Mexico: Democracy Interrupted
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ISBN-10:
0300160313
ISBN-13:
9780300160314
Pub. Date:
07/03/2012
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Mexico: Democracy Interrupted

Mexico: Democracy Interrupted

by Jo TuckmanJo Tuckman

Overview

An up-to-date portrait of Mexico since 2000, with new insights into the nation's problematic democracy and violent drug wars

In 2000, Mexico's long invincible Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidential election to Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN). The ensuing changeover—after 71 years of PRI dominance—was hailed as the beginning of a new era of hope for Mexico. Yet the promises of the PAN victory were not consolidated. In this vivid account of Mexico's recent history, a journalist with extensive reporting experience investigates the nation's young democracy, its shortcomings and achievements, and why the PRI is favored to retake the presidency in 2012.

Jo Tuckman reports on the murky, terrifying world of Mexico's drug wars, the counterproductive government strategy, and the impact of U.S. policies. She describes the reluctance and inability of politicians to seriously tackle rampant corruption, environmental degradation, pervasive poverty, and acute inequality. To make matters worse, the influence of non-elected interest groups has grown and public trust in almost all institutions—including the Catholic church—is fading. The pressure valve once presented by emigration is also closing. Even so, there are positive signs: the critical media cannot be easily controlled, and small but determined citizen groups notch up significant, if partial, victories for accountability. While Mexico faces complex challenges that can often seem insurmountable, Tuckman concludes, the unflagging vitality and imagination of many in Mexico inspire hope for a better future.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300160314
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 07/03/2012
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 328
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jo Tuckman is a Mexico-based foreign correspondent who reports for The Guardian, among many other publications on both sides of the Atlantic. She lives in Mexico City.

Read an Excerpt

MEXICO

Democracy Interrupted
By JO TUCKMAN

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Jo Tuckman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-16031-4

Chapter One

Narco Trouble

Dawn was just breaking when the first contingent of gunmen gathered at the entrance to the sleepy northern mountain town of Creel, the gateway to the spectacular Copper Canyon tourist railway. At first, the collection of figures with assault rifles slung across their backs did not do much to get noticed. They were not hiding either. They seemed to be just hanging out, watching their breath condense in the early morning air.

In the front passenger seat of a sports utility vehicle (SUV) was a round-faced man with straight eyebrows, who appeared to be in charge. At one point he waved about a piece of paper that presumably contained instructions of some kind. At another he handed around a bag filled with white powder, and then did copious amounts of snorting himself.

By the time the first rays of sunshine had crept down the sierra, the group had grown substantially and the action began. About ten of the gunmen ran across a frosted field, surrounded a two-storey white house, shot through the windows, kicked in the door, and disappeared inside.

Back at the crossroads other gunmen stopped passing cars. They roughly pulled one driver out from behind the wheel and forced him to lie on the tarmac while something was taken out of his vehicle. Back on his feet again soon after, he shook hands with one of his assailants and then drove slowly away. Eventually the commando did the same. Around thirty armed men climbed aboard thirteen vehicles that snaked out of town until they disappeared out of sight into the mountains.

I did not see any of this take place, and nor does the account come from an eye-witness. The source is more worrying. The armed organized criminal commando at work on 15 March 2010 was filmed by police cameras that were connected to a network that was supposed to mean greater coordination between different law enforcement institutions and quicker response times. There was nothing to indicate that any of those institutions responded at all that morning, during which eight people were killed in and around Creel. They included a fourteen-year-old girl shot dead in a raid on another house. The rest were abducted, killed and then dumped outside town, or else left dead inside their vehicles. Six people were also injured. It seemed the gang was free to set the death toll it wished.

By that time the Mexican drug wars, which spiralled after President Felipe Calderón launched a military-led offensive against the country's cartels in December 2006, were already producing such a litany of horror that the Creel killings warranted only a cursory mention in the national press the next day. The surrounding mountains have long been known as an area of drug cultivation, but the town was not considered particularly problematic, even within its own northern state of Chihuahua, where the daily bloodbath in the border city of Ciudad Juárez grabbed the bulk of available attention. The local Creel tourist industry was also keen to keep the news quiet, for fear of scaring off visitors.

The episode came into the spotlight only when the police video found its way onto a late-night TV news programme called Punto de Partida. Then it became a YouTube hit. The images themselves were far less disturbing than the pictures of dead bodies that were regularly printed in the local press, or than the filmed gun battles, torture and murder readily found on the internet. But there was something particularly shocking about the Creel film: murderers in no obvious hurry going about their business openly, while the authorities – and now the citizens, too – seemed capable of doing little more than watching and trying to stay out of the way.

* * *

The story of narcotics in Mexico goes back to the opium poppies, introduced by Chinese immigrants, that began growing in the twisted and towering Sierra Madre Occidental in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa at the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1920s, traffickers, who dealt primarily in opium paste, had established clear routes into the US market at a time when Prohibition fomented a wider culture of cross-border contraband. Marijuana, a native crop that was cultivated more widely, initially held less interest for smugglers; but the drug-culture boom of the 1960s in the United States changed all that and provided them with their first opportunity to get really rich. A new generation of tougher players took over the trafficking scene, still largely rooted in Sinaloa.

Under pressure to get into line with President Richard Nixon's 'war on drugs', the Mexican government dispatched tens of thousands of soldiers in the mid-1970s to eradicate those plantations in the part of the sierra that was shared by the neighbouring states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, and that is known as the Golden Triangle. Operation Condor, the closest historical precedent to the Calderón offensive of thirty years later, was billed as a great success at the time. The truth was that it did little, if anything, to slow the growing Mexican drugs industry.

Instead it instilled deep resentments in the area itself, encouraged traffickers to step up cultivation elsewhere, and prompted many drug lords, or capos, to move their bases out of Sinaloa. Some of the biggest went to the central city of Guadalajara. By the 1980s, many Mexican kingpins were also expanding their portfolios to include South American cocaine, making them less reliant on locally produced marijuana and opium paste anyway.

Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, a former policeman and bodyguard of a Sinaloa governor, became the most famous trafficker of that era. Smartly dressed, urbane and famously generous, he financed a new library at the Sinaloa state university, maintained a local hospital and travelled widely to the US and Europe, as well as across Latin America. Some remember this as a kind of golden age of Mexican trafficking – a time of rapid expansion, during which violence was used only as a last resort. Félix Gallardo lived as a respectable local businessman, protected by government officials for years.

The bell tolled for this generation of Mexican capos after an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent called Enrique Camarena was tortured and killed in 1985. The US demanded action and, after a little feet-dragging, the Mexican authorities began arresting some of the biggest traffickers and accusing them of his murder. Félix Gallardo was one of the last to fall, detained in a Guadalajara restaurant in 1989. His demise was also associated with the end of the tolerance he had enjoyed from the US authorities in return for his willingness to provide funds and weapons to the US-backed Contra counter-revolutionaries fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

The story goes that, after his arrest, the Jefe de Jefes, or Boss of Bosses, organized a week-long summit in a luxurious house in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco, at which second-tier figures divided up the different bases of his trafficking empire. These included key northern border crossing points such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez and Nuevo Laredo, as well as other trafficking hubs further south. The idea was to maintain the peace and to keep business ticking over in an era of increased pressure from law enforcement agencies.

In letters written from prison and published in Diego Enrique Osorno's 2010 book El Cartel de Sinaloa, Félix Gallardo denied that the fabled meeting ever took place. He claimed the turf division had been organized by the corrupt police chief who took him down. However it came about, this organization of the country into clear, geographically defined trafficking plazas controlled by particular groups, is sometimes referred to as the birth of the Mexican regional drug cartels. (Many academics object to the use of the word 'cartel' to describe drug-trafficking groups, because of its formal associations with price fixing. In recent years the term has become all but impossible to avoid, not least because many of the groups use it to describe themselves.)

Even if there was a peace pact, it did not last for very long, as the major capos of the 1990s began shoring up control of their bastions by killing rivals. Brutal as these conflicts were, compared to what was to come they now seem like playground scraps or knightly jousting. Though the point is often exaggerated, the contract killers of that era claim to have been a breed apart from today's murderers. They say they were guided by codes of mafia ethics not to hurt the families of their targets or innocent bystanders, as well as by the old axiom that it was bad for business to calentar la plaza, to turn up the heat on the turf.

The rapid expansion of the drug-trafficking pie that came with the demise of the major trafficking organizations based in Colombia may also have helped contain the violence. In the wake of the success of US efforts to close Caribbean smuggling routes in the 1980s, Colombian traffickers had already begun channelling ever greater quantities of cocaine to the US through Mexico. By the time the Medellín and then the Cali cartels were broken up in the 1990s, the Mexicans were ready and waiting to take more control.

The new wave of Mexican capos was still predominantly Sinaloa-rooted, even if their businesses were based elsewhere in the country. The most famous member of the Sinaloa diaspora, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, earned himself the nickname 'Lord of the Skies' for his audacious use of gutted commercial jets to transport tonnes of cocaine from Colombia to the northern Mexican border and then, after a change of aircraft, over into the US. The planes then carried cargoes of cash on their way back. Carrillo Fuentes took over the cartel based in the border city of Ciudad Juárez in 1993, but died in 1997 after what appeared to be a deliberately bungled plastic surgery operation. His death came four months after the arrest of the newly appointed Mexican drug 'tsar', a general who would later be convicted of protecting the Juárez cartel.

By the time I arrived in Mexico in 2000, the glory days of the Juárez cartel were over. Vicente Carrillo Fuentes had replaced his dead brother at the top, but showed little of Amado's flair. Even so, most independent experts and government sources still identified Juárez as the biggest player on the national scene.

The cartel based in the frontier city of Tijuana and run by the numerous siblings of the Arellano Félix family was the next most notorious; however, that family's fortunes also waned in the early years of the century. Ramón Arellano Félix, the group's chief enforcer, died in a gun battle in February 2002, a month before the authorities arrested his brother Benjamín, the reputed brains of the organization. By the time Francisco Javier Arellano Félix was apprehended by the US Coast Guard off the coast of Baja California Sur in 2006, the cartel was said to be in disarray.

Analysts also mentioned the Gulf cartel, based on the other side of the country. It was run by Osiel Cárdenas Guillén from 1998 until he was arrested by the army in 2003. His broader influence was not fully recognized at the time, in part because he lacked a traditional Sinaloa pedigree.

With the Juárez cartel not what it had been, Tijuana apparently falling apart and the Gulf without its top leader, experts began predicting the end of the big drug barons. They saw a future of small cartels that deliberately kept a low profile in order to keep business ticking over, as had happened in Colombia. But rather than sending out the message that it was time to stay out of trouble, the round-up of Mexican kingpins in 2002 and 2003 helped lay the foundations for the future drug wars, as other ambitious capos saw opportunities to expand.

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera became the biggest of all. Known universally as El Chapo (which, in his native Sinaloa, means 'short and stocky') the 1.68-meter (5 foot 6 inch) capo mutated into the symbol of Mexican drug trafficking in the new era.

Born into poverty in the drug-steeped traditions of the Golden Triangle, in a tiny village called La Tuna in the municipality of Badiraguato, El Chapo grew up under the tutelage of Félix Gallardo, but his style was very different. The older kingpin read Voltaire and García Márquez and filled one of his letters from jail with nostalgia over a trip to Geneva and his appreciation of the Swiss sense of order. Chapo, though reputedly acutely intelligent, was barely educated and is famed for using ghost-writers to finesse his love letters.

Chapo first gained public notoriety in the turf wars of the 1990s, after a shootout with the Arellano Félix brothers in the Guadalajara airport car park in 1993. They all escaped unharmed, although the battle resulted in the death of a local cardinal, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, shot dead inside his car (the controversy over whether this was accidental, as police investigations concluded, lives on to this day).

Chapo was arrested within weeks in Guatemala. Taken back to Mexico, he spent the rest of the decade in a high-security prison, with ample funds at his disposal to buy special privileges that took the edge off the hardships of confinement. His escape in January 2001 was said to have been prompted by the imminent threat of extradition to the US. A recent investigation by journalist Anabel Hernández concluded that he went out the front gate in a police uniform with the complicity of high-up government officials. This contradicts the official version that he was pushed through numerous security doors in a dirty laundry cart and driven out of the prison itself in the boot of an employee's car.

Once free, Chapo spearheaded an alliance of Sinaloa-rooted kingpins that became known as The Federation. It is widely accepted that this was sketched out at an initial capo summit in the central city of Cuernavaca in 2001. Aside from Chapo, that meeting was reportedly attended by the top brass of Sinaloa trafficking at the time. These included Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada García, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno or 'El Azul', Ignacio 'Nacho' Coronel Villarreal, and at least one of the four trafficking brothers with the surname Beltrán Leyva. Vicente Carrillo Fuentes of the Sinaloa-rooted Juárez cartel sent a high-level envoy.

The Sinaloa Federation, intertwined with familial as well as business ties, set out to achieve hegemony in the Mexican drug-trafficking world, but its expansion plans hit a block when it began an invasion of the Gulf cartel stronghold of Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas. The country's busiest inland port was an obvious jewel in any trafficker's crown. In the spring of 2005, the city erupted in a series of major shootouts in public places which broke the mould of the targeted hits that had characterized the turf wars of the past. These were not just assassinations that got out of control, but were full-on battles over physical territory.

Many date the start of the drug wars to this conflict, in which the Sinaloans badly underestimated the Gulf cartel. Despite the arrest of its top leader in 2003, the Gulf cartel both fended off the invasion and counterattacked in Sinaloa bastions elsewhere in the country, most notably Acapulco.

The Gulf's resilience stemmed from the effectiveness of its paramilitary wing, which was formed in the late 1990s from a core of around a dozen army deserters, mostly from an elite anti-drug unit. They called themselves Los Zetas, reputedly after old police radio codes, and they revolutionized the concept and practice of cartel enforcement.

The Zetas brought superior training and operational planning, a focus on weaponry, a willingness to use extreme cruelty and a disregard for who might also get killed, aside from the original target. All other major trafficking organizations in Mexico realized that they needed to form similar units if they wanted to compete. And this they did, often with the help of former police commanders. With the fighting being done by professionals on all sides, once the drug wars started, they were both particularly brutal and particularly hard to stop by the kind of capo peace pacts that had helped keep a lid on rivalries in the past.

Changes in business models have also given the cartels a broader range of things to fight over. As well as continuing to smuggle South American cocaine and locally produced marijuana and heroin, the Mexican traffickers started manufacturing synthetic drugs, particularly methamphetamines. Mexican production boomed after a 2005 US congressional ban on over-the-counter sales of pseudoephedrine, one of the main ingredients of the drug, made it harder for clandestine labs to operate 'stateside'.

The local user market has also grown, with the number of Mexican addicts jumping by 51 per cent between 2002 and 2008, according to government surveys. The problem is particularly acute in the big cities along the border. The proportion of Mexican drug users in the general population is still only about a tenth of the figure in the US or Europe, and is significantly lower than in much of Latin America. Nevertheless, managing distribution networks for key local markets with the potential to grow requires the cartels to maintain tighter control of their territories than is necessary when the objective is merely to move cargos through the country unseen.

Explicit territorial domination is also required by the parallel trend of diversification out of drugs and into other types of organized crime. The Zetas have been among the most aggressive in this respect, running extensive extortion rackets, systematically kidnapping Central American migrants on their way north, siphoning crude oil out of pipelines and selling it over the border, and producing their own label of pirated movies. There was even a bottle of brandy in the shape of a letter 'Z' at one point, though this said more about the symbolic power of the label than about its money-making potential. The Zetas are believed to operate as a kind of franchise, lending the terror of their name to budding criminal gangs across the country (which are not necessarily integrated into the structure), and then taking a cut of the profits.

(Continues...)


Excerpted from MEXICO by JO TUCKMAN Copyright © 2012 by Jo Tuckman. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Narco Trouble 18

Chapter 2 Political Wastelands 52

Chapter 3 The Misrule of Law 84

Chapter 4 Lapsed Catholics 117

Chapter 5 A Bungled War 143

Chapter 6 Not Good Enough 179

Chapter 7 Environmental Time Bombs 214

Chapter 8 Left Behind? 243

Chapter 9 Unfinished Story 278

Sources 287

Index 301

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