Worries mount over drought
The pressure on the government to rethink its
security strategy is increasing and comes from two sides. On the one hand, there
is almost daily evidence that the “surge strategy" - which involves deploying
large numbers of soldiers and federal police officers to win back control of
certain areas from drug gangs - is not working. On the other, human rights
activists are arguing that the army cuts too many corners with regards to its
respect for human rights when it is used as a police force.
Opponents of the government's security strategy can muster plenty
of evidence for these arguments from the events of August. Those arguing that
the surge is not working highlighted press reports that 17 August had been a
record day for gang killings, with 57 people murdered. The human rights
activists pointed to the apparently illegal army raid on the home of a prominent
rightwing politician, Manuel Espino Barrientos.
The government does not publish an official death toll, so media assertions that 17 August was the worst day yet in the government's war against organised crime have gone unchallenged. The previous worst day was 14 July 2009, when 53 people died.
The government has been deploying troops and federal police against the gangs since President Felipe Calderón took office on 1 December 2006. The 17 August figure was doubly embarrassing because almost to the day a year earlier (21 August 2008), the government launched the Acuerdo Nacional por la Seguridad. This initiative was designed to mobilise all levels of government (municipal, state and federal) against organised crime.
The initiative has not brought down the death toll. In its first year, 7,296 people were killed by gangsters. In the 12 months before the pact was launched, 3,742 people died. The average daily murder rate since the Acuerdo was signed is now 20.
The government argues that Mexico's murder rate is still low in regional terms. Eduardo Medina Mora, the (now former) Procurador General de la República (PGR), admitted on 17 August that the rate of killing was “serious and unprecedented" but claimed, in the same breath, that the death toll was less than it was in 1994. He also claimed that Mexico's homicide rate, of 10.7 per 100,000, was less than the rate in Colombia (33 per 100,000 people), Brazil (around 40 per 100,000), Guatemala and El Salvador (which both have murder rates of over 50 per 100,000).
Medina Mora noted that in 1994 Mexico's murder rate was 18 per 100,000. It is not clear whether government figures include casualties from the uprising by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in Chiapas. Human rights groups estimated that at least 400 people were killed in that uprising. The official death toll was 145.
The worry for the government is that the gangs seem to have come out of the lull they fell into in the first part of 2009. The most murderous months since the Acuerdo were October and November 2008 (with 791 and 729 gang killings, respectively). In June, the death toll was over 700, and July was not much lower.
The only comfort the government can draw from the figures is that six states (Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Baja California Norte) accounted for 6,007 of the deaths since the Acuerdo. This is 82.3% of total gang killings. Less encouraging is that the states where there have been the most major confrontations between gangsters and the security forces include Nuevo León and Tabasco. Quintana Roo is another state with a major drug-violence problem.
The most violent state, however, is Chihuahua. Since the Acuerdo, 2,955 people have been killed by organised criminals in the state. From 1 January 2009 to 4 September, 1,309 people have been killed in the state. In the country as a whole, 4,184 people were killed by gangsters between 1 January and 4 September 2009.
On 17 August, 33 people were killed in Chihuahua state. The epicentre of the deaths is Ciudad Juárez, on the border with the US. Despite the deployment of 8,000 troops in the city's streets, the gangs act with impunity. Early on 17 August they attacked a nightclub and machine gunned eight people to death. On 1 September, gangsters gunned down another 17 people at a drug rehabilitation centre. Survivors said that the gangsters picked out the people they wanted to kill and lined them up for execution.
On 19 August, gangsters killed Alan Cristian Domínguez, who headed the Policía Ministerial (PM) in Ciudad Juárez. The PM is the newly created federal agency designed to replace the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI), which had been undermined by almost constant revelations of AFI officers' links to drug gangs. It was officially born at the end of May 2009.
Another worry for the government is the growing gang-related violence in Monterrey and Nuevo León. Again on 17 August, there was a three-hour firefight in one of Monterrey's main streets between gangsters and the police, which left four dead.
Human rights
The human rights activists have two main
pieces of evidence to use in their argument that the use of the army has become
too heavy-handed. The first was the raid by the army on a house belonging to
Manuel Espino, a former president of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN).
This house, in Ciudad Juárez, was raided early on 16 August during a party for
one of Espino's nephews.
The raid appears to have been an embarrassing mistake rather than a deliberate attempt to intimidate Espino, who has famously poor relations with President Calderón. Espino leads the rightwing of the PAN and was one of the main critics of Calderón's choice of César Nava to take over the leadership of the party.
Espino claimed that the army had not bothered to get a warrant for the raid on his house. He added that it must be brought to heel and could not be allowed to trample over people's human rights. Such strong statements from a party hardliner show how controversial Calderón's policy of using the army against drug gangs has become.
The ministry of defence (Sedena) put out a statement on 18 August denying that its men had searched Espino's house. The ministry said that its men had been on patrol in Ciudad Juárez and noted an unusual number of people at Espino's house. Espino, according to the army, challenged the soldiers in the street but apparently had no problem with what they were doing and thanked them.
This version of events was disputed by Espino, who said on 19 August that he suspected that the government was trying to spin the event for its own purposes. Espino repeated his accusation that heavily armed soldiers had entered his house without a warrant. Espino said that he had tackled the soldiers over this issue, pointed out that they were acting illegally and managed to get them to leave. Espino specifically said that the soldiers came on to his property, namely the patio and the carport. He also denied the defence ministry claim that his initial criticism of the army had been the product of misreporting. Espino said that his claims had been accurately reported.
- Armando Chavarría Barrera
Another high profile assassination was that of Armando Chavarría Barrera,the president of the state congress in Guerrero on 20 August. The assassination shocked politicians. President Calderón telephoned Zeferino Torreblanca, the opposition Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) governor of Guerrero, and ordered the federal authorities to provide as much support as they could to the state investigation. Chavarría was a possible PRD candidate for the state governorship. What made the Chavarría killing doubly chilling was that just before he was gunned down, gangsters dropped off three ice-boxes in the main street of Coyuca de Catalán, close to the state capital Chilpancingo. Each one contained a human head.