Government extradites drug barons to US
The government unveiled the second stage of its anti-drugs strategy by extraditing 15 drug gangsters to the US on 19 and 20 January. The move was heavily applauded in the US, first by officials leading the war on drugs and then by President George W Bush himself, who rewarded President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa with a congratulatory 15-minute telephone call. The Mexican government itself fears that the initiative may be costly in the short term as the drug gangs retaliate.
The extraditions are the second phase of the government's anti-drugs policy. The first phase was the offensives against the drug trade in particular parts of Mexico. Since President Calderón took office on 1 December he has deployed 27,000 troops and police in anti-drug trade offensives in six of Mexico's 32 states.
The government has formally announced three offensives: Michoacán before Christmas; Tijuana in early January and in the "Golden Triangle" of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua in mid-January. On top of this the government has deployed more soldiers in Guerrero and is clamping down on street drug selling in Mexico City.
What the offensives appear to have done is to push the violence generated by the drug trade into fresh areas. On 30 January, two state policemen were killed in Guanajuato, previously a state that was comparatively free of drug violence. Guanajuato's interior minister, Gerardo Mosqueda Martínez, said that he feared that members of the drug gangs who had been fighting for control of the drug trade in the neighbouring state of Michoacán, where the federal government has launched a major offensive against the drug trade, have been pushed into Guanajuato.
Mosqueda noted that the gangs have started to dump bodies of people killed in Michoacán in Guanajuato. So far this year the bodies of eight people, executed by drug gangs, have been found in Guanajuato. In the whole of 2006, 21 people were murdered in Guanajuato by drug gangs.
Guanajuato, controlled by President Calderón's Partido Acción Nacional, is not the only state that has seen an upsurge in drug-related killing. Nuevo León, now controlled by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, has seen a similar upsurge in killing, especially of police officers, this year.
On 29 January the fifth law enforcement officer to be killed in Monterrey so far this year was gunned down. The death toll is unusually high and suggests that drug gangs are moving into Monterrey from neighbouring areas where the federal police and army presence has increased. The federal government's drive against the drug trade, which is hugely popular according to opinion polls, does not include Nuevo León, though the state government is trying to increase its efforts.
Academics and security experts in Mexico are doubtful about whether Calderón's strategy for tackling the drug trade would work. Several sniffed that Colombia has been doing the same things (using the army against the drug trade and extraditing drug barons to the US) without seeing much of a diminution in violence.
The Colombian example
The Mexican government is not shying away from the comparison with Colombia. On 24 January, Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, travelled to Bogotá, and at the end of his visit, on 26 January, proclaimed that Mexico wanted to learn from Colombia's experiences. Significantly, Medina Mora was accompanied by the public security minister, Genaro García, and the minister for crime prevention, Alejandro
Rubido.
On his trip, Medina Mora met the President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, and the Fiscal General de la Nación, Mario Iguarán. Medina Mora said that Mexico was no longer just a transit route to the US: he said that Mexico was developing its own drug-consumption problem.
What is clear is that the Mexican government's offensive against the drug gangs is far more than just a token militarisation. On 21 January, the defence minister, Guillermo Galván Galván, said that the government was deploying 9,000 troops in the "Golden Triangle" states. It has already committed 3,000 troops to Tijuana, 7,000 to Michoacán and an unspecified number to Guerrero.
The problem is that this huge deployment has delivered little in the way of arrests or drugs seizures. Indeed, the only significant drug-related arrest since Calderón took office on 1 December has been in Oaxaca, from where the federal forces have actually withdrawn. Pedro Díaz Parada was arrested in Oaxaca on 18 January and heads an eponymous gang which operates in south-eastern Mexico. The federal government claims that the Díaz Parada gang is the seventh biggest in the country: that may be so, but it is insignificant beside the big gangs whose leaders are now facing extradition. Díaz Parada has been on the run since 1987 when he escaped from jail, two years into a 33-year sentence.
Phase 2
The decision by the government to extradite drug barons to the US is a significant change of policy: previously Mexico had refused to extradite its nationals to the US until they had faced a Mexican court. Now Medina Mora has stated that the government will extradite people who have exhausted their legal challenges to extradition.
The previous government of President Vicente Fox indicated that policy would develop in this direction when it announced in September 2006 that anyone who faced criminal charges in the US would become liable for extradition to the US, regardless of whether they had faced a Mexican court. President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa had said that he would implement this policy.
Medina Mora was adamant that the government's decision had nothing to do with pressure from the US. Indeed, the US government went out of its way, at an unprecedented press conference on 22 January involving Paul McNulty, the deputy attorney general; John Walters, the US drug czar; and Karen Tandy, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, to say that it had been taken by surprise by the Mexican decision on 19 January. McNulty pointed out that US marshals and law enforcement agents had to work throughout the night of 19 January to handle the gangsters and complete the legal paperwork to ensure their indictments were correctly filed in the appropriate jurisdiction.
The joint press conference by US officials was unprecedented in the fulsomeness of its praise of President Calderón. John Walters, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and known formally and informally as the US drug czar, said: "What President Calderon has done is _ an enormously powerful and unprecedented step to take these structures down and _faster than anybody predicted and with an example of leadership that I think is truly stunning." No senior US administration official has used such terms about a Mexican president for years.
Karen Tandy, administrator (ie head) of the Drug Enforcement Administration, was more measured but equally impressed: "This is the first time in the history of Mexico that they have extradited to the United States what amounts to a clean sweep geographically of the cartel leadership_ Five of these [15] defendants were specially designated by President [George W] Bush as foreign narcotic kingpins. Now did we get all of Mexico's major drug traffickers? No, not yet. But this past weekend, the US and Mexico have taken a tremendous leap forward."
The three most prominent drug barons extradited to the US are: Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the supposed head of the Cartel del Golfo; Héctor "El Güero" Palma, a senior figure in the Cartel de Sinaloa (which Tandy calls the Federation gang); Ismael Higuera "El Mayel" Guerrero and his brother Gilberto, who are both senior lieutenants of the Arellano Félix family who run the Cartel de Tijuana. Tandy stressed that all those extradited were significant figures in their respective gangs.
Tandy was clearly particularly pleased at the extradition of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén who, she pointed out, was a former policeman. She noted that he had been responsible for setting up Los Zetas, the hit squads of former soldiers and policemen who kill for the Cartel del Golfo. She said that the gang was responsible for shipping between four and six tonnes of cocaine into the US every month. That volume of smuggling gives the gang a monthly turnover of between US$140m and US$210m. What is remarkable, as Tandy noted, is that Cárdenas has, apparently, continued to run his gang even though he was in a high-security prison outside Mexico City for the past four years.
The US ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, was delighted by the extraditions. He said that the extradition were "a monumental success in our nations' battle against evil drug traffickers and criminals." He added that some of those extradited were among the most vicious criminals in either US or Mexican history. Garza also added on 24 January that President Bush had telephoned President Calderón to congratulate him on the extraditions.
Most of those shipped to the US face charges of drug smuggling, though some also face murder, people-trafficking and rape charges. In 2006, Mexico extradited 60 people to the US. So far this year it has sent 17 across the border to face the US courts. The US admitted that it had guaranteed that none of those extradited would face the death penalty.
|
Offensives play well in the opinion polls |
| The anti-drugs offensives are popular, according to an opinion poll by Ipsos-Bimsa/El Universal. The poll found that the 74% of those polled approved of using the army against the drug trade in Mexico. Only 22% of those polled were against the change of policy.
What is interesting is that ordinary Mexicans are pretty aware that the results of these offensives have been minimal, so far. Only 35% of those polled said that the offensives had been successful. Equally, only 13% said that they had failed. Most people, 35% of those polled said that it was too early to judge whether the offensives had been successful. The poll data was also assessed according to the educational attainments of those polled. It is noticeable that the better educated were significantly more confident that the offensives were successful than the less well-educated. The poll also found that people still regarded the army, along with the Roman Catholic Church, as the most trusted institution in the country. |