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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | May 2007 
Mexico Hit by Drug-Fuelled Wave of Terror
 Adam Thomson - The Financial Times
| | Mexican Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, right, speaks during a news conference in Mexico City, Thursday, May 17, 2007. Garcia Luna said the attackers involved in Wednesday's gun battle in Cananea, Sonora were linked to a cell of the Gulf drug cartel that had been operating in the area, and suggested the kidnappings may have been one of the main goals of the attack. (AP/David Oziel) |
Mexico admitted on Thursday that the recent increase in narcotics-related violence has “common patterns” with the bloody wave of drugs-fuelled terror that swept Colombia in the late 1980s.
In a press conference on Thursday, Genaro García, the country’s security minister, said drugs gangs in Mexico had adopted similar working methods to those used by the notorious Colombian cartels, whose reign of terror led to the death of thousands of police and civilians.
“The [Mexican] context is different from that of Colombia but there are common patterns,” he said. “Their aim is to use violence to intimidate [the state] in order to achieve impunity.”
Mr García also said the Mexican government’s attempts to combat the drugs trade were made all the more difficult by the ease with which the criminals could obtain firearms just north of the border with the US. “There is a massive flow of firearms into Mexico [and] many of them come from the US,” he said.
Stopping short of demanding that the US government stiffen its gun-control laws, Mr García added: “The big advantage of the drugs traffickers is that in the US the possession of arms is not against the law.”
The minister’s comments come as Mexico grapples with the most acute period of violence in living memory. According to the El Universal daily newspaper, the number of drugs-related murders this year reached 1,000 on May 15. By contrast, that figure was only reached in mid July last year, and on September 12 in 2005.
One example of how the gangs are becoming increasingly daring in their strategies came early Wednesday morning this week when a group of approximately 50 armed men stormed a police station in the municipality of Cananea in the northern border state of Sonora. An ensuing gun battle with state police left 22 people dead, including 15 gang members.
The incident is the biggest clash between authorities and drugs groups since centre-right President Felipe Calderón sent thousands of troops to several hotspots around the country as part of a strategy to “recover full control of government in those affected areas”.
Mr García conceded that much of the wave of violence stemmed from Mexico’s anti-narcotics policy in recent years, which has centred on pursuing the leaders of the various cartels. “It was assumed that by going after the head, the body would stop working,” he said. “However, it just generated internal violence.”
In spite of what many security and narcotic experts view as a failure of the heavily US-backed policy, Mr García insisted that Mexican authorities would continue undeterred. “We will not take one step back,” he said.
Instead, he said that Mr Calderón’s government was busy reforming the complicated organisational structure of the police, which operates under both state and federal management, and suffers immense inefficiencies in terms of information-sharing and intelligence-gathering.
Yet he refused to specify a time by which Mexicans would see and end to the violence. “Doing that is like trying to predict the day authorities catch [Osama] Bin Laden,” he said. |
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