Seqor Gringo

Two travelers are happily swapping drinks and tales with the sheriff in a drowsy Mexican town -- until he pulls out his gun and things turn deadly crazy.

By Maxine Schur

Topics:Mexico, Latin America, Travel

The hot breeze sailed over the scrub desert and into the open blue door of the dockside cantina where we sat drinking beer. Stephen and I were heading toward the Carmen Islands — a detour on our way to the Yucatan. By this time we had been in Mexico five weeks and our travel had become desultory. We moved from town to town more like itinerant peddlers than tourists. We traveled indiscriminately, going anywhere as long as it was someplace we hadn’t seen before, someplace new to experience.

The next town was a drowsy place, a few shanties, a church and this cantina. The cantina was like so many we had seen in Mexico — concrete floor, aquarium-colored walls and a slow-moving ceiling fan. There was an amazing assortment of wall calendars, some with pictures of Jesus and others with pictures of scantily clad women — as if Heaven and Hell were vying for souls in the bars of Mexico.

Heat lay heavy on the town and the ferry to the islands wouldn’t leave for another hour, so we sat at a small oil cloth-covered table nursing Tecates in plastic glasses.

Someone a few towns back had told us that the short voyage to the Carmen Islands could be rough. Because I was 22 and naive, I had downed a Dramamine — actually, I had taken two for good measure. Now, as we sat drinking beer, I noticed the world starting to get wonderfully vague, as if the other customers were merely stage actors and all of us were in some kind of production playing passengers waiting for a ferry in a Mexican cantina. While Stephen and I chatted idly about Mayan pyramids, a blind woman walked in.

She was in her 30s, plump, wearing a soiled cotton dress; her bare feet were dark brown and leathery as if years of want had forced them to become shoes. Her eyes were pale blue marbles. At first I thought she was a beggar who had come in to sing for pesos, for along with a large sack, she carried a guitar.

But no. She sat down at one of the tables and from the sack pulled out a doll big as a toddler, a doll of good quality, made of bubble gum-color rubber and with blue eyes and blond hair. But the doll, also wearing a soiled cotton dress, was old and the rubber skin was dirt-stained and the nylon hair sprouted from its head in matted patches.

The woman sat the doll on a chair next to her and, strumming her guitar, began to sing. Perhaps it was the beer or the Dramamine, but at once I fell in love with this woman’s singing. Her voice was low, resonant. And as she sang, it became clear that it wasn’t for money. She was just waiting for the ferry and comforting herself with songs.

Time passed. A black mutt lying on its side yawned, letting out a kind of squeal. A few more passengers strolled in: somber men in black cowboy hats; housewives carrying plastic baskets of food; an old woman bent over like a nail hammered wrong; a teenage girl with gold teeth carrying a net bag of vegetables; and a short, chunky man in his 40s with a grizzled face.

We were all sitting in the cantina quiet as churchgoers when the owner brought us two more Tecates. The bright red cans frosty and cold shone like Christmas. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we didn’t order these.”

“Don’t worry,” he replied with a backward nod. “Seqor Gringo, he is buying for you.”

We looked toward the table in the corner and saw that the chunky man was raising his glass in a silent toast to us.

We smiled and lifted our fresh beers in return. “Gracias, Seqor!” we called across to him.

Taking that as his cue, the man stood up and walked over to our table.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked in a Southern accent.

“Please,” we gestured toward the empty seat across the table. “Please join us.”

“You Americans?”
“Sure,” Stephen said. “Where are you from?”
“Louisiana.”
“What are you doing here? Going on to the Yucatan?”

The man drank the beer long and deep from his glass, then
chuckled. “No. I live here. Lived here for 20 years.” He paused. “I’m
the deputy sheriff.”

“Wow!” we both said. Then, as if to impress us even more, the
man added, “Well, actually, ’cause the sheriff ‘s off in Campeche right now,
I’m the sheriff.”

“I didn’t know a gringo could be sheriff in Mexico,” I said.

“Hey!” he laughed, “I didn’t either!” He hit the table with
his fist for punctuation and we laughed together, then agreed how good it
was to be talking to someone in this boondocks place who was from the
States.

For the next 40 minutes or so while the blind woman continued
to sing, we listened to this man tell his story. It turned out that he had
come to Mexico in the ’50s to evade the draft for the Korean War.

“But why here?” Stephen asked.

“Shrimp. My family were all shrimp fishermen in Louisiana and
it’s something I knew real good. I came down here, bought a few boats and
set up a shrimp-fishing fleet. My brother came down for a while to help
me.”

“Did he stay too?”

“No, didn’t have to. My brother could go back. That son of a
bitch! He wasn’t a draft dodger!” The deputy sheriff laughed loudly. We
laughed too and hit the table too. We were feeling pretty good and we
laughed as if being barred forever from your own country was the funniest
thing.

Then the man told us how he’d gotten pretty rich from shrimp
fishing down here and his wealth had made him a power in the town. He had married
a Mexican woman about 20 years ago and they had a son. The townspeople
liked him and called him “Seqor Gringo,” and eventually he became deputy
sheriff.

I was enjoying the whole story, though I couldn’t talk much because I
was feeling pretty sleepy. So I just listened to his smooth,
Southern accent and let the blind woman’s songs waft gently over
me.
We were all feeling really good. Seqor Gringo ordered us three
more beers and kept on talking. I don’t remember all he said, but I do
remember that after a while he remarked, casually as can be, just merging
it in with the rest of his banter, that last month his only son,
21 years old, had been shot at a party in town by God knows who.
Killed.

“Why?” Stephen asked.

“Some stupid argument about girls. Hey, you guys got any kids?”

“No way. We just got married! This is our honeymoon.”

“Congratulations!” the deputy sheriff crowed. “You’re a cute
couple. Let’s get some beer to celebrate!”

We drank yet more beer and talked about nothing in particular
but laughed a lot. How amusing it all seemed, stoned as I was on Dramamine
and beer and the lazy heat. Growing drowsier by the minute, I no longer
picked up whole sentences, just individual words that my brain couldn’t
quite connect. As I fought to stay awake, it seemed everything was slowly
evolving into a dream. The deputy sheriff’s voice seemed to have gotten
quiet as a mourner’s. The glossy turquoise paint of the cantina walls
appeared to sweat. The dog looked dead. And when I glanced over at the
blind woman, her eyes had become doll’s eyes, opening and shutting in that
either/or way.

“I sure am feeling weird,” I said and the deputy sheriff pulled
out his gun and aimed it point-blank at my face.

“You know,” he said quietly, “I could kill both of you real easy.”

I was staring up the nostrils of a .38-caliber handgun. Yet it
seemed distant and kind of like a slow-motion scene in a Peckinpah movie.

Then I heard Stephen say carefully, “I’m sure you wouldn’t want
to do that.”

“I’m the law here,” he answered in a low voice full of rage.
“Nobody in this goddamn place could do anything about it and you know what?”

“No, what?”

“I could kill you both right now real easy.”

There must have been truth in that for not a soul in the
cantina made a sound. Well, he was the deputy sheriff and we were still
talking softly, so maybe from across the room it looked like he was just
joking. I don’t think people were paying us any attention, but I didn’t
dare look. A gun is great for focusing attention and I kept my eyes on it
as if it were a wild animal about to pounce. Stephen was sitting right
next to me and I didn’t dare look at him, either, but I could tell he was
agitated because he got real cheery.

“Well, you wouldn’t want to do that! Of course you wouldn’t! No,
not a nice guy like you! Not a respected deputy sheriff! Killing fellow
Americans! Ho ho! Now, why don’t you just put the gun away? Yeah, that’s
right, put it away and then we’ll have some more beers. Our treat!”

In my stupor I sensed that the deputy sheriff didn’t care what
Stephen was saying or about anything else. But I couldn’t figure it out.
Why was he suddenly so angry? Weren’t we all having a good time? Had we
said something to offend him? Slowly the deputy sheriff looked at us, then
he sighed and put the gun back in his holster. He looked really sad then
like he was going to cry. And pathetic, too, like a kid who has to put his
toys away because he’s been naughty.

“Yeah, let’s have some beer,” the deputy sheriff said to no one
in particular.

We never ordered the beers. As he started to mutter about how
fucked up everything was, we heard the ferry arriving. The people in the
cantina began moving out to the dock. Baskets of fruit, ragged string-tied
boxes and plastic suitcases were plucked off the cement floor. The dog
jumped to his feet, and the teenage girl held the elbow of the blind woman
as she guided her toward the boat. Stephen and I hastily stood up as Seqor
Gringo kept talking — talking — talking — as if he were trying to hold
on to something. Then I figured it out — he was trying to hold on to
us. We were leaving him. We were going on to anywhere we pleased, leaving
him in some bad dream.

We boarded the ferry; the ride was smooth as glass.

For 25 years I’ve told the story about how this sheriff
pulled a gun on us. It’s a great anecdote at parties and over the years it got better as I emphasized how drugged I was, and how scared I was, and how
scared Stephen was, and how much danger we were in — how we were almost
killed! In a Mexican bar! Ha ha!

Each time I told it, the story grew
scarier and funnier, yet I never understood what it was about. Not
until this year did I finally understand. The story was about grief –
how grief could be a bad drug, turning hopes to dust and hearts to steel.
And it was about love. A parent’s love. How a parent’s love is both tender
and terrible. Fierce. Fragile. Cruelly private. Crazy.

It seems so obvious
now, yet for more than two decades I never fully understood. Not until this
year, when my son turned 21.

: Maxine Schur has written for Wanderlust about Paris and Petra. More Maxine Schur

- 0Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

The threat to Mexico’s machismo culture

As the nation's first major female presidential candidate, Vazquez Mota is challenging a slowly changing boy's club

By Nathaniel Parish Flannery, GlobalPost

Josefina Vasquez Mota (Credit: AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)

Topics:GlobalPost, Mexico, Latin America

This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

MEXICO CITY — At El Mirador, a cantina frequented by Mexico’s political and economic elite, you can see a fine selection of spirits and a menu that features dishes like pickled pigs’ feet and beef tongue tacos.

But what you won’t see are women.

El Mirador, a relic from the country’s machista past, politely refuses to serve them. The bathroom has only a urinal and a sink.

So it may have come as a surprise to some when Mexico’s PAN party decided to nominate Josefina Vazquez Mota, a woman, for president – the first time a woman has ever been nominated by a major Mexican party.

Accepting her nomination, Vazquez Mota, a longtime government official, said, “I will be the first woman president of Mexico in history.”

Even if they are not yet welcome in the cantina at El Mirador, women are making noticeable inroads into other areas of Mexican political life.

With the real possibility that Mexico may join Latin American countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile in electing a female to the highest office, her nomination marks a slow but steady erosion of Mexico’s macho culture, a way of life that lives on in the upper echelon of Mexican business world.

“Back in the 1950s all the cantinas in Mexico City were only for men. It’s the embedded machismo culture,” Ramon Peña-Franco, a former media analyst who worked for Mexico’s current leader Felipe Calderon.

Men gathered in cantinas to drink and play dominoes, while women stayed at home.

While the ban on women is not explicitly stated, it is enforced through the polite entreaties of waiters who explain the “tradition.” A woman in the men-only cantina might “make the other guests uncomfortable,” the Mirador manager said.

More than in the U.S. or the UK, the main stage of Mexico’s business arena continues to be dominated by men. However, more women have begun working in finance, information technology, media and manufacturing. Mexico has also seen an increasing number of female governors and cabinet members in the public sector.

And slowly, old social mores are beginning to evolve.

In 2006 many Mexican states updated the language used in marriage ceremonies, eliminating vows that asked men to treat their wives “with the magnanimity and generous benevolence that the strong should give to the weak,” and asked women to “give to her husband obedience [and] avoid awakening the most irritable and hard part of his character.”

Monica Morales, a financial analyst who was married in Mexico City in 2011, explained that the traditional language that was historically used in nuptial proceedings is too “macho.”

“Now, not even my grandmother would support it,” she said.

“Even my friends who want the most traditional weddings wouldn’t use it,” she said.

Some arenas of public life are evolving as well.

An electoral reform enacted in 2002 requires that major parties select female candidates for at least 30 percent of the seats they campaign for in the country’s congress. In 2003, the first election under the new rules, female candidates won 23 percent of the seats.

Now, women hold 30 percent of the seats in Mexico’s congress, compared to just 17 percent in the U.S.

Still, despite recent progress in the political arena, women have not yet broken through into the highest levels of Mexico’s corporate world.

Unlike in Mexico’s congress, very few seats in the country’s board rooms are filled by women. Only one of Mexico’s top 20 largest publicly traded companies has appointed a female board chair. Not one of Mexico’s largest companies has a female CEO.

When it comes to leading businesswomen in Mexico, Ramon listed “the owner of Grupo Modelo, Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala. She’s the wealthiest woman in Mexico.”

“Other than that… I don’t think I can remember,” he said.

In July, Mexicans will vote to replace Felipe Calderon, whose six-year term has been plagued by violence from a five-year war on the drug cartels.

Many voters are ready for a change.

“This is a historic nomination, it has the potential to change the dynamics of the presidential race,” said Shannon O’Neil, a Mexico expert from the Council of Foreign Relations, a think-tank in New York.

It is still unclear whether Vazquez Mota, who has served both as secretary of social development, and later education, can convince voters to elect her.

Vazquez Mota’s main rival in the race to Los Pinos, the president’s office, is Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The party ruled Mexico as a de facto autocracy for seven decades until it was ousted from the presidency by a candidate from the PAN in 2000, is campaigning hard as well.

Peña Nieto is currently leading in the polls, and most analysts consider him to be the favorite.

Peña Nieto, though, has faced a number of missteps so far in his campaign. At a recent event in Guadalajara, he couldn’t name three books that have influenced his life. After failing to correctly state the price of a kilo of tortillas, a staple in most families’ diets, he shrugged off criticism, saying, “I’m not the woman of the house.”

Vestiges of the macho culture, after all, are still very much present in everyday Mexico.

As the rules change, other aspects of the country’s public life have evolved with time. In 2008, for instance, Mexico City banned smoking in bars and restaurants.

The cantinas begrudgingly complied.

Seated at a table at the Mirador, Ramon said, “Machismo is rooted, so it’s been harder [to change] in Mexico than anywhere else.”

By the exit, there was a table of men in their seventies finishing a game of dominos, getting ready to leave.

“The role of women in political life is changing,” Shannon, the Mexico expert, said.

“The real challenge for women in Mexico, and elsewhere, is to increase the numbers and the breadth of their participation and say in the way things are run.”

: More Nathaniel Parish Flannery

- 8Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

“Miss Bala”: Ballad of the beauty queen and the drug lord

The knockout Mexican thriller "Miss Bala" argues that life in Tijuana isn't as bad as you think -- it's worse

By Andrew O'Hehir

Stephanie Sigman in "Miss Bala"

Topics:Movies, Our Picks: Movies, Our Picks, Thrillers, Mexico, Mexican Drug War

Much of the celebrated Mexican cinema of recent years has defied conventional norteamericano expectations about what life is like in our oft-misunderstood southern neighbor. Gerardo Naranjo’s action-packed “Miss Bala,” on the other hand, seizes all the stereotypes and runs with them. In the vision of this ruthless and abundantly talented young director, life in Tijuana isn’t merely as bad as you think. It’s worse.

I heard one prominent critic complaining after the Cannes premiere of “Miss Bala” that some of Naranjo’s plot twists were implausible, to which I say: Give me a break. First of all, while “Miss Bala” strives for a naturalistic feeling and pulls facts from some recent headlines on some recent criminal history, it’s a bullet-riddled downhill thrill ride about a would-be beauty queen and a drug lord, not “The Bicycle Thief.” Second of all, Naranjo’s point is that almost nothing is implausible in the upside-down borderlands of Tijuana, where Mexican sovereignty is almost meaningless and it’s impossible to identify a clear line between cops and criminals.

A canny and stylish director who was trained in the United States and has worked on both sides of the border, Naranjo has already made a couple of film-festival favorites (“DramaMex” and “I’m Gonna Explode”) and is likely to reach international fame with “Miss Bala.” (Hardcore indie-film aficionados may also know him as the depressed, Chaplin-esque costar of Azazel Jacobs’ “The GoodTimesKid.”) This is the odyssey of leggy, likable Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a naive 23-year-old with dreams of stardom who leaves her home on the outskirts of Tijuana one day in hopes of auditioning for the Miss Baja pageant. (The film’s title is a play on words; “bala” is Spanish for bullet.) By the end of the film she actually makes it to the pageant stage, in a heartbreaking, tour-de-force scene that sums up all the points Naranjo is trying to make about the tragic dysfunction of Mexican society and is technically brilliant to boot.

“Miss Bala” belongs to that subset of film noir where a normal person takes one step off the straight and narrow path and winds up on the highway to hell. Simply by walking into the wrong nightclub, Laura comes face to face with a notorious narcotraficante named Lino (Noe Hernández) in a situation where he’s already killed a crapload of other people and could easily decide to kill her. He doesn’t, maybe because she’s cute and maybe because she could be useful, but mostly for the hell of it, and then we’re off to the races. If Sigman’s Laura remains an overly innocent cipher throughout, purely focused on survival, Lino is deftly handled; Hernández plays him as a working-class guy made good, with a sentimental streak and a sense of humor, whose business success involves lots and lots of murders.

Over the next few days Laura witnesses numerous bloody shootouts between Lino’s gang and various Mexican and American law enforcement agencies, smuggles guns and weapons across the border, seduces a police commander and tries on several expensive dresses. She tries to get away from Lino periodically, but maybe not as hard as she might — her father and little brother are in danger, and after all there’s a beauty pageant to compete in. Terrifically choreographed, violent and amoral, but never wantonly cruel, “Miss Bala” is a knockout. While Naranjo invites Mexicans to take a long, hard look in the mirror when it comes to assigning blame for their screwed-up society, he also makes clear that without the Yankee appetite for cheap drugs and cheap labor, none of this would be happening.

“Miss Bala” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, and opens Jan. 27 in Boston, Houston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, with more cities to follow.

: More Andrew O'Hehir

- 18Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

Adventures in drug war logic

Laundering money for cartels: Good! Arguing for legalization: A fireable offense

By Alex Pareene

A U.S. Border Patrol agent walks along the U.S./Mexico border fence near San Diego. (Credit: AP/Lenny Ignelzi)

Topics:Drugs, Mexican Drug War, Mexico

It’s time for an important lesson in proper, civilized behavior. Drug war soldier Gallant launders vast sums of money for the Mexican drug cartels. Drug war soldier Goofus expresses skepticism at the size and scope of this expensive and deadly boondoggle. Goofus gets canned. Gallant is the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Sorry, what’s our DEA doing this time?

Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”

“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”

Yes, but how do the feds decide which cartels to launder money for? Should the government really be picking “winners and losers” when it comes to Mexican drug cartels?

An expensive boondoggle like the ongoing war on drugs has its own nutty logic that may not make much sense to outsiders. Outsiders, for example, might think that laundering “a lot” of money for cartels in order to eventually follow that money to someone in a position of authority is a huge waste of time and resources that only makes the deadly gangs even stronger. But the agencies waging the war don’t seem to have a lot of tolerance for opinions along those lines.

When Border Patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez told a colleague that legalizing marijuana would probably lessen violence in Mexico, his colleague reported Gonzalez to their bosses, and Gonzalez was fired.

Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”

Gonzalez is now with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and the ACLU has filed a suit on his behalf.

But LEAP’s membership drives are slightly handicapped by the fact that law enforcement agencies see any sort of skepticism regarding the efficacy and morality of the drug war as dangerous and, apparently, unpatriotic. “We all know the drug war is a bad joke,” an unidentified police officer told the Times. “But we also know that you’ll never get promoted if you’re seen as soft on drugs”

Its this institutional unwillingness to question the mission that leads to the DEA “combating” drug cartels by laundering their money and selling them weapons. Drug war logic means rural ~~Oregon~~ Washington needs a million dollars in federal grants going to a a “task force” that busts small-time dealers and raids houses of medicinal marijuana users with paramilitary weaponry and tactics. Does that seems extreme and wasteful? What are you, some kind of unpatriotic hippie?

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

- 33Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

Why China and Mexico matter

America's future depends on its relations with these two nations

By Michael Lind

A toy doll hangs from the U.S. and Mexico border fence in Naco, Arizona September 7, 2011 (Credit: Reuters/Joshua Lott)

Topics:Foreign policy, Mexico, China

One of the most tiresome games in Washington, D.C., is the search for a new American grand strategy. According to the folklore of the foreign policy community, the American diplomat George Kennan came up with the grand strategy of containment of the Soviet Union that the U.S. followed through successfully until the end of the Cold War. While Kennan indeed contributed the name “containment,” by the mid-1950s he had repudiated the policy and became in effect a conservative isolationist. Nixonian realpolitik, Carter-style human rights diplomacy and Reagan’s renewed Cold War were quite different. But the myth persists that some Kennan-like genius devised a new grand strategy, be it the “concert of democracies” favored by neocons and neoliberal hawks or the “offshore balancing” preferred by realists.

A much more useful approach was laid out by the journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann in “U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic,” which he published in 1943 during World War II. Lippmann spoke of “the order of power,” that is, the relationships among the handful of great military and economic powers that matter the most. In his view of history, American foreign policy has always been defined by America’s relations with other great powers: first Britain and France, and later Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union.

To this might be added a corollary: America’s relationship with Mexico, the other populous nation in North America and one with which, along with Canada, the U.S. shares a 2,000-mile border. Quite apart from the importance of good bilateral relations, American friendship and partnership with a stable, prosperous Mexico is critical to U.S. foreign policy.

Since the 1840s, European great powers have hoped to tie down the U.S. on its southern border. Britain sought to keep the republic of Texas out of the United States, in order to pursue a divide-and-rule strategy in North America. During the American Civil War, France’s dictator Louis Napoleon imposed an Austrian prince, Maximilian, as puppet ruler in a short-lived attempt to turn Mexico into a French colony. In the years preceding World War I, Imperial Germany and the U.S. engaged in a kind of cold war in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. The Zimmerman Telegram, in which the German government promised to support Mexico’s attempt to recapture territories lost to the U.S., increased American public support for U.S. intervention against Germany. Franklin Roosevelt’s euphemistically named “Good Neighbor” policy of appeasing repressive dictatorships in Mexico and elsewhere in the hemisphere succeeded in dissuading any Latin American countries from becoming allies of the Axis powers. Later during the Cold War the Soviets found allies in Cuba, Nicaragua and elsewhere but Mexico remained neutral.

For American strategic thinkers, the ultimate nightmares have long been an alliance between a foreign great power rival and a hostile Mexico, or chaos in Mexico exploited by America’s enemies. For the foreseeable future, only China, which is still far from being a superpower, has the potential to become a serious military rival of the U.S., as Britain, France, Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union were in earlier generations. It follows that relationships among the U.S., China and Mexico are much more important to the future of American strategy than the outcome of the Arab Spring or the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict or the success or failure of Russia to regain influence in Central Asia or whether the United Kingdom splits up because of Scottish secession. And far more important than the fates of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are problems more for their neighbors — China, India, Russia, Iran — than for us.

What makes the China Question and the Mexican Question today particularly difficult is the existence of a high degree of economic and demographic integration among those countries and the U.S. Thanks to successful Chinese policies of pressuring multinationals to transfer production to its territory, much of the U.S. industrial base is integrated with China’s factory system. The American and Mexican labor markets are deeply integrated, thanks to legal and illegal immigration as well as trade.

This means that thinking about the U.S.-China relationship and the U.S.-Mexican relationship in simple-minded military terms cannot work. For example, while a hostile China might be militarily balanced in various ways, it makes no sense to talk about “containing” China geographically. The containment of the Soviet Union worked because the Soviet empire (as distinct from Russia itself) included the populations and economies of its East European colonies. The Cold War ended when the Red Army withdrew from the former empire in Eastern Europe.

But China, like America, is a continental nation-state whose power resources are almost entirely internal. In deriving its military potential from its large internal population and domestic economy, China is like the United States, although less favored with resources. Encircling China with U.S. bases in Australia, Vietnam and northeast Asia will not cripple it but may provoke it.

The excessive militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border would also be a mistake. Ever since the U.S. annexed Texas, California and the Southwest in the Mexican-American War, the smuggling of contraband and human beings has been a profitable trade along la Frontera — so profitable that local officials, in return for payoffs, have turned a blind eye for generations. Today’s Mexican drug cartels are no different in kind from the tequileros who smuggled alcohol across the border during America’s misguided experiment with Prohibition in the 1920s. The repeal of Prohibition dried up much of that business. The legalization of less dangerous drugs like marijuana would reduce, though not eliminate, the border drug trade and the attendant violence.

While border fencing in some areas and beefed-up Border Patrol units make sense, illegal immigration can be checked much more easily on the demand side, by prosecuting American employers of illegal immigrants, than on the supply side, by turning the border into a fortified combat zone. Comparisons between national border fences and the Berlin Wall are nonsense; the former seek to keep unwanted foreign natioanls out, the latter was built to keep citizens from escaping. Even so, for diplomatic reasons it is probably not prudent to create an Iron Curtain between the U.S. and one of the two countries in the world that are most important to America.

America’s foreign policy planners need to think carefully as well about the bilateral relations between China and Mexico, whether collaborative or competitive. China and Mexico, as developing countries reliant on trade for growth, are also competitors. The relationship between China, which may surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, and Mexico, which like the U.S. has one of the world’s largest populations as well as a large market and abundant resources, is significant in itself. In addition to the Chinese Question and the Mexican Question as viewed by America, then, there is the Sino-Mexican question.

Many proponents of NAFTA back in the 1990s hoped that the treaty would encourage American-based multinationals to offshore production to Mexico, rather than to China or other remote countries, spurring Mexican growth and reducing poverty and illegal immigration. That didn’t happen. But in the event of a serious Sino-American trade war the U.S. might seek to bring back some of the manufacturing it has lost to Mexico and other North American countries as well as the U.S. itself, generating new industrial growth and its spillover effects on both sides of the border.

And then there is energy. To everyone’s surprise, fracking technology has greatly expanded recoverable reserves of oil and natural gas, in Mexico and Canada as well as the U.S. In light of the continued marginal role of renewable energy worldwide, North America has the potential to become even more important in global fossil fuel energy markets. Here there is potential for collaboration among the U.S. and Mexico, as well as Canada — but also competition, if Asian and European powers pit the energy-exporting nations of North America against one another.

These are issues that have not received enough attention from the officials, academics and journalists who debate foreign policy, distracted as they have been, first by misguided American wars in the Middle East and South Asia and more recently by the global economic crisis. To make matters worse, in American public debate complex questions have to be reduced to shouting matches over illegal immigration or trade among demagogic nativists on one side and open-borders, one-world libertarian and leftist utopians on the other.

The future of America will depend to a considerable degree on developments in China and Mexico. But we Americans cannot settle on the right answers until we start asking the right questions.

: Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com. More Michael Lind

- 9Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

“El Narco”: The drug war next door

An in-depth look at the Mexican cartels that have killed thousands and threaten the government itself

By Laura Miller

Suspects are lined up as weapons are displayed to the media by the Mexican Navy in Mexico City June 9, 2011.

Rifles, guns, hand grenades, uniforms of the Mexican navy and the U.S. Army, cartridges and cocaine were seized in an operation against the Zetas drug cartel in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon in the north of Mexico. (Credit: Jorge Lopez / Reuters)

Topics:Mexican Drug War, Mexico, Books, Our Picks: Books, Drugs

Among the many striking facts that journalist Ioan Grillo recounts in his new book, “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” is that the Mexican city of Juarez became the murder capital of the world last year, beating out Mogadishu and Cape Town, South Africa, for per-capita homicides. Some 3,000 people were killed in Juarez in 2010, yet in El Paso, Texas, the U.S. city right across the river — almost a literal stone’s throw away — there were only five murders.

Some would say this proves that better law enforcement is all Mexico needs to end the drug-cartel violence currently drenching its northern states in blood. Or maybe, as Grillo suggests, it merely shows that when the cartels and their associates want to kill someone in El Paso, they first take their victim across the border where, chances are, the murder will never be properly investigated.

Whatever the case, the contrast suggests why the rampant carnage in Mexico’s border states seldom makes the front page in the U.S.; it seems far away, despite being right next door. However, cables made available by WikiLeaks indicate that American officials — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — are worried that the cartels are taking on aspects of an “insurgency,” which could make them a threat to the Mexican government. Narco tactics now include car bombs, videotaped executions, the deliberate targeting of civilians and many, many attacks on policemen, soldiers, federal officials and elected leaders (one mayor was stoned to death on the main street of his own town) — all startlingly reminiscent of militant and terrorist campaigns prosecuted elsewhere on the planet.

Grillo is a Briton living in Mexico City who has been reporting on Latin America for a decade. “El Narco” lays out the history of drug smuggling in the region over the past 100 years or so, and then homes in on the rise of the Northern Mexican cartels during the 2000s. This flourishing was partly a result of U.S.-aided crackdowns on the Colombian cocaine industry, a phenomenon described by the “balloon theory”: If you squeeze the drug trade in one area, it pops up someplace else. But Grillo also believes that the fall in 2000 of the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, a one-party oligarchy that ruled Mexico for over 70 years) led to the kind of organized-crime free-for-all that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Drug smuggling is so lucrative and Mexican police and soldiers are so poorly paid that corruption has always been a feature of the landscape. But there’s stable corruption — where everyone knows who’s in charge and who must be paid — and unstable corruption, in which the power structure becomes uncertain and ambitious criminals see the opportunity to increase their slice of the action. The cartel violence in Mexico centers around clashes between rival syndicates (each with its own set of bought officials), who vie for key cross-border routes, called “plazas,” while fighting off the relatively weak efforts of law enforcement to crack down. The result is a crazy, upside-down world that often sees state police (on the local cartel’s payroll) battling federal officers (who may or may not belong to another mob).

In the late 1990s, an ambitious drug lord in the town of Nuevo Laredo hired a former special-forces commander to assemble a militia of men with similar experience. They became the Zetas, a brutal, but well-organized team of enforcers for the Gulf Cartel. The cartel leader, Osiel Cárdenas, then felt powerful enough to take the unusual step of fighting back when the federal government came to arrest him, becoming, as Grillo puts it, “the first narco insurgent.” Cárdenas lost, but not before what was once a cops-and-robbers conflict had become militarized. The cartels now have automatic weapons, grenade launchers and explosives, and no compunction about using them when innocent bystanders are around. It’s estimated that the current drug wars have claimed 35,000 lives.

The cartels have also spawned their own culture: the famous narcocorridos (ballads about gangsters and their exploits, often commissioned by the subject himself for a handsome fee), a low-budget video industry cranking out titles like “Me Chingaron Los Gringos” (“The Gringos Fucked Me”) and a clothing style called “buchones,” which, Grillo writes, “mixes urban and rural, traditional and modern. Buchones like cowboy hats and ostrich-skin boots, but also sneakers and brightly colored baseball caps.”

The narcos even have their own flavors of quasi-Catholic folk religion, with such patron saints as Santa Muerte, a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Virgin Mary, and a possibly apocryphal early-20th-century outlaw named Jesus Malverde. (In one of the book’s rare funny moments, Jesus Malverde’s shrine keeper asks Grillo if his country has a similar Robin Hood figure, and Grillo explains that, actually, they have Robin Hood.) Strangest of all, the La Familia cartel embraced as its bible a book on “muscular Christianity” titled “Wild at Heart” (by an American writer once described as “the Robert Bly of evangelicalism”) — until, that is, the cartel’s leader wrote his own spiritual guidebook.

The strength of “El Narco” lies in its shoe-leather reporting; Grillo interviews everyone from a former cartel assassin to DEA agents to grieving families, snitches, pot and poppy farmers, illegal immigrants and gangbangers. He’s the sort of journalist who’ll pop into a plastic surgery clinic or taqueria if it turns up on a list of cartel-linked businesses, just to see what he can see. Writers this knowledgeable about the subject and with no particular ax to grind are rare because covering the cartels can be dangerous. Last fall, the main newspaper in Juarez, El Diario, published an open letter to cartel leaders (“the de facto authorities in this city”), titled “What Do You Want From Us?” in an effort to figure out whatever it was that caused several of their staffers to be killed. Lately, the Zetas have taken to hanging corpses labeled “Internet snitches” from railway overpasses.

So, perhaps top-notch writing is too much to hope for as well, though there are times when you want to shout, “Raise your hands and step away from the thesaurus!” Grillo’s many references to “severed craniums” had me baffled (do cartel thugs pack bone saws?) until I realized that he means “heads,” and unless Mexico is brimming with cheerful drug dealers, he’s got the word “sanguine” confused with “sanguinary.” At times, though, Grillo’s malaprops can be grimly amusing, as when he describes a gang who makes a practice of “devouring bodies in acid.” Not just narco killers, but cannibals with cast-iron stomachs!

Nevertheless, these are minor glitches, and a solid, comprehensive popular book on the current drug wars is much needed. Americans ought to be better informed about the cartels who are challenging Mexico’s government for supremacy in the border states. American citizens buy the drugs that fund the cartels’ reign of terror and American gun shops sell them the outrageously lethal weapons they use to enforce it. So far, the slaughter has barely lapped our own border, but it is nevertheless of our making. If more of us acknowledge this truth, then there’s a better (though still slim) chance that we can replace the failed War on Drugs with a more realistic and humane drug policy — and do it before that lapping becomes a flood.

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller