Drugs 'Taliban' declares war on Mexican state
At least 19 police officers and soldiers died last week as a narco gang called La Familia launched a counterattack against a government crackdown on cartels. But as well as hitmen, the group uses social handouts and TV propaganda, report Jo Tuckman in Mexico City and Ed Vulliamy
- The Observer, Sunday 19 July 2009
- Article history
The male voice on the line was not a typical contributor to the Voice and Solution TV programme where residents of the Mexican state of Michoacán air their everyday grievances.
"We want President Felipe Calderón to know that we are not his enemies," the caller said, after introducing himself last Wednesday as Servando Gómez Martínez, nicknamed La Tuta, one of the leaders of La Familia drug cartel. "We are open to dialogue."
It was a rare and chilling public intervention by the leader of a cartel fighting a war that has claimed 11,000 lives in three years. And the jibe to Calderón that "we are not his enemies" was a taunt marking a dramatic turn in the course of the war: a co-ordinated spate of savage attacks not between narco cartels but by La Familia against the Mexican state.
There have been relentless attacks on police forces - even the decapitation of eight soldiers and the murder of a general - in recent months, but last weekend saw the most concerted attacks on the federal police to date, raising further the spectre of an all-out narco insurrection in Mexico of a kind that ravaged Colombia 20 years ago. "This is a new phase in the drug war," said Samuel González, a former Mexican drug tsar in the mid-1990s and now a consistent critic of Calderón's force-based strategy against the cartels which he believes is making things worse. "This is the Talibanisation of the conflict."
Carlos Flores, who has studied the drug war, said: "It shows a new willingness to directly confront the federal government with paramilitary techniques and psychological warfare. And it is a warning of possible future assassinations of federal officials of higher rank."
The arrest last Saturday of Arnold Rueda Medina, nicknamed La Minsa, was the trigger for 21 attacks on the federal police - by far the most sustained challenge to government forces ever launched by a cartel. For the Mexican government, the attacks end all pretence that this crisis is confined to a turf war between cartels: this is an insurrection.
First, there were six near-simultaneous assaults on federal police stations around the state, including a dawn raid by a commando of about 50 gunmen with assault rifles and grenades on a station in the state capital, Morelia. In one of the last actions, a similarly sized hit squad pounded a cheap hotel where federal officials are put up in the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas. With the death toll already at five federal officers and two soldiers, a pile of blindfolded and tortured bodies was found on a mountain road last Tuesday. The 11 men and one woman turned out to be federal agents who had been gathering intelligence on organised crime and had been ambushed while off duty, the government said.
Calderón called the attacks "a desperate and violent reaction" to his "firm and unbending core strategy". He left comment on La Tuta's intervention to his interior minister, Fernando Gómez Mont, who first rejected out of hand the offer of "dialogue" and yesterday began deploying 5,500 extra troops in the state, taking the total to 8,300. "The criminal organisations should have no doubt that the state offensive will continue," Gómez Mont said. "There can be no other alternative for organised crime than to bend to the rule of law."
For the US, the escalation of violence worsens the nightmare and the contradictions along the busiest border in the world, which the US needs to be both porous and harsh: open to the Obama administration's pledge to "upgrade" the movement of capital and goods around the Nafta free trade zone, yet sealed from the surge of drugs and potential violence northwards and the flow south of the smuggled American guns with which Mexico's war is fought.
La Familia is a new force, indigenous to the state of Michoacán, which happens to be Calderón's home. In his TV message, the self-appointed spokesman for the group - known for its extreme violence, quasi-religious structure and rapid recent expansion - went on to deliver an extraordinary diatribe rendered all the more surreal by the mundane distortion of a television in the background. "La Familia was created to look after the interests of our people and our family," La Tuta said, picking up steam. "We are a necessary evil." Eyes darting off camera, the TV presenter looked distinctly uncomfortable as he finally interrupted to ask what La Familia really wanted. "The only thing we want is peace and tranquillity," came the reply.
Such sentiments among the cartels yearn back to the days of what was called the "Pax Mafiosa", when there was conviviality between cartels and the Mexican state, while "the product" kept moving. Only now there is a proliferation of cartels and gangs fighting each other - and now the state. La Tuta's call has been confirmed as genuine, though observers tend to see it less as a genuine effort to get the president to sit down for talks and more as a public relations exercise. "What they are looking for is a way of defending their legitimacy with local people and at the same time undermine the institutions of the state," according to a security expert, Edgardo Buscaglia, who has studied crime syndicates from Naples to Kabul.
The violence has spiralled since December 2006, when Calderón began deploying tens of thousands of soldiers and officers from the military-style federal police force around the country to rein in the violence of a cartel turf war.
The vast majority of the 11,000-plus deaths since then have been associated with an intensification of inter-cartel battles for control of their multibillion dollar narcotics business. Federal casualties have usually been limited to officers killed when they track down, or stumble into, hitmen armed with ever heavier weaponry ranging from the now standard Kalashnikov assault rifles to rocket grenade launchers. But events last week inevitably echo Colombia in the days when the Medellín cartel of Pablo Escobar staged an insurrection against the state, offering monetary rewards to those who killed police officers.
Michoacán, with its tropical sierra, long isolated beaches and major ports, was where Calderón launched his offensive. The central Pacific coastal state is known on the tourist trail for its colonial cities and exuberant indigenous culture that carries Day of the Dead ceremonies to levels of intensity seen nowhere else in Mexico. But it is ideal narco territory.
The road to the sea from Morelia winds for hours through an unpopulated sierra and tropical hills known as the Tierra Caliente, the Hot Land. This is a wilderness good for both growing narcotics and hiding from police or military operations. The sierra also provides easy hiding places for metamphetamine labs and fugitive drug lords. The lush vegetation lines isolated beaches - convenient landing places for cocaine shipped from Colombia. In the state's southern corner the port of Lázaro Cárdenas is the point of entry for the precursor chemicals from Asia that are used for metamphetamine production.
While smaller and less established than its rivals, La Familia has a solid base in Michoacán, a growing presence in other states and even in several US cities. It is also innovative: it has a spiritual leader called Nazario Moreno González, nicknamed El Más Loco, the Craziest One. It is not clear how Moreno got his nickname but he is certainly unusual in Mexican drug lord circles.
He preaches his organisation's divine right to eliminate enemies and insists that it only traffics drugs outside its home territory. He is said to carry a "bible" of his own sayings and require his army of teetotal dealers and hitmen to spend as much time in prayer meetings as in target practice. He is believed to be behind a network of religious-based rehab centres which provide La Familia with some of its most disciplined recruits.
In the past few months, though the border war rages daily, Michoacán has once again become Calderón's favoured battleground and La Familia his current bête noire. In May the government arrested 30 mayors and state officials allegedly linked to the organisation and in recent weeks federal forces have picked up several high-level members.
But the root causes of Mexico's cartel war precede Calderón's intervention. By the end of the 1980s, Mexican cartels acted as a conduit for almost all Colombian cocaine into the US, as well as manufacturing most of the methamphetamine and much of the heroin. Internally, the operation was run by a massive narco corporation based in the Pacific state of Sinaloa, whose baron, Miguel Félix Angel Gallardo, was arrested in 1989.
From jail, Gallardo allocated the border smuggling "plazas" to different wings of his organisation: the Gulf cartel in the east; the Juárez cartel and its allies, the Beltrán Leyva brothers, in the centre; a cartel known as the "Sinaloa" along a stretch of desert west of Ciudad Juárez; and the Arellano Brothers in Tijuana.
Then three things happened: the party that had ruled for seven decades and cohabited with the cartels - the Institutional Revolutionary party - was voted from power in 2001. The leader of the Sinaloa, Joaquín Guzmán, accordingly declared war in pursuit of the entire frontier and became deadlocked in battle with the Gulf cartel and its military wing, Los Zetas. In December 2006, Calderón sent in the army, kicking over a hornets' nest. The border war centred on Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana - the smuggling "plazas" - but has spread throughout the country to include states with long coastlines that receive Colombian cocaine and mountain ranges ideal for growing marijuana or opium poppies, or hiding drug labs.
Both the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels fight each other and the government across Mexico and are locked in combat for the central American cocaine-smuggling corridors. Guzmán remains the most celebrated fugitive drugs tsar, after being sprung from jail in 2001, just before he was to be extradited to the US for trial. The Gulf cartel is also irrepressible, though its leader, Osiel Cárdenas, awaits trial in the US, and the Zetas are the most heavily armed narco militia. The Gulf cartel and Zetas have borne the brunt of the government offensive, but - like the Sinaloa - have penetrated deep into the state apparatus.
But La Familia is emerging as a potent new force: indigenous to Michoacán, it is savage, ruthless, and engages above all with the Gulf cartel. In his TV message, La Tuta said La Familia was most concerned about keeping out the Zetas, who a few years ago held mentor-like status for his own cartel. "They are what is bad in this country," he said, claiming that the Zetas had infiltrated Calderón's cabinet to go after anybody linked to La Familia. This, he insisted, justified La Familia's recent decision to attack federal forces.
The latest sinister developments cast fresh doubt on the wisdom of Calderón's "war on drugs". President Barack Obama has described his Mexican counterpart as "a hero" for taking on the cartels. But Samuel González claims that the focus on military and police action south of the border will never bring the cartels to heel. "President Calderón has tunnel vision," he said. "He is allowing police strategy to dictate political and social policy and so things are getting worse every day."
With several other analysts González argues that the priority should be to work towards a pact that would commit all political parties to tackling corruption and money-laundering. They also stress the need to direct social spending to provide the young and poor in cartel areas with alternatives to gang membership and addiction. Unless that happens, the critics argue, organised crime will respond with ever greater brutality to government pressure, and dedicate more funds and effort to infiltration and building a social base of support. It is in the latter area, González said, that La Familia has excelled.
"These attacks show La Familia has a social base. They are warning the government that, if it doesn't change its strategy, there could be a social revolt," he said. "If the strategy continues in its current direction, this could happen."
Winning support in deprived rural areas is relatively easy through such things as building schools, roads and churches. But La Familia has also developed networks of support in urban areas thanks to client structures not dissimilar to the organisations that have long been part of Mexican party politics.
This has pitched La Familia into a political turf war, if conspiracy theories are to be given any credence: the suggestion is that elements in the state are backing the Sinaloa cartel as the only one capable of restoring a Pax Mafiosa, and that it is against this background that the Zetas and La Familia mount their savage insurrection and give it a Robin Hood social veneer.
A Familia group in the city of Uruapán organised a convoy of coaches to drive eight hours to Mexico City in May for a demonstration in support of the local mayor, arrested for alleged links to the cartel. "I'm just here because they told me to come," one of the protesters told the Observer. "I know they [La Familia] are really crazy. In fact, I think they are really sick sometimes, but they are the only people in my town who can help you out if you get in trouble, so that's why I joined the group." A deported migrant struggling to feed his family by selling shoes said he hoped "the organisation" would help him find a job soon in the local police force.
And perhaps La Tuta has now set a new trend by calling TV phone-ins, complete with a chilling signature sign-off: asked by the presenter if he had anything to add, the self-confessed leader of a gang until now best known for rolling five severed heads across a dance floor said: "God bless everybody, and let God give us the opportunity to live just a little bit longer. That's all. Thank you."
How the violence escalated
2005 Escaped drug lord Joaquín "Shorty" Guzmán sets out to control Tijuana and drug trade routes into California. Violence escalates in Mexico; about 1,500 die .
2006 President Felipe Calderón takes office. A new federal police force tackles drug cartels and thousands of troops are deployed. The death toll rises to 2,300, beheadings and torture increase.
2007 Calderón sends troops to Tijuana and across Mexico. George Bush pledges $1.4bn in drug-fighting equipment for Mexico and central America. The violence escalates, with more than 3,000 deaths.
2008 Guzmán takes on the cartel in Ciudad Juárez across from El Paso, Texas, as the city becomes the bloodiest drugs war flashpoint. Mexican police seize hundreds of dealers and disrupt smuggling routes but more than 6,000 people are killed, 450 of them police, soldiers or lawyers. Hundreds of thousands turn out for marches in Mexico to protest against kidnaps and killings.
2009 Calderón sends an extra 10,000 troops to Ciudad Juárez and says the surge has cut drug murders by 80%. Violence spills into US border cities Phoenix and Tucson. President Barack Obama visits Mexico City and vows to clamp down on smuggled US weapons feeding the violence. New drug fronts open up in the northern Durango state.
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