CARTEL CONFLICT IN MEXICO
VIOLENCE, INTIMIDATION, CORRUPTION FORCING FAMILIES TO FLEE HOMES SEEKING SHELTER, SAFETY
SO MANY ACTORS ARE INTERESTED IN CONTROLLING TERRITORY AND POPULATIONS TO EXTRACT RESOURCES, AND TO MAKE A STATEMENT: ‘I AM THE BOSS, AND I HAVE THE POWER TO DISPLACE YOU.’ — POLITICAL SCIENTIST ROMAIN LE COUR GRANDMAISON
María Jesús was grilling tortillas. Patricia was frying pork ribs. Adriana was sipping a cup of tea to calm her nerves. For the Martínez sisters, that Friday was shaping up like most Fridays in their mountain village, the women preparing lunch in their simple homes as their husbands tended the fields.
Then the women’s father, Javier, sent an urgent warning: The Jalisco cartel had arrived.
“Our lives changed in a minute,” said María Jesús, 31.
Gunmen in four armour-plated “monster” trucks had been spotted just across the valley, Javier told his children. They grabbed their kids and ran.
Three months later, 17 family members are crammed into an abandoned restaurant in Coahuayana, a banana-growing town on the Pacific coast, home to an estimated 1,000 Mexicans uprooted from their communities.
As criminal groups battle for control over Mexican territory, the displaced are becoming increasingly visible, in towns such as Coahuayana and at the U.S. border. An estimated 20,000 people have fled violence in the past year in Michoacán state. Thousands more have abandoned their homes in other states, such as Zacatecas and Guerrero.
Forced displacement is generally associated with armed conflict; it has been a feature of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet it has become such a problem in ostensibly peaceful Mexico that the country’s Senate is considering legislation to offer humanitarian aid to victims.
“We are at war,” said Alma Griselda Valencia, a congresswoman from Michoacán who belongs to the Morena party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“The fact the government doesn’t want to accept it is something else.”
What does Mexico’s war look like? In Michoacán’s Tierra Caliente region, one of the country’s most violent, homes are peppered with bullet holes. Drones launch bombs that gash holes in roofs. The Jalisco cartel has planted landmines.
Security officials describe the conflict as a battle between Jalisco and a rival cartel network to control the region, a hub of marijuana and methamphetamine production. But the accounts of the displaced underscore how unconventional this war actually is. At stake are not just drug routes, but timber, minerals and fruit plantations. In many cases, the armed groups have ties to local governments, business groups and the police.
Political scientist Romain Le Cour Grandmaison says displacement is a sign of the deepening crisis of violence in Mexico.
“So many actors are interested in controlling territory and populations to extract resources, and to make a statement: ‘I am the boss, and I have the power to displace you,’ ” he said.
It reflects what may be Mexico’s most critical problem. While the country has replaced its long-running authoritarian system with democracy, it has failed to build a justice system that prosecutes crime effectively.
“You can use violence for whatever interests you have in Mexico,” said Le Cour Grandmaison, who runs the security program at the think-tank México Evalúa. “It’s a low-cost, very efficient, political, economic or personal resource. It can be used with almost no judicial consequences.”
Javier Martínez’s butcher shop is an unlikely flash point in this war. For years he’d sold ground meat, ribs and fried pork rinds in his village in Chinicuila municipality, a bucolic place serenaded by the cackling of chickens.
Drugs were nothing new; for years, marijuana had flourished in Michoacán’s rich soil. But the illicit business began to change in the 1990s, as the grip of Mexico’s one-party system waned. Drug traffickers became more organized and better armed. They branched into cocaine and methamphetamines. Then they started to extort money from ordinary Mexicans.
Conditions got so bad that farmers in Martínez’s village, Tehuantepec, were forced to pay a “tax” every time they sold a cow or a sack of corn.
“We decided to rise up,” said the 53-year-old butcher.
Starting in 2013, thousands of Michoacán residents formed citizen militias, kicking out the brutal Knights Templar cartel. Martínez became head of his town’s “self-defence” force. For a while, things were quiet.
“But now,” he said, “here comes El Mencho.”
That would be Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes. He leads the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which has trafficked tons of heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl into the U.S. “One of the five most dangerous transnational criminal organizations in the world,” says the U.S. government.
Martínez sees something else: a bunch of gunmen determined to snatch control of this region’s timber supplies, iron ore mines and banana plantations.
Like the Knights Templar, the Jalisco cartel has recruited local men. Instead of cartel versus cartel battles, whole villages are now swept up in the fighting.
“The targets of violence have become much broader,” said Falko Ernst, senior Mexico analyst for the International Crisis Group. If one group moves into a town, he said, it not only expels its gun-toting enemies but frequently does a “social cleansing” of their relatives and other civilian supporters.
Economic and family disputes feed the chaos. When the Jalisco gunmen turned up in Tehuantepec on Dec. 3, Martínez said, they got help from some residents who were jealous of his successful butcher shop. Rival merchants, he said, “wanted to eliminate the competition.”
The gunmen torched Javier Martínez’s butcher shop and home, and three other houses belonging to relatives. By the time state police arrived, the family had sped down the mountain in their trucks and a borrowed a van to the coast, two hours away.
María Jesús said they had only one real guarantee of security: “My father knew Teto.”
Héctor Zepeda — “Comandante Teto” — is the law in Coahuayana, and a symbol of how Mexico’s old security arrangements have collapsed.
Hollywood-handsome, with soft brown eyes and a sly grin, Teto became head of the local “self-defence” force in 2014, after his brother was killed by the Knights Templar. Now he leads 120 men in military-grade body armour, equipped with assault rifles.
“I don’t really want to carry a weapon. None of my companions do,” said the 51-year-old former auto mechanic, sitting at a roughhewed wooden desk in front of a wall covered with pictures of fallen comrades and the Virgin of Guadalupe. “But we have to fight every day to survive.”
To many of the displaced, Teto is a hero. He has found homes for them, and given them jobs on his force. The Martínez family now live in a rundown former restaurant with a courtyard webbed with lines of drying laundry.
“He even got us a refrigerator and a stove,” María Jesús said.
Most of all, Teto has brought security to the town, an oasis of sea breezes and swaying banana trees, where traumatized families from other regions have packed into pastel-coloured homes.
Yet it’s a fragile peace. The Jalisco cartel gunmen are so close that when the “self-defence” forces patrol the town’s perimeter, they can hear their enemies’ voices crackling over the radio.
In a video last year, the Jalisco fighters accused Teto of working with their rivals, Carteles Unidos, a Michoacán-based crime syndicate. Teto denies the charge.
The traffickers aren’t the only ones making such allegations. Shortly after taking office in October, Gov. Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla pledged to disarm the “self-defence” forces in the state. They had come to represent, he said, “a sort of camouflage for illicit activities.”
But the governor hasn’t managed to dislodge Teto.
Quite the opposite. This town of 18,000 recently issued police uniforms and credentials to the “self-defence” fighters and put dozens onto the public payroll. The 15 members of the state-recognized municipal police now serve under Teto.
Mayor Gil Ruiz said many townsfolk believed that federal and state security forces were corrupt or didn’t have the savvy or will to fight criminal groups effectively. In Michoacán, everyone remembers the tight embrace between the Knights Templar and many politicians and police.
The people don’t trust the police, Ruiz said. “But the people have confidence in the self-defence forces.”
Coahuayana’s economic elite don’t want to rely on the state security apparatus, either. The banana growers, who’ve enjoyed a boom under North America’s Free Trade Agreement, began bankrolling Teto’s militia years ago. The mayor, a banana producer, said the force was the only alternative to the Knights Templar and their $250-a-day “protection fees” on fruit shipments.
Longtime residents agree that the “self-defence” forces ended a terrifying period of robbery and murder under the Knights Templar.
But questions swirl about exactly what role Teto’s force has played in Coahuayana’s unending plague of methamphetamine abuse. Teto says he has cracked down on drug sales.
“We don’t know who to trust,” said one woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety.
López Obrador has won praise from human rights groups for recognizing the problem of the internally displaced. The lower chamber of Congress, dominated by his party, unanimously approved a bill in 2020 to register and aid people who are forced to leave home. It covers not only victims of organized crime violence but those uprooted by land disputes, religious conflicts and natural disasters. The legislation is now before the Senate.