Gypsy Jan - 10-7-2008 at 09:55 PM
September 28, 2008
Security News
Narco 101
The news from Mexico does not cease to startle, with the latest story seemingly outdoing the previous one. Two dozen execution victims are found slain
in a rural field. Grenades are tossed into crowds celebrating the country’s Independence Day in Morelia, Michoacan, a colonial city designated a world
heritage site. A long-imprisoned kingpin launches a
website with cool photos like any other star .
In the Yucatan, a privately-owned airplane that crashes with more than three tons of cocaine aboard was once connected to the CIA’s “rendition”
flights of suspected Middle Eastern terrorists, according to European Union investigators. And just like the plane that dropped from the sky, the
story quickly vanishes from the radar screen.
What ties these stories together, of course, is their connection to the murky world of illegal drug trafficking.
Mexican media feature sensational stories about drugs and some of the people involved in the business. Yet there is little systematic reporting and
analysis about the breadth and scope of the trade, the political
economy of drug trafficking. Given the clandestine nature of the
narco-world, as well as the risks entailed in covering the beat, the dearth of hard-nosed business reporting is not surprising.
But pressing questions simmer beneath the ferocity of the conflict that is turning Mexico upside down. How much money is at stake?
How many people are involved? Who benefits and who doesn’t? Who controls what? Why are drugs seemingly everywhere?
Now and then, fragments of an admittedly elusive truth filter out into the press.
Mexican Defense Secretary Guillermo Galvan Galvan, for example, reportedly told a group of Mexican congressmen recently that about 500,000 people were
involved in Mexico’s narcotics trade.
According to the account, the largest group, 300,000 people, is made up of farmers who cultivate prohibited crops, which in Mexico’s case means
marijuana and opium.
The second biggest group numbers about 160,000 people
who operate as street dealers, transporters, distributors and look-outs.
A smaller stratum consists of approximately 40,000 individuals who occupy different leadership positions within the drug cartels.
Virtually every nook and cranny of Mexican society is touched by the narco.
To one degree or another, the financial, manufacturing,
agricultural, construction, retail, popular entertainment, and tourism sectors of the economy are all magnets of narco-dollars.
Earlier this year, Mexican Senator Santiago Creel, a former Interior Minister during the presidential administration of Vicente Fox (2000-2006),
triggered polemics when he contended that Mexican banks were money-laundering outlets.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Creel quipped. “Money from drug trafficking isn’t traveling all over the country in suitcases. It is deposited in banks.”
On a recent visit to Ciudad Juarez, former Mexican UN Ambassador and leading opposition politician Porfirio Munoz Ledo, offered his analysis of the
narco-phenomenon. Insisting that drug traffickers operate from high spheres of power, Munoz Ledo expounded on the social and economic
hierarchy.
“At the bottom there are assassins, dealers, collaborators, dirty cops, extortionists and murder victims,” said the historic co-founder of the
center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution. “But above them, there is a zone, which is neither legal nor illegal, and which exists thanks to the
inter-woven complex of institutions recognized by the law- stores, banks,
customs and politicians.”
Munoz Ledo said the drug cartels owe their power to the prevalence of an informal economy pumped up by the corruption and the weakness of the Mexican
state.
Eight or nine major crime syndicates purportedly control the production, distribution and sale of illegal drugs in Mexico.
Their disputes and pacts are fluid, changing with the political circumstances and market conditions. Flashed on television or carried in the
newspaper, the names and faces of the supposed bosses are well-known in Mexico.
Reputedly wildly wealthy outlaws, the capos are legends in their own time. But given the corruption and involvement of political actors and government
officials in the business, the narrative that depicts drug lords as belligerent criminals challenging a moral but besieged state is a questionable
one.
Virtually all Mexican institutions, including the Roman Catholic Church, are tainted by the narco. It was probably no accident that a “narco-manta,”
or propaganda banner, was wrapped around the historic Cathedral in Aguascalientes this year.
“(Drug traffickers) are very generous with the public of their habitual towns, and they generally put in electricity and establish communication
systems, highways and roads on their own account,” Carlos Aguiar Retes, president of the Mexican Episcopal Conference, told the Mexican press this
year. “They are very generous and many times construct a church or temple there.”
Insisting that the church does not accept direct donations from drug traffickers and attempts to put lawbreakers on a spiritual path, Aguiar
nonetheless acknowledged that narcos fill a social and economic void in poor communities. “I am not justifying it, I am simply recounting the
evidence,” he added.
NARCO NAFTA
In a 2007 interview with Proceso magazine, Ricardo Garcia Villalobos, president of Mexico’s agrarian reform court, credited the expansion of the drug
economy
on the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
According to Garcia, NAFTA favored rural drug production as government subsidies for legal crops were reduced; guaranteed prices for crops like corn
were eliminated with the disappearance of the government-owned CONASUPO buying and distribution system; energy supports were slashed; and
a government-owned fertilizer company, FERTIMEX, was privatized.
Implemented by a coterie of US-educated “technocrats,” the NAFTA-inspired agricultural reform mirrored in striking ways policies put into motion in
the United States decades earlier, when the Steagall Amendment expired and the 1953 Farm Act was passed. Price guarantees to farmers were reduced,
and a group called the Committee for Economic Development (CED) caught the United States Department of Agriculture’s ear. Largely successful, the
CED’s objectives were to eliminate the US’ “surplus” rural population, encourage corporate farming and let the marketplace work its magic.
In Mexico, the surplus agricultural population slated for elimination in NAFTA was supposed to find work in the factories that assemble goods for
export to the United States. The consequences of the free trade accord were felt in places like the state of Veracruz, a bountiful land known for
its coffee, vanilla, sugar, and citrus crops. Barely registering a blip on the national migrant registry in 1993, Veracruz became the fifth largest
contributor to Mexico’s migrant stream by 2000. Hundreds of thousands of Veracruzanos slipped across the US border or landed minimum wage jobs in the
export plants of Ciudad Juarez. Back at home, drug cartels, especially
the Gulf Cartel, expanded their hold on the populace.
In the Mexican countryside, meanwhile, cultivating contraband became a strategy of personal and economic survival for many small growers.
Prior to NAFTA’s passage in 1993, the Salinas de Gortari administration pushed through an important reform of the Mexican Constitution’s Article 27
that allowed collectively-owned farm lands to be sold off. An
undetermined amount of former ejido land has been since converted into drug plantations. Perhaps coming up with an exaggerated number,
Mexican agrarian official Garcia contended that 30 percent of Mexico’s arable land was dedicated to drug production.
Cruz Lopez Aguilar, leader of semi-official Mexico’s National Farmers Confederation, charged this year that drug traffickers were extorting or
pressuring rural producers to sell or rent their lands. Lopez cited the case of Diaz Ordaz, Tamaulipas, where he said traffickers pay $1,300 per
hectare to grow dope-far more than farmers receive in subsidies from the Procampo program to grow legal crops.
“This situation,” Lopez added, “has occurred in the traditional
mountainous zones, including Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas,
Sinaloa.
Gringo Habits Go South
For a long time, Mexico’s drug crops were grown to feed an insatiable, hedonistic gringo appetite north of the border.
Speaking in New York on September 23, Mexican President Felipe Calderon spun an old story. Mexico,
President Calderon insisted, is “paying a high price because of the consumption of drugs in the United States.”
But the old pattern is no longer exclusively the case. Official statistics reveal a sharp increase in both drug experimentation and addiction in
Mexico between 2002 and 2008. Based on the 2008 National Drug Addiction Survey administered to 50,000 households, the Secretariat of Health
estimated 4.5 million Mexicans had used some kind of illegal drug in 2008.
The estimate represented a 29 percent increase from the 2002 survey.
For comparison’s sake, a National Drug Policy Survey in the US estimated that 19.7 million US residents used illegal substances in 2005.
The vast majority of Mexican users are young men, the 2008 survey reconfirmed, but females aged 12-25 represented the fastest growing segment of
illegal drug users, more than doubling their presence from 0.9 percent to 2.0 percent of the demographic group in question.
Of all illegal drug users, 465,000 were classified as addicts in 2008-up from 307,000 in 2002.
Perhaps overstating his case, Jose Carlos Hernandez Aguilar, a Chihuahua City-based criminal researcher, recently warned that 50 percent of the
northern border state’s population could be addicted to drugs by 2020.
“Look, if you walk through the Plaza del Voceador al Pasito, you will easily bump into 10 indigents,” Hernandez said. “Of those (10), least 9 of them
are addicts of some kind of substance…the problem is growing a lot.”
Mexico still lags behind the United States in terms of the percentage of its population that abuses drugs, but the catch-up trend is clear for all who
care to look.
Drugs and Policy Solutions of Choice
Mexicans prefer using marijuana, cocaine, inhalants, methamphetamine,
hallucinogens and heroin in that order, according to the nation’s official
2008 drug survey.
Derived from the coca leaf, cocaine is not produced in Mexico. Yet by most
accounts, the Mexican drug cartels have taken over the international
distribution of a South American product that was once dominated by
Colombian mafias. Nowadays, tons of cocaine are even transported north to
Mexico in submarines.
Mexican drug cartels control the shipment of cocaine into the United
States and increasingly into Europe as well. An estimated market of 4.5
million European coke consumers assures a steady flow of blow to the Old
World of Columbus and the other conquistadors. And this month’s exposure
of alleged Mexican methamphetamine traffickers in Argentina only
underscores the ability of drug organizations to carve out new niches.
As Mexican cartels diversify their international market and consolidate
their internal one, a lot of funny money is circulating on the streets and
in the suites. Again, because of the illegal and secret character of drug
trafficking, no hard, publicly accepted number for the overall value of
the Mexican drug business exists. Various estimates range widely from $10
billion to $50 billion yearly, the lower number comparable to annual
revenue from international tourism and the higher one roughly equivalent
to the country’s combined income from migrant remittances and direct
foreign investment in 2007.
The impact of the drug business is even greater than the revenues from
illegal substances suggest, since many drug traffickers have also branched
out to other types of illicit activities, including pirating DVDs,
illegally harvesting timber and kidnapping-for-ransom.
Income from drugs and the wider underground economy are never considered
in official sets of economic indicators, though more than a few analysts
have contended that the Mexican economy would collapse without the
infusion of easy money.
Drugs and the Dilemmas of Political Choice
The illegal drug business in Mexico boasts decades as a major economic
activity, but the first decade of the 21st century could well go down in
history as watershed years for the business. Riding to office in 2000 on a
platform of good government and democratic reform, President Vicente Fox,
the first opposition politician elected in 71 years, promised anxious
Mexicans many changes.
Seven years later, at the beginning of the Calderon administration,
Coahuila Governor Humberto Moreira, a member of the former ruling PRI
party, joined with others in openly blaming the explosion of the drug
business on the shortfalls of the Fox administration.
“With the government of change, many things changed,” Moreira said. “Among
them drug trafficking grew exponentially.”
Moreira, nonetheless, was initially confident that President Felipe
Calderon’s drug control program, centered on law enforcement by the
Mexican military, would bear fruit.
As the Calderon administration nears its second anniversary in office,
many are skeptical that a law-and-order crackdown will have any real
success. Taken to its full logic, emphasizing law enforcement implies
locking up or processing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people
in an already dysfunctional justice system.
Amid drug-driven violence and terror, proposals to reexamine alternatives
to Mexico’s current drug control policy are gaining ground. In recent
congressional testimony, federal public safety czar Genaro Garcia Luna
conceded that drug legalization merits study and debate. On the other
hand, Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos affirmed the idea is
off the table.
Pointing to studies that show a connection between drug usage and memory
retention difficulties in young people, Cordova said legalizing drugs
could have an adverse public health effect. “From a health point of view,
it would be totally pernicious, totally negative,” Cordova said. “I am not
in agreement.”
Still, as in the United States, drug control policy in Mexico is an urgent
matter that will demand fresh approaches in the years ahead.
Sources: El Universal, September 15, 19, 22, 26, 2008. Articles by
Rebeca Jimenez, Alejandro Jimenez, Maria Teresa Montano, Juan Velediaz,
and the EFE news service. Cimacnoticias.com, September 19, 2008. El
Sur/Agencia Reforma, September 19, 2008. Common Dreams/Agence France
Press, September 5, 2008. Frontenet.com, August 9 and 25, 2008. Articles
by Enrique Corte Barrera and editorial staff.
El Diario de Juarez, August 8 and September 23, 2008. Articles by Gabriela
Minjares and El Universal. Proceso/Apro, August 25, 2008. Article by
Patricia Davila. Tribuna de la Bahia/Agencia Reforma, April 5, 2008. La
Jornada, November 11 and 22, 2007; September 17, 19, 20, 25, and 26, 2008.
Articles by Angeles Cruz Martinez, Jorge Durand and news agencies. Common
Dreams, September 24, 2008. Article by Willie Nelson and Eddie Albert.
Albuquerque Journal/Associated Press, September 8, 2006.
Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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