Drug War Capitalism (24 page)

Territorial control and the threat they pose to transnational capital is a crucial and oft-ignored role of these groups. “If we allow the army to enter communal territory, they will never leave. The government has its sights on exploiting the mines; they want us to fight amongst ourselves, so that they can come in and militarize the territory. That’s the bottom line here,” said Claudio Carrasco, former coordinator of the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities-Community Police (CRAC-PC).[79] There are three producing mines in Guerrero state, a host of exploration projects, and vast expanses of mountainous land that has not yet been granted in mining concessions.

In his early days as president, Peña Nieto announced the creation of a gendarmerie, a heavily armed police force that would primarily patrol rural areas.[80] “Although falling under the Ministry of the Interior, the National Gendarmerie will mostly consist of soldiers who will remain under military/naval command. These troops will be heavily armed, uniquely trained in rapid assault tactics (rather than more standard evidentiary procedures) and specifically authorized to operate above force levels that typically apply to the police.”[81] The national gendarmerie will increase police presence in resource-rich rural areas in Mexico, creating another layer of protection for mining companies and others active in these so-called under-policed areas. A 5,000 member gendarmerie was launched in August of 2014, and according to
The Economist
, “it will have special responsibility for protecting Mexico’s economic assets—oil, mines, farms and so forth—from organised crime.”[82]

The snapshots presented in this chapter are an initial attempt to look at how the deployment of police and soldiers has not brought security to the communities they patrol. Rather, these deployments act as a guarantee to investors seeking to insure their installations will be protected from community resistance, at great cost to men and women throughout the region. In addition, they’ve done little to stop the flow of drugs, but rather have contributed to shifting the flows to other regions. In the future, these other regions could also be militarized in the name of fighting the flow of drugs, extending into a kind of perpetual war.

Chapter 6:
Mexico, Paramilitarization & The Drug War

Early in 2014, I met with Javier Sicilia, a man who is today perhaps Mexico’s most well-known peace activist, in a Starbucks in the south of Mexico City. He arrived with a friend, and though he left his trademark wide-brimmed hat and beige vest at home, he still garnered attention among the half dozen people sipping their coffees. As we chatted, one man patted Sicilia on the shoulder, telling him to keep up the struggle. The circumstances that plunged Sicilia into a life of activism are tragic. On March 28, 2011, his son Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega was murdered along with six others in Temixco, Morelos, just south of Mexico City. The seven bodies were found inside a Honda Civic. Sicilia, a poet, vowed he would never write another verse, and began a national campaign known as the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, that carried out marches, caravans, and events throughout Mexico and the United States. Sicilia places the blame for his son’s murder squarely on the drug war strategy carried out by Felipe Calderón, and says that had drug trafficker Arturo Beltran Leyva not been murdered in 2009, his son would still be alive.[1] “I’m sure that if Beltran Leyva was still in Cuernavaca, if they hadn’t killed him, my son wouldn’t be dead,” said Sicilia. His son was killed with six others when they were kidnapped after denouncing a robbery. The owner of the house where they were being held freaked out and called a local crime boss, paying him 300,000 pesos and giving him two trucks to get the kidnapped youth off his hands. All seven of them were murdered, and stuffed into a car. Sicilia believes that the war on drugs strategy is what ratcheted up the violence in Mexico. “This is my hypothesis: there’s cartels out there, and when Calderón—with assistance from institutions that were involved in cartel activity—decides to mobilize the army, what he does is oblige the cartels to arm themselves like armies. Then he does another terrible thing as part of this strategy, he beheads the big
capos
, the ones who controlled those groups. So what was left were cells that cannot access drugs, which leads to the true diversification of crime.”

The paramilitarization that has taken place in Mexico since Calderón declared war on drug cartels in December 2006 can be understood as stemming from two elements of US-promoted militarization in Mexico. Sicilia mentioned the first element in our interview above. The paramilitarization of drug cartels is an outcome of the police and army’s piecemeal confrontations with well-financed drug trafficking groups that have a large supply of cash and almost unfettered access to weapons. As a consequence of state attempts to militarize their trafficking routes, drug trafficking organizations recruit and arm grunts to protect their trade. This is something that has been rigorously documented in Colombia, where “military and counter-narcotics aid to Colombia, rather than enhancing the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, is diverted to empower non-state armed actors, increasing extra-legal violence with no apparent effect on its stated goal of curbing drug production,” stated economists in a peer-reviewed paper released in December 2012.[2] “Our estimates display a distinct, asymmetric pattern: when U.S. military aid increases, attacks by paramilitaries, who are known to work with the military, increase more in municipalities with bases.” Which is to say that the more the United States spends in Colombia, the more irregular forces have their way with local populations, generating terror and violence.

The second element is that historically in Latin America the so-called professionalization of the police, explored in the last chapter, leads to paramilitarization. “Professionalization’s insistence on centralized and specialized police activities seems also to lead to the devolution (e.g. debureaucratization), as the activities of professionalized, specialized, and autonomous national police agencies increasingly diverge from the centers of authority that have produced them.… Devolution from bureaucratized militarization is often manifested in the emergence of social-control groups with less direct, more tenuous links to the state. These take the form of death squads related only in varying degree to police, or police-linked
justiciero
lone-wolf killers, or parts of the internal security system that have turned against other parts—as when one internal security organization spies on, or takes action against, another.”[3] Seen in this light, we can understand that police training actually increases the possibility that paramilitary groups will form. Instead of calling the armed groups that work for narcotics traffickers paramilitaries, they are referred to in the mainstream press and by government officials (and by extension the majority of the population) as drug cartels, or in some cases the “armed wing” of a given drug cartel. Many of these groups are initially formed by deserters from state security forces in the pay of crime groups. The notion that they are loyal to a particular organization (or more absurdly, to the trade of a particular commodity) is vastly overstated in hegemonic discourses about drug cartels. (The same is true of members of state security forces, who as noted above have defected with incredible frequency to work with organized crime groups.)

The notion of drug cartels presented in the media is very simplistic, and could be said to hide more than it obscures. Julián Cardona, the journalist who explained to me how in Juárez the police carried out the functions of a drug cartel, had the following to say to journalist Ed Vulliamy. “It simply doesn’t make sense, as the media and government think, to draw lines between cartels in Juárez. Along the smuggling corridors into the U.S., maybe, but not on the streets. The cartels cannot even see those lines themselves anymore. Of course the drug cartels exist, they are players, but they are no longer the main reason for the violence here. You have a product and a production line. There are bosses, managers, middle management, line workers, accountants, bankers, shippers—they are all part of the process but they never meet each other and most of them are not directly employed by the corporation. We’ll have counted seventeen hundred dead in this city by the end of the year [he predicted, rightly, in September 2008] and in most cases, the executioners don’t even know which cartel, if any, they’re working for. If they change sides, from someone far from here who is in the Juárez cartel to someone far from here in the Sinaloa cartel, they won’t know it. All they have is their assigned task, their piece of turf, and maybe an order to do this, do that, or kill someone. Not why or who for. They have no idea about the big money, or who their bosses are.”[4]

There are, of course, differing views on this matter and there are people who don’t believe drug cartels are functioning as paramilitary groups, carrying out the bidding of corporate or other sectors. In an interview, National Autonomous University researcher Gian Carlo Delgado hesitated at the idea of classifying cartels as paramilitary groups. “Paramilitaries have always existed, they’ve always been here, since there have been armed resistance movements or armed movements, there have been paramilitaries.… For my part, it is difficult to link or to say that organized crime is paramilitarism; if we included the armed elements of organized crime under the category of paramilitaries generally, I still have a hard time making a clear link to the state.”

Violence and Small Business

The violence in Mexico has decimated local economies, especially in the north. According to a priest I interviewed in Tamaulipas—who preferred to remain nameless for fear of being targeted—extortions and insecurity have undermined the entrepreneurial spirit of the people in northern Mexico. “The economic situation has destroyed the border [area], especially taking into account the situation of insecurity that people are living through in the city, which has meant there are less jobs, and the people are fearful and are not able to be entrepreneurs, which is characteristic of people from the north.”

“The businesses that are most affected by the violence are the smallest and those that are located in the states of northern Mexico.… The lack of security hurts small and medium producers, businesses and vendors to a larger degree, due to the fact that organized crime has ‘a higher ease of penetration with them than with the directors of large companies, which, in many cases, operate from outside the country.’”[5] According to COPARMEX, a Mexican business association, 160,000 businesses closed because of security concerns in 2011. “There is a reconversion of the economy taking place at the national level that is favoring [large companies], and it is making more [Mexicans] into employees instead of entrepreneurs,” said Dr. Correa-Cabrera during a presentation in Baja California Sur in February of 2012.

Correa-Cabrera’s observations were made plain on my first visits to Reynosa and Ciudad Juárez, both in 2011. Unlike other cities I’d visited in Mexico, here I was surprised to find large, popular areas in these cities without the food stands or little corner shops that are usually ubiquitous. Between 2009 and 2011 in Ciudad Juárez, “almost 6,000 small grocery stores were closed down, out of 7,000 such stores that were formally registered. The reason: an increase in robberies, extortions, and kidnappings.”[6]

The disappearance of local businesses meant that when I visited Juárez the only place with an open patio was Starbucks. The patio looked on to the parking lot of a Walmart, built over top of one of the city’s historic bullfighting rings. Activists held their press conferences at Sanborns, a cookie-cutter restaurant chain owned by the country’s richest man, because it was one of the few safe places open later into the evening. Those who can afford it use their cars more, shop in big department stores, and eat at restaurants, which are generally considered safer areas further outside the reach of organized crime. It is more difficult for criminal groups to operate with total impunity and threaten and extort owners and workers at transnational food and beverage chains than it is for them to do the same to a local business whose owner has lived his or her entire life in the area.

The experience of Carlos Gutierrez is one of the most public examples of how extortion can ruin someone’s life. And it’s public for two reasons: first, because he survived a bloody attack against him, and second, because he was able to leave Mexico and gain temporary legal status in the United States. These factors are what enabled him to speak out about what happened. Gutierrez ran a successful concession stand in Chihuahua City until extortionists began to demand monthly payments of up to US$10,000 a month. After about a year, Gutierrez could no longer make the payments, and one night, while he was hanging out in a park with friends, four armed men attacked him and cut off both his feet, with either a machete or an axe.[7] Those responsible for the extortions and attack were never publicly identified or captured, and Gutierrez has tried to start a new life with his family in Texas.

Correa-Cabrera notes that attributing the violence in Mexico only to narcotics trafficking is no longer a useful way to understand the conflict. “The new organized crime corporation in Mexico has a transnational character and includes various divisions or key areas, which include: drug trafficking (buying and selling); money laundering (which would be part of the financial division); human trafficking; paid assassins (which operate as a kind of marketing area, with the task of generating terror and sending messages to various actors so as to negotiate with or to threaten them); a more recently created division, which is dedicated to extortion, kidnapping, and charging rents (which represents a diversification of the traditional activities of so called drug cartels); among others.”[8]