 |
|
|
 News Around the Republic of Mexico | September 2006 
Mexico Now a Drug Destination
 Colin McMahon - Chicago Tribune
| | A forensics officer takes pictures of bullet casings at the crime scene where Tijuana Municipal Police sub-director Arturo Rivas Baca was killed in a motorway in Tijuana in Baja California September 21, 2006. Suspected drug gang hit men shot and killed Rivas on Thursday in a hail of bullets from AK-47 assault weapons, police said. Rivas had recently been sent a funeral wreath as a warning from drug traffickers. (Reuters/Jorge Duenes) |
The scourge of the drug trade is hardly new to Mexico. But the country has never been hit so frequently, so gruesomely and so close to home.
Amid a string of ghastly attacks by international traffickers, Mexico also is struggling to confront an alarming rise in drug use by its own people.
More of the cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamines and even heroin that once went exclusively to eager clients in the United States are staying in Mexico. And that domestic trade has contributed to a wave of violence so mean that the U.S. Embassy this month issued a travel advisory for Americans across Mexico.
Not only are the traditional hot spots along the U.S.-Mexico border vulnerable. The tourist resort of Acapulco has been badly bloodied as well. And here in the central state of Michoacan, police have recorded more than a dozen decapitations this year.
`A trap has been built'
Narcotics are tearing at a social fabric already under strain from the ills many Mexican families know too well: poverty, joblessness, crime and broken homes.
'Retail drug trafficking is already a reality,' said Pedro Isnardo de la Cruz Lugardo, a political analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. 'A trap has been built with the crisis of values, the increase in families with divorced parents, the rise in leisure time and the lack of any guidance from the government.
'We're talking about a market that is socially and politically undermining, but that by definition is very lucrative.'
De la Cruz Lugardo said narcomenudeo, the word Mexicans coined to distinguish the small domestic drug trade from the large international one, has deeply penetrated urban areas. Children already hooked on methamphetamines or other drugs can be found in at least 20 percent of Mexico City schools, he said.
But while Mexicans use different words for the different types of drug trades, the line dividing the two is not so distinct.
The Gulf and Sinaloa cartels, currently locked in a bloody and increasingly personal war over trafficking routes to the United States, do not care much about who specifically sells crack, pot or meth in the main plaza of Uruapan.
Yet those same cartels are increasingly intent on developing the internal market. And the drugs they use as currency in supplying the United States and Europe are filtering down to the streets of Mexico's cities and towns.
'There are no direct links between the top gangsters and the small gangs,' said Jorge Fernandez Menendez, a Mexico City journalist who is one of the nation's top authorities on narcotics. 'But the drugs used to pay the hit men, the operators and the police who work for the cartels end up in the hands of the local gangs. There is a symbiosis.'
Uruapan and its 600,000 people are hit from both ends.
State police say the local drug trade has grown significantly. In mid-September, they arrested an Uruapan man with a large supply of marijuana they believe was for local sale.
'Before we saw ourselves merely as a country of passage, but now we see that this is a country of consumers too,' said Ramon Ponce Ponce, Michoacan state's top prosecutor in Uruapan. 'Drug use has gone up a lot in the last three years.'
The wider drug trade is battering Uruapan as well.
In the early hours of Sept. 6, a group of masked and heavily armed men stormed into the Sun and Shadow nightclub, ignoring the bouncers and the large sign that reads: 'No guns. No weapons. No uniforms.'
They rounded up the 70 or so patrons, led them all to the dance floor where salsa and marimba music were being played, ordered them to lie on the ground and then opened up a black plastic bag.
Out rolled five severed heads, still moist with blood.
The gunmen then deposited a written warning: 'The family does not kill for money, it does not kill women, it does not kill innocents. Only those who should die, die. ... This is divine justice.'
Two days later, another six recipients of the drug trade's brand of divine justice were found in a place common enough to have its own name: a 'narcograve.' The men's throats had been slit. Their bodies showed signs of torture.
Ponce said state and federal authorities have identified all but two of the dead. And while it was probable the deaths were linked to the international drug trade, Ponce said police were still investigating.
The grisly late show at the Sun and Shadow brought to at least 13 the number of decapitations this year in Michoacan, including one this month of a pregnant woman in Uruapan.
Next door in Guerrero state, where traffickers are fighting not only over routes but also over the lucrative market of Acapulco, dozens of people have been executed. In one case, traffickers posted two heads on a fence outside government offices. The heads came with the warning: 'So that you learn respect.'
1,500 drug killings so far in '06 With an estimated 1,500 drug-related killings recorded so far in 2006, or about twice what Mexico sees in an average year, officials acknowledge that violence has reached unprecedented levels.
Mexico's top organized-crime official told the Mexico City daily El Universal this month that the traffickers 'are killing people in the most cruel, ruthless and bloodiest ways we have ever seen.'
This month, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City issued an advisory message to American citizens warning them to use caution in Mexico. Last week, U.S. and Mexican officials held a summit to address the rise in violence. They called for more cooperation, such as the extradition this month from Mexico to the U.S. of Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix, a suspected drug trafficker.
'Violence in the U.S.-Mexico border region continues to threaten our very way of life, and as friends and neighbors, Mexicans and Americans must be honest about the near-lawlessness of some parts of our border region,' U.S. Ambassador Antonio Garza said.
As Mexico has become more democratic politically, so has the criminal world opened to new players, new forces and new rules.
Understandings between cartels over turf and routes have broken down. The codes of confidence and secrecy among the cartels have weakened. And with new authorities in power, some of the deals between traffickers and corrupt officials that once kept a lid on violence have given way.
At the same time, the family bonds and social conservatism that Mexican officials once thought protected their people from becoming drug users have weakened.
'Up until very recently ... it was not acceptable to say that Mexico had a problem with internal consumption,' said Ana Maria Salazar, a Mexico City political analyst and former drug official with the U.S. Defense Department. 'The Mexican response to the U.S. was always, `We have trafficking problems because you guys have a consumption problem.'
'For the most part until recently they were right. But once you admit you have a consumption problem, you have to change your policies.'
This year, Mexico's Congress adopted a law relaxing some penalties for drug possession and granting state and local police a greater role in combating drugs. The changes were aimed at helping overstretched federal forces and enabling the justice system to concentrate on dealers rather than addicts.
But under pressure from the United States, which expressed concern that Mexico was going soft on drugs, President Vicente Fox vetoed the bill. For the people of Uruapan, something needs to change, and fast.
At the Sun and Shadow, manager Gabriel Solorio said the 'army' of gunmen that invaded his club, with about 25 storming the place and more outside standing guard, was the worst example of the violence that has exploded in the past few years.
'Look at this,' Solorio said, pointing to a room full of empty tables. 'People are scared. Business is dead.'
Not for the traffickers, it's not. For Mexican dealers large and small, business is booming.
cmcmahon@tribune.com |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us