by Ioan Grillo
Leaving office, Fox retired to his ranch and carried on making frank comments to reporters. His presidency had seen the start of the Mexican Drug War. However, it is unfair to blame Fox for this (as some have). Fox dutifully followed the difficult law enforcement approach to drug cartels encouraged by the United States. Few foresaw that Mexico was on the edge of the abyss in 2006.
In an interesting footnote, Fox converted to the cause of drug legalization. “Legalizing in this sense does not mean drugs are good and don’t harm those who consume them,” he wrote from his ranch in 2010. “Rather we should look at it as a strategy to strike at and break the economic structure that allows gangs to generate huge profits in their trade, which feeds corruption and increases their areas of power.”18 The man whose “mother of all battles” was cheered by American agents had decided the fight was futile.
CHAPTER 7
Warlords
We have scorched the snake, not killed it.
She’ll close and be herself whilst our poor malice
Remains in danger of her former tooth …
Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly. Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace.
—MACBETH, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, CIRCA 1603
On December 1, 2006, federal deputies were brawling in Mexico’s Congress hours before Felipe Calderón was due to enter the chamber to be sworn in as president. It was a fight for space. The leftist deputies claimed their candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had really won the election but been robbed of his rightful victory. They were trying to gain control of the podium to stop Calderón from taking the oath and assuming office. The conservative deputies were defending the podium to allow the presidential accession. The conservatives won the scrap. There were more of them, and they seemed to be better fed.
Among those attending the ceremony were former U.S. president George Bush (Bush the First) and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was covering the Congress door, snatching interviews as guests went in. The elderly Bush hobbled past with six bodyguards with bald heads and microphones at their mouths. I asked him what he thought about the ruckus in the chamber. “Well, I hope that Mexicans can resolve their differences,” he replied diplomatically. Schwarzenegger strolled past with no bodyguards at all. I asked what he thought about the fisticuffs. The Terminator turned round, stared intensely, and uttered three words:
“It’s good action!”
I phoned the quote back to headquarters and it went out on a wire story. Suddenly, Schwarznegger’s statement was being bounced around California TV stations. Then the BBC led their newscast with it: “It takes a lot to impress Arnold Schwarznegger but today when he was in Mexico …” I got frantic phone calls from the governor’s office in Los Angeles. Was his quote perhaps being used out of context? Well, I replied, I asked him straight and he told me straight.
For President Calderón, all this good action made a very testing first day on the job. He had to sneak into the chamber by the back door, rapidly get sworn into office while his deputies fought off leftists, then speed out again, defended by police in riot gear. However, he pulled it all off. With that he rapidly defused a complicated situation and killed any argument that he had not taken the proper vow of office. In a chaotic Mexico, he seemed like a man of decisiveness and action.
Ten days later, Calderon declared war on drug cartels. Wow, thought the public again. Here is a man of decisiveness and action.
Four years on, knowing that Calderón’s war would lead to thirty-five thousand murders, car bombs, grenade attacks on revelers, scores of political assassinations, a single massacre of seventy-two people, and an endless list of other atrocities, the president’s decision to attack cartels seems an earthshaking moment. Everyone figures that he must have had a grand plan. But it is so easy to read history backward. At the time, Calderon probably had no intention of still battling on with his offensive four years later, and he certainly didn’t calculate on the country blowing up in his face. Like his pushing onto the Congress podium, his declaration of war was a reaction to events and a showing of strength and decisiveness. And like the swearing in, he hoped he would quickly resolve a messy situation. With the former, his bet was spot-on. But with the drug war, he seriously miscalculated.
Calderón is from the same conservative National Action Party as Vicente Fox, but they have little else in common. While Fox entered politics in middle age, Calderón was born into it. His father, Luis Calderón, was a militant Roman Catholic who joined the Cristero rebellion in the late 1920s to defend the Church against the repression of revolutionary generals. The Cristero War claimed the lives of ninety thousand people in three years, marking it as the last major conflict in Mexico before the current drug war. It finished with a truce: Catholics could pray uninhibited while the government would still be secular. In 1939, Luis Calderón cofounded the National Action Party as a political force to fight for godly values. The senior Calderón believed in a political Catholicism that demanded social justice as well as faith, a third line between the atheist socialism and Protestant capitalism of the era.
With the PRI cheating National Action politicians out of office, Luis Calderón brought up his children in a middle-class home in stark contrast to the vast haciendas of ruling-party stalwarts. The president described it as an intensely political environment, and four of five children went into politics for the rising PAN. “My home was often a campaign headquarters. We folded printed leaflets in what we called the ‘paper train.’ In the kitchen we cooked up flour glue in big saucepans. My brothers and I went out at night to put up the propaganda.”1
Felipe Calderón, the youngest, won a scholarship to a Marist Catholic school before studying law at a private university, then doing a master’s in economics and finally a second master’s in public administration at Harvard. Such an extensive education made him well qualified to be a Latin American technocrat. He went into politics full-time at twenty-six, became a federal deputy, PAN president, energy secretary, and was finally elected to the top job at the ripe age of forty-three.
Felipe Calderón’s politics differed markedly from his father’s in that he largely kept his Catholicism private. As they climbed to power, National Action politicians decided they didn’t want to appear like religious zealots and focused on promoting free-market economic policies. Mexico’s leftists unfairly accuse the PAN of being extreme right-wing fascists. The PAN deny this, claiming to be centrists, and accuse the leftists of being raving populists. Calderón spent his election campaign tarring López Obrador as a messianic lunatic who would plunge the country into crisis.
Calderón was little known to the public before the election, so there was no track record for opponents to attack. Rivals turned to the oldest slagging point in the book: physical appearance. Calderon is short, balding, and bespectacled. In the first presidential debate, PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo turned round to him and waved his hand in the air, signaling a low height. “You can’t stand up to me,” Madrazo smirked, “because you don’t have the stature.”2
The president’s squat appearance soon became the central joke of political cartoonists. The short Calderón was shown struggling into an army uniform, trying desperately to look tough; he was drawn sitting in a tank, fighting to look over the steering wheel; and he was later depicted dwarfed by the tall gringo President Obama, who patted him on the head. The more he made tough war talk, the more cartoonists played on the joke. He was depicted as a little man going to battle—like other stumpy warmongers who have dotted history.
The declaration of war was made on December 11 by Calderón’s new security cabinet, including the defense minister, attorney general, and public safety secretary. The first strike would be in Calderón’s native state of Michoacán, where the Zetas-affiliated gang La Familia had left trails of headless corpses. Operation Michoacán, the team anno
unced, would involve sixty-five hundred ground troops backed by helicopters and navy gunboats. The ministers threw around the phrase “reconquering territory” a lot. That was a key message of Calderón’s campaign that was echoed again and again, a thrust to take back parts of Mexico where gangsters had got too strong. “It’s about recovering the calm day-to-day life of Mexicans,” Calderón said.3
I rushed with other reporters to follow troops into the battle, driving past the lush lakes of Michoacán and up to roughneck drug-producing communities in the mountains. The offensive certainly looked good. Long lines of military Humvees and jeeps full of masked federal police could be seen pouring down highways. In the hill town of Aguililla, long known as a hotbed of traffickers, pumped-up soldiers flooded streets, tossing pickup trucks and kicking down doors while helicopters buzzed relentlessly above. These images were flashed across the nation on daily newscasts. Here was a president who meant business, people remarked. The government was flexing its muscles.
Calderón rapidly spread the offensive to different states. Seven thousand troops rolled into the seaside resort of Acapulco, thirty-three hundred federal police and soldiers marched into Tijuana, six thousand more scoured the Sierra Madre. Soon, some fifty thousand men—including almost the entire federal police force and a substantial part of the effective military—were pulled into the war on drugs across half a dozen states.
Another early move was the mass extradition of kingpins. Just over a month into Calderón’s presidency, a plane left Mexico City for Houston, Texas, with fifteen traffickers shackled and guarded by masked federales. Among them were the top American targets of Osiel Cárdenas, head of the Gulf Cartel, and Hector “Whitey” Palma of the Sinaloa cartel. It was another big action that flashed across TV screens and made a big point.
Calderon flew into a military base in Michoacán. Breaking tradition, he donned a soldier’s cap and olive-green army jacket to salute the troops. Mexican presidents have shied away from wearing military colors since PRI civilian politicians took over from revolutionary generals in the 1940s. The photos of Calderón at the base became iconic Mexican political images—the president with his right hand raised and cap down to his spectacles, dwarfed by his muscular defense secretary. To make sure troops were on his side, Calderon pushed a pay hike for them through Congress and praised them as heroes of the republic at every opportunity. As he told the soldiers at Mexico’s number one military base two months into his presidency:
“New pages of glory will be written. I instruct you to persevere until victory is achieved … We are not going to surrender, neither from provocation nor attacks on the safety of Mexicans. We will give no truce or quarter to the enemies of Mexico.”4
It was certainly tough talk. But how different was Calderón’s offensive from policies of the Fox administration? As the war dragged on, Calderón argued again and again that he had opened a new chapter. Previous presidents had let El Narco grow into a monster, he claimed, while he was the first to take it on. If there was violence, he retorted, that was the fault of those before him.
But in many ways, the differences between Calderón’s and Fox’s approaches to the drug war were more about style and scale rather than substance. Fox also sent soldiers to fight drug gangs, achieved major busts, and broke records for extraditions. Calderón’s most novel actions were to increase military presence in urban areas and boost publicity for all his antidrug efforts. And he accompanied the blows with a much more confrontational rhetoric: it was a struggle of good against bad, he said; a fight against enemies of the nation; a battle in which you are with us or against us. His style made it all very much his war. He was bound to the fight.
Calderón had learned from the lessons of Nixon and Reagan that a drug war was good politics. Upon taking power, both those American presidents tuned up the rhetoric and made spectacular mobilizations, and voters loved them for it. Calderón also had the precedent of Operation Condor in the 1970s. In that offensive, the Mexican government beat the hell out of narcos for a year and they got into line. Calderón likely imagined it would be a short and swift campaign, a mistake common to so many drawn-out conflicts. British troops sailing out to the First World War were promised they would be home in time for their Christmas turkey.
Like in Operation Condor, Calderón could also use his drug war to send a message out to leftist militants. During the previous six years, Calderón had watched Fox fold his arms as leftist-led movements had embarrassed the government. In the town of San Salvador Atenco, a group protested plans to build an airport, kidnapping police and threatening to kill them until the government backed down; in Oaxaca, protesters seized the state capital for five months; and in Mexico City, López Obrador supporters blocked the center for two months. The leftists argued they were fighting an unjust system that favored the rich and screwed the poor. Calderón sneered at what he considered vestiges of a backward, anarchic Mexico. He wouldn’t stand for such nonsense. In his first weeks in office, federal officials arrested a key Oaxaca rebel leader, while a judge handed an Atenco militant a hefty fifty-year sentence. Calderón spoke repeatedly about the need to restore order and reassert the power of the state. This message applied as much to street blockades and riots as drug decapitations.
As always, the American carrot was on offer. Three months into his presidency, Felipe Calderón sat down with U.S. president George W. Bush in the southwestern city of Mérida, and they bashed out the terms of their famous Mérida Initiative of American aid for the war. It was agreed that the United States would pitch in with $1.6 billion worth of hardware and training over three years.5 The aid included thirteen Bell helicopters, eight Black Hawk helicopters, four transport aircraft, and the latest gamma scanners and phone-tap gear.
The initiative was quickly compared to Plan Colombia, which beefed up the Andean nation to fight cartels and guerrillas. However, there are some key differences. Plan Colombia was more money to a smaller country and helped transform Colombian security forces from the Keystone Kops to a regional power. The Mérida initiative meanwhile only gave about $500 million a year to Mexico, whose combined federal security budget was already $15 billion.6 Such a sum from the Americans could not drastically change the balance of power. However, advocates argued the Mérida Initiative showed the United States was finally taking responsibility for all the gringo drug takers. Now, it was a U.S.-backed offensive, and whatever Mexican troops did on the ground became American business.
Calderón’s offensive soon posted some whopping results in drug busts. Federal agents stormed a Mexico City mansion and nabbed $207 million of alleged meth money. It was the biggest cash bust anywhere in the world ever. In October 2007, Mexican marines broke another record. The troops made a surprise raid on the industrial port of Manzanillo halfway up Mexico’s Pacific coastline. Steaming through the harbor, marines stormed a ship called La Esmeralda, a container boat with a Hong Kong flag that had traveled from the Colombian port of Buenaventura. The troops inspected the floor but it didn’t feel right. So they ripped it open and … bingo. Bricks of cocaine were everywhere. It took them three days to count it. In the end they uncovered 23,562 kilo bricks or more than 23.5 metric tons of the white lady, the biggest cocaine bust in history. It was burned in the biggest cocaine bonfire the world has ever seen.
This enormous amount of cocaine is hard to comprehend. To put in more easily imaginable quantities, it is 23 million gram packets of yayo—or about 200 million white lines cut up on 200 million bathroom mirrors. Sold at gram level on the American street, it would be worth about $1.5 billion, and that is before it is cut up with flour. Calderón was earning his reputation as the Eliot Ness of Mexico. And gangsters were getting seriously pissed.
On the Mexican streets, violence raged on in Calderón’s first year in office much as it had in Fox’s last. The Zetas battled the Sinaloa cartel and its allies in half a dozen states. Both sides increasingly made snuff videos and put beheaded corpses on public display. But the total number of victims w
as only a little higher than it had been during 2006.
Then in August, some fantastic news arrived: the Zetas and Sinaloa cartel had agreed to a cease-fire. Like so many events in the Mexican Drug War, the first sign of the truce was a rumor from an unnamed source, in this case a DEA agent. But Mexican officials, including the attorney general, soon corroborated it. And narco Édgar Valdéz, called the Barbie Doll because of his blond hair, later gave a videotaped confession in which he described details of the meeting where the truce was hammered out.7
The narco peace summit took place in the northern industrial city of Monterrey between the headquarters of the world’s third-largest cement company and Sol beer factories. It is amazing how capos who had been cutting each other’s head off could sit down for a nice chat. But business trumps bad blood. The two mafias agreed to stop massacring each other and redraw a map of their turf, the Barbie Doll related. The Gulf Cartel and its Zetas army would keep northeastern Mexico, including the city of Nuevo Laredo, as well as the eastern state of Veracruz; the Sinaloa cartel would keep their old territories including Acapulco and also acquire the Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza, the richest municipality in all Mexico. The Beard Beltrán Leyva was made the Sinaloan point man to keep peace with the Zetas.
As 2007 ended, I talked to an upbeat Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora. Killings had finally gone down in the months following the truce; the year finished with twenty-five hundred drug-related murders. This was higher than 2006, Medina said, but finally the war had swung in the right direction. The government had made record seizures, extradited hot-potato kingpins, and was regaining control, he argued. American drug agents said they were working with the best Mexican president in history, and U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were due to arrive. After his first year in office, Calderón’s war looked pretty damn good. The president said he would now start focusing on other issues, such as reforming the oil industry.
