Swings and roundabouts
The government nabbed one of the eponymous leaders of the Arellano Félix gang on 24 October to score a much needed success in the war against the drug gangs. On the downside, the number of people killed by the gangs so far this year went over 4,100 on 27 October and, simultaneously, the government had to admit that senior officials in its organised crime unit, Subprocuraduría de Investigación Especializada en Delincuencia Organizada (Siedo), had been in the pay of a faction of the Sinaloa gang, one of the country's three main gangs, since 2004.
The revelation about the Sinaloa gang's penetration of what should have been its main adversary is embarrassing to the government but the uprooting of the gangsters' spy network may prove to be a major long term victory for the government. President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has long been doubtful about the loyalty and efficiency of the country's many law enforcement agencies.
On 21 October he sent two new proposals to congress to improve security. The first proposal is a new law to set up a national police force and to set out what such a force should do. Calderón's idea is that the new police force should investigate crimes under the direction of an investigating magistrate, as well as seek to preserve public order. The new national police force will based around the Policia Federal Preventiva (which is more of a paramilitary gendamerie). The commander of the national police will answer to a new national ministry, the Ministerio Público Federal.
The second proposal was, significantly, to reform the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) which runs the compromised organised crime unit, the Siedo. President Calderón's reforms here are designed to improve the quality of PGR personnel and professionalise their careers.
After the revelation about the corruption in the Siedo, the Procuraduría General de la República stepped up its purging of the unit which appears to have been riddled with spies. So far 35 Siedo officials have been implicated in the scandal. The corruption meant that the gangsters had access not only to operational information about Mexico's antidrugs operations but also to confidential information held by the US embassy and from Interpol. The US press is reporting that the gangsters may also have had another, separate spy inside the US embassy.
Eduardo Medina Mora, the Procurador General de la República admitted that the gang headed by Arturo and Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, which was part of the Sinaloa gang, headed by Joaquín “El Chapo" Guzmán, had been paying between US$150,000 and US$450,000 a month to six senior officials in the Siedo. In return the gang got access to confidential information, which allowed gangsters to destroy evidence and evade prosecution. The gangsters may also have tipped off the corrupt officials about their rivals' activities.
What is interesting is that the pay-offs did not prevent the arrest of Alfredo Beltran Leyva in January 2008. Some gang watchers claim that the Beltrán Leyva brothers are now more allied to the Golfo gang, which is effectively headed by Heriberto Lazcano ('el Lazca' or 'Z1') who set up the Golfo gang's killers, Los Zetas.
The gangsters also had access to information about US Drug Enforcement Administration agents operating in Mexico as well as information about undercover operations against the drug gangs.
Two senior Siedo officials, Fernando Rivera Hernández, assistant director general for intelligence, and Miguel Colorado González, responsible for the Siedo's technology, have been in custody since August. The US government wants to extradite Colorado González. Three other former Siedo agents have also been arrested and another, Francisco Javier Jiménez Sánchez, alias "El Pinocho", is on the run.
The Siedo was supposed to be an elite team of around 400 specialists. The PGR was shaken up at the end of July this year when Noé Ramírez Mandujano the head of the Siedo, was fired and his predecessor, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, forced out. Medina Mora appointed Marisela Morales Ibáñez, who had left the PGR in 2006, to run the Siedo.
Although the government did not say, the corruption at such as senior level
has certainly cost lives. One person almost certainly assassinated by the
Beltrán Leyva gang was Edgar Eusebio Millán Gómez, the top federal policeman for
Mexico City and a key figure in the battle against the drug gangs. He was
assassinated on 8 May this year. In the first week of May gangsters killed three
of six officials closest to Genaro García Luna, the minister for public
security.
Millán has masterminded the arrest of 13 gangsters in Sinaloa on 1
May which triggered a furious response from the Sinaloa gang. The gangsters
retaliated by killing 12 policemen in Sinaloa.
By 27 October, a total of 4,104 people have been killed by gangsters in Mexico. In 2007, the death toll was 2,700.
Success
The government played up its success in nabbing,
Eduardo, the fifth of the Arellano Félix brothers to head the family gang which
is known either as the Tijuana gang or the Arellano Félix gang. The government
claims that Eduardo had been running the gang, along with a nephew, Fernando
Sánchez Arellano, since 2006, when Eduardo's brother, Francisco Javier, was
arrested.
Prior to that, another brother, Benjamín, had run the family business. Before Benjamín, the key figure in the gang had been another brother Ramón, who was killed in a gunfight with police in 2002. Eduardo was arrested in Tijuana on the evening of 25 October after a raid on a house. He was caught with his young daughter and another gangster, Luis Ramíres Vázquez. Initially the police were unsure whom they had arrested.
In the past month Tijuana has been the scene of a vicious war between the Arellano Félix family and a a killer, nicknamed "El Teo", for control of the city and the gang. Both sides had taken to dumping bodies from the rival faction outside schools.
- Heads - Gruesomely, four heads in a coolbox were delivered to a police station in Ascención, close to Ciudad Juárez, northern Mexico, on 20 October as part of the gangsters' campaign of intimidation. The package was dropped off by a bus, whose crew knew nothing about the contents of the package.
Mexico City - On 15 October two separate incidents showed that drug gangs were trying to move into Mexico City. The two incidents in Mexico City do not seem to be connected. The first incident was the erection of what the Mexican press calls a “narcomanta". This is a bill-board message from a drug gang which is displayed somewhere prominent. This Mexico City message was hung from a footbridge on a main road close to the headquarters of the state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos. It was the second “narcomanta" in Mexico City in the past fortnight: the first was hung from another footbridge in the centre of Mexico City on 4 October.Both messages were apparently from Los Zetas and the second came exactly a month after the grenade attack on the Independence Eve celebration at Morelia, Michoacán, which killed eight people. The authorities blamed Los Zetas, who kill for the Golfo drug gang, for the Morelia attack but the “narcomanta" claimed that the Morelia attack was mounted by La Familia, the main gang in Michoacán. In the “narcomanta", Los Zetas denied responsibility for the Morelia attack, and said that Los Zetas had nothing to do with terrorism and offered the gang's support to the government to “arrest" the leaders of La Familia and anyone else who tried to pass themselves off as “People of the Z". The Mexico City police took down the “narcomanta" at about 8am. Mexico City politicians said that “narcomantas" were meaningless and that they would not get into the game of responding to them.
The second incident showed that Mexico City police have considerably better
sources of intelligence (or are simply luckier) than other police forces. On the
evening of 15 October, Mexico City police noticed a car driving very slowly in
Tlalpan and stopped it: when the police looked inside they saw several weapons.
The occupants of the vehicle said that they were federal policemen. The Mexico
City police did not believe them and a firefight broke out.
The Mexico City
police patrol was quickly supported by another 10 vehicles and two of the four
suspects were killed and the others arrested. Three policemen were wounded. The
police found a couple of grenades, two AK-47s and a couple of magazines for
AR-15 guns inside the vehicle.
The Mexico City Procuraduría General de
Justicia has opened an investigation into the incident.
US consulate attacked - On 11 October, shots were fired at
the US consulate in Monterrey, Northern Mexico. The violence in Mexico is
becoming increasingly political. This trend started when two grenades were
thrown at an Independence Day celebration in Morelia, Michoacán on 15
September.
No-one was hurt in the attack in Monterrey, but this may have been
because the e grenade thrown at the consulate did not explode.
Jalisco - The Monterrey attack was followed by another
grenade attack, on 12 October, on the headquarters of the state of Jalisco's
security ministry, in the centre of the country's second biggest city,
Guadalajara. Jalisco is a bastion of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional. The
attack on the building followed an ambush on 8 October in which five police
officers were killed. Again the killings were the result of grenades being
thrown, this time at a police checkpoint. The rise in the use of grenades
in terrorist attacks suggests that local criminal gangs are sourcing their
equipment from Central or South America. When machine guns were the gangs'
weapons of choice, the Mexican authorities blamed lax US firearm laws for the
problem.
The five Jalisco state policemen were killed after two patrol cars
stopped a vehicle on the road to Lagos de Moreno, less than a kilometre from the
Centro Integral de Justicia Regional. As the officers checked the vehicle,
another two vehicles drove past and their occupants opened fire on the police
and threw grenades at them. Another three officers were also seriously injured
in the attack.
The attackers escaped even though the police issued
descriptions to forces in the states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato and
Michoacán.
Tijuana - On 2 October another eight bodies, all killed by a single shot to the head, were dumped outside an infants' school in Tijuana, Mexico. The gangsters are taunting the government: they dumped a dozen bodies outside another school on 29 September. The latest batch all had suffered single shots to the head, though they appeared to have also been machine-gunned. One of the bodies in the latest batch had a (semi-literate) message attached to it: “These are your people, Builder, come and get them." The state procurador, José Manuel Yepiz, claims that the killings are the result of an internal feud in the main Tijuana gang, which is run by the Arellano Félix family.