Climate of fear as Mexican drug cartels rule roost

Terror digs ever-deeper into the lives of citizens as drug gangs prosper in a culture of impunity, writes MICHAEL McCAUGHAN

THE CASUALTY rate in Mexico’s drug war is higher than that of the US war in Afghanistan, leaving 40,000 dead in the past five years, mostly civilians. By comparison, an armed uprising in southeast Mexico in January 1994 resulted in 150 deaths yet prompted nationwide peace rallies, a speedy ceasefire and a national dialogue.

These days Mexicans pray that this endless war of unimaginable cruelty does not arrive at their doorstep.

The statistics fail to transmit the crippling fear which grips the living. In April, a family from Mexico City visited Acapulco and went into a restaurant. A bottle of whiskey appeared at their table.

“That man over there sent it,” said a waiter. A few minutes later the same man asked the father for permission to dance with his daughter, aged 15. The father refused. “Listen carefully,” the pushy stranger said, “this young woman is mine.”

The family left the restaurant, returned to their hotel, packed their bags and headed home. An hour later their car was intercepted and their daughter kidnapped. This story was one of 70 testimonies recounted at a massive peace rally in downtown Mexico in May (see sidebar).

Mexican president Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party has responded to critics by comparing his crusade against the drug gangs to Winston Churchill’s wartime battle against the Nazis.

“We have might and right and the law on our side,” he said in a recent televised address, dismissing a public call for peace as a surrender to the drug cartels.

Calderón’s war on drugs has failed to produce results as the cartels have expanded from four to 12 and widened their targets to include migrants passing through Mexico. The country’s National Migration Institute has been implicated in the “sale” of captured migrants to gangs who demand ransom from terrified relatives.

In the past three years, 550 migration institute employees have been suspended for alleged abuses, some 15 per cent of the workforce. The cost of safe return can be up to $3,000, a golden business opportunity when 500,000 people cross the border between Guatemala and Mexico each year.

Mexico’s security forces lead the war on drugs but have been discredited by recent revelations.

Amnesty International has accused troops of torture, disappearances and murder, including charges of passing off innocent victims of army violence as members of drug gangs.

One in four police officers is allegedly tied to drug cartels and an estimated 10,000 people have simply “disappeared” – classed as neither alive nor dead, their whereabouts unknown. The escalating violence has seen citizens step back from social encounters, retreating into private worlds just as the Argentinian and Chilean people did during the dictatorship era.

The media has toned down its coverage of drug gangs, with some newspapers publicly calling on the cartels to advise them where to draw the line to prevent reprisals.

In Sinaloa state, 700 people have been killed this year and local police are accused of collaborating with the cartels.

Last month, beleaguered state officials banned restaurants and bars from playing narcocorridos, the popular ballads which extol the exploits of drug traffickers.

Twenty years ago, a previous government banned all songs with references to the drug trade from being aired on radio. Soon after Los Tigres del Norte, a popular local band, released an album, Corridos Prohibidos, which earned the band a platinum sales disc.

The governor of Sinaloa stepped on to the battlefield once more last month to declare war on Ralph Lauren polo shirts, the uniform of choice of the drug traffickers. The governor was “hugely worried” at the manner in which disaffected youth were seduced by the glamour of expensive brands, adding that he wished they would wear clothes with images of national heroes like Emiliano Zapata.

The irony of this will not be lost on the Zapatista movement in southeast Mexico which sparked a renaissance of Zapata’s ideals in 1994, demanding peace, justice and democracy. The government responded with tanks, warplanes and bullets.

The Calderón administration points to its successes in law enforcement with record drug seizures and arrests of suspects, but there is no corresponding sense of defeat of the powerful cartels.

Mexico’s crisis is fuelled by a number of factors beyond its control: the demand for illicit drugs in the US and the ease with which assault weapons are spirited across the US-Mexico border.

The flow of illicit money travels through global financial institutions, a reminder that the long-term solution lies beyond Mexico’s borders. Meanwhile Mexico’s embattled justice system has reached breakdown point, with 98 per cent of serious crimes going unpunished, fostering a culture of impunity.

In a measure approved by the US government this week, gunshop owners must report all purchases of two or more high- calibre weapons within five days.

However, Mexico’s drug gangs have had no difficulty acquiring weapons elsewhere in a region racked for decades by civil war and criminality.