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Mexican Drug Cartels: You Want Silver or Lead? Part 4
 Chad Deal - San Diego Reader
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September 23, 2010
On May 23, 2008, as part of the Merida Initiative, a $1.5 billion security cooperation program between the U.S., Mexico, and Central America, the Senate allocated $400 million to aid Mexico's drug war, ten times its previous annual allotment. Calderón continued to escalate his antidrug campaign. Well over 25,000 troops have been deployed in Mexico to date. Despite this hard-line campaign, an estimated 80 percent of the methamphetamine on the streets in the United States still comes from Mexico and an estimated 1100 tons of marijuana are smuggled across the border annually. The amount of cocaine imported into the U.S. through Mexico rose from just over half of the national total in 1990 to more than 90 percent in 2008, according to U.S. State Department estimates. Despite the estimated $40 billion a year the U.S. spends on intercepting shipments and arresting drug dealers and users, only about 5 to 15 percent of drugs coming into the U.S. are seized. The rest go to an estimated 13 million Americans monthly, who fuel the $200-billion-a-year industry.
An estimated 2000 drug-related violent deaths occurred in Mexico in 2006, rising to 2700 deaths in 2007 and to more than 5612 in 2008 (over 1000 of these murders took place in Tijuana within the first quarter of the year). The number peaked at over 6500 in 2009. As of this August, 2010 has already seen as many homicides as all of 2008. Mexico's attorney general says at least 24,800 people have been killed in drug-gang violence since President Felipe Calderón launched his military-led offensive in 2006. While most of the victims were gang members killed by rivals or by the government, some were bystanders. At least 1100 police officers and soldiers died in the line of duty between 2006 and 2009. Tijuana ran counter to national trends with 657 killings in 2009, a 20 percent drop from 2008, when Tijuana violence peaked at 844 homicides. An estimated half of Tijuana's killings in 2009 were connected to organized crime. Thirty-one of the year's victims were Tijuana police officers.
Javier Arellano was captured in August 2006 by the U.S. Coast Guard while fishing off the coast of Baja California. A year later, he was sentenced in the U.S. to life in prison. The once highly organized Arellano-Félix organization began to unravel, with two main factions within the group feuding over control. Enedina and Fernando "the Engineer" Arellano, son of Alicia Arellano and nephew of the Arellano brothers, headed one group, while the notoriously gruesome Teodoro "El Teo" García led the other. The conflict came to a head over the last three months of 2008, when 443 murders took place on the streets of Tijuana.
On October 26, 2008, Eduardo, the last prominent Arellano brother, was arrested after a shootout in Tijuana. Cartel lieutenant Luis Vázquez was taken into custody the same day.
The New Breed
A new generation of traffickers has arisen to fill the void of the once-mighty Arellano-Félix organization — petty criminals who have diversified their activities to include bank robbery, stealing cars, and running rackets to beat up restaurant owners. Shirk describes them as "smaller, scrappier, less disciplined, and not tied to some of the old rules and customs we saw develop in the late '80s and '90s." The press often calls them "medicated and uneducated."
"We're seeing a transition from the gangsterism of traditional hit men to paramilitary terrorism with guerrilla tactics," as the Houston Chronicle in May 2007 quotes Luis Astorga, a drug-trafficking expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and co-author with Shirk of Drug Trafficking Organizations and Counter-Drug Strategies in the U.S.-Mexico Context (a report released this April analyzing U.S.-Mexico security cooperation).
A perfect example of the new breed is "El Teo" García, who established an unprecedented reputation for brutality and violence by running a profitable kidnapping ring, littering the streets of Tijuana with victims' bodies, and having over 300 bodies dissolved in acid by his "stew-maker," Santiago Meza.
"He splintered away from AFO and attempted to carve out his own domain, literally by carving people up," says Shirk. "Compare Ramón to El Teo, and [Ramón] looks like a gentleman."
More than 100 people were killed in a two-week period last October when Sánchez again clashed with "El Teo," who had the support of the largely untouched Sinaloa cartel.
The old organizations, by virtue of their negotiated agreements with authorities, didn't have to engage in fearmongering behavior. But the changing political climate in Mexico has made corruption, and thus a certain stability, more difficult to accomplish.
"I would say it's much harder today to buy a public Mexican official than it was in the past," Shirk says. "And you have to buy more people at more points in the system to connect the dots. In the past, you bought the governor or someone at the cabinet level, and it was all taken care of. The problem today is there's too much democracy. Elected officials don't all sing the same tune. They aren't on the same team."
On March 9, 2009, the Mexican Army confirmed the arrest of 26 members of the Tijuana cartel. El Teo was arrested on January 12 of this year by Mexican federal police at his estate in La Paz.
With all of the major players dead or in jail, the Arellano-Félix organization is now often referred to in the media as the Fernando Sánchez cartel. Jesús Quiñonez, the international liaison for the Baja California state attorney general's office, was arrested this July and charged with sharing confidential information with drug traffickers and arranging the arrests of Sánchez's rivals. Forty-two other defendants, many of whom were living in San Diego communities from Imperial Beach to Poway, were charged in a federal racketeering complaint that cites murder and kidnapping among other crimes. Authorities confiscated a ton of marijuana, 30 pounds of meth, and 15 pounds of cocaine during the investigation. Sánchez has been charged but not yet apprehended. A week later, 62 additional current and former officers were detained on suspicion of working with cartels. The purge came at the end of a two-year investigation into corruption that expunged more than 400 officers from Tijuana's police department.
"When an official says something or an arrest is made, it's very hard to tell if they're acting in the public interest or if they're acting in the interest of the cartels," Shirk says. "When you take out the competition, someone benefits. In this case, it's 'El Chapo' Guzmán of the Sinaloa cartel, which remains virtually untouched by this administration…. Dozens of high-ranking officials of this administration have been later identified to be on the take for one organization or another…. Until they take out Ismael Zambada or 'Chapo' Guzmán, in my view, there's going to be a lot of suspicion about whether the Sinaloa cartel is somehow being protected by the Calderón administration."
The Future
Shirk and Astorga's report identifies four possible approaches to containing drug-related violence in Mexico. The first is more or less what the Calderón administration has been engaged in for the past four years: direct confrontation with the goal of fracturing organizations into smaller groups that can be managed by local authorities. Ultimately, the aim of this approach would be to direct drug-trafficking routes away from Mexico and thus starve the fractured trafficking cells out of business. The question now is whether this can be accomplished with the current militarized line of attack or if a more covert, intelligence-oriented strategy would prove more successful. So far, Calderón's approach has provided something of a paradox: while cartels have been severely crippled by his efforts, the past few years have been the most violent and unstable in recent history.
The second approach is complicity, to some degree, with the cartels. This would involve making a pact so that cartels and government could operate harmoniously, as was the case in the early years of Mexican drug trafficking. Obviously the least desirable approach for law-enforcement agencies, this option appears highly unlikely.
A third alternative is to eliminate the black market with treatment and prevention. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that illegal drug consumption costs America more than $181 billion annually and states that "for every dollar spent on addiction treatment programs, there is a $4 to $7 reduction in cost of drug-related crimes." While a viable option, it is unknown how much effect this approach would have on aggregate consumption and thus organized crime.
The fourth option is to move away from prohibition and toward regulation of currently illegal substances, either via decriminalization or re-legalization. Decriminalization would allow law enforcement to focus on high-level drug traffickers and also reduce harsh penalties for personal use, which would theoretically encourage addicts to seek treatment and thus reduce the market. In November, Californians will vote on Proposition 19, also known as the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, which polls suggest will be supported by the majority of voters. If it passes, the new provision would allow California to generate an estimated $1.3 billion in revenue and save another $1 billion on enforcement and incarceration. It would also drop the price of an ounce of marijuana from $375 to around $38 before taxes, effectively destroying the California market for Mexican marijuana, which is generally of poorer quality than locally grown, medicinal-grade marijuana. The overall detriment to organized crime is unknown, as the modern Mexican gangster has diversified his activities and no longer relies solely on trafficking revenue.
Baja California Governor José Osuna opposes legalization of illicit drugs and has repeatedly stated that the solution lies in reducing demand in the United States and Mexico. Tightening borders have redirected some drug traffickers' attention back to the streets of Tijuana, where an estimated 200,000 drug addicts, many of them children, make the city the highest per capita in drug abuse in the country.
"The Arellano-Félix organization is no longer the organization it once was," says Shirk. "What I don't know, and what I imagine we'll find out in the coming year or two…is have they succeeded in fending off the onslaught from the Sinaloa cartel and gotten back to business as usual? Or has a new deal been made? Did they make an agreement…[to] let Sinaloa move product through because they're tired of the war? I don't know what arrangement has been made, but it seems as though there is a peace."
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