Drug Abuse

 

Pubdate: Mon, 30 Mar 2009

Source: New York Times (NY)

Page: A1, Front Page

Copyright: 2009 The New York Times Company

Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Website: http://www.nytimes.com/

 

 

IN DRUG WAR, MEXICO FIGHTS CARTEL AND ITSELF

 

REYNOSA, Mexico - An army convoy on the hunt for traffickers rolled 

out of its base recently in this border town under the control of the 

Gulf Cartel - and an ominous voice crackled over a two-way radio 

frequency to announce just that. The voice, belonging to a cartel 

spy, then broadcast the soldiers' route through the city, turn by 

turn, using the same military language as the soldiers.

 

"They're following us," Col. Juan Jose Gomez, who was monitoring the 

transmission from the front seat of an olive-green pickup truck, said 

with a shrug.

 

The presence of the informers, some of them former soldiers, 

highlights a central paradox in Mexico's ambitious and bloody assault 

on the drug cartels that have ravaged the country. The nation has 

begun a war, but it cannot fully rely on the very institutions - the 

police, customs, the courts, the prisons, even the relatively clean 

army - most needed to carry it out.

 

The cartels bring in billions of dollars more than the Mexican 

government spends to defeat them, and they spend their wealth to 

bolster their ranks with an untold number of politicians, judges, 

prison guards and police officers - so many police officers, in fact, 

that entire forces in cities across Mexico have been disbanded and 

rebuilt from scratch.

 

Over the past year, the country's top organized crime prosecutor has 

been arrested for receiving cartel cash, as was the director of 

Interpol in Mexico. The cartels even managed to slip a mole inside 

the United States Embassy. Those in important positions who have 

resisted taking cartel money are often shot to death, a powerful 

incentive to others who might be wavering.

 

This was a war started by Mexico, but supported - and in some ways 

undermined - by the United States. The template was made in the 

United States, a counternarcotics strategy originally designed for 

Colombia. Mexico is using American intelligence to track the 

traffickers and is awaiting a fleet of American helicopters and 

aircraft to pursue them, part of hundreds of millions of dollars in 

aid initiated by President George W. Bush and expanded in recent days 

by President Obama.

 

At the same time, American drug users are fueling demand for the 

drugs, and American guns are supplying the firepower wielded with 

such ferocity by Mexico's cartels - a reality acknowledged by 

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on her trip to Mexico last week.

 

With the prospect of a quick victory increasingly elusive, a rising 

chorus of voices on both sides of the border is questioning the cost 

and the fallout of the assault on the cartels.

 

Mexicans, aghast at the rising body count, the mutilated corpses on 

their streets and the swagger of the drug chieftains, wonder if they 

are paying too high a price in pursuing organized crime groups that 

have operated for generations on their soil. "Sometimes, I think this 

is a war you can't really win," a Mexican soldier whispered to a 

reporter, out of earshot of his commander, during a recent drug 

patrol in Reynosa. "You do what you can, but there's so many more of 

them than us."

 

Americans, including border state governors and military analysts in 

Washington, have begun to question whether the spillover violence 

presents a threat to their own national security, and, to the outrage 

of many Mexicans, whether the country itself will crumble under the 

strain of the war.

 

A War's Origins

 

The impetus for the drug war began during President Felipe Calderon's 

2006 campaign.

 

Although the economy was the No. 1 issue, Mr. Calderon, a 

law-and-order technocrat, was paying attention to a steady rise in 

criminality early on. Mr. Calderon received threats on his life from 

drug cartels during the campaign, fueling his outrage, according to 

officials close to him. And he began to suspect that drug money was 

finding its way into political parties.

 

After a nail-biter of a victory, by about half of a percent of the 41 

million ballots cast, so close that his main opponent still does not 

recognize it, Mr. Calderon opted to send the army into the streets to 

fight the drug cartels. He aimed for the bold step to win the support 

of the crime-weary population and to bolster his legitimacy as the 

president for all Mexicans.

 

While his contested election seemed to fade quickly from public 

discussion, the drug war proved a e bigger headache. About 28 months 

down the line, the government trumpets record seizures of drugs, 

money and guns to show that it is striking serious blows against the 

traffickers.

 

As further evidence of success, the government cites the tens of 

thousands of arrests it has made of rank-and-file members of the four 

main Mexican cartels and of some of the kingpins leading them. 

Recently, three top traffickers have been arrested, including one 

accused of organizing an assault on the United States Consulate in Monterrey.

 

The United States Drug Enforcement Administration says Mexico's 

battle against drugs is clamping down on supplies, citing the 

doubling of cocaine prices in the United States over the past two years.

 

But violence has gone up, not down. Although Mexicans have largely 

backed Mr. Calderon's efforts, the figure they seem most fixated on 

these days is the more than 6,200 drug-related killings in 2008, up 

more than 100 percent from 2007, and the more than 1,100 so far in 2009.

 

The deaths, many of them gruesome mutilations intended by the cartels 

to attract notice, come from dealers enforcing discipline within 

their ranks, from bitter turf battles among rival cartels and from 

clashes between criminals and the authorities. Prompting the most 

outrage, but representing the smallest number, are innocents struck 

down by stray bullets, enveloped by the ever-present drug war.

 

While Mr. Calderon dismisses critiques suggesting that Mexico is a 

failed state, he and his aides have spoken bluntly of the cartels' 

attempts to set up a state within a state, levying taxes, throwing up 

roadblocks and enforcing their own codes of behavior. The Mexican 

government says there are now 233 "zones of impunity," areas where 

crime runs rampant, down from 2,204 zones a year ago.

 

Mr. Calderon and his security team argue that the violence shows the 

desperation of the cartels as the government dismantles them. The 

D.E.A. agrees that the cartels are in their death throes, but it says 

it expects the violence to get worse in the near future.

 

Any projection that tougher times are on the horizon alarms an 

already jittery public. Tougher than the head of the federal police 

killed by hitmen last year? Tougher than the heads of nine soldiers 

found in plastic bags? Tougher than the cartels flaunting their power 

by hanging banners on bridges listing their demands?

 

National Weaknesses

 

It has long been considered a Mexican cultural eccentricity that the 

country's police officers are poorly paid and encouraged by 

supervisors to make ends meet through bribes. These days, however, 

those offering the biggest mordidas, as the illicit changing of money 

is known, are the traffickers, who Mr. Calderon's administration 

acknowledges have thousands of police officers, small-town mayors and 

even high-level government officials across the country on their 

payroll, something now regarded as a full-fledged national crisis.

 

"Anybody could be a narco," said a Mexican government official, using 

the Spanish slang for someone with links to the drug traffickers.

 

In fact, before the Mexican government names someone to a high-level 

antidrug post, it often runs the leading candidates by the D.E.A., 

which conducts background checks and lie-detector tests to ensure 

that the people about to be hired to fight criminals are not 

criminals themselves.

 

Even in normal times, when morgues are not overflowing, the bulk of 

Mexico's crimes are never solved. One investigation found that only 

24 of every 1,000 crimes reported to authorities resulted in suspects 

being sentenced. Of every 100 people taken into custody on suspicion 

of committing a crime, fewer than 4 were ever found guilty, the same 

study found. Evidence is mishandled, witnesses refuse to speak and 

the judiciary is manipulated.

 

The authorities often spotlight arrests, hauling the suspects before 

the cameras, and then quietly release them after the 80 days of 

investigation that Mexico's system allows.

 

Mexicans long ago lost faith in their judicial authorities. One 

recent study found that about 90 percent of those who have been 

victims of a crime never reported the episode to the authorities, 

convinced it would do no good.

 

"I didn't see anything," is the national refrain, one that Mr. 

Calderon is chipping away at with anonymous tip lines and beefed-up rewards.

 

The United States government, which has set aside a portion of its 

aid money for so-called institution building and judicial reform in 

Mexico, recently estimated that 450,000 Mexicans were making their 

living in the drug industry, about one-third of them involved 

directly in the business of trafficking drugs and two-thirds 

cultivating drugs in the countryside. But nobody really knows how 

many people are linked to what is a sprawling drug economy.

 

Some are inside Mexican customs, where someone recently dabbed Vicks 

VapoRub on the nose of a drug-sniffing dog. Airports, land borders 

and seaports have been a clearinghouse for the cartels' central 

ingredients - illegal drugs, illicit cash and smuggled guns - as some 

customs employees charged with searching for the goods have turned a 

blind eye for a fee. In fact, American authorities are discussing a 

plan to inspect vehicles leaving the United States for Mexico to make 

sure they are not carrying contraband.

 

Mexico's prison system presents another vulnerability. Joaquin Guzman 

Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and the most-wanted man in 

Mexico, presides over a huge drug production and trafficking 

operation with the help of an extensive network of turncoat 

politicians and police officers. Although he was sent to prison, he 

managed to bribe prison officials to help him escape in 2001. Aware 

that Mexican prisons are often run by the prisoners, Mexico has been 

extraditing record numbers of drug suspects to the United States, 

something it resisted doing for years.

 

On Thursday, a man who was in the process of being extradited to the 

United States for drug trafficking received help in escaping from a 

hospital in Chihuahua State, where he was undergoing medical 

treatment under police guard. The men who facilitated his escape were 

apparently his fellow traffickers, and the authorities are also 

investigating whether some of the police guards were part of the breakout plan.

 

Although Mexico's military is regarded as significantly less corrupt 

than the country's police forces, defense officials estimate that 

100,000 soldiers have quit to join the cartels over the past seven years.

 

In Reynosa, the Gulf Cartel, which controls a vast swath of territory 

along Mexico's eastern coastline, has hired a paramilitary force, 

known as the Zetas, to protect its turf. Founded by army deserters, 

their arsenal is so extensive that even their system of informants 

cannot keep it hidden.

 

On night patrol in Reynosa in November, soldiers came upon some 

suspicious men, who led them to a house that was packed with 

armaments for the drug cartels - 540 rifles, 165 grenades, 500,000 

rounds of ammunition and 14 sticks of dynamite. It was Mexico's 

biggest arms seizure to date - but the owners of the cache 

themselves, as they so often do, escaped to fight again.

 

The reach of the drug kingpins has even the army fearful. Many 

soldiers cover their faces while on patrol to avoid being identified 

and singled out by the drug cartels. The army also recently began 

allowing soldiers to grow their hair longer, because military-style 

crew cuts were believed to be putting off-duty soldiers at risk.

 

To address the problem of corruption in the military, the Defense 

Ministry has proposed a 60-year prison term for any soldier linked to 

organized crime. Commanders admit that they must carefully guard 

information on their missions from potential cartel members in 

uniform. And the roadblocks they set up, like one that stopped cars 

recently near the bridge connecting Reynosa and McAllen, Tex., only 

work for a few minutes before cartel spies discover them and route 

traffic elsewhere.

 

"Imagine Bush sending a military infiltrated with Taliban to 

Afghanistan," said Samuel Gonzalez, a security analyst who was the 

top drug prosecutor in the presidential administration of Ernesto 

Zedillo in the 1990s. He likens the fighting in Mexico to the trench 

warfare of World War I.

 

"It's block by block," he said.

 

Quest for Alternatives

 

The war analogy is not a stretch for parts of Mexico. Soldiers, more 

than 40,000 of them, are confronting heavily armed paramilitary 

groups on city streets. The military-grade weapons being used, 

antitank rockets and armor-piercing munitions, for example, are the 

same ones found on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

The country's challenge, though, may be tougher than that of a 

conventional war. The enemy is more nebulous and the battlefield is 

everywhere - in border towns like Tijuana, regional capitals like 

Culiacan and in the metropolis of Mexico City, where Mr. Calderon 

gathers with his national security staff every morning in his wooded 

compound ringed by soldiers to strategize and count the previous 

day's dead. The presidential protective detail got a thorough review 

after one of its members was found to have received money from a cartel.

 

The brutality and brazenness - the fact that drug assassins are 

chopping off heads, dissolving bodies in acid and posting notes on 

mutilated corpses taunting the authorities - has prompted more and 

more second guessing of Mr. Calderon's approach.

 

"Calderon took a stick and whacked the beehive," Javier Valdez, a 

Sinaloa journalist who covers the drug trade, said in an oft-heard 

critique of Mexico's drug war

 

The Mexican president is faulted for starting a head-on assault on 

the heavily armed cartels without first gathering intelligence on 

them, without first preparing a trustworthy police force to take them 

on, without preparing the country for how rough it would turn out to be.

 

He is taken to task for not aggressively pursuing the politicians 

collaborating with the cartels. He is criticized for failing to put a 

significant dent in the drug profits that fuel the cartels' operations.

 

An effort is under way to change laws to make it easier to seize 

businesses that are linked to traffickers, but it has been bogged 

down by fierce political infighting. "We keep hearing we're going to 

win," Victor Hugo Cirigo Vasquez, the speaker of the Mexico City 

Assembly, said to a reporter recently. "That's what the U.S. 

president said in Vietnam."

 

There are calls for a completely new approach. One of Mr. Calderon's 

predecessors, Mr. Zedillo, recently joined two other former heads of 

state from Latin America in pushing for a complete rethinking of the 

drug war, including the legalization of marijuana, which is 

considered the top revenue generator for Mexican drug cartels.

 

Mexico is nowhere near such a transformative step as legalizing 

drugs, which would cut drug profits but also might cause use to soar. 

Still, there are initiatives on the horizon.

 

Three years ago, the Mexican Congress passed a plan to decriminalize 

the possession of small quantities of cocaine and other drugs, but 

Vicente Fox, then the president, killed the bill after American 

officials raised an alarm. Mr. Calderon made a similar proposal last 

fall, albeit lowering the amounts still further, and this time 

American officials did not utter a peep.

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