Drug War Capitalism (28 page)

In 2013, leaders of a self-defense group in San Miguel de Aquila, Michoacán, told Mexico City–based alternative news website
SubVersiones
: “They are exploiting our natural resources, primarily iron. The day that the state government arrived, we told them the community’s mine was being exploited by organized crime. The government, instead of going after them, actually protected them and even more people came to work at the mine. We no longer believe in the state government, that’s why we want the federal government to intervene and give guarantees for our families, for the natural resources in our community.… We have so many natural resources in San Miguel de Aquila; we are very rich in resources but at the same time we are among the poorest, because transnationals are those who take advantage of the resources of the community.”[41]

In 2014, the group wrote another communiqué, which stated: “The period of July 24 to August 13, 2013—when the indigenous community guard from the community of San Miguel Aquila was active in the area—was one of immense calm. The rapes, kidnappings and payments of protection fees disappeared as the criminals fled. Seeing the results of the community movement, we were inspired to support the community’s cause. However, on August 14, a joint state and municipal government operation, together with the Marines, entered Aquila and dismantled the community movement. They took forty-five prisoners. The Special Operations Group (GOES) and State Judicial Police killed two and also beat women, children, and the elderly who called for them to return the men who were defending them from organized crime. When the community guard was dismantled, the Knights Templar, under the auspices of the state and municipal governments, decided to ‘exterminate’ all the residents of San Miguel Aquila.”[42] Following the state incursion, three men from the community were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered; another three were disappeared; and the Knights Templar again began to exert control over iron ore extraction, extorting the community for the royalty payments they received from the company Ternium, a Luxembourg-based transnational steel company.

Displacement and Real Estate

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, “Evidence of forced displacement in the localities of El Porvenir and Práxedis G. Guerrero in Valle de Juárez is unquestionable: virtually all houses are empty, burned out, and vandalized.”[43] But exact figures are difficult to come by: “In the small towns of Guadalupe, Praxedis G. Guerrero, Porvenir, Esperanza and the even smaller hamlets that dot the valley, there’s been no official census in recent years, so no one knows exactly how many people have left, or how many residents have been killed or forcibly disappeared,” wrote journalist Melissa del Bosque.[44] She was sure to point out that the violence and displacement did not fall neatly at the feet of drug cartels. “The official story is that the army was sent in to protect residents and drive out the cartels, but townspeople tell a different story. They say the soldiers, working in league with the Sinaloa cartel, perpetrated much of the violence.”

Just as paramilitary displacements in Colombia depopulated lands which were later used for palm oil and extractive projects, the displacement of thousands of residents in the Juárez Valley has not transformed the region into a land of ghost towns, cemeteries, and cartel free-for-alls. On the contrary, the Juárez Valley area is currently slated for redevelopment, and plans include the construction of a $400 million housing and industrial park project in San Agustín, which is about thirty kilometers from downtown Ciudad Juárez. The housing project, which will cover 2,470 acres of ejidal land in San Agustín, is being developed by Fortune 500 corporation Prudential Financial, together with one of its local partners in Mexico.[45] “It is a complete, ambitious project, almost like a new city,” Leopoldo Canizales, a city official in San Agustín, told
El Diario
.[46] The housing project will be built just over ten kilometers from a new border bridge between Tornillo, Texas, and Guadalupe, also in the Juárez Valley.[47] The San Agustín development is being erected in anticipation of a boom in the maquila industries, as massive expansions in Mexico’s manufacturing sector will be necessary should analysts’ predictions about the sector come true. “[Mexico] has the enormous advantage of bordering the U.S., which means that goods can reach much of the country in a day or two, as opposed to at least 21 days by ship from China.… In addition, by 2015, wages in Mexico will be significantly lower than in China.”[48] More maquilas are certainly not something all of those who reside in the area are keen on: “It is exactly because of the maquila industry that things are how they are; what the maquilas have left is nothing but criminality; they obliged parents to leave their children home alone,” said San Agustín resident Ignacio Ibarra.[49] “Right now things are calm here but if they bring maquilas and all the new housing, well, then we’ll see what the good life was.”

Acapulco is another city that has suffered through the worst of what the drug war has to offer. “The resort town has also become a major theater of the drug war: On a single weekend this year, more than 30 bodies were found, including night-club workers abducted after hours and later found hanging from a bridge.”[50] Fourteen tourists were tied up and threatened in a single incident in 2012, and later, six of the women (who were Spanish citizens, hence the fact that it became a national scandal) were raped. Following the rapes, the mayor of Acapulco said that what took place was bad for Acapulco’s image but that “this could have happened anywhere, in Mexico or in Acapulco.”[51] Tourism to Acapulco, a resort city nestled between cliffs, white sand beaches, and the crashing waves of the Pacific, dropped off 50 percent between 2006 and 2011.[52] The spike in violence has, just like Juárez, taken place in tandem with the deployment of state forces as part of Operacion Guerrero Seguro. In Acapulco, “Components [of Guerrero Seguro] include new lighting along Costera Miguel Alemán, the placement of more than 600 surveillance cameras in the tourist areas and the deployment of federal security forces to oversee nighttime law enforcement.”[53]

Far from scaring away investors, the height of the violence in Acapulco inspired magnate Carlos Slim, who has repeatedly been named the world’s richest man, to bring together some of Mexico’s richest and most powerful in a consortium for the economic revival of the city. While thousands of families suffered through devastating losses of friends and loved ones and were forced to live in an increasingly cruel context of kidnappings, tortures, and massacres, Slim stayed focused on investing. “Those who do not invest and go slow because they have doubts will be left behind. I am not afraid of investing here in Acapulco,” he said in 2012.[54] Slim has invested heavily in Acapulco real estate, and now owns a hotel and other properties in the resort city. Violence against the poor in Acapulco, one of the most unequal cities in Mexico, has provided investors like Slim a clean slate for kick-starting a new development plan.

Farmers and ranchers have also been displaced from rural areas in northern Mexico because of threats and violence. By the end of 2010, 5,000 farmers had been displaced in Tamaulipas state, according to a report prepared by Mexico’s intelligence agency (CISEN).[55] “Ranchers and farmers have been victims of kidnapping and extortion and all of that, and now many of them are asking me to sell their lands, and their ranches, but who can I sell them to?” said a real estate agent I interviewed in Tamaulipas state in 2011. “They’re kidnapping ranchers and farmers, so they don’t go to their ranges anymore; their ranches are abandoned.”

“They forced me out of my truck near Loma Prieta, a ranch I have near Jiménez [a city close to the capital of Tamaulipas],” a farmer told Mexican newspaper
Milenio
.[56] “There were a handful of kids, no more than twenty years old, armed with machine guns and with Central American accents.”
^[57]
After the threat against him, the farmer stopped going to his land. “I don’t know if I still have cattle, but the way things are, I’d rather lose them.” According to press reports, narco groups, especially Los Zetas, used the abandoned lands for training camps and bases.

Avocados and Limes at Gunpoint

In 2011, Mexico’s agri-food exports were valued at $22 billion, just slightly more than the country’s mining exports of $21.6 billion. The overlapping presence of armed actors in some of the country’s most productive agricultural regions has had severe consequences for the lives of farmers and has impacted the price of fruits and vegetables in Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere.

Attacks against and extortions of small and medium-sized farmers are taking place in areas that had previously undergone rapid changes to their agricultural sector as a result of neoliberal policies and changing market structures. Dr. Donna Chollett documented the transformation of the local economy in the Los Reyes region of Michoacán from one where sugar cane workers could earn a subsistence living because of state subsidies, to one where contract workers picked blackberries for luxury consumption in the United States. “The retraction of government assistance for
campesinos
, withdrawal of price supports, and reduction of import tariffs create markets in which small farmers are unable to compete, thus opening the door for transnational agribusiness.… Transnational blackberry agroindustries form a commodity chain that establishes hierarchies of power linked to broader initiatives of the WTO and NAFTA. As men are displaced from cane production, a segmented labor force that relies on unequal compensation divides workers by gender and separates capitalized growers from small-scale campesinos who lack the resources to compete in the new transnational order.”[58]

Avocados and limes are grown in the area Chollett describes, part of which is known as the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán. The state is Mexico’s number one producer of avocados and one of the most important producers of limes in the country. In fact, the very first drug trafficking group in Michoacán, Los Hermanos Valencia, had its roots in avocado farming.[59] Michoacán is also an area that, over the last decade, has been occupied by various armed groups, from the Mexican Army
^[60]
to La Familia Michoacana, which has morphed into what is known as the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar).

Michoacán has been a hotbed of political activity, including disputes between parties, Indigenous movements, student uprisings, and otherwise. Like Tamaulipas and other embattled Mexican states, it has also been an area where deep links between state governments and organized crime have contributed to the consolidation and dominance of criminal economies. Some of the most gruesome public acts of terror in Mexico since 2006 have taken place in the state: five human heads were tossed onto a dance floor at a bar in Uruapan in fall 2006; and grenades exploded at Independence Day celebrations in the capital of Morelia in September 2008, killing eight. Mexico City–based analyst Alejandro Hope notes that the family of Governor Leonel Godoy had “all kinds of links with people from La Familia, which later became Los Templarios. There is a taped phone call between [the governor’s] half-brother and La Tuta, the leader of the Templarios.… Where Julio Cesar Godoy, half-brother of the governor, calls La Tuta ‘Godfather’ and La Tuta tells him, ‘Don’t you worry, my son, you have already won, we already spoke with the boys, we told them.’” Godoy’s term ended in 2011, and new elections brought Fausto Vallejo to power in Michoacán. “He won, but he was very sick and he left his post temporarily right at the beginning of his mandate. He left the position to his secretary of government, equivalent of a secretary of the interior, and that individual has all kinds of links with the Templarios.” Hope says that historically, “What drug trafficking [in Michoacán] there was, and what organized crime there was, was strongly connected with the traditional PRI structure of control.” As an example, take the case of Tepalcatepec, where locals accused Mayor Guillermo Valencia of being the “big Templario.” Valencia, who denies the accusations, was elected to Congress as a member of the PRI in the embattled state ten years ago at the tender age of twenty-three, and then served as youth leader of the PRI, before being elected mayor.[61] Where they exist, these high-level links ensure impunity for criminal groups, whose actions do not threaten the state government so much as contribute to the rearrangement of land ownership and the economy, at a high price for small farmers and common folk.

A report on the alternative Mexican news website
Sin Embargo
reveals that, as of November 2013, the Caballeros were charging small avocado growers 3,000 pesos per hectare if they were exporting the fruit and 1,500 pesos if it was for the internal market. Humberto Padgett and Dalia Martínez, the journalists who reported the story, asked a group of small farmers how the crime group could know how much land each of them had planted. In an answer the journalists attribute to the whole group, the farmers respond: “Ahh, that’s easy! They know how much we have because they have direct access to the guides (permits) that the Local Council for Vegetable Sanitation gives, which depend on the Secretary of Agriculture, Ranching, Rural Development, Fishing and Alimentation (SAGARPA) and the State Committees of Vegetable Sanitation. The Council controls and physically inspects every meter of every hectare, every bush, every tree, and the quality of each fruit.”[62] Agricultural authorities are in the pocket of organized crime groups, who charge additional extortion fees from the growers. According to the reporters, “The incursion of organized crime in the avocado production chain has hit the small farmers who have less than 10 hectares especially hard, as well as those new to the business and who, faced with the excessive payments, have opted to abandon their lands and sell or rent them.” Indigenous and farming communities throughout Michoacán are up against organized crime groups that are increasingly taking control of the land. “First we found marijuana plantations, but the real use of the land was for planting avocados. They wanted to take over the territory. In a handful of nearby villages, in Zacapu, the same thing happened, the same thing happened there and where they’re cultivating used to be forest, and now it’s only avocados,” said Trinidad Ramírez, a member of the Council of Chéran.