The Agonist - Mexico

Covering Mexico's cartel wars puts journalists in the line of fire

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:17:45 -0800

CNN - The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 26 journalists have been killed since 2005 in Mexico -- most of them while covering the crime or corruption beats. By comparison, 10 journalists were killed in the same time period while covering the war in Afghanistan.

Honduran Congress to vote on Zelaya fate after poll

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:38:42 -0800

Helen Popper | Tegucigalpa | Nov 17

Reuters - Honduran lawmakers will wait until after a November 29 election to decide whether to reinstate ousted President Manuel Zelaya, delaying a vote central to a U.S.-led deal to end months of political crisis.

Zelaya, who irked the poor nation's elite by forming close ties with leftist Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, was sent into exile in his pajamas by soldiers on June 28 and a de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti took charge.

The U.S.-brokered pact to end the crisis stipulates a congressional vote on reinstating Zelaya, but it never set a date and the October accord collapsed within a week as the rival sides failed to form a unity government.

"We've decided to convene sessions for December 2," Congress head Jose Saavedra told reporters, adding that lawmakers expected the Supreme Court to give an opinion next week on whether Zelaya should be returned to power until a new president is sworn in January after the November 29 election.

Mexican purge axes corrupt police

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:29:38 -0800

Stephen Gibbs | Mexico City | Nov 12

BBC - Mexican authorities have dismissed almost a quarter of all traffic police in the city of Monterrey for failing corruption and competence tests.

It is the latest move by the Mexican government to clean up its police forces, many of which are suspected of having links to organised crime.

At the end of last month all 1,142 traffic police in Monterrey were pulled off duty to undergo extensive tests.

The tests assessed their honesty, mental aptitude and medical condition.

Their living circumstances were also reviewed - to see whether any evidence of possibly unlawful additional income emerged.

The end results have not been good.

More than 270 officers failed the exams outright. They have been dismissed.

Another 500 have been sent for more training. And, in a final insult, over half have been told they are overweight.

Where God and the Devil Wheel Like Vultures: Report from El Paso

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:29:30 -0800

Tom Russell nails it on the head. Worth a read to summarize the current Wild West.

I’ll watch it all go down from Ardovino’s Desert Crossing, the great bar and restaurant which sits up near Mt. Cristo Rey, overlooking the lights of El Paso. (Okay, there are a few good bars here.)Trains roll cross the mountain at happy hour and border patrol trucks chase illegals through these desperate, yucca-choked rocks and rills. Over yonder the ugly black border wall snakes across the sandy hills. The wall is our knee-jerk attempt to intimidate Mexican illegals who want to do the dirty work we shun. But this is still the old west, amigo. Those class equations have always been such. The Chinese built the railroads with a shotgun at their head, and their opium was always available in the back of the chop suey joints and whore houses. The “greasers” and “chinks” did the dirty work; and those red devil Apaches raided our horse camps until we sent Geronimo down to Florida to chill out. We’re getting it under control, ain’t we? It’s the coked-up, Manifest Destiny politics of Methland.

Where God and the Devil Wheel Like Vultures: Report from El Paso

A Remarkable Instance of Corruption and Violence in Mexico

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:58:42 -0800

First off, Mauricio Fernandez, the mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia, an exclusive community near Monterrey, announced as he was being sworn in for a new term that a feared drug cartel capo who had been threatening him had been found dead in Mexico City. Only one problem, the body hadn't been found yet. That would take another 3 1/2 hours. And it wouldn't be identified for two more days.

The mayor's explanation once the story erupted as a scandal in normally blase Mexico -- the DEA tipped him off:

When pressed, Fernandez said U.S. authorities tipped him off that somebody intercepted cartel communications and learned Saldana was planning to kill him, and he said unspecified intelligence sources told him Saldana was dead. Paul Knierim, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman, said Tuesday he couldn't comment on Fernandez's situation, but said American agents routinely coordinate with Mexican investigators trying to crack down on cartels.

Mexican farmworker activist, 14 others slain

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:46:18 -0800

Tracy Wilkinson | Mexico City | Nov 1

LA Times - A flamboyant farmworker organizer who called himself a modern-day Emiliano Zapata has been slain in a brazen ambush that also killed 14 members of his family and staff, officials said Saturday.

Prosecutors in the border state of Sonora, where the slayings occurred, said they were investigating a number of possible motives. Sonora, like much of Mexico, has been hit by a wave of killings tied to drug-trafficking gangs.

The union leader, Margarito Montes Parra, was killed in the southern part of Sonora bordering the state of Sinaloa, a major center for the production and transport of marijuana and heroin.

The farmers whom Montes represented often find themselves trapped in the drug war, with traffickers forcing them to work illicit crops. But Montes also had chalked up numerous enemies in tumultuous land disputes over more than two decades.

Montes, his wife and two children were traveling in a small convoy with at least 11 other relatives and staff members to a rural hacienda Friday afternoon when they were ambushed by several assailants armed with large-caliber weapons, investigators said. All 15 were shot to death, they said.

Red Cross workers arrived at the scene to find bullet-riddled bodies on the side of the road. There were reports that three people in the group had survived.

At Least Mexico Realizes the U.S. Government Owns Citibank

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:35:45 -0700

This is the first consequence I've yet seen in over a year of the American taxpayers putting enough money into the banks to buy a majority stake:

Citi's latest reason to be free of U.S. government ownership is that it could be forced to sell off one of its most profitable businesses.

In Mexico the pressure is on, where it's illegal for a foreign government to own a domestic bank. Citi's stake in Mexico's Banamex has fallen afoul of this law.

Citi now has to prove that its U.S. government ownership isn't long-term or overly influential, else it could be forced to discard a Mexican business that generates 15% of the company's worldwide profit.

It won't stop at Citi either:

Uncle Sam has dominant interests in companies like American International Group, Bank of New York Mellon and Bank of America, all of which also have major investments in Mexican banks.

Rick grows into major hurricane in Mexican Pacific

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:16:21 -0700

Mexico City | Oct 17

Reuters -

Hurricane Rick strengthened to an extremely dangerous Category 4 storm off Mexico's Pacific coast on Saturday and could hit resorts on the Baja California peninsula next week, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Rick, the seventh hurricane of the eastern north Pacific season, was located about 255 miles (410 km) southwest of the resort city of Acapulco with maximum sustained winds near 135 mph (215 kph) with higher gusts.

Additional strengthening is forecast during the next 36 hours and Rick could be near a Category 5 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale by Saturday night, the center said.

Outer rain bands of the storm have been hitting Mexico's southern coast and that will continue on Saturday, it said.

Mexico's Calderon Moves on the Unions

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:37:21 -0700

Not sure how this one will turn out, but Mexican President Calderon has used military and federal police to shut down the power company Luz y Fuerza that serves Mexico City. 44,000 workers were fired.

Business Week makes the case for the shutdown:

It sold 730 megawatt-hours of energy per employee, compared with 2,500MWh per employee at the Federal Electricity Commission. LyFC had one worker for every 291 electricity clients, compared with one worker for every 627 clients of the CFE. And, the union demanded—and got—generous workplace benefits and pension perks that were unsustainable, Gómez Mont said: Retirees currently earn pensions that are 3.3 times the amount taken home by active employees.

Narco News sees it differently:

Calderon's Saturday night invasion of Luz y Fuerza's facilities in the capital and four states is reminiscent of other recent joint police-military operations against drug cartels. Since Calderon deployed 40,000 soldiers and thousands of militarized Federal Police, one of the campaign's hallmark operations has been the sudden takeover of police stations in towns and cities where drug trafficking organizations are believed to have corrupted entire police forces. In these operations, soldiers and federal police surround a police station, relieve the local police officers of their duties, and occupy the building. When 6,000 soldiers and federal police suddenly invaded Luz y Fuerza's buildings and then occupied them to prevent the workers from retaking the facilities, one would have thought that Luz y Fuerza was a drug cartel's base of operations. But it wasn't.

Mexico is becoming increasingly militarized under the pretext provided by the war on drugs. Mexican citizens are becoming correspondingly desensitized to such blatant displays of state military power in the civilian realm. Mexico's Constitution expressly prohibits the military's use in times of peace; however, this was not Mexicans' principle criticism of the operation against Luz y Fuerza. Mexicans consulted by this reporter complained that the operation was a blow to the country's democratic unions, as well as a step towards privatization of the energy sector. When this reporter commented on the barbarity of deploying the military and riot police against a civilian union--one that wasn't even on strike, as if that were to justify such represion--the response was, "Tienes razon. You're right. I hadn't even considered that."

It's not just Mexico where they're getting used to a dramatically expanded definition of the normal role of the military in society. Andrew Bacevich points out what our military adventures are doing to our national psyche:

As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That “keeping Americans safe’’ obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial.

Doesn't it seem like we have always been at war with Eastasia?

Novel Terrorists Emerge in Mexico

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:25:52 -0700

From Stratfor:

At approximately 2 a.m. on Sept. 25, a small improvised explosive device (IED) consisting of three or four butane canisters was used to attack a Banamex bank branch in the Milpa Alta delegation of Mexico City. The device damaged an ATM and shattered the bank’s front windows. It was not an isolated event. The bombing was the seventh recorded IED attack in the Federal District — and the fifth such attack against a local bank branch — since the beginning of September.

The attack was claimed in a communique posted to a Spanish-language anarchist Web site by a group calling itself the Subversive Alliance for the Liberation of the Earth, Animals and Humans (ASLTAH). The note said, “Once again we have proven who our enemies are,” indicating that the organization’s “cells for the dissolution of civilization” were behind the other, similar attacks. The communique noted that the organization had attacked Banamex because it was a “business that promotes torture, destruction and slavery” and vowed that ASLTAH would not stop attacking “until we see your ashes.” The group closed its communique by sending greetings to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the “eco-pyromaniacs for the liberation of the earth in this place.” Communiques have also claimed some of the other recent IED attacks in the name of ASLTAH.

...

These IED attacks are the most recent incidents in a wave of anarchist, animal rights, and eco-protest attacks that have swept across Mexico this year. Activists have conducted literally hundreds of incidents of vandalism, arson and, in more recent months, IED attacks in various locations across the country. The most active cells are in Mexico City and Guadalajara.

Compared to the horrific violence of the War for Drugs, this is small potatoes but I expect it to get an enormously disproportional amount of hype from the press.

The Farce of Cleaning Up Mexico's Criminal Justice System

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:39:34 -0700

NarcoNews has a report from El Universal that dissects the feeble, but lavishly funded with U.S. money, efforts to clean up the Mexican police force:

the Merida Initiative provides an unknown amount of funds for the creation of a National Vetting Center, which screens police officers in order to "root out corruption." The screenings entail polygraph tests, audits of officers' personal finances to detect possible "illicit enrichment," investigations of their socio-economic backgrounds, psychological evaluations, and drug tests. Mexican law requires that all police officers be screened every six months. According to the Mexican government, the Merida Initiative funds that pay for these screenings and the National Police Registry come from a $26 million pot of money for "strengthening police professionalization programs and the National Police Registry."
...
The State Department uses these statistics in its "Mexico--Merida Initiative Report" in order to demonstrate that Mexico's police are now more "transparent" and "accountable." With the report, the State Department hopes to release the 15% of Merida Initiative funds that have been held up pending Mexico's compliance with certain conditions. In the report, the State Department implies that the firing of 284 federal police commanders and the arrest of 204 federal, state, and local public servants during the Calderon administration means that the Registry and screenings are effective tools to reduce corruption. The State Department argues that these programs constitute "concrete steps to... address issues of corruption."

The State Department report does not, however, evaluate if these measures actually have led to reduced police corruption. Mexico's daily El Universal consulted several public security experts and published their opinions on how well the Merida Initiative-funded anti-corruption vetting has worked. Their conclusion: it hasn't worked at all.

And the new Mexican Attorney General is the same man who failed to solve the horrific killings of women in Juarez when he was the Chihuahua state prosecutor, per the LA Times:

Mexico's Senate on Thursday confirmed Arturo Chavez Chavez as the nation's attorney general, despite objections by human rights activists who assailed his record as prosecutor in the northern state of Chihuahua during the 1990s.
...
Chavez was Chihuahua's top prosecutor from 1996 to 1998, a period when an alarming number of women in Ciudad Juarez were disappearing or turning up dead, often bearing ghastly injuries. More than 350 women were slain in the city during a 15-year period starting in 1993.

And this from a presentation at the Global Public Policy Forum on the U.S. War on Drugs just makes my stomach churn:

Dr. David Shirk, professor of political science and lead researcher for the Justice in Mexico Project at the University of San Diego, said the desertion of 120,000 Mexican soldiers during the presidency of Vicente Fox (2000-2006), or roughly one-third of the armed forces, provided drug cartels with a huge pool of new recruits trained to engage in types of combat that went beyond the sort of violence long practiced by the traditional gun-for-hire, or pistolero.

“In some ways, we’re seeing the military defect to the other side,” Shirk said.

Two-Face Is Running the War on Drugs

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:27:09 -0700

I've always loved the DC comics character Two-Face, the crusading District Attorney turned psychotic criminal master-mind who flips a two-headed coin to determine whether or not he'll be good or evil in any given situation.

The more I've studied the drug war in Mexico, and even the history of modern police investigations (I'll be posting a review of the Memoirs of Vidocq soon -- the autobiography of the criminal who became the first "scientific" detective and inspired Poe, Hugo, Conan Doyle etc), the more convinced I am that he is the perfect symbol for the "War on Drugs."

Today's news only reinforces my conviction that nothing is as it seems in the narcosphere.

Here's a quick run through of the highlights:

The Wall Street Journal puts on their libertarian hat and publishes this Mary O'Grady op-ed:

Nevertheless, Mexico's attempt to question the status quo in drug policy deserves praise. Unlike American drug warriors, Mexico at least acknowledges that it is insane to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome.
124 law enforcement officials, including chief of coordination for state security, were arrested in Hidalgo, linked to the deadly Zetas narco-cartel.
The border city of Mexicali is declared to be"too peaceful" by U.S. authorities:

There hasn't been a bank robbery in Mexicali in 18 months, or a reported kidnapping in a year. Mexicali is considered so safe that top law enforcement officials from Tijuana raise their families here, and are seen visiting restaurants and movie theaters without the phalanx of bodyguards that usually follows them everywhere else. But is Mexicali an oasis of tranquillity, or just a mirage? Across the border in California's Imperial County, U.S. authorities believe the Baja California state capital has become the major staging ground for drug trafficking into the U.S. The Calexico port of entry now leads the nation in cocaine seizures, with a 64% increase in overall drug seizures for the period from October 2008 through July 2009 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Bloomberg reports on an analyst who says that drug war violence is cutting Mexico's GDP by 3%.
And Jorge Castañeda cuts the crap on Mexico's supposed "decriminalization of drug possession" in the New York Times:

The recently approved new “drug” law in Mexico is in fact not a step toward decriminalization, but rather toward mandatory sentencing. Until last month, possession of small (unspecified) amounts of drugs was not a criminal offense in Mexico; only the sale or purchase was. The new law establishes a minuscule limit on legal possession, meaning that today, almost anyone caught carrying any drug is subject to arrest, prosecution and jail. If anything, the new law criminalizes drug use much more radically than before. If anything, the new law criminalizes drug use much more radically than before, and it is probably for this reason that President Calderón signed it, and that the Obama administration has looked the other way. It will almost certainly not attract US “drug tourists” to Mexico, since the risk of being arrested for possession has grown considerably with the new law, whereas before the real risk was just a shakedown by the authorities. The law actually is part of a campaign to justify President Calderón’s war of choice on drugs by stating that drug consumption in Mexico has increased over the past 10 years. In fact, the government’s own unpublished but leaked National Addiction Survey for 2008 shows that this is not the case.

Mexico Having Trouble Supplying America's Twin Addictions

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:23:39 -0700

Drugs and oil.

First drugs, from the NYT Freakonomics blog:

It has become more difficult to ship drugs from Mexico to the U.S. because of increased border enforcement. This has decreased supply in the U.S. but increased supply in Mexico.

The increased domestic competition in Mexico has pushed prices down, resulting in a large increase in Mexican drug addiction and the violence associated with it. Sadly, I imagine that the new giant border fence will make shipping drugs to the U.S. even more difficult and result in still more addiction — and violence — in Mexico.

And even worse, the oil, from the WSJ:

Mexico's oil output is falling faster than expected, increasing the chance that the country will lose its status as a major oil exporter in coming years and face a worsening budget shortfall.

Output at state-owned oil monopoly Petróleos Mexicanos's offshore field Cantarell, once the world's second-largest oil field, has plunged to 500,000 barrels a day from its peak of 2.1 million in 2005.

"I don't recall seeing anything in the industry as dramatic as Cantarell," says Mark Thurber, assistant director for research at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University.

Cantarell's slide has pushed Mexico's overall oil output down. Shrinking oil exports are costing Mexico roughly $14 billion a year -- bad news for a country that relies on oil exports to pay for nearly 40% of its annual government budget. That shortfall, aggravated by the weaker overall economy, has caused the government to cut spending this year and propose a growing budget deficit for next year.

Hijacking in Mexico

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:12:28 -0700

The Latin Americanist has the best summary:

In a developing new story, an Aeromexico flight bound for Cancun was hijacked and diverted to Mexico City.

According to footage shown by Televisa police troops surrounded Flight 576 shortly after landing and freed all the plane's occupants. CNN en Espanol reported cited TV Azteca who claimed that five people have been detained by police.

According to Milenio's website police captured at least six suspected hijackers of Aeromexico flight 576. The nationalities of the accused have yet to be revealed despite earlier reports claiming that they are not Mexican.

One of the passengers briefly spoke on TV and claimed that one of the hijackers was "well-dressed, robust, dark-skinned (and) a good passenger."

Transportation Secretary Juan Molinar Horcasitas told the press that there was no bomb on board the plane. All the occupants were freed said Horcasitas and none of them are injured.

Until the Mexican authorities announce who they have concluded is behind the hijacking we won't know the implications of this incident.

In the meantime, just for fun, here is some breathless speculation on who could be behind the hijacking and what it might mean:

Colombians: The political violence that has long-plagued the former narco-world capitol may be spilling over.
Hondurans: A connection to the recent coup is an obvious possibility.
Bolivians: Presumably Bolivians taking such drastic measures would be opposed to Evo Morales' populist regime. There have been many right-wing Bolivian nuts acting up in recent months. This is my dark horse pick.
Mexican Leftists: Most on the Mexican left believe the 2006 election was stolen from Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the PRD. With Obrador's failure to keep his coalition together the Mexican left has no legitimate political outlet. We haven't seen a dramatic and violent move from the Mexican left since the Zapatistas emerged in the 1990s.
Narcos: Hijacking a plane would be only a small escalation of the ever-escalating pattern of terrorism we've seen this year from the narcos. However, my hunch is that a narco-led hijacking would have ended in massive bloodshed.
Wild cards: It doesn't take that much to hijack a plane, anything from a batshit religious cult to a handful of anti-tourist extremists could be behind today's hijacking.

Mexico Is Drying Up

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:42:30 -0700

From the L.A. Times:

A months-long drought has affected broad swaths of the country, from the U.S. border to the Yucatan Peninsula, leaving crop fields parched and many reservoirs low. The need for rain is so dire that water officials have been rooting openly for a hurricane or two to provide a good drenching.
...

Though nearly two months remain before the rainy season ends in October, the drought is an unwelcome blow to an economy already laboring under a recession that has crimped exports and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Mexican growers report more than $1 billion in losses from crops planted during spring, in anticipation of seasonal rain. Hard hit have been corn, beans, barley and sorghum, plus livestock. Farmers and officials say the impact, including lost earnings, unpaid debts and shortages of staple foods, could be felt well into next year.

"Although no one wants to recognize it, there is a food crisis," said Cruz Lopez Aguilar, president of a national federation representing rural dwellers. He and others say increasing imports to make up for lost crops could raise food costs.

...

The dry period has also lent new urgency to longtime water worries in metropolitan Mexico City, home to 20 million residents.

Officials have for several months been rationing water from a network of outlying reservoirs, known as the Cutzamala system, which provides at least a fifth of Mexico City's water. Cutbacks have recently been doubled, to 30% of supplies. Rationing means lower flows in many neighborhoods for days at a time, but no citywide cutoffs.

Mexico is the canary in the global warming coal mine for the Western Hemisphere.