Courcy's Future Threats - April 2014

Rapid paradigm shifts in the security environment in Mexico over the last eighteen months are leading to a decrease on overall stability. The number of violent groups imposing their will in some parts of the country is growing, and ‘civilians’ are increasingly likely to get caught in the crossfire. The situation is an extremely complicated one for the government to respond to.

Extreme violence has long been one of the defining characteristics of Mexico. Over the last few decades this has principally been due to the conflicts between drug cartels*, and between the cartels and government forces. More recently, vigilante self-defence groups (autodefensas) have entered the fray, and the rise and subsequent decline of these groups over the last year and a half has led to a more fragmented security profile.

*We will refer to the Mexican drug gangs, also sometimes referred to as drug trafficking organisations (DTOs), as cartels. This is not strictly an accurate description as to qualify as a cartel the group ought to control all elements of the trade from initial production through to final distribution, which has not been the case for Mexican DTOs for many years. Nevertheless, the term ‘cartel’ is more in line with the terminology used in the region, and no term commonly used to describe them is absolutely correct, so we will continue to use it in this report.

In January and February 2013 it became evident that there was a growing trend towards vigilantism in Mexico, particularly in the south-western regions, in response to the inability of state and federal authorities to address the high levels of violence and insecurity. This immediately became a problem for the Enrique Peña Nieto government, as it was clear from the first that these groups were making the security situation worse overall. A major difficulty in the response to these groups is that, due to different laws in various states, these groups are not illegal in all parts of the country.

The situation now is one of: state and federal forces battling cartels; state and government forces battling against self-defence groups in some states; of government forces working with, and in some cases absorbing, self-defence forces in other states; of false self-defence groups working towards their own criminal goals; and of operatives from the cartels and the false self-defence groups attempting to infiltrate all the other organisations.

A history of violence

Mexican drug cartels have existed for several decades. The most powerful cartels operating currently rose to prominence after the demise of the Colombian Cali and Medellín cartels in the 1990s. Mexican drug cartels now dominate the wholesale illicit drug market, and in 2007 controlled 90% of the cocaine entering the US according to official data. Arrests of key cartel leaders, particularly in the Tijuana and Gulf cartels, has led to increasing drug violence as cartels fight for control of the trafficking routes.

Major cartels

• Los Zetas
• Sinaloa Cartel
• Gulf Cartel
• La Familia Cartel
• Tijuana Cartel
• Knights Templar
• Beltrán Leyva Cartel
• Juárez Cartel

Although accurate figures are impossible to define, analysts believe that wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales for the cartels range from $13.6 billion to $49.4 billion annually.

By the end of 2012, the official death toll of the Mexican Drug War was at least 60,000. Independent estimates, however, set the death toll above 120,000 killed by 2013, not including 27,000 missing.

The government’s inability to provide a serious opposition the cartels led to a growing sense of anger at the authorities, and eventually to people calling for another option. Some people lamented the appearance of the vigilante groups, as their rise could but herald an increase in violence. Others celebrated their creation, sick of the authorities’ impotence in the face of organised crime.

The spread of self-defence groups, sometimes also referred to as ‘community police’, led to the federal government and some state authorities to legalise them rather than try to tackle the problem of shutting them down. However, opposition politicians and many civic leaders warned that this would have dangerous, unwanted consequences.

On 17 February 2013, when the self-defence groups began to appear, the Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH), an official body that acts as a public ombudsman’s office, issued a warning about the risks posed by their spread. It said it “does not deny or minimise the fact that these self-defence groups are a desperate action of the people as a result of the state’s omissions regarding public security” but went on to express concern about the possible emergence of “armed groups with interests that have nothing to do with self-protection which may threaten the stability of the institutions, because only a thin line distinguishes the [self-defence] organisations from the paramilitary groups”.

It invoked Article 17 of the constitution, which explicitly bars people from taking justice into their own hands or of resorting to violence to claim their rights and demands that “the corresponding authorities fulfil as a priority their essential task of ensuring public security”.

The CNDH was not the only organisation to raise the alarm. The formerly ruling party, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) issued a communiqué warning about the risk posed by “the proliferation of self-defence groups or so-called community police in several of the country’s entities.” The PAN dismissed the executive’s argument that the community police had been in existence for 15 or 17 years. “It is only now,” it said at the time, “that they begin to represent a threat, because their very actions endanger public security.”

“The executive,” said the PAN, “should ensure that its security strategy should not only focus on prevention, but also on supporting the states so that the State does not appear as unable to provide its citizens with security.”

Javier Sicilia, leader of the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, publicly welcomed the emergence of “legitimate” responses to the state’s failure to ensure security, but at the same time has warned about the risk that “other groups that are not preoccupied with self-defence may cause greater harm to the country.”

Jorge Chabat, a public security expert at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), warned with some prescience that the government was facing a complex situation, “with many facets”. One is that of the community police, chiefly rural, not usually backed by the more affluent. Another is that of paramilitary groups similar to those that arose in Colombia from the 1960s onwards, funded by wealthy individuals to ensure their own protection. A third is that of lynchings, in which the people take justice into their own hands. A fourth is that of the private security firms, which are legal and constrained – at least on paper – by regulations: they cannot make arrests (as some self-defence groups have been doing).

According to Chabat, neither the federal nor the state governments had the wherewithal to control these groups, nor to provide the security they demand, so the authorities opted for “de-facto tolerance”. Banning the self-defence groups, he pointed out, would have been too costly in political terms. The danger, he said, is that these groups could turn into criminal organisations, “as happened in Colombia, where they became organisations involved in drug-trafficking and kidnapping.”

Across the country

In Guerrero, the leaders of the Unión de Pueblos y Organizaciones del Estado de Guerrero (Upoeg), which was launched in January 2013 as a sponsor of self-defence initiatives encouraging others to follow suit, reached an agreement with interior minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, under which they would hand over to the authorities the 54 suspected criminals they had arrested by that point so far, and refrain from wearing hoods or masks, in exchange for the official recognition of their group as a community police force, and also for an increase in public works and provision of services in their communities.

The Upoeg agreed, nominally, to submit to the procedures established by the Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades Comunitarias (Crac), the body which for the past 18 years has overseen the official Policía Comunitaria in rural localities. Critics, however, pointed out that the Upoeg was using the implicit threat of unregulated self-defence actions as a means of achieving political aims that go beyond public security.

The government of Oaxaca, where the mayor of the municipality of Santos Reyes Nopala launched a ‘community police’ initiative on 11 February 2013, opposed the agreement, arguing on the one hand that the state did not need such a force because the security situation was not comparable to that of neighbouring Guerrero, and on the other that because the members of the newly created force had not been vetted through the ‘confidence control’ tests they were not entitled to act as law enforcement agents.

In Michoacán, the Purépecha community of Cherán has been engaging since April 2011 in a campaign against illegal loggers purportedly protected by gunmen associated with La Familia Michoacana (or one of its two splinter organisations). As in Guerrero they have set up checkpoints to deter their activities; fatal violence has occurred repeatedly at these checkpoints. Their example led 37 communities across eastern Michoacán to start considering the reactivation of their own local police forces.

In Sinaloa, a Christmas Eve (2012) massacre of nine people in La Concordia, followed by a nearby ambush that left two police officers dead and five injured, led the mayor to call for the arming of a number of communities in the surrounding area that has come to be known as the ‘zone of fear ’, where people displaced by gangs associated with the cartels have been taking refuge.

In the north of Veracruz the communities of Tantoyuca and Platón Sánchez announced in September 2012, when the embryonic groups began to appear, that they were forming a self-defence organisation named as both Comando Civil de Defensa and Guardia Civil Huasteca which publicly threatened to “shoot to kill” against suspected drug traffickers and criminals, and called for the government to support such initiatives with arms and training.

A year on…

Roll the calendar forward a year, and there has been another major change in Mexico’s security profile. These armed groups, having appeared, risen to prominence, and been accepted in a lot of the country as ‘official’ organisations, are already transforming. Some are disarming, while some are merging with state authorities. This has led (perhaps unsurprisingly given Mexico’s history) to a rise in violence, as yet another type of armed group is rising to prominence – the fake community police organisations.

Recognising that ‘official’ security organisations no-longer necessarily look like police or soldiers, criminal groups having been setting up checkpoints and conducting operations for their own gain, mimicking the community police. As the ‘real’ self-defence groups transition, power vacuums are appearing, allowing these fake groups to act with greater impunity.

On 3 April this year the interior minister (still Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, despite the tribulations of the last twelve months) announced that with the arrest of some of the most important leaders of the Caballeros Templarios (LCT) cartel, Michoacán had moved on to “another moment”. The federal commissioner in Michoacán, Alfredo Castillo, said that this “new moment” would lead “within weeks” to the disarming of the self-defence groups and the withdrawal of their checkpoints on highways. Some of the self-defence leaders insisted that the LCT leaders still posed a threat, and warned that new threats such as the ‘fake’ community police are rapidly emerging; a view, incidentally, that is shared by federal intelligence services.

Disarming was only one item of the formal agreement reached between the community police and federal authorities on 14 April. The deal was that the community police would have to choose, by 10 May, whether to join the rural police corps or the rural defence force, or simply demobilise. In the latter case they would have to surrender their weapons. Implicitly, those joining the rural police or the rural defence force would remain armed.

Self-defence leader José Manuel Mireles said that it had been agreed that they would only have to surrender “large-calibre weapons like the Barrett .40, .50 or .60 [rifles], grenade launchers and that sort of weapons that we seized from organised crime.” The agreement said that by the 10 May deadline “the bearing and use” of the firearms would be determined “according to what is stipulated by legal parameters”. This circumlocution has been interpreted as meaning that the possession and use of “military-issue” weapons would be restricted. Apart from registering their firearms these will be subjected to ballistic tests (presumably to determine whether they had been used in unsolved crimes).

The two sides also agreed that the federal commissioner would hold two meetings a week with the municipalities of the Tierra Caliente region to discuss “integral development” and security issues; expedite social assistance and compensation for the “widows and orphans of this conflict”; transfer to the Apatzingán prison the self-defence group members arrested for bearing arms (though those charged with criminal offences would remain in the hands of the judiciary), and take the necessary steps to guarantee the physical safety of community police leaders.

The agreement also said that until the 10 May deadline “the autodefensa groups and the federal and state governments continue to work in a coordinated manner to locate organised crime targets.” Mireles spelt this out as “advancing and cleansing Morelia, Zamora, all of Uruapan, La Piedad, Zitácuaro, Ciudad de Hidalgo, Álvaro Obregón, San Lucas, Benito Juárez, Chiquiteo, Numarán, Penjamillo and the rest of the municipalities.”

The community police groups claimed that organised crime had been expelled from 35 of the state’s 113 municipalities by mid-April. However, their coordinating body,  the Consejo General de Autodefensas (CGA) said that the task was far from over, since at least 15 prominent members of the LCT were still operating within Michoacán and in the neighbouring states of  Guerrero, Jalisco and México, and many officials linked to the LCT were still in their posts.

Fate of LCT leaders

Captured

• Gerónimo Vásquez Mendoza (‘el Toro’) – 19 January 2014
• Dionisio Loya Plancarte (‘el Tío’) -27 January 2014

Killed

• Nazario Moreno González (‘el Chayo’) – 9 March 2014
• Enrique Plancarte Solís (‘el Kike’) – 30 March 2014

At large

• Servando Gómez Martínez (‘la Tuta’)
• Fernando Cruz Mendoza (‘el Tena’)
• Isidro Virrueta Montejano (‘el Chicano’ or ‘el Coco’)

The self-defence groups had drawn up a list of seven LCT kingpins they wanted ‘neutralised’ before they could consider downing their weapons. By late April two had been captured and two had been killed, leaving three at large — one of them the cartel’s paramount leader, Servando Gómez Martínez (‘la Tuta’).

Apart from the LCT kingpins, two mayors targeted by the self-defence groups as having colluded with the LCT had been arrested and charged with criminal offences: Uriel Chávez Mendoza of Apatzingán, the strategic hub of the Tierra Caliente region; and Arquímedes Oseguera of Lázaro Cárdenas, the seaport municipality taken over by the armed forces in November – and with the latter, the municipality’s treasurer. Chávez Mendoza is accused of having aided the LCT in extorting ‘contributions’ from city councillors, Oseguera of complicity in kidnapping, extortion and association with organised crime.

On 29 April the first self-defence groups began to register their firearms and make their choices.

Beside the remaining threats noted by the community police, the Proceso reported that two “confidential documents of the federal government”, the sources and status of which are not, admittedly, clear, warn about the “infiltration” of the self-defence organisations by criminal groups and a new threat posed by recent arrivals such as Los Zetas, the Gulf cartel and the Beltrán Leyva organisation.

Alliances are said to have been struck between outside organisations and factions of those operating within Michoacán. Among those seeking to fill the vacuum left by a retreating LCT are: the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), which in turn is allied with the Sinaloa/Pacífico cartel, the Gulf cartel, and the Beltrán Leyva organisation.

José Manuel Mireles said on 8 April, “The fight against the Templarios is encouraging other organisations like Los Zetas to move into our territory. It is important that the authorities, before disarming us, should cleanse the region of criminals and preventing others from coming in.”

Several self-defence group leaders have concentrated their warnings of future instability on the rise of the false community-police groups. On 22 April self-defence groups accompanied a large contingent of federal forces into Huetamo, where armed men claiming to be community police had established checkpoints on access roads. The authorities reported that 46 “false autodefensas” had been arrested, and 23 firearms, a grenade launcher and almost 3,000 rounds of ammunition had been seized from them. Self defence group spokesman Estanislao Beltrán told a radio interviewer that among the detainees were members of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), an organisation which some officials had earlier pointed out were providing weapons to the self-defence groups.

In light of the devilishly complicated security situation in Mexico, it is impossible to see any action government forces (state or federal) can take that will improve matters. In the short term, at least, any actions to counter one threat will allow other threats to increase with greater ease. We do not believe the situation in Mexico can get better until it has got worse.