The U.S.'s Unstated Role in the Mexican Drug Wars

A lot of people, in the media and elsewhere, have been talking about the effects the exploding violence in Mexico's "drug wars" may have (and already are having) on the U.S., but not a lot of people are talking about the ways U.S. domestic policy decisions have affected the drug wars. The NY Times/MSNBC have a great report up on gun smuggling that's worth watching in its entirety (warning: graphic images), in which they discuss (among other things) the effects of the American gun trade on the Mexican drug wars. Specifically, that 95% of the weapons used in the drug wars in Ciudad Juarez are made in America and illegal in Mexico. Thanks to the Republican Congress's lifting the ban on assault weapons in 2004, "anybody with a driver's license and a clean record" can get these weapons, and they're making their way into Mexico, leading to the escalating violence and body counts.

All of the talk in the U.S. of how the violence "might spill over the border into the U.S." is ignorant in its one-sidedness. The border isn't a one-way road where things and people come from Mexico to the U.S. As this report demonstrates, while we may be worried about how violence might spill over from Mexico, we've conveniently forgotten how our weapons and violence have spread from the U.S. into Mexico. Until we acknowledge this and work to make these guns more difficult to get in the U.S. or elsewhere, things like this will continue to happen, and Mexico may end up suffering even more for our policy decisions.

The "state" of Mexico's State

If anyone has been following headline's in the U.S. press about Mexico in the last month or two, you might have noticed a lot of alarmist and sensationalist garbage being thrown around suggesting that Mexico is coming close to collapse, is a "failed state" or a "narco state." Fox news has been spreading this message, along with a number of political commentators on the Sunday morning talk shows, and even Rolling Stone.

The violence in Mexico is worrying, and cause for concern, but the rhetoric seems to lead the uninformed to think Mexico is more like Somalia. It is definitely not.

Political Scientist Stephen Haber has an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal where he puts the violence in Mexico into perspective (in an article about the general state of Latin America). He writes:

The Mexican state is weak compared to the U.S., but incredibly strong when compared to places in Central Asia or Africa that are usually called failing states. There are no foreign troops on Mexican soil. There is no martial law. Garbage is picked up, streets are swept and children go to school. Middle-class couples take weekend getaways, and drive there on highways as good as those in the United States. After falling for a decade, Mexico's homicide rate increased in 2008, because the Calderón government courageously decided to take on the drug traffickers. If it keeps rising, it may soon be as high as that of...Louisiana.

I do have a lot of quibbles with what Haber writes, about Latin America in general, and in this particular paragraph about Mexico. With around 6,000 murders related to drugs last year in Mexico, comparing the rate of homicide from an entire country to the state of Louisiana does mask some of the horror going on in Mexico. Nearly half of the drug-related murders took place in the state of Chihuahua, a northern state in Mexico with a slightly smaller population than Louisiana. But the general gist of Haber's article is correct, even with allegations of corruption at all levels of government and in the police and military, and the gruesome ways in which people are being are being killed in Mexico, the state still works, and the overwhelming majority of people can still go about their daily lives as they did before Calderón came to office. 

For those that are interested, Patrick Corcoran over at the blog Gancho has been regularly addressing some of the more ridiculous claims about Mexico's supposed decent into anarchy.

Another Case of Extreme Military Violence in Brazil

Long-time readers to the blog know that I often have harped on the fact that torture and police repression in Brazil did not go away with the military dictatorship. This weekend offered a particularly gruesome reminder of this fact, as in Rio a youth in the military barracks who was caught smoking marijuana was set on fire (story in Portuguese, but the picture says enough). While the youth's condition is "stable," the burns were severe enough to cause him to be heavily wrapped, and his eyes were apparently affected.

Of course, some councilpersons in Rio have already taken a stand and demanded this issue be dealt with, but nothing will come of this - it never does. Until the Brazilian governmental systems at all levels begin to thoroughly and completely crack down on these types of military and police violence, until not one single state agent, from the lowest-ranking policeman to the highest-ranking general, retains impunity for these actions. And neither governmental leaders nor civil rights groups nor the police themselves have shown any sustained interest in making these changes. Maybe things will change some in the next 20 years, but quite honestly, I doubt it.

The Hideous and Appalling Violence and Tactics Colombia's Paramilitary Groups Employ

I have written several times before about how paramilitary groups are responsible for a not-insignificant amount violence in Colombia. This article shows just how repulsive and appalling the paramilitaries' tactics are:

Prosecutors and human rights researchers are investigating hundreds of such deaths and disappearances, contending that Colombia’s security forces are increasingly murdering civilians and making it look as if they were killed in combat, often by planting weapons by the bodies or dressing the corpses in guerrilla fatigues.
With soldiers under intense pressure in recent years to register combat kills to earn promotions and benefits like time off and extra pay, reports of civilian killings are climbing, prosecutors and researchers say, pointing to a grisly facet of Colombia’s long internal war against leftist insurgencies.
The deaths have called into question the depth of Colombia’s recent strides against the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and have begun to haunt the nation’s military hierarchy.

The whole article is depressing, but must be read. The U.S. tacitly supports these tactics via its financial support for the Uribe administration and its funding in the "drug war," whose funds often end up in the hands of these paramilitaries. Additionally, the complete failure to categorize such tactics as "terrorist" simply because Colombia is the U.S.'s biggest ally in the region, while nothing new, is no less inexcusable.

And then there's the issue of Uribe's leadership. He can insist he has nothing to do with these groups, and make public demonstrations of his "intolerance" for such actions, but they ring hollow, considering how closely paramilitary groups have been tied to Uribe's administration and friends, allies, and cabinet members.

This is in no way an apologia for the FARC or its actions; still, it has become increasingly clear of late that the FARC is far from the sole responsible agent for the civil war that plagues Colombia, and at times it seems the paramilitary groups are willing to go even further than the FARC in their "war." It's things like this that make me suspect that the disappearance of the FARC would not lead to the disappearance of violence in Colombia, in spite of what many both in and outside of Colombia may believe. As long as these groups act with relative impunity, and as long as there is a president who is unwilling to go after these groups in anything but a symbolic fashion when things get too appalling, there just doesn't seem to be a lot of hope to me that the violence in Colombia will go down anytime soon.

Brazil's Declining Crime Rates - Signs of Hope?

A few weeks back, the Economist had an article about declining crime rates in Brazil. Murder rates in the country as a whole have declined, and they have taken a very dramatic drop in São Paulo, parts of which used to be among the most violent neighborhoods in the world.

Unlike Boz, I'm not so surprised at the decline of crime in São Paulo. Earlier this year, I commented on the police's change in tactics against drug gangs in Brazil's largest city. Unlike in Rio, where the police still go into favelas with guns blazing and then occupy the favelas for weeks or months, police in São Paulo spend a lot of time gathering intelligence on individual drug lords and their networks, and go in targeting those groups specifically, instead of anybody (including the innocent) that gets in their way. Additionally, after police go into the favelas to root out the drug networks, the state follows in, offering social programs to the innocent civilians living in the favelas. In so doing, the state in São Paulo has simultaneously been able to increase its presence in a non-violent way (compared to the non-stop presence of military police in favelas in Rio) as well as offering better social services to the favelados. That the tactic of concentrating attacks only on drug gangs joined with efforts trying to improve the living conditions within the favelas has led to a decline in violence should come as no surprise. While I think the article overstates the role of gun control somewhat, it certainly hasn't hurt, either. I don't buy the demographics argument so much, simply because São Paulo has 18 million people; just because the population is getting older in the entire city doesn't necessarily mean that it's getting older in the favelas, where levels of violence can be higher.

That said, Boz's caution that we not view these gains as the beginning of a "Paz Brasiliana" is absolutely right. Rio is still suffering from the same, stale police tactics of shooting first and calling everybody "traficantes" later. Additionally, the growing presence of paramilitary militia groups that are sometimes entering into the drug trade in Rio is a bad omen. Finally, while São Paulo's murder rates have dropped significantly, rural violence (generally between rich landowners and indigenous groups or the landless and their champions) has shown no signs of slowing down. It would be great if Rio would at least try to implement some of the changes in its tactics that São Paulo has implemented, but the issue of favelas and the police is also very different from São Paulo, due to (among other things) state and city economies, geographies, and politics. As I said, the dawn of some peaceful period in Brazilian history is still a long ways off. Nonetheless, one cannot help but be at least somewhat happy to see things improving in Brazil, even if it's incrementally.

Thoughts on Colombia, the FARC, and the Possibility of Hope

I agree with the majority of Erik's points below: that the FARC hasn't been anything more than a criminal organization hiding behind a thin veil of "ideology" for decades; that things are genuinely looking better than I could have hoped for in terms of civil conflict (and its potential end) in Colombia, and this shift has indeed been far more rapid than I could have imagined; and, regardless whether the FARC disappears or not, paramilitaries can, should, and need to be brought to justice, for they have been as involved as the FARC (if not moreso) in drug production and running and the murder of innocent civilians in the name of (stop me if this sounds familiar) "combatting terrorism."


That said, I think the hope still has to be somewhat guarded. First, the FARC isn't gone yet. As I've said before, the recent setbacks have been embarassing, and the deaths of major FARC leaders (including second-in-command Raul Reyes, Ivan Rios, and Manuel Marulanda Velez) are significant. That said, that doesn't mean some charismatic leader can't emerge or come out of nowhere to give the FARC new impetus. There are reasons to believe that FARC may very well be entering its death throes, but this isn't the first time that this outcome has seemed possible.

Another issue that of course will demand attention is what happens with the cocaine production. Both the FARC and paramilitary groups are closely tied to its production and sale in Colombia. Should the FARC be eliminated, I don't see cocaine production just dropping or disappearing. The demand is still out there globally, and there will certainly be others, be they members of the paramilitary groups or just standard drug-lords with no politics other than profit, who will want to fill the FARC's void (again, if there is a void ever). The possible end of the FARC does not mean an end to cocaine production or the violence tied to the industry, and the government will really have to work hard via social and economic programs to turn cocaine producers into productive units in other, more legal areas. Given how Colombia's presidents have acted in the past, I don't see a lot of reason to be hopeful of this.

Thirdly, as Erik alluded to, there is the issue of paramilitary groups. They are as awful and violent as the FARC in many regards, indiscriminately and often contemptuously killing innocent civilians and extracting payments from international companies via protection rackets, all in the name of the "war on terror" or "drug war" or in the name of combatting "subversives." Colombia has refused to deal with this issue, especially under Uribe, in part no doubt because both the current and past governments have been in bed with the paramilitaries via "unofficial" (and sometimes official) channels. Colombia needs to tackle the paramilitary issue as much as it does FARC. I have shards of hope that, were FARC to fade away, dealing with paramilitaries would be facilitated as human right organizations could deal more directly with paramilitary violence in ways similar (albeit in different contexts) to those campaigns in Chile and Argentina. Nonetheless, such hopes are indeed just glimmers without the promise of much coming of it, particularly given the close ties of multiple politicians, administration officials, and even presidents tied to the paramilitary groups directly or indirectly. Certainly, as time goes on things could change on this front, but right now, I see no real reason to believe the politicians will stand down on this issue and let the true issue of paramilitary action at all levels, illegal and governmental, come to light.

All this is not to belittle where things are right now. As Erik correctly pointed out, this is the most hopeful we can be about Colombia for a long time. Of particular interest is how Colombian politics might play out on the ideological level if the FARC were to all but die out. Would they be as beholden to the U.S.? Would Colombians start electing more centrist and leftist leaders? Would the rightighst politicians who are popular right now really be able to maintain their popularity in a political context where the opponent on whom they base their legitimacy no longer is a threat? There's no way of knowing now, because the FARC still is around, even if diminished for the time. Still, one can't help but think that maybe, after 40+ years of conflict and 25+ years of stagnant, useless violence that has torn the country apart, things are looking better than they have for awhile.

Mexico's Country Music Stars Incresing Targets of Murders

For entirely unclear and confounding reasons, Mexico's country music (grupero) stars are being murdered at an alarming rate. Already as many as 13 have been killed this year, and they aren't even little-known performers. The most recent murder of Sergio Gomez on December 2 (in which his body was found with burn marks from torture and then killed with plastic wire) was a member of K-Paz, one of Mexico's more popular grupero groups. In another case, a failed attempt on the life of Zayda Pena Arjona led to her hospitalization, where the following day hitmen still entered the hospital and killed her with two shots to the head.

Official explanations are sparse, and the authorities are really puzzled on this. The lyrics of the dead may have had some cause, as many of them sang narcocorridos, or songs about the drug trade (not always in a bad way). Officials suspect the lyrics here and there may have angered some drug lords, yet Gomez, whose group K-Paz doesn't really have many such songs, has confused authorities further. Besides the lyrical content, the only possible suspicions autorities have on the issue is the possibility that some of these musicians were tied to organized crime (knowingly or unknowingly). However, there is absolutely nothing concrete to point to any of this - it is all just suspicion, making the cases even more bizarre and difficult to understand or solve.

What is really frustrating in all this is the blatant open war on one of Mexico's major cultural forms. Grupero music is part of the rich legacy and tradition of Norteño music in Mexico, expressing love and murder in ways not totally unlike early murder-ballads and country and blues music of the early 20th century. It isn't just terrible that a particularly rich expression of Mexican culture is under attack. Other artists, grupero or not, are now increasingly afraid to play in Northern Mexico, fearing an attack themselves. While this certainly won't end all musical production or performance in Mexico, the clear war that drug dealers or others are now launching against Mexican culture is extremely distressing, and the inability of the police and authorities to even begin to figure out where to start doesn't bode well for Mexican musicians in the near future.