Letter From Juarez

Baghdad, Mexico

It’s time we saw El Paso’s sister city for what it is—a war zone.

by Sito Negron

January 2009

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A part of El Paso’s population has always consisted of people who live on both sides of the border. But that number has spiked as Juárez in particular and Mexico in general descend into chaos and the wealthy and middle class flee. In May, George Friedman, the founder and CEO of Stratfor, a private intelligence service based in Austin, wrote that Mexico—with the second-largest economy in Latin America and the eleventh-largest population in the world—was at risk of becoming a “failed state,” similar to countries in the Middle East where government has become paralyzed and has little or no control over its territory. Chillingly, Friedman also recognized a parallel to the recent history of Colombia.

“Mexico now faces a classic problem,” he wrote. “Multiple, well-armed organized groups have emerged. They are fighting among themselves while simultaneously fighting the government. The groups are fueled by vast amounts of money earned via drug smuggling to the United States. The amount of money involved—estimated at some $40 billion a year—is sufficient to increase tension between these criminal groups and give them the resources to conduct wars against each other. It also provides them with resources to bribe and intimidate government officials. The resources they deploy in some ways are superior to the resources the government employs.”

Money also links the cartels directly to the highest levels of government. In late October, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Sinaloa cartel may have had a mole in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City who gave the drug lords information from the U.S. DEA.

In Colombia, where U.S. forces still operate in the jungles, overt cartel violence has stabilized, but the war continues. U.S. forces are a key part of Plan Colombia, which was initiated in 2000 and has provided more than $2 billion, the bulk for military aid. Mexico has its own Plan Colombia. It’s called the Mérida Initiative, and under this proposal the Bush administration has requested $1.1 billion in aid over the next two fiscal budgets to be used for equipment and training (this number includes a small amount for Central America).

But who will be the beneficiary of this infusion? The cynical observer might take note of the private jet that crashed near Mérida in September 2007, filled with more than three tons of Guzmán’s cocaine. The same aircraft has been linked to CIA rendition flights to Guantánamo Bay. The cynical observer might wonder if this extralegal mixture of drugs and national security could be the real Mérida Initiative. Iran-Contra, anyone?

Like the tribal militias in Iraq, the people who control the streets of Juárez act with impunity. In October, the El Paso Times reported that cartels were shaking down merchants to raise money for their operations. Who can protect the innocent? The soldiers? Allegations against the military have included torture, robbery, and kidnapping. In September, Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, of the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, told Newspaper Tree, the El Paso politics and culture Web site that I edit, that human rights violations by the military in Juárez had risen from 20 instances in 2007 to more than 250 in 2008. The number has increased since then.

The police? They’re either on the run for their lives or working for the cartels or both. One of the subgroups involved in the war in Juárez is known as La Linea (“the Line”), a collection of corrupt police officials that might be considered subcontractors to the cartels. Alfredo Corchado, the Mexico bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News (and a former El Pasoan), described La Linea in 2004 as “a group of drug traffickers and Juárez and Chihuahua state police officers who authorities say protect cartel leaders and smuggle drugs across the border.” (Speaking of impunity, Corchado reported that La Linea was being investigated for the infamous killings of women in Juárez.)

I imagine La Linea to be similar to corrupt police in Baghdad who have terrorist or criminal affiliates. Let’s say there is a commander who reports to a cartel lieutenant, and he has several groups of lower-ranking officers who perform various tasks. Say a couple of those guys have a relative with a load of drugs. They figure they’ll freelance. The commander finds out, and they’re dead. Or they’re guarding a sanctioned load of dope, and they decide to make a deal with the Sinaloa cartel. Or maybe they don’t make a deal, and the Sinaloa cartel wants the dope and wants to send a message, so there’s some torture involved. Then they go after the family. You’ve heard this story before, involving different motives and countries, but what is always the same is the control of the ground versus the power of an outside army—and always bodies, too often of the innocent.

I opened this piece with an anecdote. As the bloody days have turned into weeks and months, the anecdotes pile up, blurring and changing shape and form until they might no longer resemble what happened but still capture the awful, bewildering truth.

More than 1,300 people were killed in Juárez in 2008. Let that sink in. It’s not just hit men and drug smugglers and corrupt policemen; it’s children, teenagers, innocent family members. They have been shot, burned, tortured, beheaded. Go to YouTube, search for “Juárez Sinaloa cartel,” and see for yourself how similar the violence is to what has transpired in Baghdad.

The similarities go a long way. Like Iraq, which is rich in oil, Mexico is rich in drugs (either as producer or transporter), and the biggest market for these commodities is in the United States. Both oil and illegal drugs are imported from countries that struggle with unstable political systems. And now, because of a battle for control of the market—either to own the biggest percentage of the flow or to shut it down—we are in a drug war, just as we have found ourselves in a war for oil.

We could learn from history, but how likely is that?

Friedman, the Stratfor analyst, draws a comparison between Mexico as a potentially failed state and Al Capone’s Chicago: “Smuggling alcohol created huge pools of money . . . [and] gave these criminals huge amounts of power, which they used to intimidate and effectively absorb the city government.”

Ending Prohibition destroyed the crime rings. Would legalizing drugs do the same thing to the cartels? That’s a subject for another article and for a more rational public discourse, one that’s not likely anytime soon.

Meanwhile in Mexico, drug war violence and corruption threaten the government (as this article was being written, an airplane carrying Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño and other top government officials crashed in a Mexico City neighborhood in what some suspect was an assassination). In Juárez people do not trust the police, and they fear the military. The civil order has collapsed.

This drug war crossed the border years ago. We can measure its impact on our country in many ways—jail sentences, seized property, lives ruined, the growth of law enforcement. In some inner-city neighborhoods of the United States, the impact is measured in bodies.

So it is now on the border, where some days I stand in my yard and stare across the river at Juárez, looking at a Baghdad that is largely of our creation and wondering when the chickens will come home to roost.

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