Is Mexico ceding its cities to drug cartels?
EL AGUAJE, Mexico — The Mexican city of Culiacan lived under drug cartel terror for 12 hours as gang members forced the government to free a drug lord’s son, but in many parts of Mexico, the government ceded the battle to the gangs long ago.
The massive, rolling gunbattle in Culiacan, capital of Sinaloa state, was shocking for the openness of the government’s capitulation and the brazenness of gunmen who drove machine-gun mounted armored trucks through the streets.
But in state after state, the Mexican government long ago relinquished effective control of whole towns, cities and regions to the drug cartels.
“They are the law here. If you have a problem, you go to them. They solve it quickly,” said a young mother in the town of El Aguaje, in western Michoacan state. El Aguaje is so completely controlled by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel that the young wife of a lime-grove worker — who would not give her name for fear of reprisals — can’t turn to police: They are too afraid to enter the town.
When a convoy of Michoacan state police did make a rare appearance in El Aguaje last Monday, they were ambushed and slaughtered by Jalisco cartel gunmen. Thirteen state police officers were shot or burned to death in their vehicles.
When police returned to recover the burned-out vehicles the next day, they were in such a hurry to accomplish their task that they left behind the crushed, burned, bullet-pierced skull of one of their colleagues lying on the ground.
In some cases, the government has even defended cartel boundaries, apparently as part of its strategy of avoiding bloodshed at all costs.
For example, in the Michoacan town of Tepalcatepec, police line up every day to man a checkpoint at a highway leading into Jalisco state to prevent an armed incursion by Jalisco cartel gunmen. The problem is that the government force is working in coordination with a vigilante group allied with a drug cartel. The vigilantes are posted on a nearby hilltop where they can watch over the highway, armed with .50-caliber sniper rifles.
And in the northern state of Tamaulipas, when the U.S. began returning asylum-seekers to wait for hearings in Mexico, the government knew it couldn’t protect the migrants from the Zetas drug cartel in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, so it simply bused them out of the city. Now known as the Cartel of the Northeast, the former Zetas control Nuevo Laredo so completely that they recently ordered local gas stations to refuse to sell gasoline to army vehicles.
In many regions, cartels enriched by drug profits have held extensive control for at least a decade, buying off or cowing law enforcement and building huge arsenals, along with networks of informants to protect narcotics routes from the government or rivals.
In this context, the government’s decision to release drug lord Ovidio Guzman — son of imprisoned capo Joaquin Guzman Loera — after the Culiacan shootouts was striking only because the government so publicly dropped even the pretense of enforcing the law.
“It’s not unprecedented for Mexican authorities to pick up a major capo and then release him; that’s actually unfortunately too common,” said David Shirk, a political science professor at the University of San Diego. “But what’s really unprecedented is to openly acknowledge that the state does not have the capacity or the stomach for keeping a major capo behind bars because of the potential consequences.
“But what message does it send to people who are under the yoke of criminal organizations all over Mexico?” Shirk asked. “I think the message is, ‘You’re on your own. We’re not going to come in and rescue you because you could get killed in the process.’ ”
The message to soldiers in the Mexican army is also pretty clear: The Defense Department blamed a military squad for the “rushed” operation to arrest Ovidio Guzman that set off the Culiacan gunbattles and pledged to punish the leaders of the squad.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has urged military restraint, saying his predecessors’ hard-line strategy in gang-controlled areas “turned this country into a cemetery.”
And the message to the cartels is clear. “Of course this is a victory for the Sinaloa Cartel, and a defeat for everyone,” said Ismael Bojorquez, the director of the Sinaloa newspaper Rio Doce. “In practical terms, Lopez Obrador decreed a truce with the narcos, and they are happy, they can move freely … the narcos can grow and grow and become more dangerous.”
On Friday, after the Culiacan gunbattles, Jose Luis Gonzalez Meza, a lawyer for the family of Ovidio’s father, the imprisoned drug lord known as “El Chapo,” said the family “apologizes” for the shootouts and pledged, “They will take care (of the expenses) of the wounded and the dead. … However many there were, man, no problem, they will help them economically.”
And the message for the rest of the world? Don’t expect Mexico to help capture or extradite drug lords anymore, as the country did with the elder Guzman.
“It does send a very sobering signal, I think, to Mexico and arguably to Mexico’s U.S. partners,” said Shirk. “If I were going to write the next State Department advisory for Mexico, I would dramatically increase this number and the number of advisories that I had for different parts of Mexico, because it’s very clear that the federal government is ceding territory … and not just rural territory, but major cities and perhaps even entire states to drug traffickers.”