Mexico's literal war on drugs gets nastier

[Charles RB]

Now the semi-religious La Familia have killed at least 19 police officers and soldiers in a direct "fuck you" to the Mexican government.

The male voice on the line was not a typical contributor to the Voice and Solution TV programme where residents of the Mexican state of Michoacán air their everyday grievances.

"We want President Felipe Calderón to know that we are not his enemies," the caller said, after introducing himself last Wednesday as Servando Gómez Martínez, nicknamed La Tuta, one of the leaders of La Familia drug cartel. "We are open to dialogue."

It was a rare and chilling public intervention by the leader of a cartel fighting a war that has claimed 11,000 lives in three years. And the jibe to Calderón that "we are not his enemies" was a taunt marking a dramatic turn in the course of the war: a co-ordinated spate of savage attacks not between narco cartels but by La Familia against the Mexican state.

There have been relentless attacks on police forces - even the decapitation of eight soldiers and the murder of a general - in recent months, but last weekend saw the most concerted attacks on the federal police to date, raising further the spectre of an all-out narco insurrection in Mexico of a kind that ravaged Colombia 20 years ago. "This is a new phase in the drug war," said Samuel González, a former Mexican drug tsar in the mid-1990s and now a consistent critic of Calderón's force-based strategy against the cartels which he believes is making things worse. "This is the Talibanisation of the conflict."

Carlos Flores, who has studied the drug war, said: "It shows a new willingness to directly confront the federal government with paramilitary techniques and psychological warfare. And it is a warning of possible future assassinations of federal officials of higher rank."

The arrest last Saturday of Arnold Rueda Medina, nicknamed La Minsa, was the trigger for 21 attacks on the federal police - by far the most sustained challenge to government forces ever launched by a cartel. For the Mexican government, the attacks end all pretence that this crisis is confined to a turf war between cartels: this is an insurrection.

First, there were six near-simultaneous assaults on federal police stations around the state, including a dawn raid by a commando of about 50 gunmen with assault rifles and grenades on a station in the state capital, Morelia. In one of the last actions, a similarly sized hit squad pounded a cheap hotel where federal officials are put up in the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas. With the death toll already at five federal officers and two soldiers, a pile of blindfolded and tortured bodies was found on a mountain road last Tuesday. The 11 men and one woman turned out to be federal agents who had been gathering intelligence on organised crime and had been ambushed while off duty, the government said.

La Tuta's call has been confirmed as genuine, though observers tend to see it less as a genuine effort to get the president to sit down for talks and more as a public relations exercise. "What they are looking for is a way of defending their legitimacy with local people and at the same time undermine the institutions of the state," according to a security expert, Edgardo Buscaglia, who has studied crime syndicates from Naples to Kabul.

The article also covers the origins of the current drug war. And notes it's being a fucking failure so far - the print version had a sidebar noting the death toll's gone UP each year.

The latest sinister developments cast fresh doubt on the wisdom of Calderón's "war on drugs". President Barack Obama has described his Mexican counterpart as "a hero" for taking on the cartels. But Samuel González claims that the focus on military and police action south of the border will never bring the cartels to heel. "President Calderón has tunnel vision," he said. "He is allowing police strategy to dictate political and social policy and so things are getting worse every day."

With several other analysts González argues that the priority should be to work towards a pact that would commit all political parties to tackling corruption and money-laundering. They also stress the need to direct social spending to provide the young and poor in cartel areas with alternatives to gang membership and addiction. Unless that happens, the critics argue, organised crime will respond with ever greater brutality to government pressure, and dedicate more funds and effort to infiltration and building a social base of support. It is in the latter area, González said, that La Familia has excelled.

"These attacks show La Familia has a social base. They are warning the government that, if it doesn't change its strategy, there could be a social revolt," he said. "If the strategy continues in its current direction, this could happen."

Winning support in deprived rural areas is relatively easy through such things as building schools, roads and churches. But La Familia has also developed networks of support in urban areas thanks to client structures not dissimilar to the organisations that have long been part of Mexican party politics.

This has pitched La Familia into a political turf war, if conspiracy theories are to be given any credence: the suggestion is that elements in the state are backing the Sinaloa cartel as the only one capable of restoring a Pax Mafiosa, and that it is against this background that the Zetas and La Familia mount their savage insurrection and give it a Robin Hood social veneer.

A Familia group in the city of Uruapán organised a convoy of coaches to drive eight hours to Mexico City in May for a demonstration in support of the local mayor, arrested for alleged links to the cartel. "I'm just here because they told me to come," one of the protesters told the Observer. "I know they [La Familia] are really crazy. In fact, I think they are really sick sometimes, but they are the only people in my town who can help you out if you get in trouble, so that's why I joined the group." A deported migrant struggling to feed his family by selling shoes said he hoped "the organisation" would help him find a job soon in the local police force.

And this could get yet worse.

[Cam63]

If they're not careful, they may give drug dealing pricks a bad name.

[jamesfreeman]

Originally Posted by Cam63

If they're not careful, they may give drug dealing pricks a bad name.

Time to break some chairs over people's heads!

[Royal]

They're operating close to the border as well.

I'd hate to see the shitstorm a murdered federale would make.

[mgs]

hate to say it, but Mexico really is the wild west. The place is just dirty and corrupt. And, obviously, the drug lords there don't take crap from anyone. Get in their way and they WILL kill you and your family. They are nasty.

And as racist as some of the 'border' people in the U.S. may be, they often see, firsthand, just how far people are willing to go (forced or not) to get drugs over the border.

As a country, it would probably be better run under some dictatorship or communist run. As it is, people try and think about how it's changed, etc., blah, blah, blah. US businesses simply want it to be more stable so they can use the cheap labor, but any company that goes down there often gets their employees kidnapped, etc. Obviously the places on the water, kept for vacationers is beautiful, but the country just has absolutely no control whatsoever, it's just horrible.

[Charles RB]

Originally Posted by Royal

They're operating close to the border as well.

They're operating over the border too.

Originally Posted by mgs

As a country, it would probably be better run under some dictatorship or communist run.

Why? Dictatorships are corrupt as well, and a dictatorship would hardly stop narco-cartels starting an insurrection.

[LewisH]

illegal narcotics for it to be ended by force. The only logical thing to do is for the govenment to go into the drug business themselves by legalizing it and taxing it just as state lotteries pretty much put an end to numbers running.

Perhaps more people would get hooked on addictive dangerous drugs if it were legal but I think that is a better situation than the amount of violence around the world from the current state of things.

[Stressfactor]

Originally Posted by LewisH

illegal narcotics for it to be ended by force. The only logical thing to do is for the govenment to go into the drug business themselves by legalizing it and taxing it just as state lotteries pretty much put an end to numbers running.

Perhaps more people would get hooked on addictive dangerous drugs if it were legal but I think that is a better situation than the amount of violence around the world from the current state of things.

I think in this case the cartels would NEVER let the government do that. These guys are at the stage now where they really would inflict massive amounts of damage on the government to keep drugs illegal so they could continue earning obscene amounts of money.

And besides all of that, when it comes to the really, really dangerous, really addicting drugs I'm not sure the government COULD make them wholly legal. As I understand it, even the Netherlands LIMITS the amount of hash one can buy legally and (someone correct me if I'm wrong) it must be used on premesis . There will always be those addicts who will want more and more of the dangerous stuff -- more than the government will feel comfortable giving them but the cartels and the pushers will have NO such compunctions.

When dealing with a group as ruthless as this I'm afraid legalizing things really wouldn't do any good.

[Charles RB]

Originally Posted by LewisH

The only logical thing to do is for the govenment to go into the drug business themselves by legalizing it

How would that stop violent narco-cartels from targeting the state? The state would now be interfering with their trade on an unprecedented scale, they'd have to hit the state with any means possible - from violence up to using corrupt politicians - if they wanted to keep trading at their current level.

And they're hardly going to scale down operations and power for a quiet life.

[DeadXMan]

This is why I get my stuff frm the Hillbillies

[dupont2005]

hard drugs are legal over there in small amounts
http://www.reuters.com/article/lates...8349522?rpc=64

[DeadXMan]

Absinthe is legal again too.

[Gail Simone]

Good lord, this situation gets sadder and sadder.

I'm as liberal as they come but I totally get the people concerned about the border.