"Here is the US policy in a nutshell: we pay Mexicans to kill Mexicans, and this
slaughter has no effect on drug shipments or prices." 


Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?

By Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy

July 28, 2010 "The Nation" -- July 23, 2010 - With at least 25,000 people slaughtered
in Mexico since President Felipe Calderón hurled the Mexican Army into the anti-cartel
battle, three questions remain unanswered: Who is being killed, who is doing the
killing and why are people being killed? This is apparently considered a small matter
to US leaders in the discussions about failed states, narco-states and the false claim
that violence is spilling across the border.

President Calderón has stated repeatedly that 90 percent of the dead are connected
to drug organizations. The United States has silently endorsed this statement and is
bankrolling it with $1.4 billion through Plan Mérida, the three-year assistance plan
passed by the Bush administration in 2008. Yet the daily torrent of local press
accounts from Ciudad Juárez makes it clear that most of the murder victims are
ordinary Mexicans who magically morph into drug cartel members before their blood
dries on the streets, sidewalks, vacant lots, pool halls and barrooms where they fall
dead, riddled with bullets. Juárez is ground zero in this war: more than one-fourth of
the 25,000 dead that the Mexican government admits to since December 2006 have
occurred in this one border city of slightly over 1.5 million people, nearly 6,300 as of
July 21, 2010. When three people attached to the US Consulate in Ciudad Juárez
were killed in March this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the murders
"the latest horrible reminder of how much work we have to do together."

Just what is this work?

No one seems to know, but on the ground it is death. Calderón's war, assisted by the
United States, terrorizes the Mexican people, generates thousands of documented
human rights abuses by the police and Mexican Army and inspires lies told by
American politicians that violence is spilling across the border (in fact, it has been
declining on the US side of the border for years).

We are told of a War on Drugs that has no observable effect on drug distribution,
price or sales in the United States. We are told the Mexican Army is incorruptible,
when the Mexican government’s own human rights office has collected thousands of
complaints that the army robs, kidnaps, steals, tortures, rapes and kills innocent
citizens. We are told repeatedly that it is a war between cartels or that it is a war by
the Mexican government against cartels, yet no evidence is presented to back up
these claims. The evidence we do have is that the killings are not investigated, that
the military suffers almost no casualties and that thousands of Mexicans have filed
affidavits claiming abuse, often lethal, by the Mexican army.

Here is the US policy in a nutshell: we pay Mexicans to kill Mexicans, and this
slaughter has no effect on drug shipments or prices.

This war gets personal. A friend calls late at night from Juárez and says if he is
murdered before morning, be sure to tell his wife. It never occurs to him to call the
police, nor does it occur to you.

A friend who is a Mexican reporter flees to the United States because the Mexican
Army has come to his house and plans to kill him for writing a news story that
displeases the generals. He is promptly thrown into prison by the Department of
Homeland Security because he is considered a menace to American society.

On the Mexican side, a mother, stepfather and pregnant daughter are chased down
on a highway in the Valle de Juárez, and shot in their car, while two toddlers watch.
On the US side, a man receives a phone call and his father tells him, "I'm dying, I'm
dying, I'm dead." He hears his sister pleading for her life, "Don't kill me. No don't kill
me." He thinks his niece and nephew are dead also, but they are taken to a hospital,
sprayed with shattered glass. The little boy watched his mother die, her head blown
apart by the bullets. A cousin waits in a parking lot surrounded by chainlink and
razor-wire on the US side of the bridge for the bodies to be delivered so that he can
bring them home. The next day, the family takes to the parking lots of two fast-food
outlets in their hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico, for a carwash. Young girls in
pink shorts and T-shirts wave hand-lettered signs. They will wash your car and
accept donations to help bury their parents and sister, to buy clothes for two small
orphans. "This was just a family," says cousin Cristina, collecting donations in a
zippered bag. She says they are in shock, the full impact of what happened has yet
to sink in. So for now, they will raise the money they need to take care of the
children. An American family.

Or, you visit the room where nine people were shot to death in August 2008 as they
raised their arms to praise God during a prayer meeting. Forty hours later, flies buzz
over what lingers in cracks in the tile floor and bloody handprints mark the wall. This
was the scene of the first of several mass killings at drug rehab centers where at least
fifty people have been massacred over the past two years in Juárez and Chihuahua
City. An evangelical preacher who survived the slaughter that night said she saw a
truckload of soldiers parked at the end of the street a hundred yards from the
building and that the automatic rifle fire went on for fifteen minutes.

Or you talk with a former member of the Juárez cartel who is shocked to learn of a
new cabinet appointment by President Calderón because he says he used to deliver
suitcases of money to the man as payment from the Juárez cartel.

The claim that ninety percent of the dead are criminals seems at best to be self-
delusion. In June 2010, El Universal, a major daily in Mexico City, noted that the
federal government had investigated only 5 percent of the first 22,000 executions,
according to confidential material turned over to the Mexican Senate by the Mexican
Attorney General. What constituted an investigation was not explained.

On June 21, Cronica, another Mexico City paper, presented a National Human Rights
Commission (CNDH) study that examined more than 5,000 complaints filed by
Mexican citizens against the army. Besides incidents of rape, murder, torture,
kidnapping and robbery, the report described scenes like the following: "June 1,
2007, in the community of La Joya de los Martinez, Sinaloa de Leyva: Members of the
Army were camped at the edge of the highway, drinking alcoholic beverages. Two of
them were inebriated and probably under the influence of some drug. They opened
fire against a truck that drove along the road carrying eight members of the Esparza
Galaviz family. One adult and two minors died...The soldiers arranged sacks of
decomposing marijuana on the vehicle that had been attacked and killed one of their
own soldiers, whose body was arranged at the crime scene to indicate that the
civilian drivers had been the aggressors and had killed the soldier."

The CNDH also names the army as responsible for the shooting deaths of Martin and
Brayan Almanza Salazar, aged 9 and 5, on April 3, 2010, as they traveled to the
beach in Matamoros with their family. The only thing noteworthy about these cases is
that they ever became public knowledge. Many more victims and survivors remain
silent—afraid to report what has happened to them to any Mexican official or news
reporter.

Such incidents pass unnoticed in the US press and apparently do not capture the
attention of our government. Nor does the fact that in the midst of what is repeatedly
called a war against drug cartels by both the American and Mexican governments
and press, Mexican soldiers seem immune to bullets. With over 8,000 Mexicans killed
in 2009 alone, the army reported losses of thirty-five that year. According to
Reporters Without Borders, a total of sixty-seven journalists have been killed in
Mexico since 2000, while eleven others have gone missing since 2003. Mexico is now
one of the most dangerous places in the world to be reporter. And possibly the safest
place in the world to be a soldier.

When there is a noteworthy massacre, the Mexican government says it proves the
drug industry is crumbling. When there is a period of relative peace, the Mexican
government says it shows their policy is winning. On the night of July 15, a remote-
controlled car bomb exploded in downtown Juárez, killing at least three people—a
federal policeman, a kidnap victim dressed in a police uniform and used as a decoy
and a physician who rushed to the scene from his private office to help dozens of
people injured in the blast. A graffiti message attributed the blast to the Juárez cartel
and claimed it as a warning to police who work for the Sinaloa cartel.

On July 20, the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan,
minimized the Juárez bombing, saying that it was not aimed indiscriminately at
civilians and that it did not indicate any escalation in violence. He parroted the
declaration of Mexican Attorney General Arturo Chávez that the motivation for the
bombing is economic, not ideological, and that "we have no evidence in the country
of narco-terrorism." US Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual also indicated that this
violence in Mexico, which also included a grenade attack on the US Consulate in
Nuevo Laredo a few months ago, “is disturbing but has not reached the level of
terrorism.” We are supposed to believe in their evidence that 90 percent of the dead
are criminals, but that they have no evidence at all of narco-terrorism? This, despite
numerous incidents of grenades and other explosives being used in recent attacks in
the states of Michoacan, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Sonora and many other
places in Mexico. And that “armed commandos” dressed like soldiers and wielding
high-powered machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres
documented since 2008.

No one asks or answers this question: How does such an escalation benefit the drug
smuggling business which has not been diminished at all during the past three years
of hyper-violence in Mexico? Each year, the death toll rises, each year there is no
evidence of any disruption in the delivery of drugs to American consumers, each year
the United States asserts its renewed support for this war. And each year, the basic
claims about the war go unquestioned.

Let us make this simple: no one knows how many are dying, no one knows who is
killing them and no one knows what role the drug industry has in these killings.
There has been no investigation of the dead and so no one really knows whether
they were criminals or why they died. There have been no interviews with heads of
drug organizations and so no one really knows what they are thinking or what they
are trying to accomplish.

It is difficult to have a useful discussion without facts, but it seems to be very easy to
make policy without facts. We can look forward to fewer facts and more
unquestioned and unsubstantiated government claims. Such as the response by
General Felipe de Jesús Espitia, commander of the Joint Operation Chihuahua, to a
2008 report by El Diario de Juárez that one out of three Juárez citizens believed the
army occupation of the city had accomplished little or nothing. "Those who feel this
way, it is because their interests are affected or because they are paid by the narco-
traffickers," he said. "Who are these citizens?"

General Jorge Juárez Loera, the first commander of the Joint Operation Chihuahua,
put it this way: "I would like to see reporters change their articles and instead of
writing about one more murder victim, they should say, 'one less criminal.' "

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