sign and flowers from a recent march against violence
The following is a transcript of a documentary produced for FSRN which aired November 25, 2011. The audio is available for download here .
The so-called Drug War has drastically altered life in Mexico. More than 40,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive in December 2006 against the country’s powerful organized crime groups. Drug war-related violence has become increasingly brutal – and public. Criminals have branched into activities like extortion and kidnapping. The military has taken over civilian law enforcement in many parts of the country. At least a quarter million people have been displaced. The end result is a traumatic strain on Mexico’s social fabric.
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In today’s special documentary, FSRN’s Shannon Young brings us “Mexico’s Drug War in Context”. Stay tuned.
Militarized prohibition and its current effects on-the-ground in Mexico
Much of what is visible about the drug war to people outside of Mexico comes in the form of news reports about massacres, political scandals and military aid packages.
Deaths are measured in the tens of thousands, military spending in the hundreds of millions, and drug revenues are estimated in the tens of billions of dollars…but some of the most profound changes on the ground in Mexico have occurred in the details of day-to-day life.
Sanjuana Martinez is an investigative journalist based in Monterrey. The northern industrial city once associated with economic prosperity has become the center of a violent tug-of-war between various criminal organizations.
SANJUANA MARTINEZ (female VO):“People hardly go out anymore, the plazas are empty, nightlife has ended. Violence is generalized; mass murders, shootouts, massacres have become routine…people left hanging from bridges, beheaded, cut into pieces, femicide made invisible by the drug war. This is all part of a panorama of barbarity, of butchery which has created a change in the social fabric as well.”
While many parts of Mexico have experienced a spike in violence, overall the hardest hit areas are in the north along the border with Texas.
[REYNOSA SHOOTOUT AUDIO]
Shootouts, like this one in the manufacturing hub of Reynosa, can occur without warning and in broad daylight.
Another border city, Ciudad Juarez has become a so-called “world murder capital”. But when it comes to statistical murder rates, or documented homicides per 100,000 residents, the border area’s rural communities have been hardest hit. Such is the case with the Juarez Valley, an agricultural region east of of Ciudad Juarez.
One family’s experience in a small border town devastated by murder
One town in the valley, Guadalupe, has suffered more drug war homicides per capita, than anywhere else in Mexico, according to government data released in January.
Among the murder victims are 6 members of the Reyes Salazar family.
(Olga Reyes Salazar speaks – reporter interprets)
Olga Reyes Salazar says the border town was once a nice place which drew binational visitors. She recalls how people in Guadalupe and other nearby towns would host dances on the weekends in which residents from both sides of the border would get to know each other. She says it’s a way of life that’s now sorely missed.
Olga’s sister, Marisela Reyes Salazar says daily life changed dramatically with the militarization of the region.
MARISELA REYES SALAZAR (female VO): “The military would come to the towns and go into homes without any kind of warrant, groping and hitting people, even stealing groceries from small farmers and maquiladora workers who worked hard all week to provide for their families. That’s when people started to be afraid to go outside to the store, to visit the plaza, to go out for an ice cream or what have you. It started with the militarization of Ciudad Juarez and the Juarez Valley.”
Their sister, Josefina Reyes Salazar, became outspoken about alleged military abuses. In 2008, Josefina’s oldest son, Miguel Angel, was picked up by soldiers, accused of ties to criminals and later released.
Months later, another of Josefina’s sons – Julio Cesar – was assassinated at a wedding party attended by hundreds of townspeople. In January of 2010, Josefina herself was murdered, shortly after passing through a military checkpoint. Since then, three of Josefina’s siblings and a sister-in-law have been killed. The extended family has since fled the Juarez Valley.
A US Embassy cable on Josefina Reyes Salazar’s murder downplayed her activism and suggested the killing may have been related to her oldest son’s alleged ties to organized crime. Miguel Angel Reyes was detained a second time in 2009 and has yet to go to trial.
(Marisela Reyes Salazar speaks – reporter translates)
Marisela Reyes Salazar says the family has always been open to an investigation into the allegations. She says authorities have held her nephew for years without pressing formal charges.
MARISELA REYES SALAZAR (female VO):“We’ve always held our heads high and we are no longer willing to allow anyone to humiliate us, to kill us again. We’re going to struggle. We’re not willing to shed another drop of our blood.”
Historical context of the drug trafficking industry in Mexico
The industry based on the trafficking of illicit substances has been present along many parts of the US/Mexico border since the enactment of drug and alcohol prohibition nearly a century ago. But Mexico has never before experienced the current level of bloodshed related specifically to the control of a black market economy.
Sociologist and prominent organized crime researcher, Luis Astorga says the industry shifted when Mexico’s political system transitioned away from a one-party state.
(LuisAstorga speaks – reporter interprets)
While drug trafficking emerged in Mexico at the start of the 20th century, the groups involved were subordinate to state power. Astorga says this subordinate role began to change along with Mexico’s political system and that the dissolution of the one-party state’s centralized policing institution in the mid 1980s not only altered the government’s ability to contain the political opposition, but also to contain and control the strongest criminal organizations.
Astorga says the one-party system hegemony at the federal, state, and local levels gave it the leverage and control necessary to act as a de-facto referee among criminal groups, but the rise of other political forces changed the rules.
Like merchants and traders centuries ago, cartels have used a strategic corridor which runs through Ciudad Juarez. It’s located at a point to either avoid or enter the Rocky Mountains and is mid-way between the Pacific and Gulf coasts.
(Julian Contreras speaks – reporter interprets)
Long-time resident Julian Contreras says violence associated with the drug trade in Ciudad Juarez used to be contained to those who had a stake in it, but that murders targeting civilians increased in 2007. Contreras says this made residents desperate for order. The government response was to send thousands of soldiers…after which, the murder rate spiked.
During a visit to Washington DC earlier this year, President Felipe Calderon told an audience that some sectors within Mexican politics disagreed with a frontal attack against organized crime groups and urged him to continue with the tacit tolerance of the past.
FELIPE CALDERON: “My perception is that that is not possible, or at least is not possible anymore with the new business of the criminals because either you allow them to do anything they want in your whole territory – so the best you can do is to give them the key of your house – or you combat them directly and with the full force of the state. There is no other option.”
US MILITARY AID, MERIDA INITIATIVE, AND ILLEGAL FIREARMS TRAFFICKING
Receptions in Washington have been warm for Calderon. US officials, including President Barack Obama, have recognized that bilateral cooperation between the US and Mexican governments is far closer now than what IT had been under the conservative nationalist PRI party which ruled Mexico for more than 70 years.
BARACK OBAMA: I have nothing but admiration for President Calderon in his willingness to take this on. The easy thing to do would be for him to ignore the corrosive, corrupting influence of these drug cartels within Mexico. That would be the easy thing to do. He’s taking the hard path and he’s shown great courage and great risk in doing so and the United States will support him in any ways that we can to help him achieve his goals because his goals are our goals as well and they should be the goals of the Mexican people.
Past US interventions in Mexico have made the Mexican public wary of close military ties between the two countries. But the militarization of the drug war and a 1.6 billion dollar military aid and training package known as the Merida Initiative has given the US government unprecedented access to Mexico’s armed forces and intelligence apparatus. The Merida Initiative was originally announced in 2007 as a 3 year program but there’s no clear end in sight.
Mexico City-based political analyst Laura Carlsen has been tracking Merida spending.
LAURA CARLSEN:“Most of it is going to private contractors. Now, there we have a real problem to track it because public information is scarce on this. But with the amount of outsourcing that we know that the State Dept and the Defense Dept does and some of the contracts that we’ve been able to see, we know that a lot of this money is going to contractors – and the military equipment, of course. That’s easier to track. So, they’re a huge lobbying force within Congress to say ‘Let’s ramp up the drug war in Mexico; this is good business’. And that’s exactly what’s happening.”
The Merida Initiative is often compared to Plan Colombia and the two US-funded drug war programs are beginning to merge with US-trained Colombian special forces training their Mexican counterparts, a measure outlined by Congress member Connie Mack and Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield in a recent congressional hearing.
CONNIE MACK: A lot of people say ‘Why don’t we put our military down there?’. You and I know what the sovereignty issues…uh, the gringo can’t go down there. But I think the Colombian special forces can assimilate better from a cultural standpoint and it was an intriguing idea that we heard on that trip that we thought could provide some assistance.
WILLIAM BROWNFIELD: Mr. Chairman, I not only think it’s an intriguing idea, I think it is an excellent idea. It would probably not surprise you to learn that I am a great fan and admirer of what the Colombian people and their government and their institutions have accomplished over the last 11 or 12 years. I think they are now quite capable of exporting some of those capabilities through training and support elsewhere in the region.
But US-funded military aid hasn’t been the only source of firepower to flow into Mexico in recent years. Many weapons found at crimes scenes in Mexico have been traced back to Texas, where thousands of licensed firearms dealers do business…and where weapons can be purchased without background checks at regularly-held gun shows.
[GUN SHOW AMBIENT TONE]
At a gun show in Houston, firearms instructor Gary Burris explains the process for purchasing an AR-15 on display.
SY:This says right here private sale. What does that mean?
GB:Private sale means that an individual owns this gun and he’s selling it privately, meaning that there’s no tax, that there’s no paperwork involved. So, for instance, you can come and buy this gun and walk out the door with it.
SY:What’s the difference between having to do paperwork and ‘no paperwork’?
GB: To submit the paperwork to the ATF.In other words, you don’t have to show identification to prove you’re whatever. This is actually the gun show loophole that they’ve been talking about for a long time. Good, bad or indifferent, that’s a possibility that a bad guy could get it that way.
In addition to purchases made through the gun show loophole, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms knowingly allowed thousands of guns to cross into Mexico under operations “Fast and Furious” and “Wide Receiver”.
Victims push back against stigmatization and organize a movement
The concrete results of allowing weapons to flow from the US into Mexico are difficult, if not impossible, to measure. But other patterns are recognizable. Magazine reporter Marcela Turati, who grew up in the northern state of Chihuahua, began to notice changes in social behaviors in response to the violence.
MARCELA TURATI (female VO):“First, there’s a phenomenon that’s visible in many cities and that’s fear. People will spontaneously start building ever higher walls around their neighborhoods because they feel unprotected. People will stop using public spaces, stop greeting their neighbors. Whereas a funeral used to draw a crowd, people will stay away out of fear that the person murdered was up to something and the killers may show up at the funeral parlor and kill those who have come to pay their respects. The first thing lost in an area is the community bond.”
The fear of attending funerals was fueled by the perception, supported by official statements, that the vast majority of those killed were involved in criminal activities.
This perception began to shift in the wake of the January 2010 Villas del Salvarcar massacre in which 15 people, mostly high school students, were gunned down at a neighborhood birthday party in Ciudad Juarez. President Calderon, who was visiting Japan at the time, told the international media the victims were gang members. Although he later retracted his statement, residents were infuriated.
[Luz Maria Davila confronts Calderon]
During an official event, Luz Maria Davila, who lost her both of her children in the massacre confronted Calderon before the lens of the national news media. It was the first time relatives of stigmatized murder victims seeking to clear the names of their loved ones received widespread media attention.
Another important shift in public perception of drug war victims came in March of 2011 after the massacre of seven young men in Cuernavaca. One of them was the son of recognized poet Javier Sicilia. Within a week, Sicilia was helping to lead a nationwide protest movement that criticized both cartel violence and the government’s militarized strategy.
[public reading of the 'Estamos Hasta la Madre' open letter]
The movement provided a space in which those who had lost loved ones were able to come forward and tell their stories without stigma.
Disappearances, displacements, opportunistic crime, and impunity
Marches and other public events also brought attention to what had been a less visible crime; the disappearance of thousands of people across the country. Angel Bautista, whose brother Sergio disappeared in 2008, described the search process.
ANGEL BAUTISTA (male VO): “It started out with putting up posters, going to the morgues trying to find a trace of my brother. Then we filed a police report and we’ve received zero results. When mass graves were discovered, we gave DNA samples to see if there was a possibility that my brother was in one of them. But we’ve been constantly ignored, which is why we’re now mobilizing.”
Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission has documented more than 5,000cases of persons considered “disappeared”. Some non-governmental organizations say the number is much higher and exceeds 10 thousand. A United Nations fact-finding mission called for the creation of a database to track disappearances, but this has yet to happen.
Some relatives of the disappeared say police have refused to take their reports or will insist on categorizing armed abductions as missing persons cases.
(Marcela_Turati speaks – reporter interprets)
Journalist Marcela Turati says people will sometimes carry out their own investigations when police institutions refuse or fail to act. She’s seen how women whose daughters disappeared many years ago in Ciudad Juarez are now sharing the investigative skills they learned with women whose sons have disappeared in the context of the drug war.
Lack of public faith in government institutions is no secret…and impunity is a well-documented reality.
Poet and activist Javier Sicilia voiced this concern both in a famous letter penned after his son’s murder, as well as during face-to-face talks with President Calderon.
JAVIER SICILIA (male VO):“The problem Mr. President is that you think the bad guys are on the outside and good are on the inside. The problem Mr. President is that you launched a war with institutions that are rotten, with institutions that don’t bring the nation security, institutions with high rates of impunity.”
Academic and government-funded studies vary slightly, but the most commonly cited statistic puts the successful prosecution rate for crimes at only 2 percent. Again, Laura Carlsen.
LAURA CARLSEN:“That means 98 percent of crimes that are committed are not ever punished. When you have a situation like that, then it’s easy to branch out into other areas of crime. It’s easy for common criminals to feel bolder about committing homicides and crimes because they figure it’ll just be chalked up to the drug war now with blood flowing in the streets, practically another one isn’t going to make much difference, so we’re seeing what’s called ‘opportunistic crime’ as well.”
Opportunistic crime can take on many forms; from predatory rape-murders to illegal logging of protected forests to forced displacement campaigns funded by regional land bosses.
[CHANTS FROM A MARCH OF INDIGENOUS DISPLACED PERSONS]
Some indigenous communities have organized their own efforts to push back against criminals and corrupt officials operating within their resource-rich territories. But these community organized efforts are up against well-armed opponents and the apparent indifference of government institutions.
Lack of access to justice and the rise of para-militarism
(Loretta Ortiz speaks – reporter interprets)
Law professor Loretta Ortiz says the institutional abandonment and lack of political will to punish those responsible for crimes creates scenarios which have already started to emerge: para-militarism, lynchings, and the eye for an eye use of vigilante armed force.
Privately-funded armed groups have existed for decades in rural Mexico, particularly in areas marked by land disputes, but another force has surfaced in the context of the drug war; so-called narco-paramilitaries.
[MATA-ZETAS VIDEO COMMUNIQUE]
A group calling itself the Mata-Zetas or “Zeta Killers” went public this summer by posting a video communique to YouTube. The group expressed support for the government of Veracruz and admiration for the armed forces. It claimed to be affiliated with the New Generation of Jalisco Cartel and said its aim is to wipe out members of the Zetas, a criminal organization which itself was founded by defectors from an elite military unit.
Many aspects of Mexico’s drug war can be predicted by observing what has already occurred in Colombia. Paramilitary groups have been responsible for some of the most gruesome crimes in Colombia in recent decades. Victims there have included labor leaders, small landowners, and members of the political opposition.
Proposed counterinsurgency designation and its politics
Plan Colombia, like the Merida Initiative, was originally a counter-narcotics military aid package. But in 2002, Congress approved a provision that expanded the scope of authorized activities to include counterinsurgency strategies.
Some US congress members are pushing for a counterinsurgency designation for the drug war strategy in Mexico. Among them is Florida Republican Connie Mack.
CONNIE MACK: “The counterinsurgency measures must include; 1) An all US agency plan including the treasury dept, dept of justice, CIA, US immigration and customs enforcement, the state dept and others to aggressively attack and dismantle the criminal networks in the US and Mexico. 2) Once and for all, we must secure the border between the Unites States and Mexico, doubling Border Patrol agents, fully funding and delivering on the needed border protection equipment such as the unmanned aerial vehicles and the completion of double-layered security fence in urban, hard to enforce areas of the border. 3) We must take key steps to ensure local populations support the government and the rule of law over the cartels, such as by promoting culture of lawfulness programs.”
Mexican officials – and some US government officials – have objected to the use of the term “insurgency” to describe the activities of organized crime. The counterinsurgency strategy implemented in Colombia was mainly directed at the country’s leftist guerrillas while right-wing paramilitaries continued to operate or were demobilized under an amnesty deal.
Questioning prohibition, maintaining the status quo, and other possible paths
Sociologist and researcher Luis Astorga says that while it would be a mistake to negotiate with organized crime, the war on drugs itself is un-winnable.
LUIS ASTORGA (male VO): “It’s an un-winnable fight because there’s an anthropological constant which has shown that human consumption of psychoactive substances is as old as humankind itself. Therefore to act like one can gain control over these types of substances – or even wipe these substances off the face of the earth – is to not understand these types of historical and cultural processes.”
Even President Calderon has started to question prohibition in veiled references to “market alternatives”.
FELIPE CALDERON (male VO): “That’s a debate that needs to happen on an international level…What economists say is that market alternatives reduce the inflated prices paid on the black market…The price of drugs on the black market are not determined by Mexico, but rather by the American market which is why if alternatives are to be explored, they must be done so from there.”
The drug war in Mexico is using military force, with the support of a superpower, to enforce a policy of prohibition against against the fundamental economic laws of supply and demand. Yet, policies that alter the confrontation of these two forces are considered politically taboo.
Sociologist Luis Astorga explains the possible scenarios moving forward.
LUIS ASTORGA (male VO): “What we could aspire to without modifying the rules of the game as far as anti-drug policy goes is either to have institutions as solid as the advanced democracies or the other scenario, which hopefully no one supports, and that is to return to an authoritarian system. Otherwise, the rules would need to be changed on an international level as quickly as possible and that’s not on the short-term horizon. No one at the United Nations assembly is proposing this.”
While a United Nations convention signed in 1961 greatly influenced the adoption of prohibitionist policies among member nations, the United States remains a key player in upholding the policy…and in theory, US civil society could play a central role in repealing prohibition.
But the geopolitics may seem distant and abstract to the very real consequences experienced on the ground by countless people, including Olga Reyes Salazar..who, after fleeing her hometown with her extended family has joined a movement of drug war victims in Mexico.
OLGA REYES SALAZAR (female VO):“I’d like for everyone to get together and really stop this war. What we’ve been though has been awful. To lose 6 relatives in less than 3 years is very sad and very ugly. It wouldn’t want it for anyone else to have to go through it, not even my worst enemy. Much less having to leave your home without knowing where you’re going or which path you’ll take. More than anything, I’d like to see people unite and become aware of what is happening so that they won’t have to go through the same – if they haven’t already.”
This sentiment – a combined cry for help and warning to others – started coming from Ciudad Juarez nearly two decades ago in reaction to the unpunished murders of young women. It intensified with drug war related violence…which, like femicide crime, has since spread far beyond the city where it had been most concentrated.
Journalist Sanjuana Martinez says the damage already caused by violence and impunity will have lasting effects.
SANJUANA MARTINEZ (female VO): “It’s going to be very hard to heal the wounds. We have Colombia as a reference where there were more than a million deaths, paramilitary groups, drug cartels, state violence…and they are wounds that are still open twenty years later. I think it’s going to be very difficult to recover from this. It’s an enormous nationwide tragedy. The drug war is a delusional, failed policy because it’s against a nebulous enemy; an enemy which attempts to buy off and corrupt all of the state’s forces, which it has shown itself able to do. And the wounds caused by this are major. There’s a lot of bitterness and hate and all of this bitterness and hate is causing more violence.”
Although this prediction may sound grim – it’s a likely scenario – especially if policies on both sides of the border, including militarism and prohibition, remain as unchanged as the demand and consumption rates in the United States; the world’s largest drug market.
[CLOSING CREDITS]
A group of attorneys and human rights activists are seeking to have Mexico’s president, other government officials and several top drug cartel leaders investigated for war crimes.