Salon.com > Mexican Drug War

Mexican drug cartel calls truce for pope’s visit

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Late last week, residents of Michoacán received some of the best news the dangerous Mexican state has gotten in months. Friday afternoon, the powerful drug cartel the Knights Templar (Los caballeros templarios) announced a three-day truega, or truce, on violent action. The reason? Not the pleas of terrorized residents, and certainly not the futile efforts of state police, who still remain nearly powerless against the cartels. The cause of this miracle - -if you would call it that -- was nothing short of the pope himself.

In handmade posters hung in various places around the state, the Knights Templar announced their plan to renounce violence during Pope Benedict XVI’s three-day sojourn to Mexico this weekend. The posters, which were hung near busy intersections and pedestrian bridges, announced their “welcome” to the pope and renounced any “violent action” during his visit. Translated into English, their signs read:

The Knights Templar renounces any military or violent action. We are not murderers. We welcome the pope.

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

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

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.

Adventures in drug war logic

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:24:00 +0000

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.”

A narco’s case against the U.S.

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

CIUDAD MIER, Mexico -- A Mexican army commander sent to protect a region of villages and ranches in northern Mexico from the Gulf Cartel and Zetas can describe, in detail, the profile of his assigned enemy, the country's notorious drug cartels.

“These guys are sick in the head,” he says, gazing at the brush and mesquite from behind his aviator sunglasses, toward the camps of the "enemy." “They follow a sick ideology, they’re animals.” Without missing a beat, he continues, “Look, there’s no jobs, the poverty is bad; there aren’t enough schools. There is nothing for these boys and the cartels offer them a job. They tell them, ‘You can have any kind of pickup truck you want,’ he says. “They get paid more than we do!”

The commander and his soldiers have staked out a lakeside park near this colonial village, providing security for the annual fishing tournament. Bureaucrats from the state tourism department and soldiers, some manning gunners mounted on military trucks, vastly outnumber the few tourists. Even so, reporters from TV Azteca prepare a promotional report about the event, an image that makes an effort to convince tourists that the "frontera chica" (small border), the nickname for this swath of the border, is secure and ready for tourists. Last year when the Gulf Cartel and Zetas launched their siege on the frontera chica, the then governor of Tamaulipas dismissed the reports of decapitations, incinerated cars and shootouts as merely a "collective paranoia."

“El Narco”: The drug war next door

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:00:00 +0000

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.