El Narco (46 page)

The Mexican law was an important landmark, especially considering the reaction of the United States. Back in 2006, the Mexican Congress had approved an almost identical law. But the Bush White House went ballistic and put pressure on President Fox, who vetoed it. In contrast in 2009, the Obama White House was notably mum about the issue, and Calderón signed it. This reaction was not missed across Latin America and could signal a longer-term change of direction both in Washington and southern-hemisphere capitals. Another notable point was that the Mexican law had no immediate effect on drug use on the street. No fourth graders rushed out of school to try heroin, no sudden explosion of kids on crack occurred. Long term, of course, this could be a different story. But from a policy point it breaks the argument that the world will immediately stop turning if drugs are decriminalized. Fear of the unknown world of tolerated drugs has long been a factor driving the debate.

However, while decriminalization saves police money and stops punishing addicts, opponents are right to point out that it does nothing to stop organized crime. While drug use is effectively legal, trafficking and selling is still in the shadows. We will likely have to deal with this painful contradiction for many years ahead.

California’s Prop 19 doesn’t mess with these contradictions, but advocates a step into a new realm, legalized marijuana. The 2010 version proposed that anyone over twenty-one should be able to possess up to an ounce of weed for personal use, smoke in his or her own home, and grow it in greenhouses. Ganja would be sold by licensed dealers, with medical-marijuana stores providing a concrete example of what this would look like; you just wouldn’t need the doctor’s prescription. The debate will rage again in 2012, with most arguments over the health of California kids and public finances. (Advocates say the state could make some $1.4 billion in tax revenues annually from ganja.) But others will be watching it closely hundreds of miles south of the border, in the marijuana fields of the Sierra Madre.

Everyone agrees that legalized weed in the United States would have an effect on El Narco in Mexico. The question is how much. We keep getting back to the base problem that since the drug trade is illegal, we don’t know how much Mexico produces, or what crosses the border, or even how many Americans smoke weed. But we try to guess. These guesses on how much weed Mexico sells America vary wildly, from a whopping $20 billion at the top end to $1.1 billion at the bottom.

The top figures came after the drug czar’s office back in 1997 multiplied some estimated yields of Mexican marijuana crops based on plane sightings and other factors. It then multiplied these yields with American street prices and came up with an astronomical figure with a lot of zeros. It was even more than Mexicans made from cocaine. The office thus concluded that the Mexican mobs make 60 percent of their income from weed. A similar figure was produced again when the Mexican government estimated that cartels grew a whopping 35 million pounds of ganja a year and multiplied it by the American street costs (of about $525 a pound)—to produce the $20 billion. This number floated around in the media in the run-up to the Prop 19 vote.

The Rand Corporation then came up with its own study before the California referendum.
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The report launched an attack on the high-end figures, saying they should not be taken seriously. “Legalization advocates seize on such figures to complement their traditional arguments,” it states. It goes on to rightly show the immense problems with estimates and how all the numbers we are dealing with are dubious. But then the report makes its own guesstimates, involving lot of funny-looking equations with
a
’s and
b
’s and long numbers. Getting back into the confused territory of guessing how much weed stoners put in each joint (0.39 grams by one measure), it looks at data dividing wasters into four groups—from casual users to chronic smokers (of the Chronic). After more bells and whistles, it concludes that Mexican traffickers make just $1.1 billion to $2 billion in the entire American marijuana market and only 7 percent of that comes from California. Its conclusion: voting for Prop 19 won’t affect Mexican drug violence.

That deduction is highly questionable. The most concrete source, seizures, shows that tons of Mexican cartel grass go directly into California. Mexico made its biggest marijuana seize since the eighties right over the California border, in Tijuana, in 2010 (two weeks before the Prop 19 vote). It was 134 metric tons, or 295,000 pounds of the psychedelic leaves! It is so much grass, it was carried in a whole convoy of trucks and soldiers filled a parking lot with it. The pressure-packed bundles in yellow, red, green, gray, and white reached the sky. It made a hell of a bonfire. The grass would have been worth about $100 million on California streets. In apparent reaction to the loss, a cartel massacred thirteen addicts in a rehab center. It was one life for each ten tons of ganja.
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If cartels murder over the marijuana traffic into California, it is obviously a serious market. And that was only one seizure. California’s border patrol and customs also seize hundreds of tons of cannabis every year.

Mexican marijuana heading into California also moves on to other American states. If California did legalize the herb, there would be a perplexing patchwork: you would have grass produced legally in Cali sold illegally in other states; Mexican weed imported unlawfully into San Diego and selling over the counter in Los Angeles; and a whole array of other confused combinations. And it would be bizarre for Mexican soldiers to seize a truck of ganja in Tijuana if it was openly being sold in dispensaries a few miles over the border.

Policy-reform advocates, of course, see California as a first step. Once it is shown to work there, the policy could be followed in New Mexico or Washington State. Eventually, the whole union might legalize. And if the United States legalized marijuana, Mexico would inevitably legalize its own farmers and transporters. Campesinos in the Sierra Madre could get out of the drug trade and into a legitimate business; it would be one more Mexican crop such as coffee, tequila agave, or avocados.

You can argue forever with fuzzy figures about the size of this industry. But even if you believe the lowest estimates, Mexico’s marijuana trade to the United States is in the billions. If it was legalized, this would take these billions away every year from organized crime. That is more financial damage than the DEA or Mexican armed forces have achieved in a decade.

Taking Mexico’s marijuana business out of the black market would clearly mean less money spent on Kalashnikovs and paying child assassins. But whatever happens in drug-policy reform, cartel militias are not going to disappear overnight. Gangs such as the Zetas and Familia will keep fighting over any illegal drugs on the market as well as going on with their extortion, kidnapping, human smuggling, and their portfolio of other crimes. They are a threat that Mexico must confront.

Some analysts fear calling these groups insurgents because they fear counterinsurgency tactics. Armies battling rebel groups have caused human rights tragedies from Algeria to Afghanistan. Mexican soldiers have already committed widespread human rights abuses, and if they get schooled in a real anti-insurgency campaign, their record could get even worse. This is a real fear.

But the Mexican Drug War is already completely militarized. While the Mexican government refuses to concede it is fighting an insurgency, it uses a completely military strategy against cartel militias, battling them with the army, marines, and units of federal paramilitary police. Protesters march to condemn the abuses of soldiers; but they also protest how the government is failing to protect them from gangsters. Often these two points are protested in the same marches. That is the central problem for Calderón and whoever follows him. He is damned if he uses the army; and he is damned if he doesn’t.

Realistically, no president is going to completely withdraw the military while groups such as the Zetas maintain their current strength. How can any government permit squads of fifty men with automatic rifles, RPGs, and belt-driven machine guns to steam through villages? It has to challenge them. And only the military has the capacity to go toe-to-toe with Zetas black commandos.

However, the government could certainly refine this strategy. The army, or particularly the marines, have been successful in strikes on cartel bosses such as when they blew away Arturo “the Beard” Beltrán Leyva in the apartment block. But soldiers also waste a lot of time raiding random houses without intelligence, harassing civilians on the street, and manning checkpoints on dark country roads. Nervous soldiers have shot dead many of their innocent victims at these checkpoints. The military needs to be used for the heavy stuff. The intelligence has to be gathered by civilian agents who really know how to collect it, or the American desperado agents who collect much of it anyway; and daily policing has to be handled by police.

The marines are already being reorganized as the elite strike force for these type of operations. As WikiLeaks cables show, they are the Mexican force most respected by American officials. In a December 2009 cable, then American ambassador Carlos Pascual praised the marines for their work killing the Beard and some Zetas leaders, while scolding the army, who, he said, had failed to act on American intel.

“The successful operation against ABL [Arturo Beltrán Leyva] comes on the heels of an aggressive SEMAR [marines] effort in Monterrey against Zeta forces and highlights its emerging role as a key player in the counternarcotics fight. SEMAR is well-trained, well-equipped, and has shown itself capable of responding quickly to actionable intelligence. Its success puts the army in the difficult position of explaining why it has been reluctant to act on good intelligence and conduct operations against high-level targets.”
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The ambassador also revealed (thanks to WikiLeaks) that the marine unit that led the operation had been “extensively trained” by the U.S. Northern Command, the Pentagon’s joint operations center in Colorado. Other cables elaborated on American doubts about the Mexican army and recommended more training with U.S. forces. John Feeley, the deputy chief of mission for the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, wrote a scathing assessment of Mexico’s military capacities in January 2010. He called the armed forces “parochial and risk averse,” said they were “incapable of processing information and evidence,” and called the defense minister, General Galvan, “a political actor.” It was quite different from America’s public line, and quite embarrassing for Feeley when it flashed up on the Internet. Feeley’s solution: more training with the United States as well as the Colombians.
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America will invariably continue to train Mexican troops, and building up elite units that take out the worst gangsters and commandos is a good thing. But Mexico also has to work on paying these elite units decently and keeping their loyalty so they don’t desert and become more mercenaries. The modern marine core is better trained and more experienced than Arturo Guzmán Decena was when he went over to the Zetas. If a crew of marines ever deserted, it would be an awesome threat. While the U.S. trains Mexicans, the use of American forces themselves should be kept firmly off the agenda. It looms as a likely disaster, provoking nationalist resentment and pulling U.S. troops into a quagmire.

Americans do need to step up their efforts to help improve the Mexican police. A long-term solution to Mexico’s security problems is training real cops—and not just gangsters in uniform who let criminals get away with murder. Whether it is a single national force or separate agencies, the quality of officers has to be vastly improved. This is a generational project, not something that will miraculously happen in one or five or even ten years. The police ranks have to be trained and improved and monitored and cleaned out and trained again … As well as help from American police, support of Latin American police is crucial, as these corps deal with a more similar culture and circumstances. The Colombian National Police is obviously touted, but other forces have gained respect and good clearance rates in Latin America, including police in Nicaragua—Central America’s poorest country, but one of its safest.

Dealing with Mexico’s mountain of unsolved murders and crimes now seems an insurmountable task. So police have to prioritize. Busting small-time drug dealers is a never-ending mission that gets bodies in cells but doesn’t stop the drug trade or violence. Meanwhile, kidnapping for ransom is the most heinous antisocial crime of all and should not be tolerated one inch. In front of Mexico’s wave of abductions, this should be the number one priority.

The good news about kidnapping is that it can be stopped (unlike the drug trade). This point was brought home to me by former Colombian president César Gaviria. In an interview, the former premier described Colombia’s experience with the scourge of kidnapping in the nineties and what Mexico can learn from it.

“Kidapping is a problem of bad policing. Because good police can always catch kidnappers. The bad guys have to expose themselves by getting in contact with the family and getting money from them. And that allows you to trace them. If the success rate of kidnappings goes down radically, that makes it a much less profitable business.

“And unlike drug traffickers, there are not that many kidnappers. If you lock away a single gang of kidnappers, you can affect the amount of abductions; if you hit five gangs, you can make a real change.”
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In Colombia, Gaviria went on, police aggressively went after abductors and drastically changed the situation. It went from the worst kidnapping rate in the world to being the ninth on the list (with Mexico being on top, followed by Iraq and India). Most of the kidnappings that still take place in Colombia are in war-wracked corners of countryside. Kidnappings for ransom in the capital, Bogotá, have been reduced to close to zero.