El Narco (2 page)

And it’s all because a few American college kids are getting high.

Or is it?

Anybody taking a closer look at the Mexican Drug War works out quickly that nothing is what it seems. Every view is clouded by deceit and rumors, every fact argued over by competing interest groups and agencies, all key personalities, shrouded in mystery and contradictions. A squad of men dressed in police uniforms are filmed kidnapping a mayor. Are they really police? Or are they gangsters in disguise? Or both? An arrested thug tells all, signs of torture evident on his taped confession. Then thugs capture a policeman and videotape the officer giving a contradictory version of events. Whom do you believe? A villain commits murders in Mexico, then becomes a protected witness in the United States. Can you trust his testimony?

Another bizarre element is how the conflict can be everywhere and nowhere. Millions of tourists sun themselves happily on Cancún’s Caribbean beaches, oblivious that anything is amiss. The Mexican capital is less murderous than Chicago, Detroit, or New Orleans.
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And even in the hardest-hit areas, all can appear perfectly normal.

I have arrived at a restaurant in Sinaloa state twenty minutes after a police commander was gunned down having breakfast. Within an hour, the corpse had been carted away and waiters were preparing tables for lunch; you could eat some tacos and have no clue there had been an early-morning murder. I have watched hundreds of soldiers sweep into a residential neighborhood and kick down doors—and suddenly vanish with the same speed they arrived.

Americans visit the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende or the Mayan pyramids of Palenque and wonder what all the fuss is about. They can’t see any war or severed craniums. Why is the media hyping it? Others visit family over the Texas border in Tamaulipas state. They hear gunshots popping on the street like firecrackers at a carnival, and they wonder why these battles are not even mentioned in the next day’s newspapers.

Politicians are lost for language to even describe the conflict. Mexican president Felipe Calderón dresses up in a military uniform and calls for no quarter on enemies who threaten the fatherland—then balks angrily at any notion Mexico is fighting an insurrection. The Obama administration is even more confused. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assures people that Mexico is simply suffering from inner-city crime like the United States in the eighties. Then she later says Mexico has an insurgency akin to Colombia’s. An embarrassed Obama implies that Clinton didn’t mean what she said. Or did she? The head of the DEA cheers on Calderón for winning the war. Then a Pentagon analyst warns that Mexico is in danger of a Yugoslavia-style rapid collapse.
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Is it a “narco state”? Or a “captured state”? Or just in a right bloody state? Are there narco terrorists? Or is that phrase, as some conspiracy theorists claim, part of an American plot to invade Mexico? Or a CIA plot to steal budget from the DEA?

Perhaps such confusion should be expected from a Mexican Drug War. The fight against drugs is famously a game of smoke and mirrors;
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Mexico is a modern classic in the conspiracy-theory genre; and war always emits fog. Put all three together and what do you get? Smoky, black murkiness so dense that you can’t see your nose in front of your face. Confounded by such perplexity, many understandably throw their hands in the air and shrug that we just cannot comprehend what is going on.

But we must.

This is not a random explosion of violence. Residents of northern Mexico have not turned into psychotic killers overnight after drinking bad water. This violence exploded and escalated over a clear time frame. Identifiable factors have caused the conflict. Real people made of flesh and blood have pulled the strings of armies, made fortunes from the war, or pursued failed policies from government towers.

At the center of the whole dirty drama are the most mysterious figures of all: the drug smugglers. But who are they?

In Mexico, traffickers are described collectively by the Spanish word
El Narco
, using a singular proper noun. The term, which is shouted loudly in news reports and whispered quietly in cantinas, provokes the image of an enormous ghostlike form leering over society. Its capos are shadowy billionaires from ramshackle mountain villages, known from grainy, twenty-year-old photos and the verses of popular ballads. Its warriors are armies of ragged, mustachioed men who are thrust before the press like captured soldiers from a mysterious enemy state. It attacks like a wraith under the noses of thousands of police and soldiers patrolling city streets, and the vast majority of its murders are never solved. This ghost makes an estimated $30 billion every year smuggling cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and crystal meth into the United States. But the cash disappears like cosmic mist into the global economy.

In short, El Narco is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. But most people can’t put much of a face on that gorilla.

On the streets where El Narco reigns, being in the drug underworld is referred to as being in “the movement.” That word gives a sense of the broad meaning of organized crime on the ground; it is a whole way of life for a segment of society. Gangsters have even begotten their own genre of music,
narcocorridos
, lead their own fashion style,
buchones
, and nurture their own religious sects. These songs, styles, and sermons all build up an image of the drug lords as iconic heroes, celebrated by dwellers of Mexico’s cinder-block barrios as rebels who have the guts to beat back the army and the DEA. El Narco has entrenched itself in these communities over a century. By following its development as a movement—rather than just sketching the police stories of the drug kingpins—we can get much closer to understanding the threat and figuring out how to deal with it.

My personal contact with the drug trade began more than two decades before I sat in a sweaty prison by the Rio Grande prying stories from a mass murderer—back on the green pastures of southeast England. I grew up near the seaside city of Brighton, where my dad taught anthropology. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, drugs flooded into the area like a tidal wave—despite the shouts of Nancy Reagan, La Toya Jackson, and spotty adolescents from a British show called
Grange Hill
to “Just Say No.” The popular drugs were Moroccan hashish, known as rocky; Turkish heroin, known as smack; and later Dutch ecstasy, known as E’s. Students or dropouts from my school could be found getting high, low, or “on one” all over the place—from public gardens to public toilets.

No one gave a moment’s thought to the far-off lands that the mind-bending substances came from, or what the drug trade gave or took away from those countries. The farthest up the food chain anyone knew about was when a local dealer got busted by the DS (drug squad) and we chatted excitedly over the details of the raid and what prison time he got.

As I came out of these teenage years, many who had experimented with drugs went on to get good jobs and start families. Some still had the odd binge, many switching to Colombian cocaine, which became fashionable in nineties England. I also knew several who suffered addiction, mostly from heroin, and went through bad bouts of stealing from their parents’ homes and drying out in rehabs. Most got over it in the end. Some are still burned-out addicts two decades later whom I find on trips home propping up bars of grimy local pubs.

Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, I also knew four young men who died of heroin overdoses. Two were brothers. One of them finished his days passed out in a public toilet. The fourth one, Paul, had stayed over at my house days before he injected the lethal dose into his bloodstream.

Paul was a brash, brawny fellow, with a mop of thick black hair and meaty hands, who would strike up conversations with strangers from bus stops to pubs. We stayed up all night as he rambled on about the girl he was seeing, his fights with his younger brother, and his philosophy on class struggle. Then he was gone. I don’t personally blame the people who trafficked the heroin that caused Paul’s death. I don’t think he would either. But I do strive to understand the forces that led to it and search for a different world in which his death could have been avoided—and he would still be chatting to strangers at bus stops today.

I traveled to Latin America with a backpack, a one-way ticket, and a goal to be a foreign correspondent in exotic climes. The Oliver Stone movie
Salvador
inspired me with its story of reporters dodging bullets in the Central American civil wars. But by the turn of the millennium, the days of military dictators and communist insurgents were no more. We had passed through “the End of History,” we were told, and were promised a golden age of democracy and free trade the world over.

I set foot in Mexico in 2000, the day before former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox was sworn into office as president, ending seventy-one years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI. This was a titanic moment in Mexican history, a seismic shift in its political plates. It was a time of optimism and celebration. The PRI clique who’d ravaged the country and lined their pockets for most of the twentieth century had fallen from power. Its massacres of protesters and dirty wars against rebels were over, people cheered. Ordinary Mexicans looked forward to enjoying the fruit of their hard work along with freedom and human rights.

A decade later, downhearted Mexicans fought off accusations they lived in a failed state. Cartel gunmen scattered corpses in plazas; kidnappers brutally stole fortunes of successful entrepreneurs; and while the government no longer censored the press, gangsters dug graves for dozens of journalists and cowed newspapers into silence. What had gone wrong? Why had the dream soured so suddenly?

In the first years of the decade, no one saw the crisis ahead. The American media heaped high expectations on the cowboy-boot wearing Fox as he entertained Kofi Annan and became the first Mexican to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. The other big Mexican story was Subcomandante Marcos, a postmodernist rebel who led the Mayans of Chiapas into a symbolic rebellion for indigenous rights. Marcos gave TV interviews smoking a pipe and wearing a ski mask, quoting poets and inspiring leftists across the world. When El Narco was mentioned, it was in the good news of soldiers rounding up wanted capos.

However, the jangle of gunfire and chops of executioners’ axes began to sound in the background. The first wave of serious cartel warfare began in the fall of 2004 on the border with Texas and spread across the country. When President Felipe Calderón took power in 2006 and declared war on these gangs, the violence multiplied exponentially.

So why did cartels blossom during the first decade of Mexico’s democracy? Tragically, the same system that promised hope was weak in controlling the most powerful mafias on the continent. The old regime may have been corrupt and authoritarian. But it had a surefire way of managing organized crime: taking down a token few gangsters and taxing the rest. This point is now recognized by most Mexican academics and is a central theme in this book: the Mexican Drug War is inextricably linked to the democratic transition.

Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in an explosion of mafia capitalism, so did the demise of the PRI. Mexican special-force soldiers became mercenaries for gangsters. Businessmen who used to pay off corrupt officials had to pay off mobsters. Police forces turned on one another—sometimes breaking out into full-on interagency shoot-outs. When Calderón replaced Fox, he threw the entire military out to restore order. But rather than falling into line, as Calderón hoped, gangsters actually took on the government.

In the first four years of Calderón’s administration, the Mexican Drug War claimed a stunning thirty-four thousand lives.
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That tragic statistic is enough for everyone to realize it is a serious conflict—more casualties than in many declared wars. But it should also be taken in perspective. In a country of 112 million,
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it is a low-intensity war. The Vietnam War claimed 3 million casualties; the American Civil War six hundred thousand; in Rwanda, militias massacred eight hundred thousand people in a hundred days.

Another hard fact in Mexico is the number of officials who have been murdered. In this four-year period, cartel gunmen slayed more than twenty-five hundred public servants, including twenty-two hundred policemen,
⁶
two hundred soldiers, judges, mayors, a leading gubernatorial candidate, the leader of a state legislature, and dozens of federal officials. Such a murder rate compares to the most lethal insurgent forces in the world, certainly more deadly to government than Hamas, ETA, or the Irish Republican Army in its entire three decades of armed struggle. It represents a huge threat to the Mexican state.

The nature of the attacks is even more intimidating. Mexican thugs regularly shower police stations with bullets and rocket-propelled grenades; they carry out mass kidnappings of officers and leave their mutilated bodies on public display; and they even kidnapped one mayor, tied him up, and stoned him to death on a main street. Who can claim with a straight face that is no challenge to authority?

Yet in Mexico, the phrase
insurgent
sets off an even bigger political bang than the narco’s car bombs. Insurgents were the glorious founding fathers who rebelled against Spain. The biggest avenue in the country, which cuts across Mexico City, is called Insurgentes. To give criminals this label is to imply they could be heroes. These are psychotic criminals. How dare you compare them to honorable rebels?

Talk about insurgency, wars, and failed states also sends shivers down the spines of Mexican officials looking for tourist and investment dollars. Brand Mexico has been given a hiding in the last three years. Some officials are even convinced there is a gringo plot to divert tourists from Cancún to Florida.