Drug War Capitalism (25 page)

When drug trafficking patterns eventually shift away from Mexico, which history indicates that they are bound to do, those who can afford to pay members of paramilitary groups will be people connected to the state and the so-called legal economy. But the extortions carried out by these groups with impunity will likely continue, meaning that ironically it will be the poor, working, and middle-class Mexicans who are forced to pay for the ongoing survival of these paramilitary groups, chief among them Los Zetas.

Tamaulipas state is a crucial node in understanding the drug war in Mexico. There the lines between the PRI and criminal organizations are blurred to the point that there is no longer any way to differentiate between them. “[Cartels] have all the control, they monopolize the legitimate use of violence, and they are performing activities that are of the state,” said U of T professor Correa Cabrera when we spoke in 2011. According to a 2010 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, “It’s hard to be sure when the Gulf cartel gained the power over the city [Reynosa] that it has now; it didn’t happen in a single blow, reporters said. Most traced the change to three or four years ago. Before then, the cartel ran a kind of parallel government from which it strongly influenced institutions such as the police and the city government.… Journalists say the cartel is fully embedded in the government and gets nearly whatever it wants.”[9] The Gulf Cartel got its start running liquor across the border during alcohol prohibition in the United States in the 1920s. In the 80s, its main business was marijuana trafficking, by the 1990s, official estimates held that the Gulf Cartel was responsible for 30 percent of the cocaine moving through Mexico.[10] Through that time, some of the highest-ranked members of the Gulf Cartel were former police officers, and traffickers had links to the highest echelons of PRI officialdom.

In 2010, Reynosa was home to the clashes that gave birth to a new armed group, Los Zetas. The emergence of Los Zetas has proven to be a transformative element in the reconfiguration of Mexico’s military and paramilitary forces under the rubric of the war on drugs. The official story has it that the very first Zetas were men recruited from the GAFEs, an elite airborne unit of the Mexican Army originally created to provide security at the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico. French Special Forces from the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group trained the first GAFEs, and after the Zapatista uprising in 1994, they went on to carry out counterinsurgent activities against the EZLN, the Zapatista army. According to a US State Department cable released by Wikileaks, GAFE-turned-Zeta Rogelio López Villafana was trained in the United States, possibly at Fort Bragg.[11]

Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who took over the Gulf Cartel in 1999, was able to broker the participation of Mexican Special Forces in the narcotics-funded protection market. In 2003, the Mexican Army arrested Cardenas Guillen, accusing him of threatening to kill an undercover US sheriff, and threatening FBI and DEA agents in broad daylight.[12] He was jailed at La Palma, near Toluca in Mexico state, and in 2007 he was extradited to the United States.
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That same year the relationship between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas began to sour, as Cardenas Guillen was jailed and could no longer negotiate between them, creating the initial split between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas that would eventually tear wide open.

By the time Cardenas Guillen was put in jail, the Zetas had appropriated protection rackets long held by municipal police in Nuevo Laredo.[14] It is said that, around that time, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel agreed that the Gulf Cartel would continue to control trafficking routes through Tabasco, Veracruz, and Tamaulipas (along Gulf Coast), and the Zetas would control Nuevo Laredo (the busiest commercial land crossing on the US-Mexico border), as well as exercising influence in other parts of Tamaulipas, including Ciudad Victoria and San Fernando. Their pact was totally broken in January of 2010, with the assassination of El Concord, a representative of Los Zetas in Reynosa.[15] After the break, other Mexican crime groups, including La Familia Michoacana and the Sinaloa Cartel, under the name “La Nueva Federacion” declared that they would unite in a war against the Zetas.

Part of the reason the Zetas are perceived and presented as being so powerful is because their members often have military training superior to those in other cartels, which are portrayed as recruiting inexperienced eighteen-year-olds—although ex-police and ex-soldiers play an important role in the paramilitarized element of every drug cartel. The Zetas did not emerge as a traditional drug trafficking organization, and thus do not exercise the same kind of territorial control as the other groups. This is because, since their inception, the Zetas have been involved in extortion and other ways of making money—including trafficking in migrants.

Following Correa Cabrera’s conception of cartels as corporations, the Zetas are sometimes described as a kind of franchise operation, where local criminals can access weapons and branding in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. Affiliating with the Zetas brand gives criminals the potential to extort greater sums of money from kidnapping and other forms of extortion, including charging
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, and trafficking in migrants. Greater amounts of money can be extorted based on the reputation of the group one associates with, and, in the case of the Zetas, that reputation has been established through mass graves and terrible murders.

People who associate themselves with the Zetas have taken over the edges of the economy, including the so called “illegal economy” of human trafficking (of women and migrants), as well as forms of informal commerce like pirated DVDs. Colonizing these informal segments of the economy has created a new pattern of territorial expansion for the Zetas, one that is different from what other organized criminal groups have traditionally done (control a series of plazas and physical transshipment routes). With these methods, the Zetas have extended their zone of influence along, within, inside, and around territories previously of little interest to drug traffickers, areas that have little to no strategic value in terms of moving product. The Zetas also exercise their own form of control in regions monopolized by other criminal organizations (for whom movement of product has traditionally been the key focus of activities, requiring contiguous territorial access). In San Fernando, Tamaulipas, for example, it is known that local police actually assisted in training Zetas.[16] In Monterrey, state police looked on as Zetas hung banners from the State Congress.[17] Police cooperation locally, and active impunity granted by higher levels of government and reinforced by world powers willing to turn a blind eye, give the Zetas, and other paramilitary groups, a free hand to enforce and fulfill the desires of their higher-ups.

The Zetas are not simply some kind of warped end-product of transnational capitalism, nor are they an organization beyond comprehension or logic. Instead, there has been an active transnational-state-media role in their formation. As mentioned earlier, Los Zetas were allowed to flourish and consolidate when the United States supported Mexico’s decision to make Juárez a focus of the fight against cartels, instead of interrupting Los Zetas in Nuevo Laredo. The killing off of many of the Zetas’ original members has resulted in an increasingly fractured and dispersed group of trained killers, each of whom could easily recruit and train others to carry out the orders of those who can pay them, in order to do what was required to make a profit once the group is out on its own. One of the innovations of Los Zetas, which could come from the model of Central American gangs, is that they create and maintain zones of total silence: journalists do not publish stories about them, and on every street corner someone on the Zeta’s payroll keeps an eye on the neighborhood. The intense surveillance of urban areas by Los Zetas and their workers, combined with the terror generated through their actions, is enough to smother not only dissent but also mobility and communication about life under occupation.

The structure and style of Zeta control has been copied and applied outside of their original area of influence. Groups who rebelled against Zeta leadership in the state of Michoacán would later take on many characteristics of Los Zetas as they formed La Familia Michoacana, which later splintered to form Los Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar). Events in Michoacán have proven that the model of Los Zetas is one that can be copied and applied elsewhere, so long as authorities guarantee impunity.

“The Zetas are a paramilitary force,” said William Robinson, the professor and author whom I interviewed in Mexico City in 2011. “Basically it’s the creation of paramilitarism alongside formal militarization, which is a Colombian model.”[18] One barometer of paramilitary activity is the level of displacement experienced in areas where these kinds of groups are active. Those most strongly impacted by paramilitarization in Colombia are primarily poor people in urban and rural areas, and the same generally holds true for Mexico. According to the Mexican Human Rights Commission (CNDH), 120,000 people were displaced in Mexico between 2006 and 2014, especially from the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Sinaloa, and Baja California. “In Sinaloa alone 30,000 people have fled their homes, and in Guerrero, according to the CNDH, over 7,000 people have changed their places of residence due to the fear created by criminals in diverse areas of the region.”[19]

Paramilitarized Migration

Where paramilitary groups and cartels go, a strikingly similar brand of terror follows. In Colombia an important variable in counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts is the presence of guerrilla groups, but in Mexico it is the presence of migrants that is probably the largest variable. The men and women moving through the country are not necessarily organized or ideologically driven; the presence of migrants from Central America, and also from South America and elsewhere, is a significant occurrence in certain parts of the country. Controlling the flow of migration through Mexico is a key concern for Washington, and paramilitarized cartels are playing an increasingly important role in doing it. The mass kidnapping of migrants took off over the same time period as Calderón’s war on drugs spread around the country. During a six-month period between late 2008 and early 2009, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission documented 198 cases of mass kidnappings, in which 9,758 migrants were kidnapped. A later study by the organization found that between April and September of 2010 there were 214 documented mass kidnappings, resulting in 11,333 victims.[20] The ransoms associated with these kidnappings provide a new revenue stream for organized crime groups, and the kidnappings lessen the flow of migrants, effectively extending border control to the Mexico-Guatemala border, something the US government has thus far not objected to.

The situation facing migrants traveling through Mexico has long been complicated by extortion and abuse, but over the past years, the experience of migrating through Mexico has been transformed as drug war militarization has led to better equipped and more disperse armed groups. The long-functioning coyote system, in which migrants pay (often through loans) to be guided over part or all of their route by experienced border crossers, was slowly dismantled as coyotes were threatened or killed by criminal groups. The illicit activities of migration authorities and police were either assumed by cartels, or they began to function in a complimentary fashion with them. “In reality migrants always complained of abuses by authorities, especially police, not just here in Nuevo Laredo but also in Chiapas, in Veracruz, and in Tabasco; the stories they tell reflected the total fear they feel toward the authorities,” said a man I interviewed who was involved in the migrant shelter in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. “The situation they are facing became more complicated because of organized crime. Initially the kidnappings started in 2004 or 2005, when the group the migrants feared were the Maras (Central American gangs).… Those groups have since been substituted by cartels like the Zetas or the Gulf, who are responsible for this whole disaster, especially of kidnappings and the extortion of family members—that’s been the new element.” Migrants don’t generally travel with cash, they are detained and forced to give a phone number of a relative in the United States; it is that person who is then extorted for sums nearing $5,000. In dozens of interviews with migrants, I heard over and over again about groups of people traveling above one of the trains to the United States being corralled or detained by migration officials, only to be abandoned by authorities and turned over to criminal groups. They described how, from the moment they crossed into Mexico, they were subject to open recruiting by members of criminal organizations, and how once they were at the north border they would be forced to pay quotas to the Zetas or other crime groups in order to cross.

Dramatic events in Chiapas and Veracruz provide some examples of how this informal border enforcement takes place. At the crime scene, one of the women lay face up, her torso cutting a diagonal line across the railway track. The other lay face down, her right leg splayed over the same track at the thigh. Both wore reddish tank tops and pants that went down just below the knees. A police officer with an automatic weapon watched over the bodies. It was far too late to do anything to help. Little yellow numbers, from one to six, were placed on each piece of ballistic evidence, dotting across the tracks. According to local media, the women were shot and stabbed in the late afternoon of May 30, 2013.[21] A preliminary report suggests they refused to pay the quota charged by a criminal group after climbing up on the train.[22] Their bodies were found later that same day just north of the Mexican tourist town of Palenque, in Chiapas. Both women were from Honduras—Mexicans don’t risk traveling on cargo trains when they migrate through their country toward the United States. Most Central Americans traveling through Mexico do so as undocumented migrants, which means they are not afforded the right to free movement.