Mexico's Drug War - Page 54

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto clearly sees his epochal economic reforms as his legacy. Yet for the growing number of Mexican citizens taking to the streets, what stands out is his government’s failure to protect them.

That failure is reflected in the widespread anguish and outrage over the disappearance of 43 students on Sept. 26. The victims were kidnapped in Iguala, the third-biggest city in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest and most violent states. The accused are a vicious, all-too-familiar cabal of criminal gangs, police, and local officials. Iguala’s mayor, who reportedly instigated the assault, and his wife, whose family belonged to a narco gang that supplies heroin to the U.S., have been arrested. So were 36 police officers suspected of being on the gang’s payroll.

Peña Nieto had resolutely tried to divert attention from Mexico’s epic mayhem to its economic potential, pointing to a declining homicide rate as proof that things are getting better. But the numbers are sketchy, reflecting a decline in big gang feuds more than effective policing. When he took office two years ago, Peña Nieto pledged to focus more on reducing crime and violence than on dismantling drug-trafficking organizations. Unfortunately, as a forthcoming Brookings Institution report details, his efforts to differentiate his approach from that of his predecessor have amounted to little more than a redrawing of the org chart.

If Peña Nieto wants his constituents to feel and be safer, he should pursue reform of Mexico’s existing police forces with the vigor, commitment, and ingenuity he has brought to opening its energy and telecommunications markets. Police, after all, are a state’s most visible face. In Mexico, however, they are mostly a source of fear and contempt: In 2010, for instance, 90 percent of Mexicans said they had little or no confidence in their local police, and 75 percent said the same about federal police.

The Iguala case illuminates many aspects of the problem, beginning with pay. According to one investigator, the police were being paid $460 a month by the city—and $770 a month by their gang bosses, despite a decree that all Mexican police be vetted for corruption and links to organized crime by October 2013. Even when there’s scrutiny, the process lacks credibility: In crime-ridden Chihuahua state, for instance, 98 percent of a 12,000-person force was found to pass muster.

Forensic experts in Mexico have identified the body of a Ugandan Catholic priest among the remains found in a mass grave last month.

Father John Ssenyondo had been missing since being kidnapped in south-western Guerrero state six months ago.

The grave was located by federal police looking for 43 students who went missing in the area on 26 September.

The case of the missing trainee teachers caused outrage in Mexico and prompted a nationwide search.

DNA tests carried out earlier this month suggested that the bodies in the hidden grave near the town of Ocotitlan - where Father Ssenyondo's remains were found- were not of the students.

Father Ssenyondo was abducted on 30 April by unknown gunmen, who blocked a road and forced him into their car.

(CNN) -- Prosecutors in the Mexican state of Guerrero said Friday they have formally charged former Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca in the disappearance of 43 students.

Abarca is described as the "probable mastermind" in the September 26 disappearance of the students. He is charged with six counts of aggravated homicide and one count of attempted homicide, the state attorney's office said.

Authorities said the students -- mostly men in their 20s studying to be teachers -- were abducted by police in September at Abarca's direction. Police killed some students, and the rest are believed to have been turned over to gang members to be executed, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam has said.

The men's bodies were burned, and some remains were thrown in a river.

The students were traveling to Iguala to protest a lack of funding for their school.

Officials have said that Abarca ordered the city's police chief to stop the demonstration out of concern it would disrupt one of his own events.

On November 15 2014 19:46 xtorn wrote:
youre part of the movement on the 20th ? respect

ive read some of your prev posts here, so the country is pretty much led by organised crime and narcos at the moment, right? and they call themselves "government"
thats quite... mindblowing

also i dont think legalizing drugs in mexico would be the solution, i think that would just lead to gangs reorienting their main activity to extortion - kidnapping etc - and stealing the oil from the pipes. ive seen a Vice report on youtube on how the gangs are stealing the oil, like in a few hours during the night they extract $10k worth of oil

i think at this point what you need is an external army involvement that should open fire on the cartels bigtime, but thats not going to happen. but not the US - there are nowadays private military organisations, that you literally hire on contract. like, instead of ordering a pizza, you order your own personal army

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MORELIA, Mexico—If you want to know about the Mexican priest Padre Gregorio López, first of all you need to know that his parish is located in the small city of Apatzingán, at the heart of a region in southern Mexico known as a fiefdom of the Knights Templar drug cartel. Then you need to know that he considers it his religious obligation to drive the cartel out of the city and out of the state of Michoacán.

The lengths to which the padre is willing to go to achieve that end have carried his reputation far beyond the rough-and-tumble region known as Tierra Caliente, so named for an average annual temperature that rounds down to 95 degrees.

Land theft, the extortion of farmers, and the rise in kidnappings and murders were grievances left to simmer for years in the countryside. A year ago, in the fall of 2013, the frustration boiled over. Farming communities across the region rose up in arms, in some cases with guns and four-wheel-drive vehicles more in keeping with the army or a drug cartel than poor farmers.

In January, the president of Mexico put the law enforcement of Michoacán in trusteeship and a federal commission, once in place, began exerting pressure on the leaders of the self-defense movement to disarm and incorporate their ranks into a new rural police force. Most of the groups obliged. But the most authoritative spokesman for the movement, a surgeon named José Manuel Mireles, refused and continued to rally forces until the commission had him and 80 of his followers arrested in June for carrying unlicensed firearms.

Padre Goyo, as he is known to parishioners (Goyo is short for Gregorio), soon grew famous in the midst of this turmoil because of his straight talk and the occasional disclosures he made about public officials and the criminal underworld.

At a moment when Mexico is pretty desperate for heroes, when the disappearance of more than 40 students, allegedly at the hands of corrupt politicians, cops, and the cartels has inflamed the country, Goyo is just the kind of figure to capture the public imagination.

He is an animated, energetic man in his late forties, of average height and sturdy build with a high forehead, tan face, and dark hair winged with gray at the temples. He speaks in emphatic bursts, with the parish priest’s fondness for parables and jokes that bring a quick smile and a twinkle to his dark eyes when he sees he is understood. He was born to a humble family of farmers in a village of 500 not far from Apatzingán, majored in philosophy in Morelia and studied theology for four years at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He speaks with the authority of a native of this land as well as the authority of priest.

Think of Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which a cat is left inside a box with a vial of poison. The vial may break and kill the cat. Or it might not. While the lid is closed, there is no way of knowing whether the vial broke. The cat can be thought both alive and dead. Either option is possible. Unless you open the box, you can’t really tell. This is Mexico today. Everything could be happening. Or nothing.

The country is in the midst of a crisis that, up until a few months ago, seemed unlikely. The government was passing structural and constitutional reforms in order to open up the state-owned oil company and to wrest education control from the teachers’ union, by changing the way they were evaluated, among other things. These changes earned widespread international acclaim. The Economist called President Enrique Peña Nieto’s election “Mexico’s moment.” In a cover story earlier this year, Time magazine proclaimed the president was “Saving Mexico.”

In retrospect, these supposedly monumental changes were built on a house of cards. The reforms came tumbling down almost as soon as the government tried to enact them. Oil, which makes up a third of Mexico’s revenue, has dropped in price and will continue to fall throughout 2015, according to local and international forecasts. Investors may not come flocking in as the government expected, despite efforts to privatize the oil industry, currently controlled entirely by Pemex, the state-owned oil company. The teachers are fighting back too and have stopped the enactment of the new laws in some states. And most important, Mexico’s weak rule of law, a subject no one was talking about until recently, has now garnered a global spotlight.

Tensions have come close to a breaking point over the last few weeks because of two different but equally gruesome events. First, in June the army executed 22 civilians in Tlatlaya, a small town in southeastern Mexico state. Officials said the military discovered a kidnapping ring during a scheduled patrol and fought the kidnappers, killing all of them. According to witnesses, however, those killed were not criminals, but the army executed them anyway. On Sept. 26, police killed six college students and 43 others went missing in Iguala, about 80 miles south of Mexico City. The 43 students were seized by local police and then reportedly handed over to a local drug cartel. Activists say the government worked alongside organized crime to abduct and then, in all likelihood, kill the students.

There have been few and contradictory answers. The government has given several press conferences and arrested almost 100 people, but nearly two months later, it cannot even confirm whether the missing students are dead or alive. Since October, thousands have taken to the streets in almost weekly protests. On Nov. 8, during a large and otherwise peaceful march to the Zócalo, the capital’s central square, a small group of people set fire to one of the doors of the National Palace, the president’s office. The flames were quickly contained, but the image circled the globe. Mexico was on fire.

A week later, investigators from Mexico City’s district attorney office who were responding to an alleged cellphone theft at the National Autonomous University fired shots, and a student was injured. Dozens of riot police were called in, and for a while it appeared the situation could quickly escalate — like almost everything else in Mexico at the moment.

A day later, as the president was en route to China for this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, the online news site Aristegui Noticias broke a massive investigative story: Peña Nieto had built a private mansion with a cost of $6.5 million. That was not even the most important part of the story. Painted entirely white and dubbed the White House by the press, the mansion was built by Grupo Higa, a company that won most of the major infrastructure contracts in the state of Mexico while Peña Nieto was its governor and recently received another big contract, along with a Chinese consortium, to build the country’s first high-speed railway. The president abruptly canceled the contract a few hours before the news went online. But it was too little, too late.

His office later issued a statement saying the house was sold to his wife in monthly payments. No word on the clear conflict of interest; she bought a mansion built and financed specifically for her by one of the government’s main contractors. Like the case of missing students, Peña Nieto refused to talk about the issue on his seven-day international tour and only briefly addressed it at a press conference since he returned, off-handedly acknowledging that the story was published while he was away on business. During a small press conference on Tuesday, Peña Nieto went one step further. He characterized the reports as inaccurate and hinted that the reporters were not on board with “the national project,” suggesting they were trying to sabotage it.

On November 15 2014 19:46 xtorn wrote:
youre part of the movement on the 20th ? respect

ive read some of your prev posts here, so the country is pretty much led by organised crime and narcos at the moment, right? and they call themselves "government"
thats quite... mindblowing

also i dont think legalizing drugs in mexico would be the solution, i think that would just lead to gangs reorienting their main activity to extortion - kidnapping etc - and stealing the oil from the pipes. ive seen a Vice report on youtube on how the gangs are stealing the oil, like in a few hours during the night they extract $10k worth of oil

i think at this point what you need is an external army involvement that should open fire on the cartels bigtime, but thats not going to happen. but not the US - there are nowadays private military organisations, that you literally hire on contract. like, instead of ordering a pizza, you order your own personal army

+ Show Spoiler +