Drug War Capitalism (22 page)

The
Wall Street Journal
reported that, by 2012, 5,000 Mexican prison officials had been trained in Colorado.[59] There are also training facilities for Mexican prison guards in New Mexico (canine trainings), California (emergency response), and Maryland (anti-gang trainings), as well as a Mérida Initiative–funded prison guard training program in Xalapa, Veracruz.[60] In addition to training for Mexican prison guards, the United States has provided “biometric equipment consisting of fingerprint card readers, voice recognition and DNA test kits.… This equipment will be placed in Federal and State facilities for positive inmate identification and registration in the National Database.” The expansion of Mexico’s prison system is a crucial if authorities are to maintain control south of the US border.

The Border

The US-Mexico border has become a linchpin in the drug war in Mexico. In the process of researching this book I visited and crossed the border dozens of times, between Juarez and El Paso, Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, and Reynosa and Pharr. On the way up to the United States, the experience is always rigorous and generally pretty high-tech, line-ups to cross can sometimes last for hours. On the way south, the situation is reversed. At most of these crossings, there is literally no control as you pass from the United States into Mexico; you could do it without a passport. The huge discrepancy between the levels of violence on each side lead me to believe the porosity of crossing into Mexico is a factor in why the level of violence in the United States is so much lower. It’s not that there aren’t enough resources for Mexican authorities to examine everyone that comes in, it just isn’t a priority for the United States that they do so—since it is Washington that determines how these borders work. The militarization of the border on the US side, and the harsh and unjust restrictions on who (and what) can get in contribute to the concentration of criminal groups (including police, army, and authorities involved in trafficking) on the south side of the border.

Of course, there’s a feeling that you are safer after crossing the border from Mexico into the States. Many Mexicans are fleeing violence, kidnapping, threats, and so on by going to Texas. In my case, I walked around Laredo alone in the evening and didn’t feel afraid. When I visited Nuevo Laredo in early 2014, my contacts refused to take me for a walk through the city center in the evening, insisting that we drive. The same goes for when I was in McAllen and El Paso, compared to being in Reynosa and Juárez. On an individual level, stripped of context, it is much safer on the US side, but that doesn’t change the fact that the worst of the violence taking place to the south is happening in places where the border area is militarized on both the US side and the Mexican side, as in Tamaulipas and Chihuahua.[61] 

It is important to understand this militarization within the framework of counterinsurgency. Laleh Khalili notes that “Elbit Systems Ltd., the Israeli firm involved in the construction of the separation wall in Palestine, has also been contributing to the ‘security’ of the U.S.–Mexico border wall. In response to the moral panic about terror, many domestic police programs adopt military counterinsurgency tactics—and especially those of Israel—in their control of suspect urban populations.”[62] In the case of the US-Mexico border, the suspect populations are obviously those south of the wall, and, in particular, groups of Mexican, Central American, and other migrants making their way north. In his book
Border Patrol Nation,
journalist Todd Miller reports that since September 11, 2001, the US government has spent $791 billion on Homeland Security, the agency responsible for border control. Miller reports that “in 2012, the $18 billion spent on border and immigration enforcement [outdid] all other federal law enforcement bodies combined including the FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshal Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”
Border Patrol Nation
details that, prior to 1986, there were rarely more than 2,000 people deported each year. “By the late 1990s, the U.S. government was deporting more than 40,000 people annually, still only a fraction of what we see today. By the early 2010s, Homeland Security was expelling well over 400,000 people per year from the United States.” This drastic increase in deportations has taken place just as a variety of US states—most famously Arizona but also Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah—have passed laws obliging local and state police to enforce immigration law. Communities of color, and especially those living close to the line experience the impacts of border militarization in the United States particularly harshly. However, the violence south of the border should not be considered an entirely separate phenomenon, as it can be considered, in some ways, a lurid reflection of the US policy of border militarization.

The Rio Grande area has been transformed into a testing ground for the rest of the US border with Mexico, from due west of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez to the Atlantic. “The intent is to use Texas as a model for a nationwide campaign that will stem the cross-border intrusion of these dangerous and insidious criminal groups,” reads a 2011 report endorsed by the Texas Department of Agriculture. Senior Texas police officials told the retired military men who wrote the report that “much of their effort was derived from experience in recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.”[63] In 2006, Texas, under the governorship of Rick Perry, launched the Unified Command (UC) structure in six urban centers along the Texas-Mexico border, bringing together federal, state, and tribal organizations, including the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Border Patrol, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), local police departments, Parks and Wildlife, state military forces, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the FBI. At the UCs, these armed groups work hand in hand with other government agencies, including the US Postal Service and the Department of Transportation; corporations, including UPS and FedEx; as well as nongovernmental outfits like the reactionary Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. To facilitate information sharing between the UCs, which are located in El Paso, Big Bend, Del Rio, Laredo, McAllen, and the Coastal Bend, six “unified tactical commands,” known as Joint Operations and Intelligence Centers (JOIC) were created, one at the site of each UC. “UC/JOICs in effect replicate the military system of joint command and control that has proven so successful in Iraq and Afghanistan,” reads the report.
^[64]

Borders play an incredibly important role in how societies are organized today. In
Undoing Border Imperialism
, writer and activist Harsha Walia describes the overarching nature of border controls as border imperialism. She summarizes border imperialism as emerging from a confluence of four central practices spearheaded by nation states and accompanied by ongoing processes of capitalist accumulation: The first is capitalism and empire, which underpin the entire system; followed by the criminalization of migrants; the production of racialized, sexist, and imperialist national identities; and the denial of legal permanent residency and citizenship to migrants.[65] “Border controls are used to deter those for whom migration is the only option to the plundering of their communities and economies due to the free license granted to capital and militaries,” she writes.
^[66]
But in addition to their role as locations for social control and the creation of a labor apartheid system, borders are increasingly used in the drug war context as launching pads for militarism and violence. For example, in order for the drug war to take root in southern Mexico, a program of border militarization along the Guatemala and Belize borders will be necessary in order to give the state a foothold and a venue from which to begin to interrupt flows of people and narcotics. The more open the borders are, and the less the state controls the movement of people through those borders, the less violence surrounding communities will experience.

Profits

It’s long been clear that the boost in police in Mexico has been aimed at securing business interests. In August 2011, Mexico’s former finance minister Bruno Ferrari told
Bloomberg
in an English interview that “Nowadays what we are seeing is that we are having a big fight against crime so that, as I said, [it] guarantees the future investments and the investments we are having right now because what we are seeing is that Mexico is fighting to prevail against crime.”[67] Ferrari’s statement is backed up by the experiences of the transnational business elite.

“Multinationals in Mexico practically haven’t been affected, with exception of the mining sector,” said Alejandro Hope, the Mexico City–based analyst. “Yes there have been some cases, but the extortion is more a phenomenon that is directed toward small and medium-sized businesses rather than large companies. There has been some kidnappings, but not much,” he told me in the common room of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness. According to Rafael McCadden, who works with Colliers International real estate group, “We don’t see any companies leaving Mexico because of the security issues. We are experiencing expansions, which means they are here to stay.”[68] Militarization that helps the corporate sector is often framed as benefiting society at large, like in this statement from a US military journal: “President Calderón promised to improve security, thereby enhancing prosperity for the Mexican people.”[69] Though examined in the military and business press, the links between anti-narcotics programs and the economy are crucial, but are generally siloed off into separate categories or they are ignored.

According to a 2009
Business Week
cover story, attacks on foreign staff and factories have been rare in Juárez and other border towns along drug trafficking routes, including Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, and Tijuana.[70] Police are already deployed there with special instructions to care for transnational corporations. Following the kidnapping of a corporate executive, police suggested managers alter their work routines, leave Juárez by sundown, and stick to two key roads. Patrols were beefed up along these roads, “creating relatively safe corridors between the border and the industrial parks.”[71]  In other border areas, the level of repression and violence has been as intense as in Juárez, but there is less documentation of the situation.
In Nuevo Laredo and elsewhere, local radio DJs would use codes like “it’s hot outside” or “it’s not a very nice day” to warn people to stay inside and avoid violence. Bazookas, grenades, and car bombs all made early appearances in the strategic border city, the busiest commercial crossing along the US-Mexico line.
In 2010, the US consulate there was the target of a grenade attack. “Everything that the country is living through, all of the violence, started here in Nuevo Laredo,” said a young lawyer from the city, just across the Rio Grande from Laredo. In 2003, during Vicente Fox’s presidency, Nuevo Laredo was flooded with over 10,000 police (Federal Preventive Police [PFP], which preceded the creation of the Policia Federal) and soldiers. “On every corner there were four or five PFPs, from the edges of the city to the bridge,” the lawyer told me. “
As that happened, violence rose. The local police were infiltrated and they clashed with the federal police. Over time, we learned that another group had also infiltrated the federal police. In Nuevo Laredo there were clashes between municipal police and the army, and with federal police.”
On one visit, I walked across the bridge from Laredo and went over to a small Nuevo Laredo marketplace, which was once filled with restaurants and souvenir stands catering to day-tripping gringos. As I passed from stall to stall, I attempted small talk with various vendors. One man warmed to it, his voice dropping to a whisper when I told him I was a journalist. He was explicit that I couldn’t record, but he wanted to tell me something important, he said. “The army is hunting young men on the edges of town. Hunting them like animals, and killing them, just like that.”

I’ll always remember an afternoon I spent in Nuevo Laredo in late 2011, a time when that city was considered one of the most dangerous in Mexico. The presence of organized criminal groups, working right under the army’s nose, was apparent immediately, which is to say as soon as I hit the halfway point on the border bridge separating Laredo, Texas, from Nuevo Laredo, which is in the state of Tamaulipas. People I spoke to in Reynosa said going to their local, state-funded Human Rights Commission was like talking directly to narcos—there was no perceived separation between organized crime groups and the state government. Tamaulipas is famous, on one hand, for its horror stories, including the massacre of seventy-two migrants and the discovery of a series of mass graves in 2011, but it is also considered a state where “nothing happens”—where journalists are totally under state and cartel control, and local governments don’t keep statistics.

I asked the young lawyer, who himself was kidnapped a few years before, what he thought would happen in Nuevo Laredo in coming years. “Our theory is that things won’t change, this is the kind of government the PRI has always dreamed of running, with the army in the streets, with a form of control so that the people can’t rise up against them. A totalitarian state, and the PAN did it for them, the PAN put the army in the streets and they won’t, not even by accident, send the soldiers back to their bases,” he said. His friends are organizers with Morena, the offshoot of the PRD that is organized under the leadership of Andres Manuel López Obrador. Since the violence took hold, they spend long evenings inside discussing the future of the city. “The country is militarized. In Nuevo Laredo there are no civilian police; it’s been seven or eight years since we’ve seen a cop. There are no transit police. The soldiers do everything, and obviously that doesn’t guarantee security. Rather, violence has exploded.… Today there is daily violence, violence that we didn’t know before, social violence.”