Mexico & Nafta - 12 October 2004

The country's top official in the battle against organised crime, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, argued that none of the drug gangs in the country posed a threat to the Mexican state. Santiago Vasconcelos is the head of the organised crime unit at the Procuradurí­a General de la República and he was speaking at the 73rd annual meeting of Interpol, which this year was held in Cancún, Mexico. 

Santiago Vasconcelos's statement belies what many locals believe. He was responding to an interview, given by a former Colombian president, Ernesto Samper, to a Mexico City newspaper, El Universal. Samper said that Mexico was now living in a state of narco-terror similar to that which afflicted Colombia. 

Samper's argument is based on the fact that over the past 10 years, since the advent of Nafta turned Mexico into the main drug conduit to the US, Mexico's drug traffickers have become increasingly rich and violent. There have been regular rumours, and stories in the New York Times, linking senior politicians to drug gangs. The most notorious New York Times story claimed that the current president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional in the lower chamber of congress, and a former government of Sonora, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, had been close to drug traffickers. The newspaper had to retract its story when it failed to produce any firm evidence to substantiate its allegation. 

The widespread view in Mexico has been that the drug gangs either paid off or killed off those investigating them; policemen, judges and journalists could choose between plomo o plata (lead or silver). It is this background which makes the sweeping statement by José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos so newsworthy. He utterly rejected the notion that Mexico was becoming Colombianised. He said that the Mexican government had never been as weak as the Colombian government and never had submitted or bowed to organised crime groups in the way that governments in Colombia had.

Santiago Vasconcelos said that Samper's comments were out of date and out of context and that although they may have been true of Colombia in the 1980s, when the Colombian economy had a rough time and the country was divided, Mexico had never suffered anything as troubling. Santiago Vasconcelos's statements are inaccurate: Colombia's economy, amazingly, grew by a steady 3% a year for over 40 years from 1950. It did not suffer any of the economic and financial crises that buffeted Mexico from the early 1980s. Colombia was the only major economy in Latin America that did not have to reschedule its foreign debts.

Santiago Vasconcelos argues that the upsurge in drug-related violence in Mexico is the result of the weakening of the gangs. He claimed that there were now no dominant gangs with unchallenged control of areas of the country, so smaller gangs competed violently for their share of the business. Santiago Vasconcelos came dangerously close to lamenting the decline of the big powerful gangs, which, in his view, did not permit violent squabbling.

Again, this view seems at odd with the facts. The still unresolved murder of the cardinal archbishop Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who was apparently caught up in a shoot-out between two gangs at Guadalajara airport in May 1993, showed that even when the big gangs were more powerful the level of violence was high. Santiago Vasconcelos said that he was confident that there was no criminal group, organisation or alliance which posed a threat to the Mexican state.