To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  In late October 2010 when I arrived in Juárez, the top story in the news was a series of YouTube videos of former Chihuahua state Attorney General Patricia González Rodríguez’s brother, Mario Ángel, calming answering the questions of an off-camera voice while sitting handcuffed and surrounded by five masked men in desert fatigues aiming assault rifles at his head and body. Mario Ángel appeared unharmed in the video and spoke with a strangely matter-of-fact tone of voice and always with precise information. Among the many revelatory declarations in the first video was Mario Ángel’s testimony regarding the former governor, José Reyes Baeza, and his own sister, Patricia González Rodríguez, indicating their direct involvement with the Juárez Cartel, use of their offices to protect the cartel’s personnel, shipments, and, in Patricia’s case, direct involvement in the assassination of Armando Rodríguez. State prosecutors under Patricia González’s command released more than 9,500 suspects of the 10,000 detained or arrested during the federal Chihuahua Joint Operation. Mario Ángel’s body was later found in a shallow grave on the outskirts of town. (The video can hardly be taken as courtroom evidence, nor Mario Ángel’s statements as having been made freely and in the general interest of truth. That said, such narco videos have a disturbing record of disclosing accurate information, and it would be a mistake to simply disregard the accusations.)

  With all this violence, impunity, and intrigue, one might half expect to see roving death squads firing on pedestrians and writhing bodies on sidewalks while riding from the airport into town. But the only constant sign to the outsider’s eye that something is terribly wrong here is the heavy, militarized police presence—federal police convoys of large pickup trucks carrying masked, battle-ready officers with machine guns poised in the back. Seeing these convoys every time you step outside, seeing them anywhere and everywhere you go at any time of day or night, leads to a haunting question: how can so many people get shot down, so many bodies get dumped, and yet so few people get caught in the act with all these cops roaming about?

  One of the most striking features of Ciudad Juárez is that in the grip of so much terror it is still a “functioning” city. People still go to work and to school. City buses still make their routes. While I was there you could still take a walk in the morning to pick up the paper and sit outside with a cup of coffee and not have to duck bullets. But you couldn’t take that walk without thinking that getting shot was an actual, and not all that remote, possibility. It is a battered and terrified city, but it has not yet surrendered.

  Quite the opposite: there are more mobilizations against Calderón’s drug war in Ciudad Juárez than anywhere else. And the stakes for participating in such mobilizations are much higher there. A few days after I arrived, a small march of about two hundred people was nearing the campus of the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez. The march was part of the opening ceremonies of a three-day conference called “The International Forum vs. Militarization and Violence,” organized by a coalition of student, doctor, teacher, and progressive organizations. A small group of young students ran up ahead of the march to spray-paint images on the walls of a PRI office building across the street from campus. Almost immediately a federal police convoy sped around the corner and sent the students running across the street to campus. Several officers jumped out of the back of the truck and pursued the students. In Mexico, with its history of student massacres, it is against the law for police to enter an autonomous university campus—universities hire their own security. The federal police followed the students through the university entrance gate and then almost immediately opened fire on them from behind. Nineteen-year-old sociology student José Darío Álvarez took a bullet in the back and collapsed on the asphalt of the campus drive. The bullet, a 7.62 high-caliber bullet fired at close range from the police-issue G-3 assault rifle, opened a hole in José Darío’s stomach the size of his hand. Still conscious, he tried to gather up and hold his intestines in place. The police officer stood over his body, apparently stunned for a second, and then attempted to lift him up. Another officer approached to help him; both were masked.

  Pavel Vásquez, a 23-year-old elementary school teacher, and Violeta Cangas, a 27-year-old general physician, were in Violeta’s car at the university gate entrance when the students and police sprinted past them. They heard the shot and flinched with fright. When Pavel looked up he saw José Darío fall to the ground. At first he thought that the police had fired tear gas or rubber bullets, but when he got out of the car and ran up to José Darío he realized the mistake.

  “When I came up to see him,” Pavel told me, “I saw that his intestines were hanging out. The police officer approached and, you know if [the police] shot him then I doubt he’s there to help him. My friend got out of the car and pushed the cop aside shouting, ‘Look what you did, asshole! Everyone film him; take his picture!’”

  As more students and witnesses gathered, they prevented the federal police from taking José Darío away and started making frantic calls for an ambulance. Several students, understandably enraged, shouted insults and threw rocks at the police vehicles still parked across the street. The police aimed their guns at the students and fired several shots in the air. The students shouted, “You’re here to kill us, not defend us!” Press photographers arriving with the march took photos of this moment, which led to a briefly held mistaken view that the police had opened fire on the students after the latter had confronted them. The ambulance dispatcher kept hanging up on the callers, and after about fifteen minutes Violeta, Pavel, and a professor from the medical school lifted José Darío into Violeta’s car and sped him off to the hospital, saving his life. (Over the course of several days, he survived multiple reconstructive surgeries.)

  The federal police first tried to obfuscate the events by putting out a press release combining two different events that took place in distant parts of the city and at distinct times. They seemed at pains to somehow link shooting a 19-year-old student protester in the back to the drug war. Pedro Torres of El Diario brought this to my attention—I hadn’t seen the first press release—and said, “I thought that the federal police were putting too much emphasis on the fact that they came from a different part of the city. To me, that says that actually they were following the march. They say more with what they don’t say that with what they say.” Next the federal police said that the officers saw a group of “masked men” and fired shots in the air. José Darío was not masked, though the police officer who shot him was.

  I spoke with Pavel and Violeta the following morning at the scene of the crime. As they walked me through the events they pointed to the bullet casings still on the pavement and the pool of blood where José Darío fell, a few yards inside the university grounds. No one had conducted a crime-scene investigation. The municipal police arrived three hours after the fact and then left without gathering any evidence. Students made a wide ring of bricks and rocks around the pool of blood. One of the pieces of brick held down a hand-scrawled sign that read: EVIDENCE.

  “Spray-painting a wall is no reason to shoot somebody,” Pavel said, standing over the bloodstain. “We live in a fucking city where every day at least three people are executed, where convoys of armed commandos with up to five vehicles will drive away from the crime scene, and yet a city where not more than five minutes go by without a damn federal police convoy driving by, and they don’t arrest anybody. There are police roadblocks throughout the city. Military searches. Disappearances. But never, never do they arrest and convict somebody. They tell us that this is a war against drug trafficking. A war is a confrontation between two enemies. There is no confrontation here. Here there are paramilitary groups killing people. And how strange that the ones they kill are poor and young. And the government doesn’t give us any explanation beyond ‘The dead were up to something.’ And with that the government links you to organized crime. But we know that is not the case, and even if it were, it is no justification for execution. Come on! There is the rule of law, so detain t
hem, put them on trial, sentence them. But don’t send paramilitaries out to kill them. . . . There is no war on drugs. In Juárez, there are paramilitary groups shooting us dead, compañero.”

  The student organizations planning the antimilitarization forum called for another protest march for the evening of November 2, 2010, Day of the Dead. More than two thousand people heeded the call. Some people on the left are tired of marches. I once read a hostile comment on a website where I had posted photographs of a massive march in Oaxaca. “Another cattle drive,” it said. In places like Mexico City barely a week goes by without a march of a few thousand people grinding traffic to a halt. But in Ciudad Juárez—with its daily executions and only three days after police shot a student protester in the back—marching through the streets at night handing out flyers and shouting chants against the federal government’s murderous militarized drug policy is risky political action. The march was aimed at the protesters’ fellow city dwellers as much as at the federal government, and the message was a call to overcome fear and take back the city. People driving by in their cars, waiting for buses, walking down the sidewalks, either honked their horns or cheered the students on. The federal police kept mostly out of sight.

  Many of the protesters wore elaborate handmade Day of the Dead costumes. One young woman, dressed as a melancholy grim reaper, held a sign that read: ENOUGH! LET ME REST.

  FIVE

  At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and promote tolerance.

  —Slavoj Žižek

  In Mexico today tuberculosis kills more people than AK-47s, but the sound of the daily bloodshed wrought by this illness of poverty remains silent.

  —Diego Osorno

  G.W.F. HEGEL SAID THAT THE MONUMENTAL EVENTS in world history occur twice. Karl Marx later commented that Hegel forgot to add that the first time they occur as tragedy, the second time as farce. Reagan’s drug war was an overwhelming tragedy; Calderón’s is a farce. The tragedy of mass incarceration, community degradation, and decades of brutality and murder at the hands of U.S.-supported counterinsurgencies and military dictatorships throughout the hemisphere is now being repeated as the farce of senseless murder, a so-called “narco-insurgency” south of the border. Techniques and expertise acquired from decades of U.S. military training and assistance, meant to aid Latin American armies and death squads in their elimination of leftists and anyone labeled communist, have been diverted and perverted to serve the illegal drug industry: ritual beheadings; massacres of children, families, bystanders, and migrants; the brutal use of torture. Slavoj Žižek, in his book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, reminds us that Herbert Marcuse “added yet another turn of the screw” to Hegel’s comment, “Sometimes, the repetition in the guise of a farce can be more terrifying than the original tragedy.”

  A terrifying farce. What better way to understand the Zetas? About thirty men, originally trained by U.S. and Israeli commandos to be elite Mexican special forces counter­­insurgency operatives after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, abandoned ranks, went to work for the Gulf Cartel, recruited heavily from the Mexican military and Guatemalan counterinsurgency forces known as Kaibiles, completely altered the practices of cartel violence with their brutal and spectacular torture and execution techniques, and then staged a coup against the Gulf Cartel and went on a murder spree that included the indiscriminate slaughter of seventy-two Central and South American migrants in a barn in Tamaulipas. A terrifying farce. What better way to understand the Mexican Army’s participation in the drug war? The same institution that created the Sinaloa drug capos—by bowing to U.S. pressure to carry out defoliation campaigns, but then raiding, raping, and pillaging villages throughout the Sierra Madre in the 1970s—thirty years later, during Calderón’s drug war, is doing the capos’ dirty work. The army went to Ciudad Juárez soon after the Sinaloa Cartel had arrived to conquer that plaza, and many Mexican reporters and analysts I spoke to said that the army’s deployment was intended to back up El Chapo against his rivals. But here is the salient fact: after some ten thousand soldiers of the Mexican Army arrived in Juárez, the execution rate nearly doubled. The army mostly withdrew; in its stead five thousand federal police occupied the city, and the execution rate continued its grim rise.

  And then there is Obama. Reagan was a tragedy: his drug war unleashed forces that have wrecked millions of lives throughout the entire hemisphere. But what will Barack Obama become? He arrived with “hope” and “change” and then largely pursued the same prohibition, “supply control,” and “law enforcement” policies that have reigned since Reagan, though with a few notable differences—he stepped away from the bellicose rhetoric of drug wars, indicated that his administration would not target medical marijuana practices in those states where they are legal, and signed the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act—that do not challenge the dominance of the drug war ideology. For at the same time his administration stopped using the term “drug war,” it stepped up military aid ($830 million in 2009) to Mexico’s army and federal police for the now unspoken drug war and further militarized the border. Perhaps the pinnacle of farce is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s proclaimed concern about a budding “narco-insurgency” in Mexico. . . .

  But let’s step back.

  Mexico’s economy is in shambles. More than 51 percent of the population lives in poverty. Ten million people fell below the poverty line between 2006 and 2009, according to a 2009 World Bank report. In the second trimester of 2009 the Mexican economy shrank by 10.3 percent, a fall not seen in seventy-five years. In 2008 alone 12,850 businesses closed and 8,310 people died of malnutrition, that is, hunger. Between 2000 and July 2009, the number of manufacturing jobs in Mexico declined by 27 percent, a loss of some 1.1 million jobs. Meanwhile, one in three Mexican workers labors in the so-called informal economy—where defiance and bribes replace permits and taxes—which grew by nearly a million jobs from 2008 to 2009. And yet the maquiladoras in Juárez are “open for business,” Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim remains the world’s richest man, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that between $18 billion and $39 billion of illicit cash is smuggled across the border into Mexico every year, with $10 billion to $25 billion successfully laundered into the Mexican financial system annually.

  The United States and Mexican governments continue spending billions of dollars on police and military campaigns that have no rival in history in terms of their absolute failure. More people use drugs than ever before. At the time of this writing, fifteen states in the United States have some form of legalized marijuana for medicinal use. In October 2010, California reduced marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to a civil infraction. In 2009, Mexico decriminalized minor possession of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth­amphetamines, and LSD.

  Calderón took office in December 2006, exactly six years after the end of seventy-one years of one-party rule. Mexico was supposed to be a full-fledged democracy. That year, however, was one of mass protest mobilizations and extreme acts of state violence. State police arrested and raped more than twenty women taken prisoner in San Salvador Atenco on May 4, 2006. Oaxaca state police death squads killed at least seventeen people during a five-month teachers’ strike that controlled Oaxaca City until federal police were sent in to repress the movement. The presidential election itself was the cause of massive protests alleging fraud and calling for a full, vote-by-vote recount. Calderón’s less-than-one-percentage-point victory was challenged in court and in the streets. The federal electoral court ordered a recount in only 9 percent of precincts and later declared Calderón the winner. Calderó
n had to sneak into the Mexican Senate at midnight, take his oath, and flee through a back door to avoid protesters. During his first days in office he raised the salaries of the military’s top brass, appeared in military uniform at a parade, and sent the army into the streets to wage a war on the drug business.

  Just over three years later, in March 2010, Calderón told CNN, “My main objective is not to do away with drugs or eliminate their consumption. That is impossible. My objective is to strengthen Mexican law. I want to make Mexico a country where the law is respected, because that is the first step to development.” To “strengthen Mexican law” Calderón sent the army and federal police into the streets to unleash a war that, by May 2011, had left more than 38,000 people dead, 38,000 families shattered, and some 50,000 children orphaned, with an impunity rate for all these murders of at least 95 percent and an accompanying drastic increase in all manner of crime from kidnapping to oil theft.

  All talk of law and order in the drug war battlefields where 16-year-old kids roam the streets with AR-15 assault rifles following orders like, “Kill every last fucking one of them,” where one of the principal combat tactics in the trafficking zones is to “heat up” enemy territory by massacring innocent people, where five thousand federal police constantly patrol the city with the highest homicide rate in the world—and that rate keeps going up—where 95 percent of the murders are not even being investigated, all such talk of strengthening the law is simply bullshit.