2 Mexico A humanitarian crisis in the making Mónica Serrano This chapter examines the changing nature of drug related violence in Mexico and provides a framework for an interpretation of the country’s human rights crisis. Three main points are pertinent to the arguments developed here. First, while it is certain that President Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) declared a war on drugs and drug trafficking, the actual militarisation of drug policy long preceded his administration. Second, drug related violence accelerated under the Calderón administration but had already erupted during the government of Vicente Fox (2000–2006). Third, the context in which human rights violations take place and in which international human rights law and international humanitarian law operate in practice is hugely important in understanding the nature of the current drug war. Calderón’s choice of anti-narcotics policy and drug enforcement played a key role in exacerbating criminal violence. The analysis that follows provides some insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the main arguments that have been advanced to explain the violent crisis engulfing Mexico. It looks at the scale, character and nature of the violence that followed Calderón’s massive deployment of troops, ostensibly to fight organised crime, as soon as he took power. Transition to democracy and the rise of drug violence At the turn of the century Mexico appeared to be ideally positioned to make an uneventful transition to democracy. The country had navigated the uncertain and sometimes turbulent waters of a protracted political liberalisation, despite fears that political violence could trigger a major crisis. Between 1988 and 1994, when the first multi-party election took place, over sixty members of the left wing Party of Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, PRD) were killed, in what the party interpreted as a campaign of violent intimidation. In 1994 a chain of high level political assassinations, including the murder of the PRI’s presidential candidate and the rise of the Zapatista insurgency, threatened to upset the delicate balance upon which the transition rested. Nonetheless, the country managed to navigate its way to democracy. By then Mexico had embraced market reforms and a move 54 Securitization, militarization, human rights towards greater global and regional integration. The 1994 entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had been preceded by structural reforms and new economic rules that moved Mexico towards an integrated regional economy. By the time democracy was introduced, years of austerity and economic uncertainty had given way to moderate hopes for prosperity and a relatively stable political environment that were reflected in a rapidly expanding literature on electoral politics and democratic government. However, responses by the illicit drug economy to political change were largely ignored in critical analyses which concentrated on electoral shifts and party dynamics. Beneath the superficial stability of democratic institutions, organised crime was exerting an ever greater influence. The hopes that accompanied the newly formed government of Vicente Fox in 2000 were replaced by mounting security concerns. The abandonment of a hegemonic party system had eroded the regime’s capacity to uphold the formal and informal rules upon which political stability had rested. Meanwhile, the weakening of presidential authority had created a vacuum that was rapidly filled by both legitimate and illegitimate actors, including criminal groups. Besides, external trends beyond the government’s control had left the country in a vulnerable position. Mexico’s illicit markets experienced a massive shock with the rise of the cocaine economy’s powerful and brutal drugtrafficking organisations. Coincidentally, the 9/11 terrorist attacks profoundly affected US–Mexico relations, adding to the security pressures already facing the new administration. The focus of the Fox administration on re-launching NAFTA and meeting its neighbour’s post-9/11 security concerns was understandable, but the choices it made would have far reaching consequences (Smith 1997: 143), not least its apparent downplaying of the challenges posed by drug trafficking and its laissez-faire attitude to the growth of the cartels. The obvious intention behind these approaches was to ‘denarcotise’ its relationship with the US. A multiplicity of factors has produced the crisis of credibility that haunts Mexico’s democracy. Under three successive elected governments the problems besieging Mexico’s democracy became more acute. Halfway through President Peña Nieto’s term in office, electoral authority, once perceived as the beacon of Mexico’s democracy, had become increasingly contested. The main political parties which had infused life into electoral competition were now much weaker, and increasingly perceived as ‘cartel’ organisations distanced from the electorate (Smith 1997: 143). Despite the efforts of the Calderón and Peña Nieto administrations to spin the successes of their policies, doubts about the prospects for Mexico’s democracy deepened. Indeed, the charade of political pluralism, widespread and systemic corruption and impunity, almost zero economic growth and a growing public debt had drained democratic hopes (Pardiñas 2014; Silva Hérzog-Márquez 2015), leading to the erosion of the presidency’s authority, greater power for governors, and unbridled corruption. A humanitarian crisis in the making 55 How much of the criminal security crisis and the attendant exacerbation of violence can be explained by the failure of democracy still provokes much heated debate. The reality is that, given the complex nature of the illicit drug economy, it is unlikely that a more proactive drug policy could have prevented either Mexico’s collapse into criminal violence or the capture of state institutions by the cartels. The Fox administration, like its predecessor and successor, had inherited the disastrous consequences of ever more stringent drug control policies which had given rise to criminal organisations and had put in their hands the resources to engage in massive corruption and indiscriminate violence (Kenny and Serrano 2011a; 2011b). The opening of the cocaine transit economy and changes in drug related violence As Mexican authorities considered various drug control strategies, they had to contend with at least two major and interrelated challenges. The first was that Mexican drug producers had succeeded through the 1990s in keeping their traditional market position, which allowed them to continue supplying over 80 per cent of US marijuana imports and 30 percent of the US illicit heroin market (Andreas 1996: 56; Smith 1997: 128). The second was the opening of the cocaine transit economy and its impact on existing trafficking activities (MacCaun and Reuter 2001). Since the second half of the 1980s there had been evidence that the drug problem was moving and mutating at an accelerating pace (Mayorga 2016). A critical element was stiffer drug market competition caused largely by drug enforcement efforts on both sides of the US border. In Mexico, the arrest of Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo in 1989 had triggered the emergence of major regional drug organisations, with Baja California controlled by the Arellano Félix brothers; the Juárez/Chihuahua cartel by Amado Carrillo; Sinaloa dominated by Joaquin Guzmán and Ismael Zambada, and the Gulf cartel led by Juan García Ábrego and subsequently by Osiel Cárdenas, founder of the armed group Zetas, in the late 1990s (Blancornelas 2002: 52–59; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 179–180 and 211). Behind this transformation of Mexico’s criminal marketplace lay the opening of cocaine routes across Mexican territory, resulting from the closure of the main US entry point for Colombian cocaine in South Florida (Kenney 2007; Gootenberg 2011: 39–40; 2012: 160 and 168). The sudden flood of cocaine caught the unprepared Mexican authorities unawares, confronting them with unforeseen and formidable difficulties. With 10.5 million Americans reporting having used cocaine in the early 1980s, doubling to 22 million in the mid1980s, and with consumption peaking in the early 1990s, the US had established itself as the largest cocaine market in the world, with Mexico now the major transit point supplying that market (Gootenberg 2010: 72; 2012). The opening of the cocaine transhipment economy transformed Mexico’s drug problem into an insoluble conundrum. The 1,000-tonne flow of Colombian cocaine, increasingly diverted via Cali and Panama towards northern 56 Securitization, militarization, human rights Mexico, radically altered the size, value and organisation of the Mexican illicit drug market (Palacios and Serrano 2010; Serrano 2012). In the late 1980s one third of cocaine bound for the US market entered through Mexico, rising by the late 1990s to 85 per cent. As cocaine seizures in Mexico increased, tripling between 1988 and 1990, the organisations transferring the drug mutated fast. At first Mexican traffickers coexisted peacefully, and, taking toll fees from the suppliers, coordinated the delivery of cocaine to the US in ‘relative harmony’ (Blancornelas 2002: 106–107; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 226, 282 and 300; Epstein and Propublica 2016). However, as the number of players in the market increased, disputes over turf, routes and territory also increased, fuelling systemic drug violence (Goldstein 1985). Already in the early 1990s, 40 per cent of the cocaine consumed in the United States was smuggled by one organisation, the Arellano Félix brothers. As US interdiction efforts pushed the cocaine routes deeper into Mexican territory, market competition intensified, and previously local and regional drug trafficking organisations became nationwide cartels able to recruit and mobilise armies to defend their share of the trade (Epstein and Propublica 2016; Valdés Castellanos 2013). Although in the late 1990s cocaine consumption among American users began to ebb, with millions still of chronic users the US market remained buoyant (Caulkins et al. 2015). By then, campaigns by the US and Colombian authorities against the Medellín and Cali cartels had strengthened the hand of Mexican traffickers and allowed them to change the tolls they had initially charged Colombians for 40–50 per cent shares in kind, and to make their own direct purchases. Not surprisingly, their profits soared five to tenfold, as did their autonomy. As in Colombia, the scale and profitability of cocaine trafficking fuelled the rise of ‘brutal world class’ drug organisations characterised by their competitiveness, transnational links, innovative capacity, infiltration of state and business institutions, and, especially, their readiness to resort to massive bribery and violence (Kenny and Serrano 2011b; Gootenberg 2012: 168 and 174; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 217 and 365–366). Charging an average fee of $1,250 dollars per kilo of cocaine transported into the US, a Mexican intermediary between 1985 and 1986 had earned tens of millions. Once Mexican traffickers started charging one kilo of cocaine for each transported kilo, their profits rocketed, according to some sources by as much as 1,000 per cent. Not surprisingly, by the mid-1990s US officials estimated the total value of Mexican drug exports at about $10 billion, while Mexican estimates put it as high as $30 billion (Gootenberg 2012: 172; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 193–195 and 291–292). With such enormous profits giving traffickers the means to buy or coerce state authorities, the risk of legal penalties was easily neutralised. Mexican traffickers also acquired additional revenues by exporting methamphetamines to the US after the government had closed laboratories in California supplying a growing North American market. A humanitarian crisis in the making 57 Mexican administrations, particularly those of the Zedillo government, could not keep up with the frantic expansion of the new illicit market. The escalation of turf wars between drug trafficking organisations was a forceful indicator of violent changes in Mexico’s drug marketplace. Greater control of cocaine smuggling and distribution enabled the cartels to pay ‘informal taxes’ to institutional actors including the police, the military and politicians, and ultimately to compromise the state. But when efforts to persuade the authorities actively to favour the criminals did not achieve the intended results, traffickers resorted to more violent means. Indeed, through the 1990s, the economic weight and power of Mexican drug cartels allowed them to neutralise state institutions and coerce law enforcement and security agencies. The first elected government had identified the reform of law enforcement institutions as a democratic priority, but had failed to recognise the scale of the task. By the time the Fox government assumed power, violent criminal confrontations had exposed the transnational dimensions of the country’s security challenges. The criminal wars between the Arellano Félix and Sinaloa cartels, and the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, and the rise of the Zetas and their capture of the border city of Nuevo Laredo in 2003–2005, were glaring exposures of security weaknesses and the government’s inability to enforce the law. The logic of criminal war During the Fox administration, criminal competition had led to full scale criminal wars in the major cities along the border, from Tijuana, to Juárez to Nuevo Laredo. This section will argue that the rise and evolution of these wars was closely linked to anti-narcotic policy decisions and drug enforcement. (a) Arellano Félix’s reign of terror In Baja California, where the first elected opposition government assumed office in 1989, drug trafficking revealed its power over two decades on many fronts. From the early 1990s main roads were often closed at night to allow the landing of planes loaded with marijuana and cocaine. By then the Arellano Félix organisation was sending two tons of cocaine a day into the US and was mainly responsible for administering the transfer of drugs across the Baja California–California border with the connivance of local and federal authorities and security services (Reyna and Fresnedo 2014). In 1993 the FBI published a list of the names of over 100 police officers who, it believed, were on Arellano Félix’s payroll. Backed by a dependable network of police protection, including that of Enrique Harari, head of the Federal Road Police (1986–1988), Arellano Félix’s ascendancy remained uncontested for most of the 1990s. In 1997, they offered the then recently appointed PGR delegate, General José Luis Chávez García, a choice between the life of his family or a 58 Securitization, militarization, human rights 1 million dollar payment. Two major operations aimed at overhauling the state’s Attorney General’s Office, and the arrest of nearly twenty-five federal police officers on charges of criminal association with Arellano Félix organisation did little to erode its power (Proceso 2000, Blancornelas 2002, 193–194 and 248; García and Dávila 2002; Cornejo 2000, Valdés Castellanos 2013: 227). It is true that the Arellano Félix’s violent hegemony was gradually weakened by sustained efforts at law enforcement, including a series of DEA operations. However, the pressure of the anti-narcotics policy on Arellano Félix made room for criminal competition, especially from the Sinaloa cartel (Cornejo 1997; Avila 2002; Venegas and Cornejo 1996). By 1997, with Ramón Arellano Félix on the FBI’s most wanted list, the power of the organisation had suffered a significant diminution (Reyna and Fresnedo 2014). By the late 1990s, the effects of gang instability were revealed in increasing numbers of homicides and disappearances, as well as in open attacks on state authorities and journalists, including Jesús Blancornelas. In 1999 the state’s total number of homicides doubled to reach 637 and more than 400 minor traffickers were slain in 1999–2000 for freelancing (Blancornelas 2002: 131; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 234). As Blancornelas and his colleagues at Zeta tried to keep track of drug related deaths, their estimated figure for 1997–July 2000 reached 2,094 individuals executed in Baja California (Blancornelas 2003: 69–72; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 233–234). With the help of young middle-class men known as ‘narco-juniors’, who acted as mules and triggermen for the cartel, and a whole team of ‘baseballistas’, the Arellano Félix cartel had established a reputation for ‘innovative’ and vicious violence. Victims were hung and beaten to death or disintegrated in barrels of hot lye or acid (Solís 1996; Blancornelas 2002: 201 and 207–212; Epstein and Propublica 2016). The statement given by Santiago Meza López ‘el pozolero’ upon his capture in 2009, regarding the more than 300 dead bodies that he had helped dissolve in the course of a decade, offered a gruesome glimpse into the cartel’s callous murderousness (PGR 2009; De Mauleón 2009; El País 2009). Although its ongoing corruption of local police forces and authorities allowed Arellano Félix to keep things reasonably under control, by 2002–2003 the death of Ramón Arellano and arrest of his brother Benjamín exacerbated renewed internecine conflict and criminal competition. Three years later, in 2006, the capture of the youngest brother, Javier Arellano Félix, by the DEA, drove violence in Tijuana and Baja California to unprecedented levels, largely resulting from the DEA’s protracted operations, culminating in Operation Shadow Game and the arrest of Javier Arellano Félix, which mortally wounded the Tijuana organisation (Epstein and Propublica 2016). Between 2006 and 2008, open conflict between the lieutenants fighting over the cartel’s internal succession, Eduardo Sánchez Arellano ‘the engineer’ and Teodoro García Simental, ‘el Teo’, the latter already recruited by the Sinaloa organisation, left over 1,000 deaths. The Binational Centre for Human Rights A humanitarian crisis in the making 59 claimed that at least 1,200 people had been disappeared in the state, with mounting numbers in 2007 caused by internecine conflict within the Tijuana organisation. With critical information provided by the rival Sinaloa cartel, the DEA’s pressures expedited the final downfall of the Tijuana cartel. Ironically, as DEA agents themselves have acknowledged, the blows they had inflicted on the Arellano brothers facilitated a takeover by the Sinaloa group. In the words of Dave Herrod, the DEA agent in charge of the final operation, ‘taking out the Arellano Félix Organisation cleared territory for Chapo’ (Moore 1997; Epstein and Propublica 2016). (b) The Sinaloa cartel’s march eastward: the battle for Juárez Having established a foothold in the Tijuana–San Diego corridor, the ascendant Sinaloa cartel pushed turf war violence eastwards. As in Baja California and Tijuana, for over a decade in Chihuahua a pax mafiosa agreed by the Juárez/Chihuahua cartel, and firmly anchored in police protection, had survived. Thus, between 1984 and 1993 the homicide rate in Ciudad Juárez, the organisation’s main gateway into the US, had remained fairly stable at around 8.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. However, by the end of 1991, the assassination of Victor Manuel Oropeza, a journalist who had exposed the links between local police and drug trafficking, set off the first alarms. With 134 murders registered in the city in 1991, El Norte de Ciudad Juárez described 1991 as one of the most violent years in the history of Juárez (Molloy and Bowden, 2011: 20–21). Additionally, in April 1993, the killing of Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a founder of the Juárez cartel and an ex-regional head of the DFS, together with the subsequent murder attempt on the man thought to be responsible, drug lord Amado Carrillo, were obvious symptoms of rising criminal competition (Gutiérrez 1993; de Mauleón 2001; Villalpando and Castillo 2005; Pérez Espino and Páez Varela 2009). The impact of these events on the extralegal peace enforced by the Juárez cartel in Ciudad Juárez manifested itself in a sudden surge in the city’s homicide rate and the first appearance of an apparently systematic femicide. In 1994, following the discovery of one of the first female bodies, El Diario de Juárez called attention to a pattern linking a series of female killings from 1993 to 1996 (Alvarado Alvarez 2009). The unexpected death in 1997 of Amado Carrillo, ‘el señor de los cielos’, opened a further phase of chronic infighting. Internal strife among criminal gangs and political instability at local and state levels intensified competition for the control of drug trafficking, a trend reflected in the doubling of the state’s annual total homicide figure, from 306 in 1990 to 648 in 1997, and the discovery of the first mass graves in 1999. Throughout the next decade, as had been the case in Tijuana, the Juárez cartel, led by Vicente and Rodolfo Carrillo, managed to maintain formal control of the ‘plaza’. In sharp contrast with Tijuana, in Ciudad Juárez criminal instability almost immediately resulted in a human rights crisis. Thanks to the hitman El Sicario’s confessions, the details of thousands of executions, no less than one hundred witnessed by 60 Securitization, militarization, human rights him, came to light. His testimony revealed indiscriminate killing campaigns, including one prompted by the disappearance of 3,000 kg of cocaine, targeting at least seventy drug dealers and forty-five car thieves. As his account makes clear, contract killers, like him, working for the Juárez cartel, would dump the bodies in clandestine graves (Molloy and Bowden 2011: 116–125; Lomas 2009). Between 1997 and 2007 a rising tide of femicides, involving the violent deaths of hundreds of women, a rapidly growing number of disappeared persons, reaching nearly 200 by 2003, and the discovery of their burials were a bleak precursor of things to come (Dillon 1997; Badillo 1999; Reforma 2002; El Siglo de Torreón 2004; González 2015). Criminal collusion between local police forces and the Juárez cartel was exposed in 2004: under the orders of Miguel Angel Loya, chief police officer, dealers who had gambled against the Juárez organisation had been disappeared, killed and buried in mass graves (Valdés Castellanos 2013: 240–241). The violence that had descended upon Ciudad Juárez took an ever more brutal turn as the Juárez and Sinaloa cartels outsourced coercive power to local gangs. Estimates by the Municipal Public Secretariat calculated that in the late 1990s the total number of gangs in Ciudad Juárez was around 300 with approximately 15,000 members. The estimated total for the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso area was 400 gangs and 25,000 members (Pineda Jaimes and Herrera Robles 2007: 99; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 402). In an effort to bolster ‘La Línea’, the Juárez cartel’s armed branch, members of the gang known as ‘Los Aztecas’ were recruited. Meanwhile, the Sinaloa organisation resorted to members of the local gangs known as the ‘Mexicles’ and ‘Los Artistas Asesinos’ as murderous enforcers of its aims. (c) The Gulf–Zetas military drug cartel at war in Nuevo Laredo Thanks to their military strength, their geographical reach and territorial control, the rise of the Zetas undoubtedly marked a turning point in the history of organised crime in Mexico (Kenny and Serrano 2011c; Valdés Castellano, 2013: 257). Originally the armed branch of the Gulf cartel, the Zetas started operations in 1999 and were first recorded in 2002 in an FBI electronic communication. The Zetas brought together between 14 and 30 former elite officers of the GAFES (Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales), many of whom had received training at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, under the command of Arturo Guzmán Decena, a defector from the Mexican Army. Following Arturo Guzmán’s death in 2002 and the capture of Osiel Cárdenas the following year, the leadership of the Gulf cartel fell to Heriberto Lazcano, ‘El Lazca’. The consequent disruption of the Gulf cartel’s internal structure pushed the Zetas towards ever more violent activities, including the diversification of the organisation’s business portfolio to include kidnappings, human trafficking, arms trafficking and extortion (Cook 2007; Milenio 2015). With the emergence of a previously unimaginable ruthlessness and efficiency in the escalating use of violence, arising from both the Zetas’ military A humanitarian crisis in the making 61 training and the recruitment of ex-Kaibiles, members of the Guatemalan special forces, Mexico saw the dawn of a new and more extreme era in the drug wars (Kenny and Serrano 2011c: 62–64). By 2003 both Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and FBI reports highlighted the Zetas’ geographical expansion and their military power, then estimated at around 350 heavily armed men. In that year the PGR revealed that the Gulf cartel was active in at least ten states, stretching from Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche and Quintana Roo to Chiapas and Zacatecas, Jalisco and Mexico City (López Medellín 2015: 31). This expansion, and the Gulf cartel’s decision to open a Pacific coast route, were responses to the logistics of transporting cocaine overland from Guatemala to the northern border. Already in 2001 the Zetas had extended into Michoacán, and, a few years later, into Guerrero. In January 2004 their military potency was demonstrated when a sixty-strong armed commando freed twenty-five members of the Gulf cartel from a state prison in Apatzingán in Michoacán (Gómez 2004; Valdés Castellano 2013: 257–258). As far back as 1999 El Chapo and Arturo Beltrán Leyva of the Sinaloa cartel had identified Nuevo Laredo as a potential priority for expansion of its activities. It was, however, the arrest of Osiel Cárdenas, leader of the Gulf cartel, in 2003, that promoted open competition between the two organisations. Indeed, not only did Osiel Cárdenas’ capture prompt fierce internal disputes, pitting five would-be successors to the leadership against each other, it also invited external challenges. As a result, throughout 2003 violent confrontations between armed groups linked to the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas, or between the Zetas and the state security forces, became increasingly frequent (Proceso 2003; Gómez and Monge 2003; Crónica 2003; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 251, 256 and 306). Unsurprisingly, such unprecedented levels of violence forced the government to deploy troops to Nuevo Laredo to secure the airport, control entry points into the US and patrol the streets. Exactly as in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, indisputable evidence pointed to local, state and federal police collusion with the criminals and revealed the cartels’ pervasive capture of state institutions. In the sequence of violent confrontations that took place in 2003, local and federal police forces were often at loggerheads with members of the newly created Federal Investigation Agency (AFI) allegedly extending their protection to the Sinaloa cartel. In 2004 Nuevo Laredo’s mayor, José Manuel Suárez, admitted the extent of police corruption, acknowledging that in the period 1999–2004 at least 868 police officers had been dismissed in that city. Police collusion with organised crime was suspected in the wave of kidnappings and disappearances that spread throughout 2003. Investigations following the kidnapping of eight people, and the abduction and murder of businessman Cervantes Ezpeleta, confirmed these fears (Proceso 2004). According to the Centro de Estudios Fronterizos y de Promoción de los Derechos Humanos (Cefprodhac) in 2003 alone the number of kidnappings and forced disappearances registered in ten municipalities located near the border had reached 240, while the total 62 Securitization, militarization, human rights number of violent deaths in Tamaulipas for the period 1992–2004 surpassed 3,000, of which nearly 700 were drug related, the majority occurring under the Yarrington administration of 1999–2004 (Monge et al. 2004). The exceptional violence of events taking place in the state can be attributed to the military origins of the Zetas and the absence of a family structure at the head of the Gulf cartel, as factors which combined to produce a uniquely savage and predatory criminal organisation. The battle for Nuevo Laredo was ferocious. Growing suspicion in the media over the accuracy of the authorities’ reporting of homicides and their manipulation of homicide statistics was believed to underlie the assassination of the editor of the newspaper El Mañana de Nuevo León, who had accused the police authorities and Francisco Cayuela Villarreal, the state’s Justice Attorney, of massaging the figures (López Medellín 2015). In 2005 an internal DEA assessment reported the ascendancy of the Gulf cartel and the Zetas as they recaptured areas previously under the control of the Sinaloa organisation (DEA 2009). That same year, an FBI classified report alerted the US Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to the presence of training camps where Guatemalan ex-Kaibil officers were training drug traffickers in paramilitary tactics just over the border from McAllen, Texas (Joint Staff 2004; Smith 2005; Padgett 2005). The Zetas–Kaibil nexus had been first documented in September 2004 when, at a federal checkpoint in Aguililla, Michoacán, three men transporting a massive arms shipment admitted their Guatemalan origin. A year later in October 2005, Deputy Attorney General Santiago Vasconcelos confirmed that at least thirty Kaibiles were under the orders of Heriberto Lazcano, el ‘Lazca’, head of the Zetas and the Gulf cartel. If the unstoppable rise of the Zetas had already signalled the use of advanced military skills in the drug market, their collaboration with the kaibiles had also exposed the extent of the arms smuggling that for decades had fuelled the violence of the drug wars (El Universal 2005; Castillo 2005; Cortés 2006). The vortex of violence As we have seen, when Felipe Calderón assumed power in December 2006, Mexico’s tide of violence was being propelled by criminal wars arising either from fierce competition between major heavily armed groups, and/or violent internecine battles within such organisations. There is no doubt that, underlying the more than 2,000 violent deaths attributed to drug violence and organised crime in 2006, was the contest between five criminal organisations for the control of strategic territories, routes and border cities. Initially the new government wasted precious time by failing to track the homicide rate, but the drastic escalation of violence and a 50 per cent increase in recorded homicides soon prompted a heated debate. Supporters of the Calderón administration were right in arguing that the violence had preceded their election, and that its escalation had already been incubated by criminal A humanitarian crisis in the making 63 competition. Thus Alejandro Poiré, head of the Executive Secretariat of Public Security, and the director of Mexico’s intelligence agency, the Centre of Investigation and National Security (Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, CISEN), Guillermo Valdés, went to great pains to emphasise the emergency context in which the eventual decision to deploy massive federal forces took place. Government advisors Joaquín Villalobos and Alejandro Hope concurred with the view that the situation clearly merited an immediate response, but disagreed on the form it should take. (Poiré 2011; Villalobos 2010; 2012; Valdés Castellanos 2013; 363–379; Hope 2012). As things stood, critics were right to press for more nuanced explanations for the sharp upturn in violence in the period 2008–2010. While it was generally accepted that extreme criminal violence had existed prior to the Calderón administration, there was heated discussion about the immediate causes of its sudden escalation and about the role of military and federal security deployments in that escalation. Government officials argued emphatically that heightened criminal competition was the main reason for the growth in and diffusion of violence. Accordingly, they cited as evidence the wars between the Sinaloa and the Arellano Félix organisations over the Tijuana–San Diego corridor, the vicious fracture between El Chapo Guzmán and the Beltrán Leyva brothers, as well as the latter’s decision to close ranks with the Juárez cartel and the Zetas, resulting in the subsequent violent divorce between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas, and the spread of these conflicts to the Pacific coast. In the government view, it was indisputable that the violence resulting directly from these wars and criminal competition for territorial and market control was entirely to blame for the massive increase in drug related deaths, from a total of 2,200 in 2006 to 16,987 in 2011. There is a general acceptance that criminal competition did play a key role in shaping violent trends in the country. Indeed, the tripling of homicides between 2007 and 2008 in Baja California was largely the result of the Sinaloa takeover of the Arellano Félix stronghold. Similarly, the repercussions of the 2008 rupture between El Chapo and the Beltrán Leyva brothers were not confined to internal chains of killings and vendettas, but were felt all the way from Ciudad Juárez to Guerrero and Michoacán (Zepeda Gil 2016; Pantoja García 2016). Similarly, the drastic escalation observed in 2009 and 2010 of homicides in Nuevo León and Tamaulipas cannot be explained without taking into account the violent split between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas (Kenny and Serrano 2011d: 214; Poiré 2011). However, missing from the government’s diagnosis is the incendiary role of anti-narcotics policy and drug enforcement. As the government struggled to distance itself from responsibility for the violence, it portrayed it as almost entirely criminal. The Calderón administration’s account stressed the concentration of violent activities in particular states and particular municipalities. When official figures were released for the period January 2007–December 2011, a total of 51,501 drug related deaths were reported, but their 51 per cent concentration in four states – Chihuahua 25 per cent, Sinaloa 11 per cent, 64 Securitization, militarization, human rights Guerrero 9 per cent and Tamaulipas 6 per cent – was duly highlighted. And once three other states, Durango, Nuevo León and Michoacán, were included, each one containing 5 per cent of allegedly drug related deaths, as many as 66 per cent of such deaths were found to be concentrated in just seven states. The government’s argument did not stop there; it insisted on the eminently criminal, i.e. non-civilian character, of the victims of these deaths. Accordingly, it contended that the great bulk of such deaths, that is 43,551, or 85 per cent, of total drug related deaths, were the result of either internal cartel executions (82 per cent), or criminal armed confrontations (3 per cent). In this analysis just 15 per cent of total drug related deaths had originated in unilateral and direct criminal aggression against state authorities (7 per cent) or armed clashes with state security forces (8 per cent). The emphasis on such statistical abstractions played a key role in the administration’s narrative (Kenny and Serrano 2011d: 204). By stressing the geographical isolation of these trends, the government sought to refute its critics’ claims of rising and widespread violence. Also at the core of the government’s implausible assertions about criminal deaths lay the proposition that killings were exclusively criminal-on-criminal. In the words of Poiré (2011) and Villalobos (2012), since 89 per cent of drug related killings registered in the period 2006–2010 were the result of executions, it was reasonable to conclude that victims and perpetrators alike were involved in organised crime, and that the bulk of the deaths resulted from internecine conflicts. Sooner than expected, critics and human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch, called into question the procedures the administration had used to record drug related killings in order to conclude that the great majority had been perpetrated by criminals on criminals. Partly owing to a lack of consensus among government agencies over the criteria by which to define drug related killings, but more because of outrage at their presumption of a guilty verdict without a proper criminal investigation, the government was forced to resile from this classification after human rights organisations argued vociferously that the government’s claims regarding alleged criminal infighting could be substantiated only through proper judicial investigations. The government’s narrative continued blatantly to ignore the role of drug control and enforcement in promoting gang violence, although drug policy experts had long called attention to the propensity of drug cartels to react violently to prohibitionist and punitive drug control policies. Indeed, for decades experts on drug policy and security had highlighted the way in which, by laying down the rules of the game governing the interactions between state drug control organisations and criminal organisations, drug policy ultimately shapes the market’s systemic violence. Once drug related homicides multiplied further, increasing by 142 per cent in 2008, reaching 6,824 deaths, the role of drug enforcement again took centre stage. Obviously the size of criminal organisations and their financial and military resources could not be ignored, but it was impossible to explain their expansion and violence without putting drug policy decisions into the A humanitarian crisis in the making 65 equation. To many, the succession of criminal wars which had spread along the border had provided enough warnings about deeply flawed anti-narcotic policies and enforcement. As critics were keen to point out, it was state policy and drug control enforcement that had long shaped the decisions of drug traffickers, inducing them to resort to violence to enforce internal discipline, settle criminal accounts or secure territory and routes (Reuter 2009). The contentious debate about the causes of the abrupt escalation in violence in 2008 included recognition by both the government and its critics of the existence of rising criminal competition, but beneath this apparent consensus lay significant disagreements. There were important differences in accounting for the drivers of the increase in drug violence, but essentially the discussion boiled down to two main arguments. Both highlighted systemic drug violence but disagreed about the contribution to it of anti-narcotics and enforcement policy. One emphasised changes in the illicit cocaine market; the other underlined the role of federal and military deployments. The logic of the arguments blaming changes in the illicit cocaine economy can best be understood by pointing to their effects on criminal competition and systemic violence. In this line of argument, the risk of market saturation and a possible reduction in cocaine supply and demand are seen as key factors in increased competition and drug violence. Indeed, evidence of a steady decline in US cocaine consumption and the prospect of a saturated market has been highlighted as a potential element in fostering fiercer criminal competition (Friman 2009; Caulkins et al. 2015; Valdés Castellanos 2013: 290). Others have instead pointed to changes arising from Colombian anti-drug policies resulting in an increase in prices and a reduction in the supply of cocaine from 43.4 million tonnes in 2006 to 16.6 million tonnes in 2010, as important factors in the drug violence equation (Serrano 2000; Castillo et al. 2014). Whether as a result of a reduction in demand, a smaller volume of available cocaine, or higher prices, the idea supporting these arguments is that enforced changes in the illicit cocaine market intensified competition, and probably exacerbated systemic drug violence among Mexican drug traffickers. What seems true in all of this, as in previous complex drug trafficking relationships between Mexico and Colombia, or Turkey and Mexico, is that drug enforcement efforts in one latitude were bound to have knock-on effects, including spasmodic violence, in distant locations. The second theory seems especially compelling, including as it does not only the decision to deploy military and federal troops, but also the way in which it was executed. According to this thesis, President Calderón’s all-out war on drugs spread violence across the country and triggered criminal fragmentation, unleashing in turn a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Critics started questioning the official strategic narrative, according to which rising levels of violence were the necessary corollary of what had, of necessity, to be a long war and clearly indicated success in its conduct. In the words of Villalobos, ‘This enemy can only be dominated through the full force of the state, and when that happens its resistance augments, exacerbating in turn its 66 Securitization, militarization, human rights own wars.’ Drawing on Colombia’s experience, defenders of government strategy went on to argue that, in the city of Medellín, after ten years of war and 70,000 deaths, the government’s victory had produced no reduction in violence. In this account, which echoed that of the government, violence abated only following ‘the state’s resolution to recover by force the territories that had been captured by drug cartels, paramilitary and narco-guerrillas’ (Villalobos 2010; 2012). Notwithstanding the government spin, many critics remained dubious about the wisdom of Calderón’s counter-drug strategy. In their view, behind the escalation of violence into a humanitarian crisis lay policy decisions and law enforcement tactics that shaped the responses of drug trafficking organisations. Distrusting the government’s assumption that rising violence was a clear sign of success, critics started charting the impact of the government’s anti-drugs strategy on two main fronts: the effects of the kingpin strategy and the consequences of military deployment on the ground. For decades there had been concern within the security community about the detrimental effects of the headhunting ‘kingpin’ policy devised to eliminate the leaders of drug cartels. Designed by the DEA in the early 1990s, this decapitation strategy has long been blamed for turning a national security threat into a public order menace. Although over the past decades the scheme has produced a considerable flow of drug related extraditions to the US, it soon ran into trouble by exacerbating drug violence. Despite this, security advisors, compelled by US authorities in both Colombia and Mexico, continued to endorse it (Kenney 2007: 90–91; Llorente 2014). As a matter of fact, the strategy had already been deployed by President Calderón’s predecessors. Indeed, throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s a chain of highly visible arrests, including those of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Amado Carrillo and others, had been designed to mitigate US certification pressures. In 1996 the first top Mexican drug trafficker, Juan García Abrego, then head of the Gulf cartel and also a US national, was extradited upon his arrest by the Zedillo government. And while it is true that under the Fox administration 63,456 drug dealers were arrested and set free upon admitting personal consumption, these individuals were clearly linked to major organisations: 15,849 of them to the Juárez cartel, 6,133 to the Amezcua Contreras organisation, 12,171 to the Sinaloa cartel and 8,736 to the Gulf cartel. Moreover, no fewer than fifteen top drug lords were captured and extradited among 235 nationals who were handed over to foreign governments (Castillo 2006). But with the publication in 2009 of an official list, including the names of the thirty-seven most wanted drug lords, plans for the capture and extradition of drug traffickers gathered momentum (Finnegan 2012). The decapitation strategy was enthusiastically embraced by then attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora, who found inspiration in an uncritical reading of the dismantling of the Medellín and Cali cartels. Disregarding the relocation of Colombia’s drug marketplace to FARC and the paramilitary, and the rise and multiplication of a third generation of smaller, nimbler but A humanitarian crisis in the making 67 brutally violent criminal organisations, Medina Mora committed himself to breaking up Mexico’s major cartels into fifty or more smaller entities. For this he was duly praised by the United States’ General MacCaffrey (ICG 2007; Kenny and Serrano 2011d). Thus, in the period between 2007 and 2011, more than thirty drug lords were either killed or arrested, and as many as 505 nationals extradited. As in Colombia, in Mexico the kingpin strategy informed anti-narcotic policy and enforcement. Not only did these efforts lead to the capture, extradition or assassination of major drug figures, but also to the vicious fragmentation of the criminal market place, causing in the process humanitarian havoc (Oxford Analytica 2015). It is no surprise that in both countries, the adoption and implementation of this strategy had been vigorously promoted by US drug agencies, in particular the DEA. In Mexico, with the blessing of the Calderón government, at least sixty-two DEA agents were allowed to operate freely, with no restrictions or reporting requirements, and to work with a network of informants that the agency had long cultivated. Indeed, in Mexico, as in Colombia, the implementation of the kingpin strategy came to depend on the information obtained from talks and negotiations with members of criminal organisations. Using this information, US and Mexican agencies have been able to seize drugs and to capture rival traffickers. According to court testimonies of informants, as well as of Justice Department agents and some DEA officials, some of these relationships were developed through sustained and frequent contacts dating back to the late 1990s. A prominent case concerned a Sinaloa organisation lieutenant whose information led to at least twelve arrests and the confiscation of drug shipments belonging to the Arellano Félix and the Juárez cartels. Nonetheless, it is clear that under these arrangements criminal and violent activity has been allowed to continue. And it is also transparently obvious that the expectation of legal immunity and reduced sentences has encouraged informants to share information that has indubitably fuelled brutal criminal violence. While accepting that these arrangements are ‘deals with the devil’, many continue to defend them on the basis of intelligence they provide such as ‘where traffickers like to eat’ or where they may ‘sleep’. Thus ex-ambassador Myles Frechette, who had been entrusted with the task of re-establishing extradition between the US and Colombia, claimed success for the kingpin strategy, notwithstanding the fact that the drug trade continues unabated. More recently, Vanda FelbabBrown from the Brookings Institution considered the information exchanges with the Sinaloa cartel informant as an important intelligence coup, whereas in the view of Eric L. Olson, based at the Woodrow Wilson Center, ‘What makes this so hard’ is the fact that ‘the United States is using tools in a country where officials are still uncomfortable with those tools’. However, their permissiveness towards brutal behaviour, and their tolerance of the criminal violence and human tragedy they often unleash, make it hard to see how official actions can be justified (Thompson 2011; Gómora 2014). When President Calderón rolled out his military operation for Michoacán in December 2006, the Attorney General’s Office had identified half a dozen 68 Securitization, militarization, human rights criminal organisations as being active. Two years later, under the pressure of anti-narcotics policy and law enforcement, the Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels had split into four organisations. The ripple effects of the Sinaloa–Beltrán Leyva divorce produced at least five organisations, while the Milenio cartel spawned at least two offspring. Towards the end of the Calderón administration the Attorney General’s Office identified twelve major organisations, though in some states the level of fragmentation had reached unprecedented levels: in Guerrero federal authorities estimated that at least four regional organisations and ten local groups were fully active. The succession of military and joint operations deployed by President Calderón in early 2007 in Guerrero, Baja California, Tijuana, Chihuahua and the Golden Triangle, and in 2008 in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Sinaloa, followed by a deployment to the southern border in 2009, further fragmented the criminal marketplace. By 2013, although the Attorney General’s Office again identified eight major criminal organisations, its intelligence branch concluded that their ramifications spread across eighty sub-groups with a presence in twentyfour states. According to the PGR analysis, the Barbie cartel commanded twentythree sub-groups, the Arellano Félix fourteen, the Sinaloa cartel twelve of the most powerful cells, the Familia Michoacana five cells, the Zetas three sub-groups, the Caballeros Templarios and the New Juárez group two sub-groups each, while the Beltran Leyva had fragmented into nineteen cells (Guerrero 2011; PGR 2013; Flores 2013). This fragmentation also meant that these groups were engaging in ever more predatory crime throughout the country. The combined effect of military deployments and decapitation created a criminal nightmare of greater proportions, with violent networks spreading ever further. Criminal violence in various places has created pressure for military intervention, in some instances requested by governors, including PRD governors in Guerrero and Michoacán. However, it soon became evident that military involvement had been adopted with little or no awareness of its likely impact on criminal power balances and dynamics. The reasoning that drove military deployment was based on two equally questionable assumptions: that the drug cartels had to be confronted by full military might, and that by the capture or elimination of their top leaders they could be destroyed. If voices within the Calderón administration had raised doubts or called attention to the potential dangers of military action, they were clearly silenced. By contrast, the security advisors who singlemindedly argued that ‘200 targets had been identified and that the purpose of the campaign was precisely to eliminate them’ presumably prevailed. The proliferation of criminal gangs and explosion of violence immediately following military action revealed the degree of blindness to the complexities of tackling the drug problem within the Calderón administration. Indeed, the Calderón government showed little grasp of the probable repercussions of initiating a war on drugs. On the one hand, by resorting to the rhetoric of war it inadvertently ran the risk of conferring the status and legitimacy of belligerents to criminal actors. But more importantly, by declaring A humanitarian crisis in the making 69 an all-out war on drugs the government inflated the pressure to use military force, creating in turn the expectation of a quick, decisive victory. President Calderón’s policy turned the elimination of illicit drug transactions into a military target, failing to understand that drug trafficking can never be wiped out, it can only be regulated. There was certainly a security aspect to the crisis, possibly even a military dimension, but clearly there was no military solution to the drug problem. Any suggestion that the best policy would be either to refrain from the use of military force altogether or to use it ‘in the proper capacity and in a precise and principled manner’ did not appear to find an echo within the administration, and was possibly dismissed as a sign of weakness (Howard 2002; Mullen 2010). The failure to understand that criminal organisations held sway over local communities, and that traffickers were generally embedded within the population, meant that the use of force was not considered only as a last resort, nor were tactics aimed at protecting the population. The accounts of military patrols and operations in cities, including Ciudad Juárez, reveals how the simple logic of ‘going after the 200’ came face to face with murky realities on the ground. In Ciudad Juárez, in 2008, after the military campaign there, the homicide rate reached 1,607 violent deaths, including 175 police officers, and through the next two years the funerary business thrived. With no clear intelligence policy, and no stated rules of engagement, military action turned into a desperate search for drug deposits and a brutal witchhunt. Having been tortured into forced confessions, hundreds of young men, many of them dealers, were then left at the mercy of a ferocious war for criminal survival between ‘La Línea’, the armed branch of the Juárez organisation, and the Sinaloa cartel. The ripple effects of the drug war spread in diverse ways. The head of the local police, Roberto Orduña, was forced to resign upon the warning that every 48 hours a police agent would be killed. Drug rehabilitation centres were stormed and forced to close. Agricultural communities like ‘Le Barón’ felt compelled to organise self-defence units. Notwithstanding these outcomes, in February of that year Fernando Gómez Mont, then secretary of the interior, announced that the local, state and federal levels of government had joined forces to expel all criminals from Ciudad Juárez (Rodríguez Nieto 2009a; 2009b; Chávez Días de León 2009; Alvarado Alvarez 2009; Turati 2009, Lomas 2009). The government had sought to defeat its elusive adversary by deploying 9,000 troops, the objective being to trace and detain the enemy as quickly as possible with little or no concern for the impact on the civilian population. The absence of clear rules of engagement and a lack of clarity over the use of firepower in military operations meant that a significant number of civilians was bound to be affected. Moreover, the fluidity of the violence and its multifarious sources meant that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify who was criminal or non-criminal and thus to establish the non-combatant status of hundreds of innocent citizens (Strachan and Scheipers 2011; Roberts 2011). If the objective was the total defeat of a criminal enemy, the chances of 70 Securitization, militarization, human rights civilians being wrongly identified as complicit and thus becoming military targets clearly increased. As the stories described in the tragic vignettes included in La guerra por Juárez (Páez Varela 2009) make clear, in the eyes of the citizens of Ciudad Juárez ‘Operación Conjunta Chihuahua’ was never designed to use force in a ‘precise and principled’ way so as to protect them from criminal violence or to diminish the traffickers’ influence over their lives. 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Available at: www.academia.edu/20045679/La_seguridad_p%C3%BAblica_local._Inseguridad_deli ncuencia_y_participaci%C3%B3n_ciudadana_en_Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez. Poiré, A. (2011) ‘Los homicidios y la violencia del crimen organizado’, Nexos, 1 February. Available at: www.nexos.com.mx/?p=14126. Price, C. B. (2012) ‘Targeting Top Terrorists: How Leadership Decapitation Contributes to Counterterrorism’, International Security, 36(4): 9–46. 74 Securitization, militarization, human rights Proceso (2000) ‘“Me quieren acabar a periodicazos”, asegura Enrique Harari, exdirector de la Policía Federal de Caminos’, 30 September. Available at: www.proceso. com.mx/183870/me-quieren-acabar-a-periodicazos-asegura-enrique-harari-exdirecto r-de-la-policia-federal-de-caminos. Proceso (2003) ‘Violento enfrentamiento en Nuevo Laredo’, 2 August. Available at: www.proceso.com.mx/255067/violento-enfrentamiento-en-nuevo-laredo. Proceso (2004) ‘Tamaulipas, el reino de la violencia’, 15 February. Available at: www. proceso.com.mx/191085/tamaulipas-el-reino-de-la-violencia. Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) (2009) ‘Arraigo por 40 días a Santiago Meza López “el pozolero” y dos personas más’, PGR press release # 61/09. Available at: http://calderon.presidencia.gob.mx/2009/01/arraigo-por-40-dias-a-santiago-meza -lopez-el-pozolero-y-dos-personas-mas/. Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) (2013) ‘SubProcuraduría Jurídica y de Asuntos Internacionales, Oficio SJAI/DGAJ/5211/2013’, 27 March. Reforma (2002) ‘Destapan narcofosas red de Carrillo Fuentes’, 17 February. Available at: http://reforma.vlex.com.mx/vid/destapan-narcofosas-carrillo-fuentes-81829909. Reuter, P. (2009) ‘Systemic Violence in Drug Markets’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 52(3): 275–284. Reyna, J. C. and Fresnedo, F. (2014) ‘El extraditado, de Juan Carlos Reyna’, Esquire Latinoamérica, 24 November. Available at: www.esquirelat.com/reportajes/14/11/24/ El-extraditado-de-Juan-Carlos-Reyna/. Roberts, A. (2011) ‘The Civilian in Modern War’, in H. Strachan and S. Scheipers (eds), The Changing Character of War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodríguez Nieto, S. (2009a) ‘Guerra Sucia’, in Alejandro Páez Varela (ed.), La guerra por Juárez, Mexico City: Editorial Planeta, pp. 45–51. Rodríguez Nieto, S. (2009b) ‘Indicios de resistencia’, in Alejandro Páez Varela (ed.), La guerra por Juárez, Mexico City: Editorial Planeta, pp. 87–92. Serrano, M. (2000) ‘Transnational Crime in the Western Hemisphere’, in J. Domínguez (ed.), The Future of Inter-American Relations, New York and London: Routledge. Serrano, M. (2012) ‘States of Violence: State–Crime Relations in Mexico’, in Wil G. Pansters (ed.), Violence, Coercion and State Making in Twentieth Century Mexico, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Silva Hérzog Márquez, J. (2015) ‘El vaciamiento democrático’, Nexos, 1 October. Available at: www.nexos.com.mx/?p=26468. Smith, F. (2005) ‘The Untouchable Narco-State. Guatemala’s Military Defy the DEA’, Texas Observer, 18 November. Available at: www.franksmyth.com/the-texas-obser ver/the-untouchable-narco-state-guatemalas-army-defies-dea/. Smith, P. (1997) ‘Drug-Trafficking in Mexico’, in B. Bosworth, S. M. Collins and N. C. Lustig (eds), Coming Together? Mexico–US Relations, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Solís, D. (1996) ‘Nueva tendencia en México: los jóvenes ricos se convierten los sicarios preferidos’, El Tiempo, 5 November. Available at: www.eltiempo.com/archivo/ documento/MAM-581971. Strachan, H. and Scheipers, S. (2011) ‘Introduction: The Changing Character of War’, in H. Strachan and S. Scheipers (eds), The Changing Character of War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, G. (2011) ‘U.S. Agencies Infiltrating Drug Cartels Across Mexico’, New York Times, 24 October. A humanitarian crisis in the making 75 Turati, M. (2009) ‘Sin lugar para los adictos’, in Alejandro Páez Varela (ed.), La guerra por Juárez, Mexico City: Editorial Planeta, pp. 99–104. Valdés Castellanos, G. (2013) Historia del narcotráfico en México, Mexico City: Aguilar. Venegas, J. M. and Cornejo, J. A. (1996) ‘El cartel de Tijuana desarticulado: PGR’, La Jornada, 17 June. Available at: www.jornada.unam.mx/1996/06/17/narcos.html. Villalobos, J. (2010) ‘Doce mitos de la guerra contra el narco’, Nexos, 1 January. Available at: www.nexos.com.mx/?p=13461. Villalobos, J. (2012) ‘Nuevos mitos de la guerra contra el narco’, Nexos, 1 January. Available at: www.nexos.com.mx/?p=14631. Villalpando, R. and Castillo, G. (2005) ‘En la lista de la DEA, 22 integrantes del cártel de Juárez’, La Jornada, 6 August. Available at: www.jornada.unam.mx/2005/ 08/06/index.php?section=politica&article=005n2pol. Zepeda Gil, R. (2016) ‘Violencia en tierra caliente: guerra criminal e intervenciones federales 2000–2014’, M.A. thesis, El Colegio de México. Neither Truth nor Justice: Mexico's De Facto Amnesty Author(s): Sergio Aguayo Quezada, Javier Treviño Rangel and Maria Pallais Source: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 2, The Mexican Presidency, 2006-2012: Neoliberalism, Social Movements, and Electoral Politics (Mar., 2006), pp. 56-68 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27647917 Accessed: 05-09-2019 20:46 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Latin American Perspectives This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Neither Truth nor Justice Mexico's De Facto Amnesty by Sergio Aguayo Quezada and Javier Trevi?o Rangel Translated by Maria Pall?is All countries that travel the path to democracy eventually have to decide what to do about the atrocities and excesses of their predecessors. During Mex ico 's own interminable transition to democracy, opinion was divided about what to do about the human rights violations committed during the long authoritarian rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The govern ment of Vicente Fox sided, both verbally and in some of its early decisions, in favor of truth and justice. Meanwhile, however, the president was proposing and/or approving political, administrative, and legal decisions which in prac tice granted defacto amnesty to the perpetrators of state crimes under the old regime. Some consequences are evident. The culture of impunity remains in tact, and it has continued to erode and trivialize the culture of human right and justice, which, in Mexico, have become abused rhetorical concepts gradually emptied of political meaning. Keywords: human rights, truth and justice, impunity, state crimes, truth commis sions, amnesty On July 22, 2005, the new Fiscal?a Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Pol?ticos del Pasado (Office of the Special Prosecutor for Historical Social and Political Movements?FEMOSPP) called for the arrest of former Mexi can president Luis Echeverr?a and his interior minister, Mario Moya Palencia, charging them with genocide. The indictment accused them of ordering an illegal paramilitary squad to gun down 25 student demonstrators in 1971. On July 26, however, a federal judge quashed the genocide indict Sergio Aguayo Quezada is a professor at the Center for International Studies of El Colegio de M?xico and a columnist for the daily Reforma and other newspapers in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Javier Trevi?o Rangel is a human rights consultant and lecturer on structures of social control systems, the sociology of human rights, and truth commissions. Maria Pall?is is a bilingual journalist and editor based in Mexico City and a freelance translator and correspon dent of Hoy. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 147, Vol. 33 No. 2, March 2006 56-68 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X05286085 ? 2006 Latin American Perspectives 56 This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Aguayo Quezada, Trevi?o Rangel / MEXICO'S DE FACTO AMNESTY 57 ment and ruled the arrest warrants invalid, citing a 30-year statute of limita tion. Following this precedent, another judge ruled in September that neither could be tried for the massacres of October 2,1968, in which a combined mil itary and police assault killed hundreds (the exact number has never been established) of student protesters in the Plaza de Tlatelolco in Mexico City. Together, the two rulings confirm the failure of President Fox's FEMOSPP, designed to investigate and clarify past repression, and call into question his commitment to ending the impunity of former Mexican authorities. All countries that travel the path to democracy eventually have to decide what to do about the atrocities and excesses of their predecessors. In Mexico, the government of Vicente Fox sided, both verbally and in some of its early decisions, in favor of truth and justice. Meanwhile, however, the president was proposing and/or approving political, administrative, and legal measures that granted de facto amnesty to the perpetrators of state crimes under the old regime.l Today, as Fox's six-year term draws to a close, it is clear that his gov ernment, heralded as the transition to democracy, has failed to erase Mexico's reputation for impunity and cover-up. THE CONTEXT What should be done about the atrocities of the past? Until the end of World War II, the answer was typically that they should be forgotten?that new regimes had a better chance of establishing themselves if a sort of "social amnesia" or "veil of ignorance" were extended over former excesses (see Cohen, 2005). After the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, however, the new consensus became that only if the past was confronted and the historical truth of what had happened exposed could democracy flourish. Only after the truth was known should the decision be made about whether to try those responsi ble for violating human rights or to opt for forgetting. The idea that it was possible to be indifferent to the past was gradually discarded.2 During Mexico's own interminable transition to democracy, opinions were divided about what to do about human rights violations committed dur ing the long authoritarian rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party?PRI).3 One political and academic school of thought preferred to forget, arguing that the priority should be gov ernability.4 National and international civilian human rights organizations and relatives of the disappeared, with the support of politicians and intellec tuals, fought to uncover the truth and indict those responsible for criminal acts in accordance with international principles of human rights long recog nized by Mexico. This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 58 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES The issue became urgent in 2000, when the PRI was defeated in the presi dential elections that brought the Partido de Acci?n Nacional (National Action party?PAN) to power. As a candidate, the PAN's Vicente Fox had pledged to confront head-on all state crimes committed by his predecessors. In fact, this was one of the promises that won him the so-called voto ?til (use ful vote) of those on the left who wanted at all costs to oust the PRI from power. There were other reasons as well to believe that Fox's government would initiate the process of uncovering the truth and fighting for justice. Confronting the past was one practical way that Fox's new government could strengthen itself at a time when respect for human rights had been accepted as a universal source of legitimacy and a way to consolidate democ racy.5 It would also contribute to building a favorable image of a new Mexico in the international arena, where several organizations had expressed concern about the impunity with which human rights violations were treated in the country (see Amnesty International, 1998; 2001a; 2001b; Human Rights Watch, 2003). Finally, it would send a clear message to the international com munity that Mexico was prepared to become a true democracy (Trevi?o Rangel, 2005: 14-20). These notions are evident in official documents released during Fox's initial months as president (Gobierno de la Rep?blica, 2002). Last but not least, national security was also at stake. SPECIAL PROSECUTOR, TRUTH COMMISSION, OR AMNESTY? Fox had to choose one of several approaches: a truth commission like those in South Africa, Guatemala, or El Salvador, a special prosecutor's office to bring to trial those responsible for abuses, and the amnesty that? regardless of its legality or legitimacy?had been favored during periods of political transition in several other countries.6 Public opinion, Fox's cabinet ministers, and his close advisers were all against an amnesty, but in private meetings with the president the military favored this option. The Comisi onado de Orden y Respeto (Commissioner of Order and Respect), Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Foreign Minister Jorge Casta?eda, and Minister of the Inte rior Santiago Creel?all three known for their long-term commitment to democracy and human rights?were divided over whether it would be better to create a special prosecutor's office or a truth commission. Creel believed that a truth commission was "extremely risky," arguing that "we know, generally speaking, where it begins but not where it ends." For him the main advantage of a special prosecutor was that it would work "inside the institutions," in the process strengthening the budding democracy, This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Aguayo Quezada, Trevi?o Rangel / MEXICO' S DE FACTO AMNESTY 59 establishing the individual responsibility of those who had violated human rights, respecting the legal and judicial processes established in the Mexican Constitution, and consolidating the authority of the new regime (Aguayo, 2001c). For their part, Aguilar Zinser and Casta?eda fought for the creation of a truth commission, arguing that the special prosecutor's office proposed by Creel would lead to impunity because of the difficulties it would confront. The first obvious obstacle, according to both, was that the military was suffi ciently powerful to obstruct any effort to charge any of its members. They also argued that the judiciary could easily be intimidated or corrupted and that some crimes had been perpetrated by secret agents or paramilitary groups whose link to official power was murky at best. In their opinion, a truth commission would identify individual criminals and expose the secret mechanisms of the authoritarian system that had allowed the abuses. If the workings of this system's repressive apparatus, which still held on to much of its power, were better known, it might be easier to dismantle it or at least restrain it, and this, in turn, would have a positive effect on the security of the new regime.7 Organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, both historically skeptical about truth commissions, applauded such a structure in the case of Mexico, believing that it was the best option for con fronting human rights violators.8 During the new regime's first few months, the proposal for a truth com mission gained momentum. In April 2001, Fox handwrote the order that Aguilar Zinser become the project coordinator of the Truth Commission and of the new Centro de Investigaci?n y Seguridad Nacional (National Security and Investigation Center?CISEN). Because the president included in the same decision a resolution about past state crimes and a reform of the most important civilian intelligence service, it followed that he understood the connection between human rights and security.9 In the same text, he also ordered the creation of a team to monitor the process, which included Aguilar Zinser, Creel, Ram?n Mu?oz, Rodolfo Elizondo, and Martha Sahagun. Simultaneously, three academics?Sergio Aguayo, Jos? Antonio Crespo, and Clara Jusidman?were named to work with Aguilar Zinser in developing the proposal.10 This second advisory group proposed that two commissions be created, one in charge of ascertaining the truth about the most serious human rights violations and the other in charge of investigating the most important cases of corruption. Both commissions were to be announced in the president's first address to the nation, on September 1, 2001. During the following four months, they were to define a methodology, carry out consultations with the public, and select the most representative cases to investigate. They were to This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 60 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES begin their inquiries on January 1,2002, and have 12 months, which could be extended for another year, to finish their job and present their findings to the Mexican people.11 In a meeting held in Los Pinos, the presidential residence, on July 19, 2001, Fox read aloud each paragraph and approved everything with enthusiasm. By way of conclusion, he declared, "Well done, in a week everything will be ready to start working."12 Fox failed to fulfill his promise, remaining silent for months. Some argue that negotiations with the PRI to get Congress to approve his fiscal reform stalled his efforts: winning the support of the PRI meant canceling the com missions. Independently of Fox's doubts, however, the issue remained on the public's agenda, and the press continued to publish ample evidence of the responsibility of the former regime's police forces in the disappearance and torture of hundreds.13 The atmosphere heated up even more in October 2001, when Digna Ochoa, a leading human rights militant, died under mysterious circum stances and various human rights activists received death threats. It was widely believed that this was all part of a campaign of destabilization orches trated by the old regime. Through it all, however, Fox's government contin ued to face huge pressure, both at home and abroad, to do something about past state crimes. Finally, on November 27, 2001, in a ceremony full of symbolism held in Lecumberri, a building that had once housed political prisoners, Fox an nounced the creation of the FEMOSPP. The mission of the new office was to "procure justice for crimes against people associated with past social and political movements" (Fox et al., 2001). With an air of triumphalism, the fed eral government committed itself to uncovering the truth and making amends to the victims of past atrocities. Creel's proposal had prevailed. In reality, however, the real winners were those who wanted an amnesty. A PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE IN SEARCH OF JUSTICE The new FEMOSPP failed to bring any of the main human rights violators to justice. In addition to its own monumental mistakes, it faced huge obsta cles. Ironically, some of the most important of these were the result of actions of the state itself. The balance of forces became evident with the process of selecting the person to head the office. Fox's cabinet ministers had agreed to name Alberto Szekely, a prominent lawyer and diplomat whose personality and legitimacy were a perfect match for the difficult task ahead. Even before his appointment This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Aguayo Quezada, Trevi?o Rangel / MEXICO'S DE FACTO AMNESTY 61 became official, Szekely created a Comit? Ciudadano de Apoyo (Citizens' Support Group) consisting of academics and experts on the repression of the former regime and the most prestigious human rights activists in Mexico. Unexpectedly, however, Fox decided to delegate the power to appoint the head of FEMOSPP to the then attorney general, General Rafael Macedo de la Concha. Macedo de la Concha ignored the agreement to name Szekely and then blocked four other candidates suggested by Aguilar Zinser and Casta?eda. It became clear that he wanted a weak special prosecutor, and he got one. Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, who lacked the experience and legitimacy necessary to face such a mammoth task, was his choice. The new special prosecutor was never able to overcome his liabilities. His credibility was damaged from the beginning by the murky process of his appointment, with its secret criteria and the cancellation of all consultation with human rights NGOs. The fact that he committed incomprehensible errors compounded this weakness (Academia Mexicana de Derechos Humanos, 2003). The selection of those who would make up the Citizens' Support Group was just as opaque. Those selected by Szekely were abruptly uninvited in various ways. Initially, the new committee had 5 members. By 2003 it had 16: a collection of academics and journalists whose common trait was their lack of specialized knowledge on the subject and a group of student leaders and relatives of los desaparecidos whose participation endangered the work of the FEMOSPP because of possible conflicts of interest. The support group's membership aside, with only a few exceptions, such as journalist Denise Dresser, the committee played a rather passive role and left all the work in the hands of Carrillo Prieto (see Acosta and Ennelin, n.d.: 20). The FEMOSPP's mandate was also fraught with limitations and ambigu ities. Its purview was limited to "federal crimes perpetrated, directly or indi rectly, by public officials," but this excluded paramilitary groups and all the municipal and state authorities who participated in the repression. Addition ally, the victims had to be "linked to political or social movements"?an ambiguous statement at best. Finally, the mandate lacked a time frame, which allowed the possibility of introducing cases too far in the past. The special prosecutor's office began its work under difficult circum stances. On the one hand, there was pressure from the victims, justifiably angry after waiting for decades, whose expectations had now been raised by the official discourse. On the other, the time element worked against effective action: the memories of some witnesses were fading, others were reluctant to testify, and evidence was missing. Finally, the alleged perpetrators had exten sive financial resources to pay for very good lawyers. As expected, the Ministry of Defense stonewalled, cooperating hardly at all. In its view, military personnel accused of abuses during the repression This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 62 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES were obeying orders from civilian presidents and in any case could be tried only by military courts. In the one case in which any military personnel were brought to trial for their involvement in the dirty war, the high military tribu nal exonerated the three accused, arguing that it had "lost" the evidence against them. This was a clear sign that the Ministry of Defense was unwill ing to punish alleged criminals (Acosta and Ennelin, n.d.: 26). This attitude was probably influential in creating serious conflicts of interest. Macedo de la Concha was an officer on active duty whose military superior was the min ister of defense. As a youth, he had worked for the Ministry of the Interior and had been close to Fernando Guti?rrez Barrios, one of the key perpetrators of the repression. One of his outside advisers, meanwhile, was Humberto Castillejos Cisneros, a member of the law firm of his father, Marcos Castillejos, who was the defense attorney for the former director of the Fed eral Security Office, Luis de la Barreda Moreno?one of the few against whom an arrest warrant was issued. The FEMOSPP also engaged in perplexing conflicts of interest. Carrillo Prieto appointed Am?rico Mel?ndez as director of investigations for the spe cial prosecutor's office, even though he had once been an agent of the federal prosecutor's office and as such had interrogated guerrilleros from the Movi miento Armado Revolucionario (Revolutionary Armed Movement) impris oned by the government (Aguayo, 2003). Widespread doubts regarding Carrillo Prieto's commitment as special prosecutor grew when the FEMOSPP implemented questionable judicial strategies that at times appeared designed not only to fail but to set dangerous precedents that would hinder future investigations. The most important example of such a course was charging former president Echeverr?a, among other government officials, with genocide for the assassination of 25 students in June 10,1971. According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punish ment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide presupposes "the intention to destroy a national group," defined as one sharing "ethnic, racial, or religious" ties. It is, therefore, a complicated legal statute to execute.14 Carrillo Prieto argued that the murder of the students was ultimately intended to "destroy a national group."15 In his opinion, the reason the 25 students could be consid ered a "national group" was that they shared "complex material and historical links; a common past, similar culture and well-known habits."16 As to the issue of "ethnic, racial, or religious" ties, he broadened the concept of geno cide by claiming that "in contemporary civilization, the most frequent mo tives for persecution are no longer religious but political and ideological."17 Had he been a political scientist, he might have made a good case in some seminar, but as special prosecutor he was wrong: political genocide had no basis in law. This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Aguayo Quezada, Trevi?o Rangel / MEXICO'S DE FACTO AMNESTY 63 It was strange that he should have chosen to take that path, considering that only shortly before the Spanish judge Baltasar Garz?n had failed in his own attempt to build a case for political genocide against General Augusto Pinochet. Whereas Garz?n rapidly changed strategy, however, and recon structed his case with evidence of torture, Carrillo Prieto stubbornly stuck to the genocide thesis. The result was predictable: On July 26, 2005, a judge denied the arrest warrants after ruling that the special prosecutor had failed to prove that the killings of June 10, 1971, could be labeled genocide. Two months later, Carrillo Prieto failed again. A second judge ruled that the mas sacre of students on October 2, 1968, was not genocide either. While the special prosecutor's office pursued these mistaken strategies, the PAN, the PRI, the executive, and the Senate had added additional burdens to the pursuit of justice. In December 2001, Mexico ratified the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, which in Article 1 states that "no statutory limitation shall apply" to crimes against humanity such as genocide "irrespective of the date of their commission." In signing the convention, however, Mexico had added as a coda an "interpretative declaration": "Only those crimes committed after Mexico's adoption of the measure [that is, after 2002] are to be covered." This lock on the past was confirmed on February 23, 2005, when the Supreme Court ruled against Carrillo Prieto, finding that the statute of limitations applied to his accusations of genocide. With this decision, the Mexican government provided juridical protection to human rights violators. To this the congressional delegations of the PRI and the PAN added a modification to Article 55 of the Federal Penal Code permitting those over 70 years of age to serve their sentences under house arrest. The left-wing Partido de la Revoluci?n Democr?tica (Party of the Dem ocratic Revolution?PRD) failed to include a clause excluding those guilty of severe crimes. The amendment was implemented May 26, 2004, a few months after Miguel Nazar Haro, a former director of Federal Security, was imprisoned. This time, the judiciary ruled that the law could be retroactive, and Nazar Haro was released to his home on November 29, 2004. THE FRAGILE COMPROMISE WITH TRUTH AND REPARATIONS Vicente Fox's government also failed to meet its commitment to uncover the truth and repair the damage done to the victims of repression. When the special prosecutor's office was created, Fox declared, "I have decided to issue an executive order" that the "government's ministries ... transfer to the This content downloaded from 137.110.34.162 on Thu, 05 Sep 2019 20:46:53 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 64 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES Archivo General de la Naci?n (AGN) all information relevant to the investi gation of past human rights violations and crimes. This information will be available to all interested, according to the rules of law." But there was a prob lem. The federal government did not provide the financial resources the AGN needed to comply with the president's order. The special prosecutor's office has managed to compile a great deal of information about human rights violations?a collection that will be an essential tool in reconstructing historical truth. It is logical, although there are no guarantees, that these documents will eventually be in the AGN, which already houses an enormous archive about the period of repression. The Inte rior Ministry Collection (Fondo Gobernaci?n), for instance, includes the dossiers of the Direcci?n General de Investigaciones Pol?ticas y Sociales (General Directorate of Political and Social Investigations), one of the civil ian intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, it lacks an index to make it possible to find anything. Again, in 2002 the AGN received all the records from the Direcci?n Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate?DFS), including a splendidly well-organized file system, but it continues to be under the control of a DFS/CISEN archivist who, according to witnesses, is very selective about the documents he releases (Human Rights Watch, 2003). In short, the information is there, but the resources necessary to study it prop erly are lacking. Indeed, while in 2005 the United States designated US$552 million, Canada US$104 million, Spain US$57 million, and Chile US$21 million to their nationa...
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