To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  Calderón’s “war,” however, has mostly targeted the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas, the Carrillo Fuentes, or Juárez Cartel, the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, and the Familia Michoacana, and has left the Sinaloa Cartel more or less alone. A National Public Radio analysis of 2,600 drug-related federal arrests between December 2006 and May 2010 found that members of the Sinaloa Cartel accounted for only 12 percent of arrestees. According to Mexican federal government statistics the Sinaloa Cartel is responsible for 84 percent of the recent drug-war murders. In November 2008 federal police arrested Noé Ramírez Mandujano, the director of Mexico’s national counter-narcotics agency, for accepting a bribe of $450,000 from the Beltrán Leyvas’ Pacific Cartel, then the archenemy of the Sinaloa Cartel. In December 2009, navy commandos stormed the high-end Cuernavaca apartment complex where Arturo Beltrán Leyva, leader of the Pacific Cartel, was hiding out. The soldiers killed him, stripped his body naked, and carefully laid out his money and jewelry over the bullet-ridden corpse.

  His war has also created a climate of such overwhelming violence and impunity that assassinations of political opponents—indigenous rights leaders, human rights advocates, anti-mining activists, guerrilla insurgents—are quickly swept into the ever rising body count without much attention or outcry. Paramilitaries shot and killed Beatriz Cariño and Jyri Jaakkola in broad daylight as they participated in a human rights caravan taking food and medical supplies to the besieged Triqui indigenous community of San Juan Copala in the state of Oaxaca. No one has been arrested; the federal government did not send police to break the paramilitary barricade on the highway leading to Copala. Raúl Lucas Lucía and Manuel Ponce Ríos, two indigenous rights activists in Guerrero state were tortured an executed in February 2010. No arrests were made. Activists have been murdered in Chiapas, Sinaloa, Baja California, and Chihuahua states; all the cases remain unsolved.

  In the United States, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have sent money, arms, and military aid to Mexico’s army and federal police to help them “combat” drug trafficking. U.S. officials and most of the major U.S. press outlets forget the long list of federal police and generals who later became known as top-level narcos—Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, Amado Carillo Fuentes, Osiel Cárdenas, Guillermo González Calderoni, Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo—when approving or covering U.S. aid to the Mexican federal government, such as the $1.4 billion Mérida Initiative. U.S. officials and the press routinely neglect to mention that the Mexican army and federal police very often are drug traffickers.

  Drugs are big business. The United Nations 2010 World Drug Report estimates that the global cocaine and opiates markets generate $153 billion a year. The U.N. estimates the global drug industry to generate between $300 and $500 billion. Cannabis is the most widely consumed illegal drug, but it is more difficult to estimate its annual revenues since it can be grown and sold locally worldwide in small amounts. The quasi-legal marijuana crop in the State of California alone was worth an estimated $17 billion in 2008; the value of all of California’s legal field crops in 2008 was $4.19 billion. The 2010 U.S. Department of State’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report estimates that Mexican drug-trafficking organizations move up to $25 billion in earnings across the U.S. border into Mexico every year. The Mexican federal government estimates that drug traffickers earned over $132 billion between December 2006 and June 2010. Mexico’s “most wanted” capo—El Chapo Guzmán—is now a recurring figure on the Forbes list of billionaires. The first year Guzmán appeared on the list, 2009, the magazine editors listed the source of his fortune, as “shipping.”

  Estimates are suspect. The government numbers for how many billions of dollars are earned in the business, how many tons of product are successfully moved across borders, how many people get high on a regular basis, and how many people only briefly experiment with illegal drugs are mostly guesses, some perhaps intelligent, some driven by ulterior motives, and some just wild. The United Nations 1994 estimate that the global illegal drug market was worth some $500 billion a year is really just conjecture. No one knows. Drug barons do not submit (accurate) income tax returns. But these numbers, whether they are a bit high or a bit low, do indicate the sheer scale of both the marketplace for illegal narcotics and the failure of interdiction efforts.

  Drugs are commodities. People have been consuming cannabis and coca for at least two thousand years. Poppies were first domesticated some eight thousand years ago, and in 1552 BCE Theban physicians had more than 700 medicinal recipes for the use of opiates. Successive United States governments have spearheaded and imposed a global prohibition regime banning the consumption of these and other plants and chemicals for the past hundred years. Along with coffee, tea, tobacco, and sugar, these plants were essential commodities in the formation of Western European capitalism over the past five hundred years. The fact that they are now illegal is what makes the business of shipping and selling them so amazingly profitable. Illegality is now a part of their commodity form. A Colombian farmer will take in no more than $1,000 for the 100 kilograms of coca leaves used to make a kilogram of basic coca paste. Three kilos of paste will make one kilo of processed cocaine. Once that kilo of cocaine hits the streets in the United States of America, it will be worth $100,000, or about $100 a gram. In the Colombian countryside the exact same substance is worth no more than $3,000. Arriving in Mexico, it is worth about $12,500. By the time it reaches Seattle or Columbus or Baltimore, its value will increase by over 3,000 percent. Growing the plant used to make cocaine is not good money. Moving cocaine into the United States is insanely good money.

  The business of transporting cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamines is so profitable precisely because those drugs are illegal. Legalization would slash the massive profit margin that illegality creates. As California voters faced a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in the summer of 2010, the right-wing RAND Drug Policy Research Center released estimates that marijuana prices would fall by 90 percent upon legalization and regulation: a $375 ounce of medical marijuana could be worth $38 an ounce upon statewide legalization. But medical marijuana is grown in California and already quasi-legal (legal under state law and illegal under federal law). The price for illegal drugs from Mexico and South America might plummet even further. Legalization would put the traffickers as they exist today out of business.

  Illegality creates complications as well as spectacular profits. First, one has to do something with the mass of cash, the sheer bulk of paper money. Drug lords need banks.

  A glimpse: Bloomberg Markets magazine’s August 2010 issue reported that drug traffickers who used a DC-9 jet to move cocaine from South America to Mexico had purchased the jet “with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp.” The Mexican newsweekly Proceso reported that the Mexican banking industry finds itself with an “extra” $10 billion in cash every year. The Mexican Treasury Secretary said in a press conference on June 15, 2010, that the forty-one banks operating in Mexico have “ten billion dollars that cannot be explained within the proper dynamics of the country’s economic activity.”

  But banks also need drug lords. In 2008, drug money saved the major global banks from collapse and thus, stretching just a bit, saved capitalism from a devastating internal crisis when the speculative capital markets imploded. Drug money—truckloads of cash, actual physical money—would appear to be one of capitalism’s global savings accounts. In December 2009, Rajeev Syal at The Observer in London reported, “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, told Syal that he had seen “evidence that the proceeds of organized crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse [in 2008]. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

  Christian
De Brie wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2000 that over $350 billion of illicit cash is successfully laundered and reinvested globally every year, nearly $1 billion a day. Here is his math, “The annual profits from drug trafficking (cannabis, cocaine, heroin) are estimated at $300–500bn (not to mention the rapidly mushrooming synthetic drugs), that is 8% to 10% of world trade. Computer piracy has a turnover in excess of $200bn, counterfeit goods $100bn, European Community budget fraud $10-15bn, animal smuggling $20bn, etc. In all, and counting only activities with a transnational dimension, including the white slave trade, the world’s gross criminal product totals far above $1,000bn a year, nearly 20% of world trade.” He writes that if half of that goes to overhead, that leaves $500 billion in profit. If one-third of that amount goes to the laundry services of banks and investors, that would leave $350 billion in profit fully integrated into the “legal” capitalist economy every year.

  Black market entrepreneurs also like to diversify their investment portfolios. Besides laundering their cash through myriad businesses in the legal economy, today’s transnational drug barons are expanding, for example, into oil. A report in the Washington Post in December 2009 details how the Zetas and other cartels stole more than $1 billion of oil from the Mexican national oil company Pemex between 2008 and the end of 2009. In the cases described in the Washington Post, the Zetas tapped directly into federal pipelines and siphoned the oil off to stolen tanker trucks, which they then used to sell the fuel to a range of Texas-based oil companies like Y Gas and Oil and Trammo Petroleum. Pemex officials said they detected $715 million of stolen oil in 2008 alone. And apparently the Zetas are not the only ones working the stolen oil market: company officials found 396 illegal taps throughout all of Mexico’s thirty-one states. In 2010, oil theft increased by another 75 percent. In December 2010, an oil pipeline in Puebla state exploded, killing twenty-eight people, including thirteen children. Pemex director Juan José Suárez Coppel blamed the blast on an illegal tap.

  Those in the illicit drug business add to their profits with income from human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, and even cattle rustling. Edmundo Ramírez Martínez authored a report for the Mexican legislature on the perils Central American migrants face while crossing Mexico en route to the United States. He estimated that the drug organizations’ control over human trafficking along the border brings them another $3 billion a year. Another report from the Mexican legislature states that kidnapping has increased 300 percent in the past five years. The report calculates that drug gangs participated in 30 percent of the recent kidnappings while soldiers and police made up 22 percent of the nation’s kidnappers. On one balmy day in August 2010 in Tamaulipas state, gunmen executed seventy-two Central and South American migrants in a barn. Soon after, the National Human Rights Commission reported having received 198 witness accounts of kidnappings involving nearly ten thousand migrants, all in the first six months of 2009. In Ciudad Juárez, extortion and kidnapping have driven thousands of small and medium-sized businesses to ruin, prompting the closure of ten thousand businesses in the past three years. Under the headline “Crime steals cattle and sells on the formal market,” the daily newspaper El Universal wrote in September 2010 that at least eleven states show an increase of 30 to 50 percent in cattle rustling. Ranchers “attribute the increase to the growth of organized crime and the fact that the drug-trafficking cartels are expanding their field of activities.”

  And then there are the guns. In Mexico, federal law prohibits open gun sales and the permits granted directly from the Secretary of Defense are extremely rare. In the U.S. border states of Texas and Arizona, one can purchase AK-47 and AR-15 machine guns, 9mm handguns, and even Barrett .50-caliber rifles in an over-the-counter cash transaction. Calderón’s “drug war” has apparently created a boom for the 7,000 or so legal mom-and-pop gun stores in the U.S.-Mexican border region. According to a report published by the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Mexican government’s seizures of illegal firearms more than tripled between 2007 and 2008, from 9,553 to 29,824. The Washington Post reported in September 2010 that 62,800 of the more than 80,000 illegal guns confiscated between December 2006 and February 2010 were traced back to gun stores in the United States. (In 2008, U.S, agents confiscated only 70 guns at border crossings.) And those are just the guns found and reported by Mexican police and soldiers. In January 2011, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence released a report using data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to show that since 2008 more than 62,000 firearms have “gone missing” from U.S. gun store inventories. Since the ATF only inspects 20 percent of gun stores, the number is most likely much higher. Similarly, the number of weapons seized, traced, and reported by Mexican authorities is surely only a fraction of all those guns still in use. The National Rifle Association says that Mexican drug gangs get their weapons from Central American arms traffickers and army deserters who take their guns with them. While that is not disputed, the number of guns seized in Mexico and traced back to legal U.S. dealers is staggering. Wherever they come from, all these machine guns and automatic pistols make up another booming side industry made possible by the murder spree in Mexico. Ironically, Calderón often blames U.S. gun laws and the easy availability in the United States for the violence in Mexico. (U.S. laws are largely to blame, but not the gun laws.)

  Illegality also requires that one back up the moral discourse of prohibition with massive infusions of funds into armies and law-enforcement agencies. These infusions in turn require the production of arrests and drug seizures. Competitors in the drug economy use this need as a way to eliminate opponents and rivals, tipping off federal authorities to the whereabouts of one’s enemy’s stash and bedroom.

  And in this context, illegality leads to a third complication: all disputes within the industry must be settled outside the law. The most popular method of conflict resolution in an illegal business culture where cash is so abundant as to be a kind of burden is contract murder. Betray, snitch, steal, mess up, forget, offend the boss, or say too much, and your transgression will likely lead to your death. The rule makers of the drug business do not impose fines, jail time, or community service, just death. And death is also good business. The Brookings Institution estimates that on average two thousand guns—ranging from cop-killer pistols to AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles—are legally purchased in the United States and then smuggled across the border into Mexico every day.

  This is what you cannot say: death is a part of the overhead, a business expense in a multibillion-dollar transnational illegal industry; the Mexican army and federal police are on the take, waging a war of extermination against suspected drug dealers and traffickers aligned with organizations that the federal government considers unruly or threatening, principally the Beltrán Leyva gang and the Zetas. That war of extermination provides cover for political assassinations, paramilitary executions, vigilante justice, and everyday extortion, abduction, and murder. That war of extermination has also fueled a coordinated, armed, and indescribably cruel counter-wave of murder as the Beltrán Leyva, Familia Michoacana and Zetas cartels scramble to maintain control of their territory and trafficking routes.

  Death is everywhere.

  In Ciudad Juárez, Francisco María Sagredo Villarreal, 69 years old, got tired of finding dead bodies discarded outside of his house. One day in November 2006, he nailed up a sign that read: PROHIBITED: LITTERING AND DUMPING CORPSES. He denounced the roaming bands of killers terrorizing the city and the complete impunity with which they always commit their crimes. He would find four more destroyed bodies there until October 2008 when a group of men shot Sagredo on his doorstep a little before noon. Two months later armed men killed his daughter Cinthia Sagredo Escobedo and dumped her body under the sign. The following day a group of men fired some twenty AK-47 bullets into his other daughter, Ruth Sagredo Escobedo, and a friend of hers as they drove in C
inthia’s funeral procession. Both died.