Six months ago, in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, a convoy of SUVs and trucks pulled up in front of a house party. Masked gunmen stormed the premises then rounded up and executed a group-teenagers as well as several adults who attempted to intervene. Sixteen people were killed – five adults and 11 children – and dozens more left wounded. Initially, both state and federal authorities claimed the violence was drug-related. Then evidence emerged that a local drugs cartel had in fact mistaken the party for a gathering of rival gang members close by.
Should these deaths be tallied as a form of drug violence, or blamed on a government that has stirred a hornet’s nest of corrupt officials and competitive cartels? Of course, the distinction makes no difference to grieving families, but it is an important reminder for outsiders that the costs of President Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs have been borne most often by innocent bystanders. During the three and a half years Calderón adopted military tactics against the country’s drug trafficking organizations similar horrors have become commonplace. To date the resulting violence has killed more than 25,000 Mexicans, at least 5,000 of them in Juarez. (Trinidad, which has a similar population and is currently experiencing a record murder rate, is on course for 550 killings by the end of this year.)
Eager to boost his credibility after a disputed election President Calderón did not begin a war in December 2006 so much as authorize a surge which substantively deepened an existing conflict. Even so it has become Calderón’s war, one for which the federal government is ill prepared. As the violence swells to epidemic proportions the state seems to have no clearly defined goals, coherent tactics or even a viable endgame. The initial justifications for the conflict – that drug consumption and related violence were increasing – were provably false (in fact crime had been falling in the border region for more than a decade, as had national consumption) but the war has now created the conditions necessary to justify its own continuance.
From the start the authorities have claimed victories with the same determined optimism that skewed early American accounts from post-invasion Iraq. Spikes in violence are offered as evidence that the cartels are fighting for their existence, temporary lulls are said to be signs of a return to law and order. Either way the government wins. In fact, the entire campaign has been marked by failures and misjudgments. The most noticeable elephant in the room has been the wholesale defection of state forces. Lured by the exorbitant profits of the $65 billion market they were meant to disrupt, many soldiers simply switched sides. The New York Times reports that more than 100,000 soldiers have deserted the Mexican army during the last seven years, many of them Special Forces with the sort of military knowledge that is invaluable to narco-traffickers.
Some have even started their own cartel, Los Zetas – currently waging its own mini-war against the Gulf Cartel in and around the city of Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas.
Throughout the war Mexico’s journalists have been attacked by both sides. Reporters without Borders estimates that nearly 70 media workers have been killed during the last decade and with ten killings already this year that figure is likely to rise significantly. Even so, Mexico’s journalists have continued to uncover facts that seriously undermine official claims about the management of the war. Some recent scandals are so florid they would strain the credulity of a Hollywood producer. In Durango state, for example, the Attorney General’s Office has been forced to admit that guards at a state prison not only helped to sneak inmates out of the prison but also armed them to carry out murders and massacres on behalf of the cartels. El Universal, one of the capital’s largest dailies, has disclosed that confidential information shared with the senate indicates that to date the government has investigated only 5 per cent of 22,000 reported executions. International monitors of press freedom report that 65 per cent of the threats against the media recorded last year were made by state or national forces (only six per cent by drugs gangs). Most damning of all, perhaps, are the government’s own statistics on the body counts so far. As the current edition of The Nation magazine observes: “in the midst of what is repeatedly called a war… Mexican soldiers seem immune to bullets. With over 8,000 Mexicans killed in 2009 alone, the army reported losses of thirty-five that year… Mexico is now one of the most dangerous places in the world to be reporter. And possibly the safest place in the world to be a soldier.”
Forty years after President Nixon started America’s own “war on drugs” there is much to suggest that the best a confrontational drugs policy can achieve is a series of Pyrrhic victories. After a trillion dollars worth of federal efforts at prohibition, plus a $41 billion annual budget for local and state governments, the cartels’ supply networks within North America are intact and their bottom lines more profitable than ever. There also seems to be growing incoherence in the US government’s idea of how to fight the war. As Jorge Castañeda, a former Foreign Minister of Mexico, noted in a recent debate: “We have tens of people dying every day in Tijuana, on the border with the United States. Sometimes, 50, 60, 70. And, they are there basically dying to stop Mexican marijuana, among other drugs, from entering the United States. The small problem is that 120 miles north of Tijuana, in Los Angeles, there are more public, legal dispensaries of medical marijuana than public schools.”
President Calderón’s misconceived war appears to be morphing into the sort of multi-faceted guerrilla conflict that could last, conveniently, for the duration of his entire presidency, perhaps longer if needed. While the government crows over its illusory victories and the cartels continue to reap their accustomed profits, the wretched citizens of cities like Juarez are forced to learn how to live with corruption, savage gang violence and almost complete impunity. As with every classic Mexican standoff there are no winners, but some losses are heavier than others.
