The Fight to Save Juárez (51 page)

The strategy of “disarticulating” the cartels has been largely successful,
the
CISEN officer told me. The command and control structure of the cartels has been decimated and the cartels severely fractured. Twenty-one of the thirty-seven individuals on Mexico's Most Wanted list had either been apprehended or killed.
¹
Of the five original cartels, two of them, the Juárez cartel and the Tijuana cartel, were mere shadows of their former selves (the Juárez cartel continued to control the important border crossings in Chihuahua, and their war with the Sinaloa cartel continued in the state's cities and rural areas, but the national scope of the Juárez cartel had been significantly reduced). The Gulf cartel had split into two warring factions, with Los Zetas, their armed wing, now fighting to take control of the Gulf cartel territory. La Familia Michoacana had atomized into small bands. The Sinaloa cartel, under the leadership of the mythic El Chapo Guzmán Loera, had always operated more as a federation of closely allied organizations, with Guzmán at the head. The Beltrán-Leyva organization had broken off from El Chapo in 2008 and had been at war with him ever since. Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, a powerful leader within the Sinaloa cartel, had been killed in 2010. And there was evidence of ruptures between groups in Durango, the heart of El Chapo's territory. The cartels had been eviscerated by a combination of federal operations and internecine conflict, the intelligence officer summarized.

The CISEN agent told me that one factor making it increasingly difficult for the cartels to operate was that they were being hunted by a variety of Mexican military and law enforcement agencies. The Mexican Army and Marines operated independently of one another, and Mexican federal police had quintupled in size to a force of 35,000 officers (and U.S. sources described their cooperation with American law enforcement as unprecedented). Each of these entities was pursuing the cartels, sometimes collaboratively, sometimes independently, and each had taken down important cartel capos. There were too many players tracking down the cartels and it was costly and difficult to pay all of them off. For example, even though the Beltrán-Leyva cartel had been paying the head of the organized crime unit in the Mexican attorney general's office $450,000 dollars a month to provide information about investigations and operations, Mexican Army special forces had arrested Alfredo Beltrán Leyva in January 2008. His brother, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, was subsequently killed in December of 2009 by the Mexican Marines. The federal police had also taken down top Beltrán-Leyva operatives.

A source who had served as a security advisor for President Calderón during the first two years of his administration suggested an additional variable making it more difficult and costly for cartels to ensure the control and protection to which they'd long been accustomed. Prior to 2000, in PRI-controlled, pre-democracy Mexico, what was decreed at the top levels
of
government was enforced all the way down to the poorest municipalities. That made corruption efficient. Well-placed bribes at the top controlled everything up and down the line. Today's playing field was much more complex, given that there were so many actors. Mexico's fledgling democratization had increased the cartels' cost of doing business. Once a country where a single party controlled everything, today Mexico's three most influential political parties controlled governorships and municipalities, making it more cumbersome and expensive for the cartels to control local and regional institutions. In response, the cartels had turned to raw intimidation, murdering mayors and attempting to influence electoral processes more directly.

The Mexican government was perhaps right in its assessment that it was “winning the war,” if by winning they meant arrests of cartel operatives and the fragmentation of cartel operations. There had been unprecedented seizures of cash, weapons, and drugs over the course of the Calderón administration. The problem was that these successes had had no appreciable impact on the one index that mattered most to the Mexican public: the level of violence and the overall climate of lawlessness in some regions of the country. In fact, destabilizing the cartels had generated more violence and more crime, not less. Therein lay the paradox facing the government's efforts, a paradox that was not easily explained to a Mexican public for whom, in many communities, ordinary life consisted of daily fear of what might happen to them or to their loved ones each time they left their homes.

In addition to the bloody cartel-on-cartel warfare (the Sinaloa cartel attempting to seize control of the Juárez
plaza
, the Zetas attempting to take over the Gulf cartel's areas of operation, etc.), there were two additional factors behind the tidal wave of crime and violence in Mexico. One was the emergence of the Mexican retail drug markets that had begun slowly in the mid-1990s after the United States' Operation Hold the Line started making it more costly for the cartels to move product across the border. By 2000, Mexico, which had been a transit point for drugs but not a major consumer of them, was experiencing a precipitous rise in addictions and drug-related crime problems. The majority of deaths across the nation were due to gang-on-gang disputes related to the local retail drug business. Thus, some of this violence was more akin to the Bloods and the Crips killing one another off in the streets of South Central Los Angeles than cartel-upon-cartel violence per se.

The fracturing of the cartels had also resulted in a proliferation of criminal bands engaging in ordinary street crime, including the lucrative kidnapping and extortion rackets. In Juárez, I spoke to shopkeepers and small business owners who were deeply afraid of the extortionists. People who did not pay the
cuota
were executed or had their relatives or employees kid
napped
, or their businesses burned to the ground (both as a consequence for not paying and as a way of terrorizing others who were being extorted). These crimes were taking an enormous toll on citizens, which is why Calderón's popularity was sagging, notwithstanding his government's success in dismantling the cartels.

Though the dividing lines were anything but clear given who the players were, Mexico was now actually fighting two different, if interrelated, wars: the war against the cartels (which was under the purview of federal authorities), and an explosion of ordinary street crime (much of which was under the purview of state and local police forces). The Mexican government had had a significant impact on cartel operations, but organized crime groups had proven to have a tremendous capacity to adapt and to reinvent themselves. Meanwhile, local crime had become an enormous challenge. And even as the federal government succeeded in strengthening the federal police and the military as tools for fighting organized crime, the institutions for fighting ordinary crime, the state and municipal police forces, were still highly problematic: many remained infected by cartel influence and the traditional corruption that had been their mainstay for decades. As “ordinary” (though no less violent) crime exploded, the institutions charged with meeting that challenge were at best inadequate, at worst still participating and colluding with it.

The biggest failure of all remained the Mexican judicial system, a system so flawed and byzantine that it ensured criminals' impunity in all but a small percentage of cases. The fact was so apparent and so grotesquely obvious that no one could fail to see it, yet the Mexican Congress was either unwilling or unable to implement meaningful reform. Admittedly, the challenge was complex, involving both reforms to Mexican law enforcement (how crimes were investigated, how police were trained to handle evidence, questions of human rights, etc.) as well as judicial reform (how attorneys were trained and how judges and the courts worked to establish truth and culpability or innocence). But the Mexican Congress had dallied with these questions for more than a decade, and the outcome of those years of debate were far short of what the Mexican nation needed if it was going to be saved from the narco-disease by which it was being devoured from within. Instead, the absence of judicial reform in Mexico bordered on legislative malfeasance; it was unconscionable, but politics and personal agendas consistently trumped the greater good in these deliberations. No progress was possible without substantive reform. It was a matter of will, but it was also a matter of the Mexican public pressuring, insisting that legislators do the necessary work.

In late August of 2011, four vehicles pulled up to the entrance to the Casino Royale in Monterrey, Nuevo León, where they set fire to the establishment, trapping and killing fifty-two people inside. The act of narco-terrorism resulted in the greatest number of civilian deaths on record in Mexico.
President
Calderón declared three days of national mourning, vowing to track down the killers. The federal attorney general's office offered a nearly three-million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the culprits. In an unusual move, Calderón delivered a fifteen-minute speech to the Mexican nation. Especially noteworthy were the last four minutes of the speech, in which he directly and pointedly addressed the American people, the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. government. Calderón thanked the United States for its cooperation and for the information and intelligence that had helped Mexico “to capture dozens of organized crime leaders and hit their criminal structures.” Calderón asked Americans to “reflect upon the tragedy that we are living in Mexico.” It was partly a plea, partly a demand. “Part of the tragedy that we are living as Mexicans,” Calderón said, “comes from the fact that we live next door to the greatest consumer of drugs in the world.” (It was a play, perhaps, on the oft-repeated phrase apocryphally attributed to Porfirio Díaz following the Mexican-American War: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!”) Calderón called on Americans to reduce their “insatiable” drug consumption or institute “mechanisms” that would deprive the cartels of the profits derived from drug trafficking (a thinly disguised appeal for legalization strategies). Finally, Calderón addressed the fact that the cartels were armed with weapons that had been purchased in the United States. “There is no reason that hundreds of thousands of weapons are being sold to criminals,” he argued. He urged the United States to close the “criminal” sale of high-powered arms and assault weapons. These weapons were going into the hands of criminals operating in Mexico and everyone knew it. The problem had a solution, Calderón argued. The United States “has done it in the recent past. Stop the indiscriminate and uncontrolled sale of assault weapons!” Calderón demanded.

Perhaps it was the onslaught of Hurricane Irene, which was preparing to hit the Eastern Seaboard the day of Calderón's speech, but in the United States Calderón's words, like much of what was taking place in Mexico, received scant attention. By the fall of 2011 the national tally of the dead since the beginning of the narco-wars was nearing fifty thousand, though no one could know the true number with any certainty.
²
In Juárez, the grim tally had exceeded nine thousand souls, and the counting appeared far from over.

.   .   .

One afternoon I visited a cemetery in the heart of one of Juárez's bloodiest neighborhoods. I'd been told that the violence was so transforming the city's culture that it was even altering the rituals around death. The man who oversaw the cemetery told me that funeral directors like himself no longer stood too close to the victims' families for fear that
sicarios
might come to the graveside and assassinate the deceased's relatives along with anyone who happened to be standing near them. It went against the grain of his job of providing comfort, he said, but people in his line of work saw no alter
native.
Recently, a van full of men wearing sunglasses had pulled into the cemetery just as a funeral was getting underway. The funeral director and his crew had panicked. “They looked like
sicarios
,” he told me. It turned out they were only a mariachi band contracted to play at the graveside. But the panic was testimony to the edginess that had come to reign over everything. Implicit in the funeral director's lamentation was the connotation that civilization itself seemed to be unraveling. I left the cemetery feeling disquieted.

Less than fifty yards from the cemetery entrance, I happened upon a group of six young men. In Juárez, in this neighborhood, the reflexive assumption was to assume that they were
cholos
or NiNis. All of them were under twenty, some sporting tattoos. But they were holding musical instruments, not assault rifles. The musicians (three trumpet players, two percussionists, and a bass player) were playing tropical
cumbia
music outdoors, in the driveway of a house. They told me that they were called Banda La Palmera. “We're playing at a party tonight!” they added, almost in a chorus. There was an innocence in their excitement that I found refreshing. That day I had been to two executions prior to visiting the cemetery, and I'd been feeling the press of the city's violence. The
cumbia
group dissolved those emotions. These young men were full of life. It was a serendipitous gift, I thought. In this forlorn neighborhood, surrounded by so much death, the musicians were evidence of the resilience of the human spirit.

Two years later, there was a glimmer of light. As October 2012 drew to a close, the tally of the dead for the year was running slightly more than 700, the lowest murder rate since the drug war had begun in 2008. Local tax revenues were up (a sign that people were going out to restaurants and making purchases in stores), as were building permits and real estate sales. Some credited the purported victory of the Sinaloa over the Juárez cartel, others the success of Mexican law enforcement, still others the rebounding maquiladora industry enjoying the fruits of a post-recession American economy. There had also been unprecedented investment in the city's social fabric. Whatever the reasons, the turn made it possible for some to begin to hope that Mexico's most brutalized city had perhaps seen the worst of it.