Books in 2017: A Personal Selection

 Mohammad Mohiedine Anis, 70, smokes his pipe as he sits in his destroyed bedroom listening to music on his vinyl player in Aleppo's formerly rebel-held al-Shaar neighbourhood.(AFP PHOTO / JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images)

Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos

One of the most important - but in many ways least remembered - Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, whose words translate seamlessly into English in this bilingual collection, Julia de Burgos was the often-anguished and sometimes dizzyingly sensual voice of Puerto Rico who died at 39 in New York City in 1953. In her poetry, recurring images - the sea, the stars - lighten to a degree what can often be the bleak inner life of her writing, and, as a committed political militant and passionate anti-fascist, one of her greatest poems, a tribute to the Rio Grande de Loíza remains, years later, a defiant call to an island and a people battered by catastrophes both natural and man-made:

¡Río Grande de Loíza!... Río grande. Llanto grande.
El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños,
si no fuera más grande el que de mi se sale
por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo.

Rio Grande de Loiza! . . . Great river. Great flood of tears.
The greatest of all our island's tears
save those greater that come from the eyes
up of my soul for my enslaved people.

Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania Book by Roland Clark

This all-too-relevant book looks at the foundations and growth of Romania’s indigenous fascist movements, especially Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Iron Guard, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael or, simply, as the Legionnaire movement. Facing a crumbling state whose moral equivocations finally eroded its authority, the Romanian fascists blended a wild, faux-mystical antisemitic violence with religious and folk-historical symbolism, including appearing in isolated rural villages dressed as haiduc, outlaws who had fought local oppressors in the 19th century. It is no coincidence that Codreanu’s image appeared on t-shirts worn by some of the far-right protesters who ran amok in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past summer. In addition to assassinations and street violence, the Legionnaires also defined themselves through art – they sold handmade crosses with the words “by sacrificing our lives we will escape from thieves” inscribed beneath them - and by long marches in between Romanian towns that “alerted onlookers that there was something distinctive about the Legion, showing that legionnaires valued hierarchy, order, discipline and physical fitness.” Though not a time in European history that attracts a great deal of attention today, this interwar period in Romania certainly holds a cautionary tale for our present moment.

Los Zetas Inc: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico by Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

Though there have been a surfeit of books detailing the garish violence of Mexico’s drug cartels – organizations whose lifeblood depends on both the ravenous appetite for narcotics and current policies of the United States – no book has delved in such nuts-and-bolts detail into the financial hierarchies and dynamics that inform the running of one of these organizations as does Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s tome on Los Zetas. Highly recommended for anyone seeking to understand the inner working of organized crime and how it integrates itself into the legitimate economy.

Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad

The majesty of one of Iran’s greatest poets – who combines a world and once modern and antique and who writes as frankly and elegantly about female desire as anyone ever has – calls out from the page and evokes a forgotten glory of a national literary tradition that, while perhaps dormant at the moment, waits to be born again.

Family Portrait With Fidel: A Memoir by Carlos Franqui

A memoir of disillusionment and disenchantment with a revolution he once risked his life to support, this memoir by Carlos Franqui, an anti-Batista author and rebel who became editor of the important newspaper Revolución after the dictator’s fall, Franqui’s book shows the betrayal of the Cuban people by the Castro brothers and their allies and the subsuming of hard-fought victories and dreams of progress to totalitarianism. “We carried out all kinds of executions,” Franqui writes at one point. “Real, moral and symbolic.”

Everybody Leaves by Wendy Guerra

A moving elegy to the vanished youth of a Cuban girl’s conflicted and adventurous early life growing up in Cienfuegos and Havana.

Ghost Stories by M. R. James

Classic English ghost stories from one of the masters of the genre, including such gems as “Casting the Runes” and “After Dark in the Playing Fields.” A most enjoyable diversion.

Paradiso by  José Lezama Lima

A complicated, allusive novel of Cuba in the early part of the 20^th century, Lezama’s key work remains one of the greatest achievements of Latin American fiction of his era, and his erotic, poetic prose (“They looked each other over with long pauses of insatiation and a carnality of symphonic progression”) couldn’t be further away from the square, macho military culture of today’s “official” Cuba. A sleeping giant, waiting be discovered.

The End of Eddy: A Novel by Édouard Louis

A beautifully rendered and occasionally brutal and disturbing memoir of growing up poor and gay in  northern France, this book captures the simultaneous ache and occasional truces in difficult, dysfunctional families with great clarity and speaks to anyone who ever felt like a misfit who had to break away into the great unknown.

Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea by Shiraz Maher

A vitally important work in decoding the ideology (cosmology might be a better term) of salafi-Jihadism, this book by a noted British academic (and former radical himself) lays out in minute detail the current jihadi interpretation of such concepts as tatarrus (roughly a theological construct relating to human shields but also expanding into targeting civilians) and their roots in various schismatic schools of Islamic thought.

Mephisto by Klaus Manm

The story of an actor’s seduction by the rewards offered by proximity to power in Nazi Germany, the great German author’s 1936 novel has unnerving parables to the situation here in the contemporary United States, and one wonders how many in the orbit of the current U.S. president and his minions have - or will - mentally echo the performer Höfgen thoughts when, as Mephisto, he meets Herman Goering: ”Now I have contaminated myself…Now there is a stain on my hand that I can never wash off…Now I have sold myself…Now I am marked for life.”

Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons

The garishly theatrical nature of the early Ku Klux Klan, where elements of minstrelsy combined with brutal violence, is here chronicled in a book that is often revelatory. Formed in Pulaski, Tennessee in May or June 1866 (and not, as is often claimed, by former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who only attached to himself to the Klan later), the Klan were defined from the beginning by a relentless repetition of “the portrayal of black people as failed citizens and of white attackers as the people” and sought to destroy black associations and kill their white allies, and to actively and deliberately to destroy familial bonds among freepeople. A vital and important part of U.S. history to be understood.

 Impossible Revolution by Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Perhaps the pinnacle of Syrian dissident literature from a man who spent 16 years in the prisons of the tyrant Hafez al-Assad only to be released and watch the dictator’s son, Bashar al-Assad, take over and level the country, Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s book is a cri de cœur that leaves few unscathed.

Writing that, by early 2012 it was “increasingly clear that the unimaginable situation we had discussed privately - the regime would be willing to destroy the country for the sake of staying in power - was its only political agenda, and that it was already being implemented,” Saleh chronicles massacres in Damascus, Homs and elsewhere and illuminates such critical moments as the July 2012 killing of various Syrian security officers (and the subsequent escalation of the use of barrel bombs) as the moment Iran began taking control of the regime’s defenses.

Saleh scathingly critiques “a neo-bourgeois during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, a class that owes everything to the regime and has a lot to lose were the revolution to emerge victorious” who in turn serve a government who views its people “with contempt and disdain, in a manner no different from a colonizing power’s view of the colonized; this justifies the use of violence against the “backward” masses and cheapens the value of the lives, so much so that killing them is a matter of no great concern.” Saleh sees his hometown of Raqqa slide under control of the jihadists, noting bitterly that he was “unable to walk around the city where I had spent years of my adolescence, where most of my brothers lived, and where my parents had lived until their deaths, while some religiously-obsessed, enraged Tunisians, Saudis, Egyptians and Europeans roamed freely, unable to engage in anything other than murder.” Detailing the depredations of the regime’s muscle-bound, murderous shock troops, known as shabiha (many with roots in the seaside city of Latakia), Saleh quotes the Syrian-British writer Rana Kabbani describing pro-regime Western writers - especially Robert Fisk - as "shabiha of the pen." Nor does former U.S. President Barack Obama – whose inaction in the wake of Assad’s August 2013 Ghouta must be seen as a turning point of the war escape critique, cited for his “treacherous and dastardly” deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Syria shortly thereafter.

“Those who had appointed themselves the guardians of international law were reassuring a murderer that they might be compelled to punish him for violating international law,” Saleh writes of the toothless response to the attack. “But without affecting his ability to kill people and with no reference to his other crimes…The international community decided mass slaughter of Syrians by regime wasn’t a crime, but the weapon used was.”

The government in Syria, Saleh writes, only ever offered “a cosmetic modernity…without any emancipatory privileges,” whose “real identity” consisted of “ the combination of an obsolete, inhumane political apparatus with a glamorous material façade.”

Today, seven years after Syria’s war began, the international community’s abandonment of the people of Syria has never seemed more complete.

Foreign Correspondent by Robert St. Johh

An extraordinary first hand account of Europe’s slide into fascism, this memoir contains, among other details, chilling eyewitness accounts of the rise (and fall) of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard and of the destruction of Belgrade by the Nazis. A searing and timely reminder of how quickly a society that thought of itself as civilized can descend into madness.

Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada by Zoé Valdés

A novel of a rebel voice living through the hundred daily humiliations of life in an ossifying tyranny, this book sets out to chronicle “the island that in wanting to build a paradise has created a hell,” and in doing so skewers many hoary myths of Cuba.

“There are those who maintain that people throw themselves into the sea over insignificant economic deprivations - can’t get any blue jeans, can’t find any chewing gum - but anyone who says that simply doesn’t know Cuba,” Valdés writes. “Doesn’t know the terror and hunger the Cuban people have known; people who say that are those whose knowledge of the country is limited to the luxury hotels and the government."

A Direct Line: How a glut of cheap, powerful heroin grown in Mexico is delivered more than 2,000 miles to Lancaster County

6 September 2017

How a glut of cheap, powerful heroin grown in Mexico is delivered more than 2,000 miles to Lancaster County

By Michael Deibert

LNP

(Read the originals story here)

They stare out silently from the photographs as they were in life, but they have crossed over to a plain from which there is no return. 

Megan Anna Hummer, of Landisville, smiling and playing with her dog, died of a heroin overdose at age 31. She was living in a recovery home at the time.

“Iron Mike” Stauffer, tattooed and homeless on the streets of Lancaster city, began using heroin as a 16-yearold in Ephrata and died at 36 this summer.

Elizabeth Loranzo, a Lancaster School of Cosmetology graduate, had gotten clean, relapsed and died of an overdose at 25, leaving behind a 9-month-old son and a fiance.

The rolling farmlands of Lancaster County might seem a world away from the rugged hills of northern Mexico, but the ravenous appetite for drugs here has made southeastern Pennsylvania a lucrative market for a product that’s sale continues to fuel violence in America’s southern neighbor and despair on Pennsylvanian streets.

The surge in demand for heroin has coincided with shifts in the distribution network that allow for cheaper, more powerful forms of the drug to be delivered more quickly via brokers working for cartels to small-town neighborhoods from coast to coast.

In the most noteworthy change in recent decades, Mexican drug cartels sneaking heroin through legal points of entry have disrupted and overtaken the traditional supply chain, which once originated in the poppy fields of Afghanistan.

“Our heroin used to come from Afghanistan, and it was expensive to get it here,” Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman said. “Now it comes from Mexico, and it’s a lot cheaper. The heroin we have is predominantly coming from Mexican cartels.”

Mexico’s Golden Triangle, an imposing, mountainous region where the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua meet, produces both high-grade poppies, from which heroin is derived, and marijuana.

The influence of the organizations that benefit from the trade — and two cartels in particular — can be felt even here, nearly 2,000 miles from the Mexican border.

Meet the suppliers

Responsible for delivering most of the heroin and other drugs flowing into Pennsylvania are two Mexican drug cartels: the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG.

“It’s safe to say the majority of drugs coming in today are chiefly from the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG,” said Gary Tuggle, the special agent in charge at the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Philadelphia field division, under whose jurisdiction Lancaster County falls.

The Sinaloa Cartel was founded by the now imprisoned Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera and Héctor Luis “El Güero” Palma Salazar after the collapse of the Guadalajara Cartel in the late 1980s.

The cartel operated a cocaine distribution hub in Lancaster County until the arrest of its county-based drug runners in 2007. The runners flew drugs into the Smoketown Airport, lived in homes in Manheim Township and operated a local carpet cleaning business as a front as they ran drugs up and down the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

When the runners were arrested, authorities found $1.8 million in cash and $160,000 in drugs in their Manheim Township homes, as well as $2 million worth of drugs in a car that was stopped on the turnpike just north of Lancaster County.

The CJNG is Mexico’s fastest-growing drug trafficking organization, holding sway over a multistate empire that runs nearly unbroken from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf Coast.

The CJNG was largely formed by the foot soldiers of Sinaloa Cartel boss Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal after he was killed in a July 2010 drug battle with the Mexican army.

The cartel began as something of a spinoff of Sinaloa and has since emerged as a force all its own. In its September 2011 coming out, the CJNG dumped 35 corpses, believed to be members of the rival Los Zetas Cartel, into rush-hour traffic in a suburb of the Gulf Coast city of Veracruz.

In 2015, the CJNG ambushed and killed 15 police officers. Last year, it shot down a military helicopter with rocketpropelled grenades, killing five soldiers.

Though many of the group’s chieftains have been captured in recent years, the CJNG’s cofounder, a former police officer named Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, remains at large.

The CJNG is the dominant criminal faction in Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, Nayarit, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Morelos and Veracruz and is believed to have its eyes on an expansion.

A report earlier this month in the Mexican newspaper Periódico Noroeste quoted anonymous sources from an investigative body affiliated with Mexico’s Ministry of Interior who claimed the CJNG would launch an offensive in coming months to take over vast swaths of the Sinaloa Cartel’s territory.

Cheaper and faster delivery

The traditionally dominant drug trafficking organizations from Mexico have begun to fracture as drug lords are slain or captured by the government or one another, and the highly linear system of drug distribution in Pennsylvania and elsewhere has had to adapt.

The characteristic control that Mexican drug-trafficking organizations had exercised over everything from the production of marijuana and poppies to the processing, manufacturing, transportation and distribution of the product down to the retail level has shifted.

Drug trafficking today is no longer the centralized process it once was, and now involves brokers who go into particular areas and identify the retail distribution networks, which are interested in the highest purity level at the lowest cost.

“We believe the Sinaloa Cartel is still involved in providing cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl and other drugs to this area, but it’s being shipped directly rather than going to a distribution hub like Chicago,” said Tuggle, of the Drug Enforcement Agency. “We strongly believe that pattern is going to increase.”

Law enforcement officials say cartel brokers will now enter a zone and offer their services to indigenous drug-trafficking groups.

Those groups themselves, in turn, have become so atomized and businesslike that some will “rent” territory to other organizations in which they can sell their product while the local criminal organizations collect a cut of the profits.

This has proven to be the case in North Philadelphia, for example, in areas where traditionally Latino gangs have subleased territory to African-American drug organizations.

These shifting dynamics have produced a marked change in both the users and the dealers, police say.

“Back in the day, the stereotypical heroin addict was older,” said Lancaster city police Chief Keith Sadler, who worked with law enforcement in Philadelphia for 27 years before taking the reins to head Lancaster’s police force in 2008.

“But it’s no longer just an old junkie drug. And that heroin was, like, 5 to 10 percent (pure) back then. Now it’s almost pure. And half of these dealers now are addicts themselves. Further up the food chain. Now you see a lot of these guys are using their own product.”

And despite the takedown of many major cartel figures in Mexico, the purity of the drug gets better as the prices go down.

“You don’t have the corner trafficking and as many shootouts over the corner,” Stedman said. “But what we’re seeing now are drug rip-offs and people using violence because they feel people owe them money for drugs, home invasions and things like that.”

Losing the war?

The decapitations and capture of so many cartel leaders has had little impact on the flow of drugs into the United States. And they have failed to tamp down the violence associated with the drug trade in Mexico itself.

In June, 2,234 people were slain in Mexico in what was the deadliest month in 20 years.

“The kingpin strategy does not work in anti-narcotics operations if the aim is to stop drug trafficking and related activities,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Correa-Cabrera has studied cartel activity in Mexico for more than a decade.

“When a kingpin is removed, he’s replaced by someone else, violence increases, and there has not been really any visible impact in the drug trade,” Correa- Cabrera said.

Once powerful regional cartels such as Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel fracture, but others rise to take their place.

And the drugs keep flowing.

In March, authorities dismantled an Allentown-Reading drug trafficking ring that was smuggling large quantities of heroin, cocaine and meth into the area from Mexico.

Police seized $2.2 million worth of heroin and meth when they stopped and searched a tractor-trailer with California plates in Reading, leading to the arrest of six people, five of whom are U.S. residents.

In May, five members of the so-called Aryan Strikeforce, a white-supremacist organization based in Pennsylvania, were indicted by a Harrisburg grand jury for conspiring to transport methamphetamines, firearms and machine gun parts.

In June 2015, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania handed down a 108-count indictment charging 37 people allegedly associated with the Cartel de los Laredo, a kind of mini-cartel based in the city of Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos, with money laundering and drug charges stemming from the importation of heroin to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois and elsewhere.

One often overlooked aspect of the drug trade is the role that legitimate financial institutions in the United States and elsewhere have played in facilitating it.

Entities such as Bank of America, Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) and HSBC were found by U.S. investigators to have been used to launder billions of dollars of drug profits. The latter was ordered to pay a record $1.92 billion for laundering Mexican drug money in 2012.

And for every kilo of heroin seized, many more are making it through the legal points of entry between the two countries and into communities across Pennsylvania.

Building a wall along the Mexico border, such as the one proposed by President Donald Trump, likely would have little impact on the trade in Lancaster County or anywhere else in the United States, officials said.

Despite the U.S. Customs and Border Protection requesting $1.6 billion earlier this year for 32 miles of a new wall system and 28 miles of levee walls, according the CBP’s own figures, from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2016, 81 percent of the drugs intercepted at the U.S.Mexico border were stopped at legal ports of entry, not by border patrol agents patrolling more remote locations.

On the Ground: Michael Deibert interview with Sam Schindler on What We Will Abide

26 August 2017

Journalist Michael Deibert has called several countries –if not continents– home, and has written several books, including In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico, and most recently Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History, which came out earlier this year.

He’s had articles published in The Guardian, Truthdig, The Huffington Post and Slate among others.

He currently resides in Lancaster, but as his résumé clearly shows, staying put isn’t exactly his game. We sat together on a relatively cool summer morning in the cemetery adjacent to St. James’ Church in the heart of Lancaster City, where he was born and the city he calls home – for now.

Listen to the full interview here. 

2016: A Reporter’s Notebook of the Year Gone By

 Gibara, Cuba. Photo by the author.

This year marked two milestones for your humble correspondent as a writer: I completed my second book on Haiti - Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History, which will be published by Zed Books next year - and I was finally able to engage thoroughly with Cuba, a fascinating country at a pivotal moment and which I was lucky enough to visit multiple times this year. Hopefully, going forward in 2017, I can continue trying to bridge the gaps between we fragile humans who inhabit this delicate earth, and help people to realize that the threads than bind us together are in fact stronger than those which keep us apart.

Paz y amor,

M

A New Global Footprint for Cuba Biomed for Cuba Trade Magazine (15 December 2016)

Closing Arguments for Michael Deibert's Blog (6 November 2016)

The Ghosts of Assad  A Review of Francesca Borri's Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War for Michael Deibert's Blog (15 September 2016)

Nicaragua tiptoes back to tyranny for fDi Magazine (26 August 2016)

Former economy minister takes power in Peru for fDi Magazine (27 June 2016)

The Panama Papers is the least of Central America’s woes for fDi Magazine (16 June 2016)

My talk "Haiti Will Not Perish" at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (thanks to Severine Autesserre for making it happen (27 April 2016)

Review of my book  In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico  From "Drugs, Violence, and Corruption: Perspectives from Mexico and Central America" in Latin American Politics and Society, Vol 58, Issue 1 (17 April 2016)

The fêted and the dead in Haiti for Michael Deibert's Blog (17 February 2016)

‘Rotten system’ blamed as Haiti’s election ends in stalemate for The Guardian (14 February 2016)

Haiti dances nervously towards bitterly contested presidential election for The Guardian (21 January 2016)

The Demon Heirs of El Chapo for The Daily Beast (10 January 2016)

Review of In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico

Review of In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico

From "Drugs, Violence, and Corruption: Perspectives from Mexico and Central America" By Sonja Wolf in Latin American Politics and Society, Vol 58, Issue 1

(Read the original here)

In the Shadow of Saint Death, the third book from independent journalist Michael Deibert, is a superb piece of reporting on U.S. drug policy and its devastating effects on drug-producing and transit countries in the Western Hemisphere. Ambitious in scope, the volume touches on themes such as violence and sleaze, media censorship, and the survival and resistance of local heroes. With rich descriptions, the author effortlessly recreates the atmosphere in villages and towns across Mexico and Central America that are reeling under the impact of the drug war. The narrative is constructed around the history of the Gulf Cartel and events in its home state of Tamaulipas. But the book is really addressed to a U.S. audience, to whom Deibert aspires to convey the bloody consequences of an insatiable drug demand and a futile prohibitionist approach to drug control.

In his biting critique of U.S. policy, Deibert shows how historically the prohibition of certain substances and the criminalization of their consumers have created corruption and illegal markets. Successive administrations—from Richard Nixon through Barack Obama—have pursued the drug war both at home and abroad, costing the country more than one trillion dollars without ever making significant inroads into this public health issue. In a brief but fascinating section on the Reagan years, the journalist reminds readers how political goals even prompted the United States to collude with known drug traffickers. If the drug war has not yielded the expected results, why does the United States insist on fighting it, and how has it been successfully exporting it around the world for so long? Deibert does not concern himself with the second question and answers the first puzzle by pointing to business interests— notably the private prison industry—and the electoral interests of politicians.

The author is adamant that current drug policies must change and alternatives to drug control and addiction be explored. In the epilogue, the most reflective part of the book, he predicts more violence for Mexico and its southern neighbors unless a fundamental shift in strategy occurs. The terms of the debate have altered, although the fight for drug policy reform is bound to be a long one. Sounding a hopeful note, Deibert cites a 2009 report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy—which pronounced the failure of the eradication and interdiction approach—and a 2011 document by the Global Commission on Drug Policy that urges experimentation with government regulation of drugs.

In the Shadow of Saint Death went to press before the publication of the GCDP’s successor report (2014), which set out a roadmap for the creation of more effective and humane drug policies. Deibert identifies Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina as an example of leadership on drug decriminalization, even as he recognizes that the unexpected espousal of a progressive standpoint may mask other agendas. The book certainly makes a strong case for drug policy alternatives, but scientific research will need to demonstrate the viability of unconventional approaches.

The Demon Heirs of El Chapo

01.10.1612:15 AM ET

The Demon Heirs of El Chapo

 Like the hydra from Greek mythology, the chopping off of one of the drug cartel’s heads leaves room for many more bloodthirsty replacements.

By Michael Deibert

The Daily Beast

(Read the original here.)

When Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto tweeted Misión cumplida: lo tenemos (Mission accomplished, we got him), no one in Mexico had to ask who the “him” in question was. After fleeing what was supposedly the nation’s most secure prison in July 2015 for a second time, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of Mexico’s storied Sinaloa Cartel and the world’s most well-known drug trafficker, had been re-captured after six months on the run.

With the exception of his Sinaloa Cartel colleague Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, El Chapo is virtually the last of the old guard of Mexico’s drug trafficking monarchy to fall. Preceding him have been the likes of the Juárez Cartel’s Amado Carrillo Fuentes (who moved so much cocaine into Mexico from Colombia in the hollowed-out bodies of jets that he was called El Señor de Los Cielos, or Lord of the Skies), the Tijuana Cartel’s Arellano Félix brothers (almost all killed or imprisoned), the Gulf Cartel’s Osiel Cárdenas Guillén (currently held at the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado), the brothers who lead the Beltrán Leyva Organization (dead or imprisoned) and virtually all of the original members of Los Zetas, a group that started out as Gulf Cartel enforcers but violently broke out on their own in early 2010.

Though cartel kingpins have been falling liking dominoes in recent years, the drug trade in Mexico has micronized rather than disappeared. Violence and insecurity, much of it linked to politics, continues to bedevil the country.

In the violence-plagued state of Guerrero, whose Acapulco was once a playground for the idle rich, narco gangs such as Los Ardillos and Los Rojos victimize the state’s indigenous communities as they do battle with one another for lucrative drug-trafficking routes. Los Ardillos are run by a pair of criminally minded brothers, Celso and Antonio Ortega Jiménez (drug trafficking in Mexico is often a family business) from a family where a third sibling, Bernardo Ortega Jiménez, served as president of the state congress in Guerrero. Los Rojos are led by Santiago “El Carrete” Mazari Miranda, a former soldier in the Beltrán-Leyva Organization.

The Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG), which began as something of a spinoff of the Sinaloa Cartel, has since emerged as a force all its own. After a spectacular September 2011 coming out—it dumped 35 corpses into rush-hour traffic in a suburb of the Gulf Coast city of Veracruz, many of them daubed with anti-Zetas slogans—the CJNG shot down a military helicopter last year. Though many of the group’s chieftains have been captured in recent years, the CJNG’s co-founder, Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, a native of the state of Michoacán and, like so many narcos, a former police officer, remains at large.

Along Mexico’s border with the United States, after a four-year war of attrition against one another in the state of Tamaulipas that saw mass-casualty gunbattles and entire busloads of people kidnapped and killed, Los Zetas themselves and their former employers in the Gulf Cartel have seen their leadership decapitated. But their remaining cells remain active and highly lethal.

After Zetas co-founder Rogelio González Pizaña, known better as El Kelín, was released in August 2014 after serving a decade in prison, he reportedly headed back to Tamaulipas to resume his role in the drug trade, and was there murdered by current Gulf Cartel leaders when he attempted a takeover of the group’s birthplace, the city of Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

If true, the murder of the old hand, allegedly by forces loyal to the new Matamoros plaza boss, Odon “El Cherry” Azua Cruces, is highly symbolic of the earlier generation being pushed out by the new. In a further illustration of this phenomenon, in Reynosa, Tamaulipas and across the Rio Grande from the U.S. city of McAllen, Texas, splintering factions of the Gulf Cartel now do battle with legions of sicarios (assassins) barely into their teens.

There was supposed to be a changing of the political guard in Mexico, too, after the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI) spent 12 years outside the presidency before returning under the younger, telegenic Peña Nieto. But during that interim, democracy, such as it is, settled rather more lightly across much of the country.

In the state of Veracruz, for example, the administrations of the PRI’s Fidel Herrera Beltrán and now Javier Duarte de Ochoa, which have collectively governed the state for more than a decade, have seen an ever-greater blurring of the lines between political cadres, law enforcement, and drug traffickers. A Gulf Cartel accountant even testified in a U.S. federal court that he had funneled $12 million in cartel money to Herrera Beltrán’s electoral campaign in exchange for moving narcotics freely through the state. And those who criticize the situation in Veracruz too strongly have a bad habit of turning up dead. Just ask the families of photojournalist Rubén Espinosa and activist Nadia Vera Pérez, who were slain in a Mexico City apartment along with three others this past summer.

And in the border state of Tamaulipas, likewise, the PRI’s grip on power has never been dislodged.
Two years ago, the chief bodyguard for Tamaulipas Gov. Egidio Torre Cantú was arrested for involvement in the murder of state intelligence chief Salvador Haro Muñoz. Torre Cantú’s predecessor as governor, Eugenio Javier Hernández Flores, saw fit to entrust his personal security to a well-known Gulf Cartel hitman, and was indicted in the United States last year on drug-related money-laundering charges. Hernández Flores’s predecessor, Tomás Yarrington, was publicly praised by then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry but was eventually indicted both in Mexico and the United States for aiding the Gulf Cartel. He has since disappeared.

In the state of Guerrero, governed by the opposition Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD) since 2005, the investigation into the September 2014 kidnapping of 43 students from a teacher’s colleague was bungled so badly that it served to deepen citizens’ suspicion of federal and state governments, rather than assuage it

And the price to be paid by those willing to speak out remains high.

The  killing this month of Gisela Mota Ocampo, a former PRD national deputy one day after she took over at the mayor of the city of Temixco in the state of Morelos, was reminiscent to many of the murder of María Santos Gorrostieta Salazar, the former mayor of the town of Tiquicheo in the state of Michoacán.

Gorrostieta Salazar had spoken out against the corruption and violence in her state, once telling the newspaper El País “despite my own safety and that of my family, I have a responsibility to my people, with children, women, the elderly and men who are breaking their back every day tirelessly to procure a piece of bread...It is not possible for me to cave into when I have three children whom I have to teach by example.”

After three attempts on her life in as many years—including one that took the life of her then-husband—Gorrostieta Salazar was slain in a fourth attack in November 2012.
It is a crime, like so many in Mexico, that remains unpunished to this day.

Michael Deibert is the author of several books, the most recently In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press, 2014). His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, Le Monde diplomatique, Folha de São Paulo, and the World Policy Journal, among other venues. He can be followed on Twitter at @michaelcdeibert.

Ayotzinapa

Ayotzinapa, un año después. Dónde están?

Letter to the New Yorker regarding Dan Slater's “The Missing Story of the Drug War"

To Michael Agger, Cultural Editor at the New Yorker:

In his recent article, “The Missing Story of the Drug War,” Dan Slater characterizes accounts exploring Mexico’s drug trade by Ioan Grillo, Malcolm Beith, Anabel Hernández and myself as “flyover books with little firsthand reporting.”

This is false.

Mr. Grillo and Mr. Beith both lived in Mexico for a number of years while working on their books on the Mexican cartels (Mr. Grillo still lives there), and Anabel Hernández is a respected Mexican journalist who has lived under great threat to her life for many years for her role in exposing the nexus between political power and the drug trade in Mexico, with her house invaded by armed men only last year, and her father kidnapped and killed in 2000.

As for myself, I spent several years working on my book on Mexico’s Gulf Cartel, both in areas of Mexico such as Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Chihuahua and Mexico City, and also in Guatemala and Colombia.

Though I never encountered Mr. Slater in any of the above places mentioned (his own book, I now discover, focuses on the twilight struggle of online dating), his name vaguely rang a bell. I realize now it was because he sent the following email to my publisher, Lyons Press, on the publication of my book, In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico, last year:

From: Dan Slater [mailto:danielbslater@gmail.com] 

Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2014 9:45 AM

To: GPP-Publicity

Subject: Review Copy Request: "In the Shadow of Saint Death"

Dear Sharon,
 
I'm a former Wall Street Journal reporter, current freelance writer, author of a recent book called "Love in the Time of Algorithms" (Penguin).
 
I'm working on my second book, about the life of a former hit man for the Zetas. I'd love to cite Michael Deibert's book in my book, and I was wondering if it'd be possible to get a review copy of "In the Shadow of Saint Death." If so, I'd be hugely appreciative.

My address: 

Dan Slater
xxx Valley Road
Easton, Connecticut 
06612

Though in his article Mr. Slater dismisses the idea that “the drug war is...a problem of hypocrisy and delusion in the United States, and of tumult in Mexico,” I would strongly recommend that he leave the Connecticut suburbs behind and immerse himself on the ground in Mexico itself, as Mr. Grillo, Mr. Beith, Ms. Hernández and I (not to mention Mexico's own heroic journalists) have done. There he will see first-hand the stark reality of the tragedy that U.S. practices connected to narcotics, firearms, money laundering and the private prison industry have helped bring about. He just might learn something. The people of Mexico certainly deserve more in-depth coverage of their travails than can be provided by a journalist sitting comfortably behind his desk 2,000 miles away.

Saludos cordiales,

MD

--
Michael Deibert, Author
In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press, 2014)
The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books, 2013)
Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005)

cc: themail@newyorker.com
      Rachel Arons, Associate Culture Editor

In Mexico’s Veracruz, violence stalks journalists and students

4 August 2015

In Mexico’s Veracruz, violence stalks journalists and students

by Michael Deibert

Fusion

(Read the original story here)

One late summer night in Xalapa, the resplendent capital of the Mexican state of Veracruz, I was walking with a local media worker through a chilly evening drizzle in search of pozole, the delicious, spicy soup that is something of a local specialty. I was researching a book on the country’s oldest drug-trafficking organization, the Gulf Cartel, based in the state of Tamaulipas directly to the north, and their erstwhile comrades-turned-deadly enemies, Los Zetas, many of whose members hailed from Veracruz.

Gazing out at us from the walls of the city were dozens of handmade flyers, most of them asking for information about women who had disappeared, but some asking for help locating missing children as well. As we walked through a beautiful old square that still holds the cisterns to what had been a colonial laundry, my contact mused on the difficulty of working in such a milieu.

“Here journalism exists in the shadow of the government,” he told me.

Despite Mexico’s supposed democratic breakthrough 15 years ago, brought on by the defeat of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for the first time in over 70 years, democracy, such as it exists here, has always settled rather lightly in states like Veracruz, a place where, as in Tamaulipas, the PRI’s grip has never loosened. Despite a seductive landscape of mist-covered mountains slouching through deep valleys toward the coast, and a dramatic history that includes occupations by both France and the United States and the first independent community of African slaves in the Americas (founded by Gaspar Yanga in the 1570s), for more than a decade the atmosphere in Veracruz has been one of cyclical terror, with much of the violence directed at journalists and other critics of the government.

During the back-to-back administrations of the PRI’s Fidel Herrera Beltrán, who served as Veracruz’s governor from 2004 to 2010, and now Javier Duarte de Ochoa, another PRI politician, the influence of drug traffickers on the levers of power in the state and the overlap between their cadres and local law enforcement has become so blurred as to be nearly indistinguishable. In 2013 an accountant for the Gulf Cartel told a federal court in the United States that he had funneled $12 million in cartel money to Herrera Beltrán's electoral campaign between 2004 and 2005, in exchange for the cartel moving narcotics freely through the state.

Over the past decade, at least nine journalists have been killed in Veracruz. Some organizations put that number considerably higher. Some of the journalists were ambushed in their homes, such as Proceso reporter Regina Martínez Pérez, while others were found putrefying in sewage canals, including Veracruz News photographer Guillermo Luna Varela, Luna’s girlfriend Irasema Becerra, freelance photographer Gabriel Huge Córdova, and former cameraman Esteban Rodríguez. Without exception, the investigations into their killings went nowhere fast, often tossing up insignificant petty criminals as the culprits who, the public was told, thought up and committed such crimes entirely on their own.

When Rubén Espinosa, a Xalapa-based photographer for Proceso, was found dead this past weekend along with four others in the Mexico City neighborhood of Narvarte, where he had fled for safety after repeated threats to his life, it represented the violence of the state finally reaching into the heart of the nation’s cosmopolitan capital, which to a great degree has thus far been spared many of the horrors of the drug war. Hours after Espinosa’s killing, the Veracruz office of the newspaper Diario Presente was strafed by gunfire.

Espinosa had been a vocal critic of the impunity that had surrounded the murders of his colleagues in Veracruz. During a November 2012 demonstration to protest the results of the election that brought current president Enrique Peña Nieto to power, he was assaulted by police ostensibly under Duarte’s command as he tried to photograph them beating student protesters. Some of the students were part of #YoSoy132, a movement that emerged after Peña Nieto’s disastrous May 2012 visit to the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, during which he was heckled, cursed and eventually forced to hide in a bathroom.

One of those found dead alongside Espinosa this past weekend was #YoSoy132 activist Nadia Vera Pérez, who had been among the students attacked in November 2012. In an interview recorded eight months ago with Rompeviento TV, Vera charged that, should anything happen to her, Duarte would be responsible.

For years Veracruz has been the sight of spectacular violence. When one of Los Zetas’ founders, Efraín “Z-14” Teodoro Torres, met his bloody end in 2007, a group of armed commandos surrounded the cemetery where he had been buried, exhumed the corpse, and carted it away in a typical example of Los Zetas’ ritualistic esprit de corps. In 2009, the dismembered body of a local police commander, his torso and limbs in one pile and his head nearby, was found in the town of Soledad de Doblado, with a message that read Esto es por faltarle a la letra Z (This is for disappointing the letter Z). In September 2011, the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), a spinoff of the Sinaloa Cartel that had been percolating for sometime (and who earlier this year shot down a military helicopter), had a spectacular public coming out i when it blocked rush hour traffic and dumped 35 corpses — many of them daubed with a “Z”— into the street while unfurling banners that read “This will happen to all the Zetas that stay in Veracruz.”

Such is the atmosphere in which the journalists in Veracruz and other states in Mexico are forced to work, and such is the climate that Rubén Espinosa and Nadia Vera Pérez were fleeing.

During that same summer in Veracruz, I found myself one day sitting with two local journalists on the veranda of a fashionable hotel in Veracruz’s eponymous main port city. On a leafy square just off the zócalo, in the shadow of the city’s gleaming white cathedral whose Moorish tiled dome gives it a markedly Islamic feel, our conversation was largely drowned out by the roar of passing taxis and near-empty tour buses. As we spoke, convoys of masked, heavily armed navy commandos rolled by.

“This is a war,” one of my companions told me. ““But in this war, your enemy is not a visible enemy.”

And so the world has again learned as Veracruz —and Mexico — buries more of its courageous children.

Los Zetas graffiti in Newburgh, New York

Photo  © Michael Deibert

How is this for a good morning? Los Zetas graffiti on Ann Street a few blocks away from my apartment in Newburgh, New York, referencing the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz and former Zetas chief Miguel "Z40" Treviño Morales.

2014: A Reporter’s Notebook of the Year Gone By

This past year was one where I continued to discuss the issues raised by one of my books - The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books) - as well as toured and debated the issues raised by another one, In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press). In the coming year, while working on a new book (or two), I hope to continue to be able to shine a light on conflicted places such as these, as well as provoke discussion on how we in the United States and elsewhere can work to ameliorate the world's often too-sanguinary state. Abrazos and in strength, MD 

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael Deibert - Rory Carroll on a valuable, angry account of Congo's difficulties for the Guardian (2 January 2014) 
 
Book Review: The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair for the London School of Economics (17 January 2014)

Discussion on crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Katanga region with Save the Congo's Vava Tampa and the LSE's Gabi Hesselbien on Press TV (27 February 2014)

The Horror, the Horror: Nomi Prins reviews The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair for Truthdig (28 February 2014)  


Exploring the world of Haitian vodou for the Miami Herald (2 March 2014)

Haiti: In the Kingdom of Impunity for Huffington Post (2 April 2014)  

Inside Mexico’s Drug War: Interview with KERA Dallas (3 June 2014)   

Journalist paints an ugly picture of Mexican cartel violence in 'In the Shadow of Saint Death': Interview with the Miami Herald (6 June 2014) 

An Inside Look at Mexico's Drug War: Interview with the Takeaway (19 June 1004)  

Tamaulipas, Cradle of Mexico's Drug War, Erupts for the Huffington Post (26 June 2014)  

Michael Deibert interview with This is Hell! on Chicago's WNUR (3 July 2014)  

The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico: Interview with Portland's KBOO (4 July 2014) 

Imperialism 2.0? Review of Howard French’s ‘China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa’ for African Arguments (9 July 2014) 

Virginia Isaad interviews author Michael Deibert for Frontera List (1 August 2014) 

The Miami Herald's Gaza Problem for Michael Deibert, Writer (22 August 2014) 

Mexico’s Endless War for the Huffington Post (8 October 2014)  

A Review of Séverine Autesserre’s Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention for African Arguments (14 October 2014)


Congo in Harlem 6: Video of Special Panel Discussion on DRC's 2016 Elections video with Kambale Musavuli, Alain Seckler and Jason Stearns (25 October 2014)