Top Cartel Lord Killed in Mexico

I don't follow Mexican politics or the nuances of the drug war as closely as I probably should, but this is big news:

Two hundred sailors raided an upscale apartment complex and killed a reputed Mexican drug cartel chief in a two-hour gunbattle, one of the biggest victories yet in President Felipe Calderon's drug war.

Arturo Beltran Leyva, the ''boss of bosses,'' and three members of his cartel were slain in the shootout Wednesday in Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City, according to a navy statement. A fifth cartel member committed suicide during the shootout.

This in no way means the end of the drug trade, or the end of the cartels' power in Mexico. Still, this is definitely good news for President Calderon, who has been needing good news. And as pc points out, the news is everywhere in Mexico today.

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.

Political violence from Mexico's drug cartels?

Last night someone threw some grenades into a plaza during Mexico's Independence celebrations in the capital city of Michoacán. The governor of Michoacán is claiming it was drug cartels. So far, 8 are dead and over 100 people are wounded, but the numbers or changing quickly. You can read more about it here or here (in English). If it does turn out to be related to organized crime, this would be the first time they have engaged in such an open attack on civilians, and during a symbolic political event. The consequences of this attack are likely to be pretty bad...

UPDATE 9/18/08: Just a quick update on these attacks. First, the number of dead is 7, not 8. There were a number of conflicting reports when I originally wrote the post. Second, it seems the attacks might be linked to the cartel, La Familia. I've read it might be related to different factions within the cartel that are fighting each other, or it may be a rival cartel that is striking at La Familia. La Familia has been attempting to spread its operations through Michoacán and Central Mexico, and may have pissed off some other cartel.

Calderón's War and support for Authoritarianism in Mexico

My guess is that many readers have at least heard in passing the increasing level of violence in Mexico as a result of President Calderón’s offensive against drug trafficking and organized crime. Since his election in 2006, Calderón has been relying on the Mexican military to attempt to dismantle organized crime networks throughout the country. Many of these cartels are heavily armed, and many times better trained than the military. The result has been catastrophic. El Universal reports that in 2004, there were 667 executions related to drug trafficking, in 2005, there were 1003, and in 2006 1410. Last year, the number of executions rose to 2673, and in the first 8 months of 2008, there have already been 2682 assassinations related to Calderon’s war against the cartels. The police, especially local law enforcement organizations, have been completely ineffective and in many cases are helping the cartels by alerting them of any actions taken by the federal police or the military. So far, the military has supported Calderón, as he is one of the first presidents to really pay attention to the military in Mexico and gave pay raises to soldiers and officers soon after taking office. (El Universal also has an interesting interactive map here, that shows the extent of the different cartels throughout Mexico)

In addition to the increasing drug-related violence in Mexico, there is increasing outrage directed at the level of kidnappings and other criminal activities, that the police have also been completely ineffective in stopping. Most recently, the kidnapping and subsequent murder of the 14-year old son of a prominent Mexican businessman  has led to calls for the death penalty for kidnappers and the legalization of firearms. Calderón himself has voiced his support for increasing the penalty for kidnapping from 70 years to a life sentence, although all these options seem unlikely to be effective. The government recently released figures (probably highly unreliable) that suggest 97% of all crime goes unpunished. And of the remaining 3%, only half ever lead to some type of punishment.

All of this drug-related violence, impunity, and police corruption has of course led to all kinds of attacks from politicians of the PRI and the PRD in an attempt to lay the blame for the rise in violence on the PAN. The public is angry, and politicians are attempting to capitalize on this anger for their own electoral gain. It is somewhat ironic that the PRI is most likely to benefit from the outrage against all the violence in the 2009 election. If the blame should be laid anywhere, it should be with the decades of PRI governance that did very little to professionalize their police forces or combat drug traffickers.

The point of this post is not to give a history of public security in Mexico over the last couple years, if you are interested in reading more about Calderon’s war, click here and here. There are plenty of other stories available in English regarding what is going on. What I’d like to comment on is that the violence in Mexico is leading to an increase in voices that support more authoritarian and repressive policies, which is why I am very disturbed by an editorial from yesterday’s edition of La Jornada. La Jornada is probably the most important left-leaning paper in Mexico, and widely available (although like most newspapers, only read by the elite, politicians, and those interested in politics).

The editorial, entitled “The Weakness of the State,” was written by Soledad Loaeza, a Mexican political scientist well known for her work on the history of the National Action Party. In this piece, Loaeza argues that the inability of the Mexican government to deal with the increasing levels of executions and kidnappings is due to a weakening of the Mexican state, to the point where the state has lost its monopoly over the use of force within its national territory. All in all, this is fairly obvious, but she lays the blame for the weakening of the state on democratization, the economic reforms of the 80s and 90s, and electoral competition between the major political parties. According to her argument, these reforms and increasing political competition have weakened the Mexican state’s ability to provide security and public services, and have led to the politicization of the bureaucracy. Loaeza suggests the political parties in Mexico only have private interests, which has led them to weaken the state’s ability to serve its basic functions, instead of looking out for the public good.

I find the implications of such an argument fairly dangerous, especially in a country like Mexico, which has made some significant advances in democratization but still has a long way to go. If electoral competition and democracy weaken the state’s ability to provide security, then what is the solution? I don’t find it very far fetched that one could make an argument in support of more authoritarian rule and increased militarization from Loaeza’s line of reasoning. I find this especially disheartening since this is coming from a political scientist.

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.

"Tenía que ser el Chavo del 8!"

When I lived in Costa Rica, one of the few TV programs I watched was Mexico's 1970s comedy, "El Chavo". "El Chavo" starred Roberto Goméz Bolaños (who also starred in "El Chapulin", a program that preceded "El Chavo" but that was not as foolishly amusing to me). "El Chavo" was far from brilliant - the comedic narrative and trajectory of an entire episode can be mapped out within the first 2 minutes or so. Still, the show was amusing, and was a great way to try to improve my Spanish after a long day of classes. In this regard, I joined millions of citizens across multiple generations in Latin America and the United States in having "El Chavo" as a part of my past (it is still broadcast all over the place - I know for a fact they still rerun it here in Brazil in the afternoons, and I caught it on one of the Spanish-language channels in New Mexico when I lived there).

So imagine my surprise to learn that, in a new book, Columbian drug lord Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela is alleging Bolaños (as well as many other artists and actors) performed at parties held by the Cali Cartel. Bolaños is denying the charges, and it's not like a drug lord is the most reputable person. Hopefully, they are baseless and factless allegations, and Bolaños never did anything like this. Nonetheless, it's not out of the realm of possibility. Strange times....