Michael Deibert interviewed about Mexico on KPFK

My interview with KPFK in Los Angeles about my new book on the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas and the price of America's drug war in Mexico can be heard here.

Frontera List interviews author Michael Deibert

1 August 2014

Frontera List interviews author Michael Deibert

Interview by Virginia Isaad

(Read the original article here)

Frontera List focuses on the number of deaths in Juarez which is higher than what’s often published. After writing this book, how do you feel about how the war and the casualties are portrayed in mainstream media?

I feel that the generally accepted figures of those who have died in the war in Mexico since 2006, which, if one takes into account the 2012 Propuesta Cívica report of around 21,000 people who have had disappeared in addition to more than 70,000 killed, are actually quite conservative. As I mention in the book, after the Tamaulipas massacres in 2010/2011, one Zetas lieutenant said they he thought up to that point the Zetas had buried up to 600 bodies around Tamaulipas alone. I think the full number of those killed in Mexico may be many, many more.  And people also like to forget, because of the drug trade and US drug policies, there are also bodies dropping in places like Miami, Chicago and New Orleans in the United States every single day.

You put yourself in some precarious situations while researching this book. What is one incident that stands out and why?

In Reynosa, Tamaulipas, in late 2013, while finishing up some interviews with people who had been deported from the United States, a contact and I were driving though a cartel-dominated part of the city to another interview across town. As we began to leave the first neighborhood we ran headlong into a Gulf Cartel roadblock of half a dozen guys with automatic rifles stopping cars and deciding who could pass and who couldn’t. They let some go, and stopped some others. To me it looked as if they were scanning the cars for someone in particular, though my contact said that he thought they were actually coming out as a show of force to recruit young people in the neighborhood, something they do from time to time.

You quote an interviewee who says “a new culture and belief are taking hold.” How would you characterize the war now versus five years ago?
Unfortunately, I think now, certainly among border communities in Tamaulipas but also in other parts of Mexico, there is a kind of collective PTSD among many people who live there, and a fatalism verging on despair. You send your kids out for school in the morning and don’t know whether they wil be trapped there by a gunattle later in the day. You open up a business and someone shows up claiming they work for this or that criminal group and that you must pay la mordida or else there will be consequences. You get on the highway to drive from Reynosa to Matamoros and God only knows if you will get there alive or not.

America plays a large role not only as drug consumers but also gun suppliers. What needs to change in America in order to bring about changes in Mexico?

I think there needs to be a general decriminalization and regulation of narcotics in the United States similar to what what we saw with alcohol after the repeal of Prohibition.  Since Richard Nixon’s famous speech in 1971, which many view as the beginning of what came to be known as the war on drugs, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion fighting it, and yet we have seen violence related to the drug trade cut a bloody swathe through Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and elsewhere. All these year later, I could still step out the door of my apartment in Miami and cop any drug I wanted in about 20 minutes. Over half of sentenced prisoners under federal jurisdiction in the United States are serving time for drug offenses, for which African-Americans are sent to prison at 10 times the rate of caucasians. Does that sound like a successful, equitable system of justice to you? It doesn’t to me.

In terms of the gun industry, I have a story in the book about a guy from Houston who helped facilitate the purchase of more than 100 military-style firearms, many of which ended up in the hands of Mexico’s cartels, including at such locales as a February 2007 assault on the Guerrero  state attorney general’s office in Acapulco that left seven people dead. It is not an unrepresentative case and, as I’m sure you, know, for many years, at gun shows in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, unlicensed dealers were not even obligated to record the buyer’s name, and in Arizona, no licensing or permit requirements whatsoever were imposed for purchasing  firearms, including limiting the firearms a person could purchase by quantity or time period. The US is a great one-stop shop for the cartels.

My hope is, building on the example we’ve seen shown by states like Colorado and Washington, US drug policy will go the way of Portugal, which in November 2000 decriminalized “personal” drug possession and use up to amounts generally thought of to be able to be consumed by one person over a 10-day period, including for drugs  such as cocaine and heroin. With an emphasis on dissuasion and prevention of drug addiction as well as treatment, in the 14 years since the law was passed, Portugal didn’t see a significant increases in drug use among the population and rather drug consumption among 15 to 19 years olds, a particularly at-risk group, actually went down. Portuguese police are making fewer arrests but are seizing larger quantities of drugs because now, rather than low level drug use and dealing, they are free to combat organized crime.

A lot of media coverage focuses on  capturing drug kingpins like El Chapo however you say it does very little to truly impact the drug trade. What needs to happen in order to cause the foundations of these cartels to unravel?

As I said, I think there needs to be a general decriminalization of narcotics, and we need to realize that it’s not productive to put people – the users – in jail, for basically beings sick. As Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, one of the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel says at one point in the book, even if authorities might feel a momentary elation at the killing or capture of this or that drug lord, their replacements are already out there.

If there’s one thing you wish readers would take from this book, what would it be?

The the policies of the United States with regard to the drug trade – from the prohibition of narcotics to the free flow of firearms to the private prison industry that jails so much of our population to the US banks that launder billions of dollars of drug money – have corrupted not only drug producing and distributing counties like Colombia and Mexico, but the United States itself. And it is time that these policies change.

Reading at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon

Reading from In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico at the famous Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon.

Photo © James Rexroad

The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico on Portland's KBOO

In advance of my appearance at Powell's next week, I spoke with Portland's KBOO yesterday on the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas and the price of America's drug war in Mexico. You can listen to the full interview here.

Interview with This is Hell! on Chicago's WNUR

I was interviewed about the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas and America's drug war in Mexico by Chuck Mertz on This is Hell! on Chicago's WNUR. During the interview, I suggest that if Americans want to know what a narco-state looks like, they step out the front door and have a look around. The segment can be heard here.

Tamaulipas, Cradle of Mexico's Drug War, Erupts

Posted: 06/26/2014 12:59 pm

Tamaulipas, Cradle of Mexico's Drug War, Erupts 

 

By Michael Deibert

The Huffington Post

(Read the original article here)

The Mexican state of Tamaulipas, birthplace of the country's oldest criminal organization, the Gulf Cartel, is again awash in blood. Just across the Rio Grande from Texas and abutting the Gulf of Mexico, neither a change of presidents, seemingly endless battles within the cartel and with their former allies turned deadly enemies Los Zetas, years of high-profile killings and arrests of cartel leaders, or the United States' own seemingly endless war on drugs have made a dent in the violence.

While some U.S. publications have myopically lauded the government of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto as "saving Mexico" since he took over from his predecessor Felipe Calderón's militarized battle with the country's narcos, the reality on the ground tells a different story.

In the space of a few days in May, gun battles in the city of Reynosa killed at least 23 people, 16 bullet-riddled corpses were found in abandoned vehicles around the state, and the chief bodyguard for Tamaulipas governor Egidio Torre Cantú was arrested for involvement in the murder of state intelligence chief Salvador Haro Muñoz. Just south of Tamaulipas in the tropical port city of Veracruz, nine presumed cartel gunmen were slain in a shootout with Mexican armed forces, and earlier this month more than 30 bodies were found in a mass grave there, a grave it took the state's governor days to secure.

As I detail in my new book, In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico, (Lyons Press), the Gulf Cartel was a regional anomaly among Mexico's drug trafficking organizations, most of whose lineage harkens back to the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa. The organization traces its roots back to the failed U.S. policy of prohibition of alcohol, a time when millions of Americans were turned into criminals because of a substance they chose to put into their own bodies, and during when the power and reach of organized crime in the United States grew exponentially, much as it has in Mexico in recent decades.

The criminal band that would grow into the Gulf Cartel was founded by a Tamaulipas farm boy named Juan Nepomuceno Guerra, born in 1915, and who for years ran the organization from behind the doors of the Piedras Negras Restaurant in the city of Matamoros, its walls adorned with pictures of horses from his 500-acre ranch, El Tlahuachal.

In his dotage, by the mid 1980s Guerra had turned over the running of the organization to his nephew, Juan García Ábrego, who ran it until his arrest in January 1996. García Ábrego was eventually succeeded by Osiel Cárdenas, who, in a highly significant move for drug trafficking and for Mexico, around 1997 succeeding in getting a clique of Mexican special forces soldiers to defect and form a group of enforces, Los Zetas (the Z's). Eventually, many more Mexican (and Guatemalan) special forces soldiers, and ambitious common criminals, would follow.

The expansion of the Gulf Cartel, its allies and its rivals was helped invaluably by economic pressures north of the border.

According to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, with a population of 310 million, the United States consumes around $37 billion of cocaine a year, while Europe as a whole, with a population of 830 million, consumed $34 billion. Much of that money is laundered through the U.S. banking system, with financial institutions such as Bank of America, HSBC and Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo) found by U.S. investigators to have laundered billions of dollars of drug profits for groups like the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas.

Despite the United States having the highest rate of incarceration in the world (between 1989 and 2009, the private prison industry in the United States grew by an astonishing 1,600 percent), and despite more than half of America's federal inmates being in prison for drug-related offenses, no one ever went to jail for the banks' role in facilitating the cartels' bloody business. Meanwhile, border states with liberal gun laws such as Texas and Arizona have long served as a one-stop shop for Mexican drug cartels.

Osiel Cárdenas was arrested in Mexico in March 2003, yet more or less continued running the organization for behind bars until his extradition to the United States in January 2007. Both García Ábrego and Cárdenas are now held at the super maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, along with such inmates as the "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski and the Al-Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.

Eventually, the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas would violently rupture, with ever more micronized versions fighting battles with heavy-weapons such as grenade launchers over specific towns and even individual streets. This past December, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the author of this article ran headlong into a heavily-armed Gulf Cartel roadblock set up in the border city of Reynosa, only a few minutes from the U.S. border.

Tamaulipas remains a bastion of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI), the party that ruled Mexico for decades until 2000, and to which current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who recaptured the presidency after it rested for 12 years in the hands of the opposition Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party or PAN), belongs.

Historically, residents of Tamaulipas, long a PRI bastion, would be unwise to look to officialdom for protection. In addition to Torre (who ran for governor only after his own brother, Rodolfo Torre Cantú, was murdered while campaigning in June 2010 in what many believe was a cartel-sanctioned hit), the previous governors of Tamaulipas have an interesting history.

Torre's immediate predecessor, Eugenio Hernández Flores, saw fit to entrust his personal security to a well-known Gulf Cartel hitman during his 2005-2011 tenure, and fled to Europe at the end of his mandate. Hernández's own predecessor, Tomás Yarrington, was publicly praised by Texas governor Rick Perry during his time in office, but his 1999 to 2005 reign saw an extraordinary expansion of drug trafficking in the state. Yarrington eventually disappeared entirely shortly before being indicted both in Mexico and the United States for aiding the Gulf Cartel. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

During Mexico's 2012 election - the one that brought the PRI back to the presidency - some residents of Tamaulipas claimed to receive anonymous calls claiming to be from the Gulf Cartel ordering them to cast their ballots for the PRI under penalty of death for failing to do so. This strategy did not work in Matamoros itself, where voters elected the PAN candidate for mayor, breaking the PRI's long domination of the city.

As a result both of Mexico's own institutional failings but, also, those of the United States -- where drug money is laundered in U.S. banks, the private prison industry spends millions of dollars lobbying for mandatory minimum sentencing statutes for drug offenses, and firearms manufacturers gleefully supply cartels with weapons -- Tamaulipas has been almost completely lawless for years, although it has received scant attention compared with Ciudad Juarez, over 800 miles to the west.
Until the United States is willing to face up to its own role in Mexico's drug war, both as the world's largest consumer of narcotics and a bonanza for cartels seeking firepower, it is unlikely that the long-suffering citizens of Tamaulipas can expect anything like peace.

An Inside Look at Mexico's Drug War

An Inside Look at Mexico's Drug War

The Takeaway 

(Please listen to the full interview with The Takeaway's John Hockenberry here)

As a country, we've become accustomed to the gruesome headlines out of Mexico. Things like "26,121 Missing During Mexico's Drug War" or "Mass Beheading Rocks Mexico City" regularly flash across screens and are printed across newspapers in bold fonts. We're in close proximity to a raging drug war, yet most of us couldn't be more removed from the realities occurring just over the border.

In his new book, "In The Shadow of Saint Death," author Michael Deibert chronicles the history and evolution of the warring cartels. Their influence, fueled by America's own drug policies and addictions, now permeates nearly every part of society, from the government to business owners to the military.

"What had been somewhat isolated now is violence that's affecting everywhere in Mexico practically, including places like Acapulco and places like Cuernavaca, which is very close to the capital," says Deibert. "So there has been, I'd say, a general disintegration of law and order in the country as a whole."

Beheadings are a preferred form of cruelty used by drug cartels. They are frequently video taped and are designed as a symbol used to instill terror in the hearts of Mexican citizens.

"They learned that basically by watching insurgent videos from Iraq," says Deibert. "The mass graves are a great testimony to the complete absence of the state in huge parts of Mexico."

Deibert says that is important to be very skeptical of about the number of people dead and wounded in the drug war.

"The number of people that we have dead now, which including the missing is somewhere around 70,000 to 75,000, but I think it could be much, much more than that," Deibert continues. "And that makes the drug war in Mexico since 2006 the most deadly conflict in Latin America aside from Guatemala's civil war, which was 30 years long and killed 200,000 people. But in the modern era, that's the most deadly."

Since the violence began there has also been a cultural shift in Mexico, says Deibert, spurring a controversial folk-music genre called narcocorridos, which romanticize drugs, guns, and violence.
The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto are unable to get the situation under control, though they often project a contradictory image.

"They have a great PR machine and they're trying to project this image that the country is turning the corner, when in fact in Tamaulipas last year the murder rate went up 90 percent," he says. "If you talk to your average Mexican, they don't feel any safer now than they did four years ago."

Deibert says that Americans must accept responsibility for some of the conflict in Mexico. In 2012, an estimated 23.9 million Americans aged 12 or older—or 9.2 percent of the population—had used an illicit drug or abused a psychotherapeutic medication (such as a pain reliever, stimulant, or tranquilizer) in the past month.

"Felipe Calderón, who was Peña Nieto's predecessor, had something interesting to say once: 'It's not easy living next door to the world's biggest and richest drug addict,' which is the United States," says Deibert. "I think that's accurate, and something for us to ponder for us as Americans."

But it's not just America's demand for drugs that is fueling the Mexican drug war. Guns flow in the opposite direction from the United States and south of the border.

"So many of these guns come from the United States, and that's something that people have to understand," says Deibert. "There was one guy that I write about in the book who, over the period of a couple months, bought over 100 assault rifles in Houston, many of which were found in different crime scenes around Mexico, including an attack on the state prosecutor's office in Acapulco that killed seven people."

While most of the drug cartel violence is contained to Mexico, the U.S. is not impervious.

"There's piles of dead bodies in Chicago, in New Orleans, in Baltimore, and in Miami," says Deibert.
"The death and destruction that has been caused by the criminalization of narcotics in the United States, and the perfect market environment that's been created for criminals by that criminalization, is really what has to end, along with a more restrictive gun policy."

Deibert suggests that the United States adopt a model that is similar to that of Portugal. In the year 2000, he says that Portugal decriminalized small amounts of drugs. He says that in 14 years there hasn't been an increase in drug use or abuse—in fact, among usage among those age 13 to 19 actually decreased.

"I don't think Americans can eternally watch Mexico go up in flames and claim they don't have a responsibility for it," he says.

Journalist paints an ugly picture of Mexican cartel violence in 'In the Shadow of Saint Death'

Posted on Fri, Jun. 06, 2014

Journalist paints an ugly picture of Mexican cartel violence in 'In the Shadow of Saint Death'

By Connie Ogle
cogle@MiamiHerald.com


(Read the original article here)

Journalist Michael Deibert doesn't believe America's war on drugs is a battle that can be won.

"I think if most Americans saw the cost that the prohibition of narcotics exacts in places like Mexico and Guatemala and Colombia," he says, "the idea of decriminalizing drugs might not seem so far
fetched."

That's why Deibert has written In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico (Lyons, $24.95), about which he'll talk Tuesday at Books & Books in Coral Gables. In the book, he examines the history and legacy of the drug war, which he
traces back to President Richard Nixon, through the prism of the Gulf Cartel, a ruthless trafficking organization operating across the border from East Texas. In terms of the drug wars, Ciudad Juárez gets all the notoriety, but Deibert writes that this area has seen just as much violence as its sister city to the west.

Embroiled in a brutal battle with its former allies Los Zetas -- made up of "military special forces who became the enforcement wing and changed the dynamic of drug trafficking in Mexico," Deibert says -- the cartel has been around so long its founding members got started during Prohibition.

"Another great success that immediately made people stop drinking and undercut the criminal element," Deibert says wryly. "The U.S. had this 13-year experiment that was a total disaster. So I thought I'd look at the strategy that has been a more deadly disaster in my view."

Deibert is no stranger to dangerous territory. For his book The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair, he traveled through the killing fields of central Africa. He's also the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti, an account of the events leading up to the overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But talking to ordinary people trying to
conduct their lives amid the cartel violence was eye-opening.

"People are living under a siege and have been for many years," he says. "It's amazing what the human spirit can adjust to."

Q: What parts of U.S. policy are most problematic in your view?

A: The kingpin strategy, taking out the leaders, makes no difference in terms of movement of narcotics to the United States. There are 100 people in line to take their places. ... The idea that somehow we have this secure fence act, that we're going to have a 12-foot wall at the
border, and the cartels are going to say, "We're going to stop trafficking drugs," is just ridiculous. The idea that corruption stops at the border in Mexico is false. ... I really, truly believe that decriminalization is the only way the violence will end.

Q: What prevents the United States from making policy changes?

A: Our economic system is intrinsically dependent on the drug war. Look at the billions of dollars that have been traced to drug profits laundered by banks like Bank of America and Wachovia. That's all part of the public record. Look at the growth of the private prison industry in the last 15 years, with multimillion-dollar companies dependent on having strict enforcement of drug laws and harsh
mandatory minimums.

We're in a unique situation in America. There's supply and demand, and we're demand. We consume more cocaine than western Europe. ... There's a narrative in the U.S. that we're being invaded by Mexican drug cartels, but I would say our need for drugs, our addiction, is being fought in Mexico along with places like Miami Gardens and Chicago and New Orleans.

Q: Do you think the recent decriminalization of marijuana in a handful of states could lead to significant policy changes?

A: I think change will come from the states themselves. There's even talk of medical marijuana being approved in Florida. I hope that happens. I don't know how long it will take, but there will be a
critical mass of states saying enough is enough. On the federal level, politicians are too cowardly. Look at Portugal and the Netherlands that have more permissive drug laws. When Portugal decriminalized small amounts of cocaine and heroin, people didn't run out and start sticking needles into their arms.

Q: Journalists covering this story haven't fared well in Mexico. Did you fear for your life while researching this story?

A: I never felt safe for a moment. ... I was stopped at a Gulf Cartel roadblock where people were getting pulled out of their cars. It was a Saturday afternoon, sunny, and they're able to set up a heavily armed roadblock in the middle of a city. ... I've done reporting over the years in Haiti or the Congo or Brazil, and I've had a lot of experiences where people have pointed guns at me. When you're younger you have this idea you're indestructible. But I've seen people killed in front of me, and that brings home the idea you're not. The older you get, that weighs on you a bit. I'll be 41 this summer...I'm
thinking this may be the last hurrah for the kind of reporting that I do. Very strange that on my last day of research I get stopped outside Reynosa at that roadblock. It just brought home again the idea that despite all this rhetoric in Washington that these guys have no fear.

Q: What's it like for the people who live amid all this violence?

A: I interviewed people who had to deal with this every day -- businessmen, school kids, prosecutors, journalists -- to see what it's like to live in this reality. ... I think there's a kind of collective PTSD people have. They're living under circumstances no one should have to live under. Imagine sending your kids to school not knowing if there will be a gun battle or not. In Tamaulipas, there's a general
breakdown in law and order, increases in extortion and kidnapping. People say they're from the Gulf Cartel to extort money even if they're not, because people are so scared they'll pay. I was talking
to someone in Ciudad Juárez in 2010, which was one of the worst years for the city, and he said, "Can you believe it -- it used to be no one would go into Mexico City because they said it was too dangerous."

What's sad is you feel Mexican society has been shredded over the past 10 years because of this. There's a great restaurant in Matamoros, Garcia's, across the bridge from Brownsville, Texas. Everybody from Brownsville would go over there, there was great food and a great atmosphere, Mexican music. You go there now, and it's empty. The last time I was there, we were one of two tables in the restaurant.

Connie Ogle is the Miami Herald's book editor.

Inside Mexico’s Drug War on on KERA Dallas

You can listen to my hour-long discussion on the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas and Mexico's (and America's) drug war on KERA Dallas here.

Special delivery from La Flaca

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

 

(I guess the cat is out of the bag, now. Look for it from Lyons Press in Spring 2014. MD)

Why Arrest of Zetas Leader Does Not Mean End to Mexico's Drug War

Posted: 07/16/2013 8:34 pm

Why Arrest of Zetas Leader Does Not Mean End to Mexico's Drug War

By Michael Deibert

The Huffington Post

(Read the original article here) 

In the violence that has claimed more than 60,000 lives in Mexico since 2006, the criminal organization know as Los Zetas have been the perpetrators of some sickening crimes.

Originally made up of largely of deserters from a special forces unit of the Mexican army and since buffeted by rogue elements of the Guatemalan military and common thugs, Los Zetas (named after a Mexican radio code for high-ranking officers) were originally recruited in the 1990s by the Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.

With its roots stretching all the way back to Prohibition, the Gulf Cartel at the time was battling the Sinaloa Cartel from Mexico's Pacific Coast for control of its slice of the country's border with the United States. The battle ended with a Gulf Cartel victory, but shortly thereafter the alliance splintered when Gulf gunmen killed a deputy of one of the leaders of Los Zetas, a smuggler born in Mexico but raised largely in Texas named Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, aka Z-40.

What followed was a war between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas for control of the states of
Tamaulipas and Nuevo León that, in its savagery, surpassed nearly anything the country had seen before.

In these states Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) -- which ruled the country for 71 years until 2000 and to which Mexico's current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, belongs -- was often viewed as little more than a Gulf Cartel vassal, and a series of governors were later indicted for links to organized crime. Los Zetas, for their part, expanded their influence to the nearby states of Coahuila, Hidalgo and Veracruz. The two cartels appeared to try and outdo one another, with gruesome public displays and videotaped executions becoming commonplace. Ironically, the Gulf Cartel was forced to form an alliance of convenience with its former enemies in the Sinaloa Cartel to fend off their one-time employees.

Los Zetas' actions often seemed demonic in their ferocity. The organization committed a series of massacres in the San Fernando Valley region of Tamaulipas between August 2010 and April 2010 that left over 260 people dead, many of them immigrants en route to the United States from Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas, or otherwise-uninvolved civilians. In August 2011, Zetas hitmen set fire to a casino in the city of Monterrey in a dispute of extortion money, killing 53 people.

Through it all, cartel bosses and henchmen were falling like flies. The Gulf Cartel's former boss of bosses, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, was extradited to the United States in 2007. His brother Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén, better known by his nickname Tony Tormenta (Tony the Storm) was killed by the Mexican military in Matamoros in November 2010. Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez aka El Coss, a former Matamoros municipal police officer with whom Tony Tormenta had shared co-governing duties, was arrested in Tamaulipas in September 2012, as was anther Cárdenas brother, Mario Alberto. The Gulf Cartel had fallen into a vicious bout of infighting.

As for Los Zetas, their original founder, Arturo Guzmán Decena, was long dead, slain in 2002, and his subsequent replacement, Heriberto Lazcano, aka El Verdugo (The Executioner), was killed by the Mexican Navy in October 2012. Displaying the esprit de corps for which they were known, Los Zetas stole both corpses rather than allow them to remain in government hands. Leadership of the group fell to Miguel Treviño -- Z-40 -- a man who seemed determined to compensate for his lack of military background by being the most brutal leader of all. When Treviño was arrested in Tamaulipas on Monday, many there and beyond breathed a sigh of relief.

But there is little reason to think that Treviño's arrest will mean an immediate decrease in violence in Mexico, violence that is inextricably linked to U.S. policy both on narcotics and firearms.

The violence that has torn Mexico apart for the last several years is often misunderstood, even down to the fact that it was President Vicente Fox, in office from 2000 to 2006, and not his successor Felipe Calderón, who began the war against Mexico's narcos, declaring upon taking office that he was "going to give the mother of all battles against organized crime in Mexico." But Calderón, in office until last year and like Fox a member of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), expanded and deepened the policy with the enthusiastic support of both the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The amount of money the cartels make from the ravenous appetite for drugs in the United States -- and the perfect market conditions created for criminals by their very illegality -- beggars belief. The Mexican newspaper La Reforma recently reported that Los Zetas were making $350 million a year from importing cocaine to the U.S. alone, but that they were having to spend all of that money trying to fight off the Gulf Cartel. The very lowest figures given for the revenues derived by the Mexican cartels exporting drugs to the United States are in the neighborhood of $6.6 billion a year, with some estimates suggesting five times that.

Easy access to firearms in U.S. states that border Mexico has also helped fuel the violence there.
In 2009, a 26 year-old Houston man, was sentenced to eight years for purchasing or helping to purchase more than 100 military-style firearms which ended up in the hands of Mexico's cartels, including one that was used during a February 2007 assault on the attorney general's office in Acapulco, an attack that left seven people dead. His case was not unique. A pair of poorly thought-out policies under both Bush and Obama -- Operation Wide Receiver and Operation Fast and Furious, respectively -- allowed weapons to flow into cartel hands under the (often erroneous) supposition that the U.S. government could then track them. One such weapon was used when U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry was shot to death in a December 2010 gunbattle in Arizona.

Some of the largest banks operating in the U.S. -- including Bank of America and HSBC -- have shown little appetite for monitoring hundreds of billions of dollars of drug profits laundered through their channels.

And finally, like Treviño, a number of the grandees of the Mexican drug world responsible for so much violence have roots in the United States. Martín Omar Estrada Luna, alias El Kilo, who had been in command of the Los Zetas cell in San Fernando during the massacres there, grew up largely in central Washington State in the farm town of Tieton. More famously, Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a former high-school football star from Laredo, Texas know as La Barbie, went on to became one of the chief lieutenants of the the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel. Both men have since been arrested

Thus, the violence afflicting Mexico is not only Mexico's violence. It is our violence, as well. Try as it might, the United States cannot, and by proxy cannot ask Mexico, to shoot and jail its way out of this problem.

Waiting in the wings in Mexico, Miguel Treviño's brother, Omar Treviño Morales, is believed to be poised to step into the leadership of Los Zetas. A former Gulf Cartel lieutenant, Mario Ramírez Treviño aka El Pelón, is believed to have assumed command of what is left of that organization. The Gulf Cartel's connections among the state police in Tamaulipas remain strong.

And so the battle for Mexico goes on.

Brief note on the capture of Miguel Angel Treviño Morales

Among the most difficult passages to write in my new Mexico book have been those on the atrocities Los Zetas have committed during their long war against their rivals, the Mexican state and ordinary Mexicans. The Sinaloa Cartel and Mario "El Pelón" Ramírez Treviño and what's left of the Gulf Cartel will undoubtedly view the capture of Los Zetas leader Miguel Angel Treviño Morales in Tamaulipas as an opportunity for expansion and reconquest, but this does mark an important moment in Mexico's long national nightmare.

Cartel Wars

Cartel Wars

May 16, 2011

By Michael Deibert

Truthdig

(Read the original article here)

MATAMOROS, Mexico—Of all the iconography that one encounters when traversing the border regions between the United States and Mexico—a land informed by the exploits of Mexican and American bandits and smugglers and which was part of a single country until 1836—two images stand out to a visitor.

Gazing out at passersby from clothing shops and discount stores on both sides of the border, the first is a visage of dapper, mustachioed solemnity: The face of Jesús Malverde. Often depicted today on T-shirts and baseball caps with marijuana leafs wreathing his face, Malverde was said to have been an outlaw from the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa. The main shrine dedicated to Malverde—allegedly executed by authorities in about 1909 and revered as a quasi-saint by many in Mexico’s criminal underworld—is in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan, birthplace of the eponymous Cartel de Sinaloa, headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, perhaps Mexico’s most famous drug trafficker.

The other image is that of a hooded, scythe-wielding skeleton, Santa Muerte (Saint Death). Like Jesús Malverde, Santa Muerte—whose main shrine in the rough-and-ready Mexican city barrio of Tepito sees visitors greeted by the skeletal lady in a white wedding dress—has become an object of veneration among Mexico’s criminals.

Here in Matamoros, a community of about 500,000 that gave birth to the criminal organization known as the Cartel del Golfo (Gulf Cartel) and which sits just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, these figures, culled from the rich imagery of religion and crime, have now been joined by new depictions of transgression and loss.

At the Matamoros morgue, plastered to its glass doors amid a stench of human decay, the faces of dozens of people who have disappeared in this Mexican state of Tamaulipas over the last year gaze out onto the world. Relatives believe that they may be among the 183 bodies exhumed from 40 separate pits by Mexican authorities over the last month or so, likely victims of the Gulf Cartel’s erstwhile allies-turned-enemies, Los Zetas.

In the annals of a conflict that has killed more than 34,600 since Mexican President Felipe Calderon militarized his country’s battle against drug traffickers in December 2006, the conflict in Tamaulipas is writing a new and bloody chapter.

Cartel Recruited Elite Army Unit’s Members

What would grow into the present-day Cartel del Golfo had its genesis in Matamoros and the enterprising diversification of a Mexican smuggler and bootlegger named Juan Nepomuceno Guerra. Born in 1915, Guerra and his nephew, Juan Garcia Abrego, had decided by the 1970s to expand the criminal band’s connections with Colombia’s Cali Cartel, and had developed an extensive web of corruption of local, state and federal government officials in Tamaulipas.

Garcia Abrego was arrested at a ranch in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon in January 1996 and subsequently sentenced to 11 life terms in the United States for drug trafficking. Guerra died in 2001 of natural causes. Control of the cartel fell into the hands of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, a former mechanic who promptly earned the sobriquet El Mata Amigos (Friend Killer) by dispatching a potential rival, a close personal acquaintance.

When Cardenas recruited as his lieutenants his two brothers—Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (aka Tony Tormenta, or Tony the Storm) and Mario Cardenas Guillen—as well as Jorge Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla Sanchez, a former Matamoros police officer, the modern-day Gulf Cartel was born.

Feeling under pressure from his rivals after his ascension to the head of the cartel, in the late 1990s Cardenas began to recruit active members of an elite Mexican army unit, the Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), to become the organization’s military wing. Trained originally in counterinsurgency and counternarcotics tactics, the GAFE deserters were also skilled in such tactics as rapid deployment, intelligence collection, countersurveillance and ambush.

Initially led by Arturo Guzman Decena, known as Z1 (“Zeta” in Spanish) after a Mexican radio code for high-ranking officers. Guzman Decena was killed in November 2002, and his successor, Rogelio Gonzalez Pizaña (Z2), was scooped up by authorities less than two years later. The leadership of Los Zetas then coalesced around Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (Z3), a man whose violence caused him to become known as El Verdugo (The Executioner).

For a time, the arrangement worked. Los Zetas proved themselves to be so adept at killing and terrorizing the cartel’s enemies that they were even recruited to train members of La Familia, Gulf Cartel allies based in the western state of Michoacan and at the time led by Nazario Moreno Gonzalez. Known as El Mas Loco (The Craziest One), Moreno invested La Familia with quasi-religious overtones, even giving the group’s foot soldiers a book of his aphorisms to carry along as they committed such acts as hurling five decapitated heads across the floor of the Sol y Sombra (Sun and Shadow) nightclub in September 2006. Moreno would be killed in a gun battle with Mexican security forces in December 2010.

La Familia was outrageous and bizarre, but it proved to be only the smallest foreshadowing of what was to come. Shortly after the Sol y Sombra incident, Felipe Calderon was elected Mexico’s president and declared war on the country’s drug trade. In an equally significant corollary, although hardly commented upon at the time, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who had been running the Gulf Cartel from a Mexican prison cell since his arrest in March 2003, was extradited to the United States.

The glue that had held together one of Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking operations for a decade was becoming unstuck. The center would not hold.

Pits Filled With the Dead at San Fernando

Following the extradition of Cardenas, relations between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas grew ever more strained. Members of the latter, high on their own sense of power and fortified by copious amounts of cocaine and Buchanan whisky (the cartel libation of choice), had little use for their former bosses, diminished as they were by the Cardenas arrest and a decentralized system that saw Cardenas’ brother Tony Tormenta and the former cop El Coss acting as co-heads of the organization.

The January 2010 slaying of Victor Mendoza, a Zeta lieutenant killed by a Gulf Cartel gunman in circumstances that are not entirely clear, proved to be the match that lit the bonfire of violence that now threatens to consume Tamaulipas.

Following pitched battles in the city of Reynosa, about 50 miles west of Matamoros, the Gulf Cartel claimed control of those two cities, with the Zetas ruling in the state capital, Ciudad Victoria, and in Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican counterpart of Laredo, Texas. The space between these population centers consists of little-patrolled rough countryside, and became the scene of the most ruthless kind of war as each side tried to eliminate the other.

“The current levels of violence are indeed changing the entire culture of the border region,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who has studied the conflict extensively. “The levels of violence have escalated to unprecedented levels, and the new practices by killers are extreme and had never been observed in the past.”

Correa-Cabrera is referring to the 183 confirmed dead recovered thus far from the San Fernando pits, roughly 80 miles to the south, but her observations are anything but distant and academic. The university campus where she works, just across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, has been struck on three separate occasions by bullets fired during confrontations on the Mexican side.

Almost unbelievably, before this latest outrage, San Fernando, surrounded by rural roads and ranches, had been the scene of a similar mass killing less than a year earlier, when a group believed to be the Zetas killed 72 Central American migrants outside the town in August 2010 after holding them for ransom. Since the most recent killings, 16 local police officers have been detained under suspicion of involvement.

“They recruit boys from 13 to 17 years old,” says a 19-year-old university student from Matamoros, speaking in hushed tones about the cartels. “The police are also involved in this.”

Since the February 2010 mutiny by the Zetas, two loose and broad-based cartel alliances have seemed to coalesce. One configuration consists of the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel and the now greatly diminished La Familia; the Zetas have aligned themselves with the Cartel de Juarez (based in the eponymous city in the state of Chihuahua in western Mexico) and the Beltran-Leyva Carte, which became famous for its use of 12-year-old hit men and has suffered the loss of its top leaders through killings and imprisonment at the Calderon government’s hands. The Zetas have also reinforced themselves by recruiting members of Los Kabiles, a special-operations unit of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics and that had a particularly ghastly record in that country’s civil war.

In Tamaulipas, at least, the federal government has often seemed little more than a hapless referee as the two sides have battled each other for control of lucrative drug trafficking routes with ever-increasing levels of savagery. The dumping of dismembered bodies in the state has become almost routine, while gruesome videos of the foot soldiers of various factions being beheaded or otherwise killed are posted to websites such as the anonymously run Blog del Narco as a way to send messages and spread fear among opponents.

Though several midlevel Zeta operatives have been killed or captured, perhaps the Calderon government’s most notable victory in the region was the killing of Tony Tormenta during an hours-long gun battle in Matamoros last November. Although the official reports said that four cartel gunmen, three marines and a reporter perished during a series of gun battles throughout the city, Matamoros residents put the number of dead that day at closer to 100.

In February of this year, banners addressed to the Zetas were hung from bridges in Tamaulipas and three other Mexican states. They contained the claim, among others, that the state “had already witnessed the killing and massacre of innocent people by the Zetas” and a demand that the group “fight like men.” The banners were signed Carteles Unidos (United Cartels), an apparent reference to the Gulf-Sinaloa-La Familia alliance.

An entire new vocabulary of neologisms—from narcocorridos (songs) and narcomantas (banners) to narcobloqueos (blockades)—has taken root in Mexican culture as the society at large seeks ways to label the pervasive influence of drug traffickers and their signifiers.

“People are tired,” says Mauricio Meschoulam, a professor at the department of international studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana in the capital of Mexico City, where an estimated 150,000 people marched against the violence this month. “They feel that the government’s fight is unsuccessful and that the government is not in control of the situation. This perception increased sharply in 2010, especially in the second half of the year.”

Endless Violence Fueled by U.S. Firearms

Though the violence in Tamaulipas is shocking, it is not isolated.

In Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city of 1.3 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, 3,000 people were killed last year during a power struggle between the Cartel de Juarez and the Cartel de Sinaloa and a general breakdown in law and order not lessened by the presence of the Mexican army. This past February, Jaime Zapata, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, was shot to death and his partner was wounded as they drove in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. A known member of Los Zetas was subsequently arrested for his killing.

On May 19, a gun battle between suspected Zetas and Mexican marines patrolling Falcon Lake, which sits on the border between Texas and Tamaulipas, left 12 gang members and one marine dead. Last September, U.S. boater David Hartley disappeared after being chased and shot by gunmen on the Mexican side of the lake’s border. The severed head of the Mexican police commander in charge of investigating the case was subsequently left outside a Mexican army post.

The policies of the United States, involved in a perversely symbiotic relationship with Mexico in which drugs flow north and weapons flow south, have not been helpful.

A recent report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime concluded that the U.S., with a population of 310 million, consumed $37 billion in cocaine in 2008, while Europe as a whole, with a population of 830 million, consumed $34 billion. Over the past four years, as The Washington Post has reported, more than 60,000 U.S. guns have been found in Mexico, largely coming from gun dealers in states with conspicuously liberal gun laws such as Texas and Arizona. The AK-47 used to kill agent Jaime Zapata was traced to a legal purchase at a Texas gun store.

In the meantime, the brazen and highly ritualized drumbeat of violence continues, leading observers on both sides of the border to wonder just how deeply it is permanently changing Mexico.

“How can you justify these extreme new practices and massacres?” asks professor Correa-Cabrera. “How can someone justify to himself assassinating dozens of men, women and children?”

“The economic explanation is definitely an important one,” she continues. “But there must be more elements in these new and extreme forms of violence. A new culture and new beliefs are taking hold.”


Michael Deibert's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Miami Herald, Le Monde diplomatique, Folha de Sao Paulo and the World Policy Journal, among other publications. He has been a featured commentator on international affairs for the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, National Public Radio, and WNYC New York Public Radio.

In his role as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University, which promotes processes of reconciliation by non-violent means at all levels throughout the world, he aids the Centre in its mission to increase and sustain dialogue on international peacebuliding and development issues, with a particular focus on Africa and Latin America.

A recognized authority on the Caribbean nation of Haiti, which he first visited in 1997, Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His reporting currently focuses on drug trafficking, organized crime and insurgency in the Americas.

His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com. He can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/michaelcdeibert.

Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war

Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war

By Michael Deibert

Thu May 12 2011, 1:12 am ET

MATAMOROS, Mexico (AFP) – Plastered to the front of the morgue in this border city, where only hours before a battle raged between Mexican security forces and gunmen believed to belong to a local drug cartel, the faces stare back, haunting in their silence and mystery.

Carlos Alberto Sanchez, 17 years old. Fernando Tejeda Loya, 39 years old. Kelvin Alvin Palomo Nava, 22 years old. Dozens of photos and names belonging to people who have disappeared in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas over the last year.

From inside the squat, gray structure, a sickly whiff of human decay is unmistakable.

Since Mexican authorities exhumed a total of 183 bodies from 40 separate pits in the state over the last month, the families of hundreds of missing people have offered DNA samples to Mexican authorities.

At this point, only three of the bodies have been identified.

This part of Mexico was once a booming hub for cross-border trade between the country and the United States -- which operates hundreds of low-wage factories on the Mexican side.

Today, it finds itself in the midst of a terrifying war of attrition between the city's indigenous Gulf Cartel, their former partners known as Los Zetas and the elements of government power that have not been bought or bullied into the drug traffickers' service.

Near the morgue, black-clad policemen, their identities hidden under ski masks, set up check points, their assault rifles at the ready, while convoys of Mexican marines speed down broad boulevards.

"There is practically an anarchy here," says a businessman from the nearby city of Reynosa. "Many people have abandoned their homes."

The Gulf Cartel, which came into force under the wing of a Matamoros crime boss who had made his money bootlegging, by the late 1990s was being led by former mechanic Osiel Cardenas Guillen.

It was Cardenas Guillen who recruited the group of 30 Mexican special forces soldiers that would become Los Zetas to act as the cartel's military shock troops.

The group has since changed and expanded through the killing or arrest of most of its founding members and the addition of elements such as rogue soldiers from the Kabiles, a feared special forces branch of the Guatemalan military with an abysmal human rights record.

With Cardenas Guillen in jail in the United States and the leadership of the Gulf Cartel having shifted to his two brothers and a former Matamoros police officer, tensions between the two organizations grew until they exploded into open conflict in early 2010, each seeking to control lucrative drug shipment routes heading north.

Though a substantial portion of the the Zetas membership appears to be drawn from around the state of Veracruz, the group as a whole lacks the deep regional roots connect to many Mexican drug trafficking organizations whose very names -- Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Tijuana, La Familia Michoacana -- speak of their histories in the regions that gave birth to them.

"The introduction of the Zetas changed the whole panorama of drug trafficking in Mexico," says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who has studied the region extensively.

"Because of these new paramilitary practices, other groups have been made to raise their standards of violence, as well."

In August 2010, the Zetas were blamed for the slaying of 72 Central American migrants whose bodies were found at a ranch in Tamaulipas.

In June of that year, the leading candidate for the governorship of the state -- brother of the its current governor -- was slain along with four others.

This past February, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was shot to death while driving in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi and a known member of Los Zetas was subsequently arrested for his killing.

Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon militarized his country's battle against Mexico's drug traffickers in December 2006, more than 34,600 have died in drug-related violence.

Along with the violence has grown a pervasive culture of corruption and fear. After the discovery of the most recent mass graves, 16 police officers were detained under suspicion of involvement.

Many newspapers on the Tamaulipas side of the border have almost stopped covering drug-related violence entirely.

Now, with one of Cardenas Guillen's brothers having perished in a wild firefight with Mexican security forces in Matamoros last year and the command of the Zetas having passed to Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (known as El Verdugo, or The Executioner), Tamaulipas remains hotly contested and divided.

The Gulf Cartel controls the northeastern part of the state that encompasses the cities of Reynosa and Matamoros itself, while the Zetas maintain power bases in the state capital Ciudad Victoria and Nuevo Laredo.

Despite the government's promises of security and increased aid, many local residents remain unconvinced, and say that governmental control in the region is visible little, if at all.

"The president says that here are many federal forces between here and Ciudad Victoria," says a cab driver in Matamoros who frequents the road. "But it's just not true."