As male police officers in Mexico continue to quit their jobs and turn up dead, women are taking over. Young mothers, university students, and women with little or no experience in law enforcement are stepping up to fight one of the most dangerous wars going—except they don’t have entire armies to support them.
Case in point: Erika Gandara, the last police officer in the northern town of Guadalupe (pop. 9,000), has disappeared. The 28-year-old cop kept working after all her peers had quit, disappeared, or been murdered. And now she’s gone, leaving Guadalupe without a single cop.
The 28-year-old started as a police dispatcher in Mexico’s drug-plagued north. In November, barely a year later, she found herself running the show in Guadalupe, population 9,000, near the drug-war ground zero of Ciudad Juarez. She was the only law officer remaining in the border municipality after the 12 other cops she worked with were either killed or quit in the face of rising drug violence. But, she hasn’t been seen in almost a week, after a dozen gunmen burned her house down and torched two cars outside, according to reports.
More:
Down the road in another town, university student and young mother, Marisol Valles, 20, made headlines a few months ago when she was named that town’s police chief. Elsewhere in the state, the police chief’s job went to Hermila Garcia, 38, who had never worked in policing. She was assassinated outside of her home after 50 days on the job. On some of the communal farms known as ejidos outside Ciudad Juarez, two housewives took over the police forces in November. “We don’t have weapons. We have a patrol car that barely runs, but we have a lot of will to work and make things right,” the president of one of the ejidos told the Reforma newspaper.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that a recent cable released by WikiLeaks (“10MONTERREY66“) says the Zetas completely control Monterrey—they don’t just control the drug turf, they control the city police.
The Zetas (who were originally trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, U.S.A. as counterinsurgents to fight the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas) so thoroughly control the Monterrey police that the diplomatic cable to D.C. on recent attacks against the police posits it was an attack by the Gulf Cartel against the Zetas. Because the Zetas = the police.
The cable forwards a few theories about the strategy behind the attacks:
Given the thorough penetration by the Zetas of the police forces in those municipalities that were hit, a much more likely explanation is that the attacks were a signal from the Gulf cartel to the police to cease/desist their support of the Zetas and switch sides. Other plausible theories exist as well — such as the attack was an attempt to “heat up” the Monterrey plaza — but none involve organized crime responding to “effective” state government enforcement efforts.
The Zetas and the Gulf aren’t fighting the cops. They’re just fighting over who gets the cops as foot soldiers. In other words: the drug war, at least in Monterrey, has been 100% lost. Done. Over. The narcos won. It’s not shocking, but it’s refreshing to hear the federal government admit it so plainly. And now the Zetas are declaring war against Guatemala. (Can you imagine the Bloods declaring war against Canada?)
This is all further evidence to support the theory that the drug war cannot be won because the narcos and the state have been thoroughly entwined since the beginning. They share the same DNA.
One articulation of that theory:
Corva and other drug-trade experts hesitate to call the narco-capitalist organizations “cartels” because the word implies alien entities separate from the state (the way that, say, the Bloods or the Crips are separate from the state). Mexico’s narcos are thoroughly integrated into the government—through both contemporary corruption and long-standing historical alliances that predate U.S. drug-prohibition policy.
Major Mexican landowners had been growing marijuana and opium poppies and selling them to the U.S. long before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 (the first major federal drug prohibition—prior to that, even the Sears, Roebuck catalogue advertised a syringe and a dose of cocaine for $1.50). Those Mexican landowners were aligned with, or outright members of, the Mexican political establishment. One brief example: Colonel Esteban Cantú Jiménez, who had a personal army of 1,800 soldiers and political control of Baja California Norte, started taking a cut from Mexican opium traders as soon as the Harrison Act was passed. The Mexican army eventually flushed him out in 1920—with a force of 6,000—but Colonel Jiménez secured amnesty with the help of a former military colleague.
The overlap between Mexico’s military officers, politicians, and drug barons goes all the way back to the beginning.
All this talk about drug war can get a little abstract—so if you need a reminder that we’re talking about real flesh-and-blood bodies, click here. (Not safe for work; not safe for life.)
Let’s be clear.
Even if we legalize MJ in the West, the morons in the rest of the South will continue to make it illegal, and the Drug War will continue to have Mexico as the battleground.
But at least we – other than people buying cocaine and other fun things – wouldn’t be helping make it worse.
But fighting this ‘war’ is a great business/cash cow in the US. It’s not about drugs, drug abuse, or the bad consequences visited upon the users. It’s all about the money. Permanent war is now a living for hundreds of thousands of people. Support full employment!
Karl: I’ll support it when they hire me to sit around and do nothing.
And the sad thing is, I’d still be more effective than most DEA officers. Trust me- I used to live on the Mexican border.
@2,
And it’s primarily about the money that the pharmaceutical companies make by selling overpriced medicine. They’ll lobby until the end of time against the legalization of pain killers that people could simply grow at home.
why would the bloods waste their time taking a shithole like canada?
Where is Charles Bronson when you need him?
@7, Charles Bronson? Really? He’s been dead for seven years now. But the thinking that all that’s needed to fix a problem is a mythical badass to shoot enough people is unfortunately alive and well as part of the problem here.
@ 5. Thanks, Ken. I speak a little and read a little, though Google Translator comes in handy.
Maybe this is farfetched, but how about you all STOP BUYING POT FOR A MONTH? The problem won’t be solved on the demand side, but really, how many of you have bothered to ethically source your fucking pot? Yeah, I know, it’s heroin, it’s cocaine, it’s all of it. But how about you start with your pot? It’s easy and from what I’ve been told, it’s not addictive so hey, it’s not a necessity, right? Right?
Really. This burns me. To listen to people who have enough disposable income and safety report on this … this fucking disastrous black hole of policy and criminal insanity without any attempt to moderate cultural behaviors just makes me insane with rage. There’s a whole fucking movement against blood diamonds, potheads, get with the program.
@10 Ya know, some good locally grown pot would help calm you down.
Last person who said that to me was beating his girlfriend in public.
xo
(nothing personal OuterCow, some of my most favorite people are major potheads. sergeant potheads. colonel potheads…)
Mexico is a shithole. I grew up in San Diego and stared at it every day. Tijuana is, was, and always will be a shithole. Been to El Paso/Juarez EVER? Bigger SHITHOLE. We’re pouring so much money in the Middle East for oil when we should be laying waste to a many-mile wide band of Northern Mexico…I mean Northern Shithole….just like we do between North and South Korea. Fucking shoot and kill anything coming or going (that includes Americans) except for a couple of little checkpoints. That means no guns coming from us and no drugs coming from them.
@10: I think it’s time for The Stranger and other pro-pot outlets to consider that given current legal and political realities, purchasers of Mexican dope are indeed contributing to this horrid carnage. Maybe a “grow-your-own” campaign is in order. If everyone had a pot plant or two next to their poinsettia, we might make a dent.
It could be like the Not In Our Town of pot! What are they gonna do, arrest EVERYONE? What could possibly go wrong?
Seriously, it’s a 1 to 1 equation. The only answer that I can see is to legalize, grow and buy local. And given the reality of the situation, not in that order. I think the grow your own campaign (with enough moms and grandmas involved) is a great idea. And aside from having to listen to shit like ‘yeah, bra’ and ‘pass the dutchie to the left hand side’ I would be totally into it.
That’s a good point; since legalization is a few years away at best, why not just stop smoking it until then? Have a little self restraint and help the poor people of Mexico. Plus you can buy more tasty and legal liquor with all the money you save.
You seriously think the situation in Mexico will be affected in the slightest by buying / not buying the amount of Mexican pot that makes it all the way to Washington? Not buying cocaine might make a tiny dent in the market, but I’m positive that the vast majority of Washington pot is grown locally, or comes from BC. IIRC from ‘The Union’, up to 85% of the pot grown in BC ends up in the USA, so while you are supporting a repressive regime (Matt Luby Irony flashback), you almost certainly aren’t supporting the corrupt regime in Mexico when you buy pot in Seattle.
@18 – actually if you carry that argument one step further it works. From what I’ve read, a lot of BC pot isn’t sold across the border for cash, it’s traded for cocaine and sometimes guns. If WA residents stop buying BC pot, the trade for cocaine will be affected. Pot is the only major drug that can easily be produced by the user. If you can keep a houseplant alive, you can grow it.
@14: I love the extrapolation of Tijuana as representative of an entire country to justify your violence and hatred.
@18, Who do you think is running the large scale grow operations here in the US and BC? Follow the money up and guess who? Yep, the same Mexican drug gangs. Sometimes the guys at the ground level doing the actual growing are Mexicans and sometimes not, but they all answer to the same drug gangs.
Unless you’re growing it yourself, you’re supporting one of the drug gangs.
I admit that, given the stranglehold Mexican gangs have on the US cocaine trade (according to The Stranger’s cocaine / Levamisole articles), it’s actually likely that they have a good grip on the pot market too. And 19 has a good point regarding pot / cocaine trade across the US Canada border. It’s possible that Mexican cocaine is traded for SE Asian controlled BC grown pot. It actually makes more sense when you consider that both sides have a strict embargo on selling cocaine outside their own territory.
I would be more convinced if I knew whether Canadian cocaine is as contaminated with Levamisole as US cocaine is.