Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
AMLO has abdicated his responsibility to provide security for Mexico: his strategy has led to a bloodbath in Mexico. In the first 54 months of Calderón’s government, 80,000 people died. Under Peña, 102,000 people died in the same period. Under AMLO, 154,000 people have died. The end of his six-year term is still to come when violence reigns, contempt for the law prevails, and impunity is rampant throughout the country.
These figures are the crude and undeniable expression of the horror millions of Mexicans experience daily. Even more horrifying are the tales of terror that take place in the communities that have been ravaged by violence. These facts are terrible. But worse is the social phenomenon that people experience daily as they encounter criminal organizations in all their cruelty, power, and disdain for human life. Terrorism is the daily bread in thousands of communities across the country.
Examples abound. Tepito is the biggest drug market in the whole country, not just in Mexico City. And it is, consequently, where the recruitment of young people for gangs and cartels runs at full speed.
The Covid pandemic changed how groups, gangs, and drug cartels operate and relate to each other. The central factor was that the demand for drugs in the United States declined markedly during this period. This caused an increase in violence, given more competition in a smaller market. It also led to the disappearance of the more independent groups of drug traffickers as they could not compete with the economic and military strength of larger groups, including the cartels. The modes of operation of the established groups had to change in the face of the new circumstances of increased competition for space in the shrinking market, albeit temporarily.
The relevance of the change in modes of operation was that the “old school” transitioned to the “new school”, consisting of the more intensive use of social networks for the recruitment of new members and operators, as well as the emergence of new drugs, more synthetic and cheaper, as well as more potent and addictive. Finally, new forms of product distribution were developed, with advertisements on networks and the offer of deliveries via the tools offered by the latest apps, such as Rappi, Uber, etc. The Covid pandemic impacted all of this.
But the “old school” and the “new school” have other differences. The Sinaloa Cartel operates as old school in its recruitment method, while the new school refers to the practices employed by the Zetas and the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (CJNG). The essential difference in their recruitment methods is that Sinaloa receives voluntary recruitment while Zetas and CJNG resort to forced recruitment.
Behind these two methods lie important social and historical realities. The Sinaloa Cartel has enjoyed a historical reputation since it was called the Guadalajara Cartel, commanded by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. Later, with leaders such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, it gained economic, military, and political strength through its presence and operations in more than 50 countries worldwide. In Sinaloa and other parts of Mexico, the narco culture of corridos (songs inspired by the life of famous drug lords) has spread, exalting the characters of drug trafficking, the idea of masculinity and the power of weapons and money, and the seduction of women with money. For young people of limited economic means, without much education, the route to success is obvious: joining the Sinaloa Cartel is the life option within reach of most young people. Thus, combining history, mythology, culture, and access to money, power, and weapons makes recruitment voluntary.
In contrast, the Zetas and the CJNG emerged without mythology and history, where the musical culture is less vibrant, and thus their recruitment is different. First, they have had to become highly militarised organizations. Their soldiers are ready to champion their cause of maintaining power through their military capacity to maneuver and impose their will on the communities where they operate and base themselves. Their appeal to young people is partly due to the addiction that is created between the power of weapons and the addiction to their marketed product.
While the Sinaloa Cartel could be defined as more civilians, including sustaining social bases and support networks, both the Zetas and CJNG are distinctly militaristic organizations, relying on methods of conscription or forced recruitment of their elements and operating with unusual ruthlessness when they seek to occupy areas of any municipality or state in the Republic.
But despite their different origins and forms of operation among drug trafficking organizations, both internally and externally, they are all governed by the same fundamental laws for the members of these human and social groups. Proven loyalty, the willingness to use violence when required, and always being willing to keep one’s word. This conditioning of drug trafficking recruits is expressed in a common saying: “See, hear, obey, be silent”.
Finally, many say, already immersed in the criminal environment, that they have no other future than “a bullet in the head or jail”. This is reminiscent of the phrase of the ineffable Chinese Zhenli Ye Gon, distrustful of banks because he kept his money at home: “You cooperate, or your neck”. This was his defense, essentially endorsing what common knowledge in popular culture about crime and its ways of operating is: once you are inside a criminal organization, the only way out is feet first.
Inter-group violence has hardened with the fragmentation of the cartels. Young people are being recruited, voluntarily or forcibly, for dangerous tasks, as soldiers or hitmen. They are seen as cannon fodder and are replaced by newcomers through permanent recruitment tactics. Drug trafficking groups always need new recruits to keep up the war for control or to regain their turf.
Women are often forcibly recruited in Sinaloa and with the Zetas and CJNG. They generally end up as sex slaves or secondary participants in criminal activities such as kidnappings and preparing food for their victims.
One expression of the militarism of organizations such as the CJNG and the Familia Michoacana has been the increasing use of drones to carry out attacks against the civilian population in Guerrero. Towns such as the Nuevo Poblado el Caracol, which borders the Atoyac River, have been attacked by drug traffickers who seek to force its inhabitants to abandon their homes due to the high strategic value of this river, which flows into the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, which is under the control of the Familia Michoacana. The land is apparently fertile for growing coca and poppy plants. It is a privileged place to move their product to the port or from the port inland.
Attacks on these civilian populations are, without a doubt, acts of terrorism. The same is true, albeit with different characteristics, of attacks on civilian towns in San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Michoacán, Colima, Nayarit, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Campeche, and Oaxaca. This list is not exhaustive. But what it does show is that terrorism against the civilian population happens, it is real, and it happens every day.
This is the failure of López Obrador’s security policy. He has allowed this phenomenon of terrorism to maintain a supposed agreement of “peaceful coexistence” with organized crime in Mexico.
The Mexican state has failed in its essential task of providing security for its citizens. Terrorism prevails.
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