihuahua became one of the most violent states in Mexico. There were 2,601 homicides in the state in 2008; 3,671 in 2009; 6,407 in 2010; and 4,500 in 2011, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
^[48]
More than 10,000 people were murdered in Juárez following the troop surge between 2008 and early 2012. Officials often assert that the dead were involved in the drug trade, but murders are rarely investigated. “Yes, there have been standoffs of hitmen versus hitmen, as they say, or hitmen against soldiers who stopped them and detained them and they opened fire, but there’s very few events like that. Most of the killings are between people.… Well, the people who died were unarmed,” said Dr. Hector Padilla, a professor at the UACJ, with a dry chuckle. When I met Padilla, a father of two who splits his life between Juárez and El Paso, he was hard at work on a research project to qualitatively and quantitatively understand the violence in the city. “The majority [of the victims] are people who were in transit, or who were working, or in their homes and someone arrives and pluck,” he said, making a gun with his fingers and pulling the trigger.

It’s extremely difficult to understand the events in Juárez since the beginning of the drug war. One evening in 2011, while we drove through the deserted streets of the city, Alvarado offered his version. He described extreme violence in Juárez taking place in waves, which are discernible from media coverage of the killings. In 2007 and early 2008, a wave of assassinations targeted lawyers, owners of currency exchanges, and other middle-class residents. In January 2008, a wave of killings against police officers—particularly those in middle management with historical links to the drug trade—took place. “Then, in May 2008, what for me is the biggest episode of social cleansing started. They started killing many people from the lower classes. These folks were characterized as being inside the system of gangs, they lived in peripheral neighborhoods and in areas that have been conflictive historically in the city. It was incredible how they killed people then, in a massive and systematic manner. When we look at the statistics, we can see with clarity that at first the victims were over twenty-five years old, then, as time passed, the killings were against young men, in particular those who were under twenty-five, sometimes even younger than fifteen years old.” Alvarado, who has lived in Juárez since his teens, explained that gang membership grew in the city toward the end of the 1990s, and clarified that not all gangs are involved in the local drug market, though part of the gang system is dedicated to small-time trafficking. He says another wave of killings targeted kidnappers and extortionists who were working outside of organized crime groups—non-unionized criminals, he calls them—people who take advantage of the overall climate of insecurity and try their hand at kidnapping or extortion. “Because they were not inside the structures of organized crime as it’s called, these people were easy targets for this social cleansing, which served to nourish the discourse that something was being done.” Alvarado’s explanation, based on careful study of newspapers and dozens of formal and informal sources in the city, is but one approximation of what has taken place in Juárez over the past years. But it is an explanation that captures the crux of what took place in the beleaguered border city after it became ground zero for the drug war in 2008: the extrajudicial elimination of particular criminal, police, and popular sectors tragically expanded, transforming into massive social cleansing against poor young people in marginalized communities. The perpetrators were often police and soldiers, the killings serving as proof that, as Alvarado said, something was being done to combat crime.

Over the same time period, the level of police involvement in the drug trade in Juárez is believed to have deepened. “There’s always been a really close line, or, well, they’re the same,” said journalist Julián Cardona, who has lived in Juárez for over thirty years. “The police and the entire state apparatus, all of the institutions of the state, have always been the guarantors of the drug trade.” As drug markets inside Mexico grew following an increasingly closed US border after 9/11, according to Cardona, police began to sell drugs themselves, to execute people, and even to move bodies in patrol cars, all of which meant they earned more money. Instead of wiping out these occurrences, the militarization of the city seems to have exacerbated them. “What happens is that when the Federales arrive in Juárez, and the army, they basically displace local state or municipal police from their markets,” Cardona told me in 2011. Tall and thin as a rail, Cardona has worked as a fixer for some of the most high-profile journalists visiting Juárez. When we met in the Starbucks on the Panamerican highway (which he, half jokingly, calls his office) it was just to talk, but he later insisted on taking me to see the city’s highlights, including a nearly empty “narco bar” where he reminisced about what it was like in the city when there was ample money being spent. Another day, he took me to a historic downtown district once home to table dancing clubs, now half torn down. He was obviously nostalgic for old times, but deeply affected by the violence in the city. The last time I met with Cardona, in late 2013, he joked that now that police and soldiers had left the city, violence had dropped off and there was no longer much work for him there.

None of the reports of police and army involvement in criminal activity are particularly surprising, but what
is
astounding is that the majority of media reports and so-called expert commentary on the violence in Juárez and elsewhere didn’t link the increased number of police and soldiers and the spike in violence. Take the work of Steven Dudley—who works for US-funded think tank InSight Crime, and moonlights for the Woodrow Wilson Center—for example: In early 2013, he wrote, “Last year was the least violent 12-month stretch since 2007, with the state government registering 740 murders. Homicide levels are a fifth of what they were at the beginning of 2011. Naturally, some analysts and authorities have focused on the criminal groups to explain why homicides have dropped so quickly.”[49] This report ignores the link between the surge of police and army and the spike in killings in Juárez, and that when police and soldiers were withdrawn from Juárez and sent to other parts of the country, violence in Juárez dropped.

What Dudley missed is deadly obvious to Juárez residents. I’ll always remember how, when I asked Cardona who I should interview about the role of police in the murders and the violence in the city, without giving it a moment’s thought, he told me to ask anyone, anyone I met on the street. Over repeated visits to Juárez I took his advice, and he was bang on. His suggestion is confirmed by the statistics: a 2010 study carried out by UACJ found an average of one in four residents of Juárez were direct victims of police violence.[50] Your blinders must be security fastened in order to miss the connection between the mass deployment of police and soldiers in order to fight against internal enemies and systematic murders among poor and marginalized populations.

South of the Mexico-US border in Guerrero state, a similar pattern with regards to the arrival of federal troops and an increased use of violence emerged. In 2012 and 2013, the resort town (and port) of Acapulco played host to a federal police and army surge on the pretext of fighting organized crime. In 2012, Acapulco replaced Juárez as Mexico’s most dangerous city, with 1,170 homicides, or a rate of 142.88 killings per 100,000 people.
^[51]
An October 2013 case saw eighteen arrests of members of a kidnapping ring, thirteen of them federal police.[52] A government spokesperson told the media that the group of criminals and police had carried out seven murders and four kidnappings.

Prisons

The US rule of law program in Mexico falls in lockstep with counterinsurgency efforts, and it is clear that changes to the Mexican legal system are tied to the Mérida Initiative’s funded expansion of the Mexican prison system. Remember, the United States has already “expanded secure incarceration at the federal level from five facilities with a capacity of 3,500 to fourteen facilities with a capacity of 20,000.”[53] The statistics show that a move toward a US system is a transition to a model that incarcerates more and more people. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, incarceration rates in Mexico have been climbing—from 186 per 100,000 in 2004; to 197 in 2010; to 209 per 100,000 in January 2013.[54] Compare this to the United States, which incarcerated an estimated 716 people per 100,000 in 2011—by far the highest rate in the world.[55]

The war on drugs has been part of the impetus for the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs program to provide prison training for foreign prison guards. Mexicans, Afghans, and others traveled to a women’s prison, which was converted into the International Correctional Management Training Center, in Cañon City, Colorado.[56] “The threats are different; the cultures are different,” training coordinator Bill Claspell told the
Denver Post
, which reported that “the strategies for neutralizing a cartel kingpin, a white-supremacist recruiter or a Taliban jihadist are the same: isolation.”[57] According to a 2010 report on Colorado’s training of Mexican prison guards, the exercises took place in a secret location, and the focus of the visit was on transporting high-risk prisoners from one jail to another: “Much of what they learn is about strategy. Ambushes most often happen because of breaches in intelligence. Drug lords pay underpaid federal agents to get information about when transports happen. In response, the Colorado authorities taught Mexican agents to limit how many prison officials know when transports happen, showed them how to use decoys and explained how to change when the transports happen. It makes sense sometimes to do them in the middle of the night.”[58]