17 October 2019 will forever be etched in the memory of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico, as Black Thursday. That afternoon, two convoys of soldiers knocked on the door of a safehouse hiding Ovidio Guzmán López, son of drug baron ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán and scion of the Sinaloa Cartel, to execute an arrest warrant.
‘The boss has fallen! The boss has fallen!’ crackled the walkie-talkies.
Within minutes, heavy gunfire erupted as mobsters arrived with machine gun turrets mounted on the back of their pick-up trucks. They took over the neighbouring streets and then the rest of the city, seizing roads and bridges and setting buses alight to act as burning barricades.
‘The city was taken hostage,’ remembered Gecko, a 35-year-old schoolteacher. ‘I was eating and my girlfriend texted me, “don’t come out, because there’s something going on.” My dad was trapped at his job; he had to spend the night there. People were trapped in banks, supermarkets. And what did our beloved president do?… Let him go.’
The carnage ended when president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) personally ordered the armed forces to stand down and release Guzmán. The narcos won.
This weekend, Mexico goes to the polls in an election where a narco-insurgency which has left hundreds of thousands dead will be one of the nation’s most pressing issues.
AMLO, who was elected in 2018 in a landslide victory, remains popular in Mexico, but his record on the narcos is disappointing. Although the murder rate dipped slightly during his watch, overall his six-year presidency has been the bloodiest this century. Last year, seven out of ten of the world’s most murderous cities were in Mexico, with Colima on the Pacific coast leading the charts with a staggering homicide rate of 140 per capita (for perspective, that’s over a hundred times deadlier than London).
How did Mexico get so bad?
The war on drugs has been raging for some time. The 1914 Harrison Act effectively outlawed cocaine and opioids in the United States, creating a black market. The demand was eagerly met in Mexico by strongmen lording over the poppy fields introduced to Mexico by Chinese immigrants. In the 1940s Mexico tried legalising drugs before the narcos grew too powerful, but Washington forced them to stay the course. As the country democratised in the 1990s, crime lords began raising private militias.
For President Felipe Calderón, the problem had festered long enough. Within weeks of taking office in late 2006, he rallied his troops for a very literal war on drugs. The campaign drenched Mexico in blood. It also disrupted the old order, igniting a power struggle between the syndicates, who were equipped with high-calibre weaponry.
Calderón’s campaign created another problem. Genaro García Luna was Mexico’s top cop, the architect of Calderón’s drug war who oversaw the Federal Police, prison system, and co-ordinated with the CIA and DEA. He was also on the Sinaloa Cartel’s payroll. It often appeared that the drug war was merely a front to wipe out the Sinaloan’s competitors. Soldiers shot first and asked questions later. There were mass atrocities by the security forces – rape, torture, death squads, disappearances – who often simply took over the drug rackets for themselves.
In certain ways, AMLO followed the same militarised path as his predecessors – for instance, he disbanded the old Federal Police and rebranded it the National Guard. But his philosophy of ‘hugs, not bullets’ meant, as Black Thursday proved, he was reluctant to take the cartels head-on. There may be more soldiers on the streets than ever before in Mexico, but they don’t actually do much for the millions of citizens living under the tyranny of the mafia. Towns along the Guatemalan border are under de-facto narco-occupation. In parts of the country, gang wars are starting to resemble conventional battlefields, with landmines, drone strikes and ‘narco-tanks’, sending refugees fleeing over the Rio Grande.
‘This is the worst it’s ever been,’ says Miguel Angel Vega, a journalist who specialises in organised crime.
‘AMLO – with his crazy idea of ‘hugs, not bullets’ – f***ed it up bigtime. [The cartels] can do whatever they want and he won’t lift a finger. Extortion is on the rise, and it’s not just happening in the small rural towns but it’s happening everywhere. I’ve seen it myself, how the families are caught between the cartels and the soldiers are just standing by.’
‘This flawed strategy has allowed the cartels to grow more powerful and it’s damning democracy in Mexico,’ added the DEA’s former chief of international operations, Mike Vigil.
‘They have penetrated the $3.5 billion a year avocado industry, the lemon and lime industry, the fishing industry. They’re involved in the theft of lumber. Mexico has seven petroleum refineries, and they’re stealing about a billion dollars’ worth of fuel each year. Not everybody uses drugs, but everybody uses petroleum.’
Part of AMLO’s appeal to voters was that he was a fierce Mexican nationalist who stuck his middle finger at the gringos. ‘We are not going to act as policemen for any foreign government,’ he declared. ‘Mexico First.’
But this had the side-effect of benefitting the cartels.
‘All our previous presidents – Calderón, Peña Nieto – they all bowed down to the United States. That’s why I liked López Obrador, he’s our first president who told the Americans “hey, we’re not your colony. We have some shared interests so let’s work together, but you can’t tell us what to do!’’’ admitted a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel.
In 2020 on of Mexicos’s top generals, Salvador Cienfuegos, was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport, accused of protecting a drug ring.
‘López Obrador really didn’t care, but then a cabal of military generals approached him and requested that he be returned to Mexico,’ said Vigil.
‘I believe that one of the reasons is the fact that they may have been involved with drug traffickers and were afraid that if he were tried in the United States, he might be naming names.’
AMLO denounced the arrest as yet more American meddling. In the end the incident stirred up so much anger that it led to the near-complete collapse of co-operation between the two countries until the general was repatriated home, where the Mexicans concluded, unsurprisingly, that he’d done nothing wrong. AMLO then stripped DEA agents of their diplomatic immunity and made it harder for them to obtain visas.
‘The relationship between Mexico and the US in terms of counter-drug efforts is extraordinarily broken,’ continued Vigil, ‘and that’s a win-win for the cartels.’
On 2 June, Mexicans will head to the polls. Since AMLO is not allowed to run for a second term, his successor in the left-populist Morena party is Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City. Under her tenure the murder rate has dropped to historic lows. She aims to replicate that success nationwide, focusing on education and inequality to address the root causes of crime. But her data has been called into question.
‘If you add the fact of disappearances, people that are missing – it’s not because they just went to another country where they’re just hanging out or something,’ explained Vega.
‘It’s because the cartels are killing them and burying the bodies, and you don’t see that reflected in the official numbers.’
Sheinbaum’s chief opponent, Xóchitl Gálvez, favours an iron-fisted approach in the style of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who successfully crushed the gangs by imprisoning 1 per cent of the population. Gálvez wants to build a high-tech mega-prison, but many Mexicans are wary of more of the same.
‘We’re not like El Salvador, that one guy [Bukele] cleaning everything,’ Gecko lamented. ‘We don’t have the cajónes to do that. Only one guy did [Calderón], and we saw how that turned out. I don’t think any candidate has the attitude, the leadership to fight, because if they want to that they put us all in danger.’
Trailing in third place is Jorge Máynez, whose peace plan involves legalising marijuana. But it’s debatable how much good this will do at this stage, since legalisation in the States has collapsed the export industry and the cartels have now expanded into crystal meth and avocados.
Meanwhile, the gangs are using the elections to entrench their positions. Not only is the presidency up for grabs but 500 positions in congress, 128 in the senate, plus various local seats, and crime bosses use all possible means to ensure whichever candidate they can work with wins the race. 2024 is already on-track to be Mexico’s bloodiest election in history, with scores of candidates kidnapped or assassinated. Last month gunmen opened fire at a rally in the southern state of Chiapas, killing a mayoral hopeful and five others, including a little girl.
‘Election after election, we’re seeing the direction this is taking,’ Vega sighed. ‘These killings are not casual; everything is part of the plan, and the government isn’t doing anything.’ Mexico is rapidly becoming a narco state.
Comments