Mexico & Nafta - January 2009 (ISSN 1741-444X)

On 1 January national daily, El Universal, reported that 5,630 people had been killed by gangsters in Mexico in 2008. The government has not published an official figure, though one figure produced by the government appeared to suggest that in the first 11 months of 2008 5,376 people had been killed by gangsters. A third count, from another newspaper, Reforma, put the death toll for the whole of 2008 at 5,207. Where both newspapers concur is that the 2008 death toll is at least double the 2007 figure.

Chihuahua is the state with the highest number of gang killings (at least 1,650, according to the Mexico city daily, Reforma, but 2,006 according to El Universal, followed by Sinaloa (650 on Reforma's count) and Baja California (616). Only one of Mexico's 32 states, Tlaxcala, did not see a single gang killing in 2008.

What is striking is that, according to Reforma, only 148 people were killed by gangsters in Chihuahua in 2007.

The only mild comfort for the government is that the killing rate slackened off in November and December after hitting a peak of 791 in October. In November 729 people were killed by gangsters, a figure which dropped to 669 in December.

Even before the end of 2008, the country's top law enforcement ministers were at odds over exactly how many people had been killed by gangsters. On 8 December the Procurador General de la República (PGR), Eduardo Medina Mora, admitted that 5,376 people had been killed by “drug traffickers" in 2008 alone. Yet a day earlier, Genaro Garcí­a Luna, the embattled public security minister, said that a total of 6,943 people had been “executed" - almost all of them killed by gangsters - since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa took office on 1 December 2006.

What made the PGR figure even more striking is that it is much higher than the unofficial score kept by the Mexico City press. The PGR's figure covered the period from 1 January to 2 December. El Universal, estimated that the death toll from 1 January to 3 December 2008 was 5,031 while Reforma reckoned that the toll from 1 January to 5 December 2008 at 4,780.

What is just as worrying for policymakers is that Medina Mora added, in a briefing to foreign correspondents, that he did not think that the killings had yet reached their peak. Medina Mora noted that in the comparable period of 2007 (1 January to 2 December), 2,477 people had been killed by gangsters in Mexico.

The PGR also argued that, contrary to Reforma's count, November was by far the worst month so far this year for gang killings. It reported that 943 people were killed in November alone by gangsters. December had been shaping up to be even worse, but the gangsters seem to have slackened off from 12 December (the Feast Day of Virgin of Guadalupe and the traditional start of Mexico's Christmas holidays which end with Epiphany on 6 January).

Where the PGR and Garcí­a Luna do agree, (but, we argue, are both in error) is that Mexico's annual murder rate is still comparatively low at 11 per 100,000 inhabitants. They say that Mexico's population is around 108.7m. They point out that the homicide rate in Guatemala and El Salvador is around 50 per 100,000 inhabitants; in Brazil, it is 40 per 100,000; and, in Colombia, 33 per 100,000. The homicide rate in the US is six per 100,000 inhabitants, while in Western Europe the rate is four per 100,000.

Yet according to data in President Calderón's Second Informe, published on 1 September 2008, there were 28,877 homicides in Mexico in calendar year 2007. This suggests that Mexico's homicide rate is, in fact, pretty close to Colombia's. In the Informe the government admits that the murder rate is 27.3 per 100,000 inhabitants, up from 26.3 per 100,000 in 2006.

Targeting, as well as massacring
The Mexican government argues that the upsurge in killings this year is largely due to increased feuding between factions of the country's three main drug gangs. There is certainly more killing of low-level gangsters in places such as Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Baja California, but there is also increasing evidence of gangs targeting and assassinating senior policemen.

On 8 December, Ví­ctor Hugo Moneda Rangel, one of Mexico City's top law enforcement officers, was gunned down as he arrived home. Two days later, Rogelio Calderón, a senior commander of the Policí­a Judicial in the Estado de México, was murdered while out on patrol in a squad car. He was responsible for coordinating state and federal forces against drug selling in the streets of Ecatepec, one of the suburbs of Mexico City.

These two killings suggest that the drug gangs are starting to move into Mexico City. Previously they have only killed policemen and law enforcement officials with national or regional responsibilities who happened to be based (and therefore killed) in Mexico City.  

The other big worry for the authorities is the gangs' corruption of the police. Edgar Olvera, the number two on the congressional public security committee, said on 8 December that the current purge of the police would leave the country with only 20% of the current national police strength of 375,000. Olvera was arguing that congress should approve the new public security law, which is designed to increase the quality of the police and pay them better.

Currently some police officers earn only between M$1,000 (US$74) and M$3,000 a month, and the majority get paid less than M$7,000. Some, according to Olvera, have to make ends meet by driving cabs or providing massages. Under the new law, the minimum police wage will be M$10,000 a month.

Kidnapping
Mexican public opinion, however, is much more concerned about kidnapping than the level of gang killings. An opinion poll in El Universal, published on 8 December, found that 70% of Mexicans supported the restoration of the death penalty (preferably by lethal injection) for kidnappers. The issue of capital punishment has come to the fore after the state congress in Coahuila, which is dominated by the opposition Partido Revolucionario Institucional, voted to ask the federal government for the state to be allowed to execute kidnappers who kill their victims. Nationally, the Partido Verde Ecologista de México supports the re-introduction of capital punishment for kidnappers and rapists.

In 2008, the Mexican media played up a couple of kidnappings (and subsequent murder) of two children. The first was that of Fernando Martí­, the son of a prominent businessman in August. The second was that of Silvia Vargas, the daughter of the former president of the Comisión Nacional de Deporte, Nelson Vargas. DNA tests confirmed that a body found in early December is that of Silvia, who was kidnapped over a year ago. Her disappearance and her family's anger at the police's sluggish response fuelled national indignation at the police just as the kidnapping and murder of Fernando Martí­ in August did.

Mexico has not executed anyone since 1961 and capital punishment was formally abolished by the federal congress in 2005.

Embattled
Genaro Garcí­a Luna, the public security minister, is facing a series of accusations and threats. The most serious comes from a former policeman, Javier Herrera Valles, who claims that Garcí­a Luna has let corruption flourish since he was appointed by President Felipe Calderón.

In early December two other threats to Garcí­a Luna emerged. The most eye-catching was a series of narcomantas (posters erected in public places by gangsters). On 8 December 27 narcomantas were erected in 12 cities in eight states. One huge (six metre) poster was even draped from the cathedral in Monterrey. The coordination of the operation to erect the narcomantas in highly public places suggests that whoever was behind them could pass themselves off as part of officialdom. Cynics suggest that Garcí­a Luna himself ordered the posters to shore up his position.  

Garcí­a Luna's other new threat, which may turn out to be the most serious, was the appointment of a serving general to the number-two position in Garcí­a Luna's own ministry, the Secretarí­a de Seguridad Pública (SSP). The snap judgment by Mexico's commentariat is that the appointment of General Javier del Real Magallanes as deputy minister for police strategy and intelligence shows that the army is taking more power for itself in the battle against organised crime. It may possibly, however, be an astute move by Garcí­a Luna to repair his relations with the military, which has an unquestioned reputation for probity in Mexico.  

The general was appointed on 5 December to replace Garcí­a Luna's associate, Facundo Rosas Rosas. Rosas has been shunted sideways to the less critical task of crime prevention. The defence minister, General Guillermo Galván Galván, is a longstanding sceptic about Garcí­a Luna, and Galván's supporters claim that Del Real Magallanes's appointment keeps Garcí­a Luna out of police intelligence and operations. Garcí­a Luna has been bidding to take control of the country's entire law enforcement operation which is currently split between his ministry, the Procurador General de la República (PGR), and states and municipalities.

The big problem for Garcí­a Luna is that Del Real is a serving general and so answers to the military chain of command. His superior is, obviously, Galván Galván rather than Garcí­a Luna.

It is no secret that General Galván had sought to persuade Calderón not to appoint Garcí­a Luna to the SSP, and had submitted evidence of acts of corruption and collusion with the drug gangs during the time Garcí­a Luna had been running the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI). The army is not the only organisation with doubts about Garcí­a Luna. The Catholic bishops' conference is perhaps the most prestigious.

Herrera
From Garcí­a Luna's point of view the allegations from Herrera Valles, a former head of regional deployment at the Policí­a Federal Preventiva, are perhaps the most dangerous because they are both sensational and appear to have some external validation.

Herrera claims that he was arrested by the PFP, which reports to the public security ministry, on allegedly trumped-up charges. Intriguingly, Ví­ctor Gerardo Garay Cadena, the then-commander of the PFP who sacked Herrera (presumably on Garcí­a Luna's orders), is now himself in prison, accused of being in the pay of the Beltrán Leyva brothers, who control a faction of the Sinaloa gang. On 10 December, Garay was also accused of profiting from robberies organised by gangs.

Garay's charge sheet suddenly lengthened on 13 December when the daily Reforma published a sensationalist article, based on a leaked report from the federal Procuraduria General de la República (PGR), that Garay, while   head of the Policia Federal Preventiva (PFP)   had taken part in an orgy when he raided a drug baron's mansion on 16 October 2008.

According to the report, Garay, who is now in preventive custody, led the raid on the drug baron's house, the Desierto de los Leones. Immediately after the police had secured the house, he lined up 30 of the girls found in the house in the in-house cinema and then picked out four of them; he then reportedly ordered the Jacuzzi to be warmed up and cocaine to be provided for the girls he had chosen to accompany him and the door locked.

Originally the government had made great play of the raid on the Desierto de los Leones. The gangster who owned it kept two panthers; two lions and a white tiger in the grounds.

The raid was supposed to lead to the arrest of Harold Poveda, a Colombian, who owned the Desierto de los Leones. Poveda was close to the Beltrán Leyva brothers. Poveda escaped during the raid on his house and Garay cancelled an order for a helicopter to be used to search for him because, Garay said, the weather was too cold. In fact, according to the PGR, Garay was in the Jacuzzi.    

The PGR leak to Reforma is damning. Garay demanded money from the gangsters he arrested and when one, Mauricio Fino, came up with only US$30,000 rather than the US$500,000 he had promised Garay, Garay made Fino ring Colombia to wire the missing US$470,000. Bizarrely, the money apparently turned up in a Winnie the Pooh bag hidden in a grey Ford Focus. The car was raided by the PFP and the money handed over to Garay's deputy, Edgard Bayardo.

Where the money went after that is unclear. Garay accused Bayardo of stealing it: Bayardo denied this and then told the PGR what Garay had been up to in the Desierto de los Leones. Other eyewitness, equally outraged at Garay's behaviour, confirmed Bayardo's accusations.

It is worth noting that several of the girls arrested (and abused as prostitutes) in the Desierto de los Leones raid have been released without charge. One Colombian woman who claimed that she was only at the house to show jewellery to Poveda's girlfriend on her birthday, had her story entirely checked out by the PGR.

Tijuana: A gang dressed in military fatigues attacked the offices of the state attorney general in Tijuana, Baja California on 17 December. The attack was beaten off before the gangsters could free prisoners arrested on 14 December but demonstrates how brazen the gangs have become. Three lawmen were injured in the attack.

Decapitations:   On 21 December the ministry of defence confirmed that eight of the 13 decapitated bodies found in Guerrero had been soldiers. The eight soldiers were killed (after apparently being tortured) between 9 and 21 December. The ministry of defence argued, in a statement, that the brutality of the attacks showed how desperate the gangsters are becoming.   Unofficial reports suggest that most of the soldiers were picked up by the gangsters while on leave from the 41st Infantry Batallion which is based at Chilpancingo.
The decapitated body of Simón Wenses Martí­nez, a former deputy head of the state police, was also found with the soldiers' bodies. The police also found a further four decapitated bodies: the police presume that these bodies were civilians.

• The death toll of 213 people for the week from 29 November to 5 December was the highest figure since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa took office on 1 December 2006.

• On 23 December the reigning Miss Sinaloa, Laura Zúñiga, the daughter of a gangster from the Juárez gang was arrested with seven other men as she travelled in a convoy conveying weapons and cash to Guadalajara. Zúñiga is not the first beauty queen to be tempted by the glamour of gangsters: the year before Emma Coronel, a beauty queen in Durango married Joaquí­n “El Chapo" Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa gang, on her 18th birthday.

• According to a witness in a witness-protection programme, Arturo González Rodrí­guez, a former major in the presidential guard, was in the pay of the Beltrán Leyva faction of the Sinaloa gang. He gave the gang confidential information of the president's itinerary and on anti-gang operations.