Mexico Rethinks Drug Strategy
As death toll rises, Mexico rethinks drug war strategy
By TIM JOHNSON
McClatchy Newspapers
MEXICO CITY | The drug war in Mexico is at a crossroads.
As the death toll climbs above 28,000, President Felipe Calderon confronts growing pressure to try a different strategy — some are even suggesting legalizing narcotics — to quell the violence unleashed by major drug syndicates.
Many Mexicans don’t know whether their country is winning or losing the war against drug traffickers, but they know they are fatigued by the brutality sweeping parts of their nation. For example:
Eighteen people were killed at a July 18 birthday party in Torreon, the capital of the state of Coahuila. A prison warden freed the assailants and lent them vehicles and assault rifles to do the killing.
In Durango, eight severed heads were left strewn around the state one late July morning. Outside of Monterrey, soldiers discovered a mass dumping ground of victims of the drug wars containing 51 bodies.
During Calderon’s tenure, gangs have killed 915 municipal police officers, 698 state police, and 463 federal agents, said the Secretariat of Public Safety.
Beyond the drug trade’s public violence, its corrupting aspects have affected many aspects of Mexican society.
“There are powerful interests in Mexico who benefit from the drug trade and the $40 billion, or whatever it is, that is pumped into the Mexican economy,” said Scott Stewart, vice president for tactical intelligence at Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that provides global analysis. “You’re talking bankers. You’re talking businesses that are laundering money, construction companies that are building resorts.”
When the huge drug trade boils into the public eye, it threatens another of Mexico’s major trade channels — tourism, the nation’s third-largest source of revenue, and generator of one out of every 7.7 jobs in Mexico.
Fighting the cartels
After coming to office in 2007, Calderon turned to the military for help in fighting at least seven drug cartels that held sway over vast areas of Mexico, rapidly deploying some 45,000 troops.
The deployment coincided with intensified fighting between the Gulf Cartel and its former armed wing, known as Los Zetas.
The Sinaloa Cartel, perhaps the strongest drug syndicate to emerge since the heyday of Colombian cartels in the 1980s and early 1990s, also is battling a weaker cartel based in the border city of Juarez across from El Paso, Texas.
Calderon this week urged his countrymen to not gauge the drug war by the relentless rise in deaths.
In early April, newspaper tallies put the toll at about 18,000, but legislators leaked a higher official estimate — 22,700. This month, the number was pegged at 28,000 by the nation’s intelligence chief.
“The number of murders or the degree of violence isn’t necessarily the best indicator of progress or retreat, or if the war … is won or lost,” the president told opposition party chiefs at a meeting called to pull the nation behind his counter-drug strategy. “It is a sign of the severity of the problem.”
Calderon called the party bosses, along with academics and civic leaders, into public sessions on how to improve security and get the upper hand against the drug gangs, several of which are engaged in bloody warfare over smuggling routes.
“What I ask, simply, is for clear ideas and precise proposals on how to improve this strategy,” the president said at one session.
What Calderon, a bespectacled economist with a professorial manner, got instead was a barrage of criticism. The government should send soldiers back to their barracks, he was told, and do more to attack money laundering and to protect judges. Several politicians, including former President Vicente Fox, suggested that he consider legalizing narcotics.
The near-daily brainstorming sessions were interrupted when Calderon flew to Colombia to attend the swearing-in of President Juan Manuel Santos. That nation’s success in battling cocaine cartels has served as a reference point for discussions.
The police question
Calderon is seeking support for wholesale police reform in Mexico, where some 33,000 officers belong to a federal police force and 430,000 more belong to disparate state or municipal forces. He has pointed to Colombia’s unified national police as how to make headway against organized crime.
Calderon would abolish about 1,200 municipal police departments and strengthen 32 state police under some level of federal command.
As it is now, he said, “there is no possibility of setting directives on strategy, logistics or even discipline on this enormous body of police at the municipal level.”
Municipal police earn miserable salaries and are often notoriously corrupt. They also often face a choice given by drug gangs — “plomo” or “plata” — either take a “lead” bullet or accept a payoff in “silver” to look the other way.
Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna estimated that narcotics cartels paid about $100 million a month in bribes to municipal police officers across Mexico, ensuring their activities went undisturbed.
“Probably the most corrupt institutions in Mexico are those municipal police forces,” Stewart said. “The police officers are kind of seen as some sort of third-class citizens. “Basically, the privileged … like the fact that they can offer somebody 20 or 50 bucks to get out of a speeding ticket. It’s very convenient to have that level of corruption.”
No one believes the corruption ends with the municipal force. Some 250 federal police officers last weekend abducted a commander briefly in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, accusing him of being in cahoots with traffickers and forcing the police to extort citizens.
The backlash
As public discussions unfolded about counter-drug strategy, a surprisingly harsh critic was Fox, of Calderon’s National Action Party.
“We should consider legalizing the production, sale and distribution of drugs,” Fox wrote on his blog Aug. 7, making big headlines the next day. “Radical prohibition strategies have never worked.”
Fox wrote that legalization would “break the economic system that allows cartels to make huge profits, which in turn increases their power and capacity to corrupt.”
Opposition party chiefs, such as Jesus Ortega, the head of the leftist Revolutionary Democratic Party, backed Fox’s calls for legalization and said prosecutors should examine the corrupt financial system.
The money of the cartels “isn’t stuffed under the mattresses of drug lords,” he said.
Attorney General Arturo Chavez Chavez acknowledged that legal “stumbling blocks” hindered the confiscation of drug lords’ assets, saying that the government soon would offer reforms.
However, Stewart predicted that entrenched political and business interests would block any reform of law enforcement or money-laundering legislation.
“People are becoming very rich off the flow of money,” Stewart said.
Travel safety
Mexican tourism officials, trying to keep the flow of 22 million foreigners and their foreign currency each year, downplay the drug violence and point to white beaches, colonial cities, Mayan pyramids and world-class cuisine.
In Kansas City, travel agents are advising travelers to Mexico to avoid driving through border towns. A travel agent had a client cancel her wedding there in favor of another location.
“We tell everybody that it’s the border towns where most of the problems are. But if you’re flying in you’re passing by all the trouble spots,” said Marj Beane, an agent at AAA Travel Agency in Overland Park.
“We’ve had people come back recently from Mexico and say that they found people there bending over backwards to help them out. Tourism is a big money maker there so they want and really need tourists to come. … I myself would not hesitate to go there at all.”
Mexican tourism officials highlight some off-the-beaten-path destinations, promoting 10 “Routes of Mexico” in a campaign in the U.S. and Canada. The beautifully crafted ads on cable TV and in mass-market magazines show no images of the gunfights that have been a feature of streets in a number of cities or mention that drug traffickers have kidnapped guests out of reputable hotels in Monterrey.
Acapulco’s hotel zone on April 14 was the site of a daylight shootout between police and drug traffickers that left three people dead.
Would-be tourists are left with a lingering question: Where is it safe to go?
It is a question that the Mexico Tourism Board does not answer. Its officials say foreigners can go just about anywhere. Itineraries suggested on the visitmexico.com website include violence-ravaged states such as Michoacan, Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango, where the U.S. State Department urges American citizens to exercise “extreme caution.” The State Department also urges Americans to avoid all unnecessary travel to Michoacan.
“Our job isn’t to talk about security. Our job is to talk about the assets we have as a country,” said Rodolfo Lopez Negrete, the Tourism Board’s operating chief. “The positives vastly outweigh these kinds of very isolated situations we have in the country.”
Tijuana has a poor reputation, but the farther down the Baja California peninsula, the safer it gets. The beautiful and quaint colonial cities in the states of Guanajuato, Queretaro and Jalisco beckon. Hidalgo, Veracruz and San Luis Potosi states along the Gulf of Mexico are relatively calm.
But in Tamaulipas state, beheadings and kidnappings have been intense.
Mexico City and the states of Tlaxcala, Puebla, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche and Yucatan with its Mayan ruins are also considered safe.
“Millions of U.S. citizens safely visit Mexico each year,” said a State Department warning dated July 16.
It noted that roughly 1 million Americans live in Mexico, and that resort and tourist destinations don’t see the violence of border areas or drug corridors.
It seems to me that it would benefit Mexico even more if the US would legalize drugs.
Tags: Mexico, Oaxaca, USA
Zoe
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