Understanding the Root Causes of Violence in Mexico
Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy links NAFTA to increased drug violence in Mexico and discusses how this trade agreement has been used to escalate the presence of United States intelligence and security agencies on Mexican territory, militarizing the drug war and leading to, especially along the border, a break down of the social fabric.
Alejandro Díaz is originally from San Antonio, where he developed a provocative and pertinent body of work exemplifying the complex and visually rich cultural milieu particular to South Texas and Mexico. He has lived in Mexico City, and is currently based in New York City.
Díaz is well-known for his conceptual, recurrent use of everyday materials; his humor infused politics; and his ongoing involvement with art as a form of entertainment, activism, public intervention, and free enterprise. He began making and selling his cardboard signs, “Mexican Wallpaper”, on the streets of Manhattan in the late 90s. More recently, he has translated them into a compelling series of colorful neon signs.
Digital artist Tonatiuh Moreno of Guadalajara interrupts Felipe Calderón to challenge his drug war policy during a speech yesterday to local business leaders shouting, “When will this war be over?”
Javier Sicilia is a novelist and a poet. In 2009, he was awarded Mexico’s prestigious Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize. This September, he read a poem dedicated to his son, Juan Francisco, at a rally:
There is nothing else to say
The world is not worthy of the word
They drowned it, deep inside of us
As they asphyxiated you
As they ripped your lungs apart
And the pain does not leave me
All we have is a world
For the silence of the just
Only for your silence and my silence, Juanelo.
This was the last poem Sicilia wrote. His son was murdered in the central state of Morelos in March, along with six other people, by members of a drug cartel.
Javier Sicilia renounced poetry and became the leader of a national protest against the drug war. Yet he says poetry has been an integral part of the “Peace with Justice and Dignity” movement.
“Poetry has been present, the poets have been part of it,” Sicilia says. “The problem is that the mass media don’t like to cover it and don’t understand that this movement was born out of poetry, and the reason why it’s important is because it’s filled with a poetic content that has transformed the language. And behind all of this is a profound ethics, as with all poetry.”
Sicilia says the poet has a moral responsibility to tell these stories.
Other artists are also reacting to the violent realities in Mexico today. Singer Lila Downs addresses the violence in a song that deals directly with the consequences, called “La Reina del Inframundo” — Queen of the Underworld. The lyrics read:
“Six feet underground, it’s for a certain kind of weed, for which the bosses up north are making us kill each other off, and now I’m the queen of the underworld, and my crown is a tombstone …”
US-Backed Drug War Claims More Than 12,000 Mexican Lives in 2011
Mexico’s leading papers released drug war death count estimates on Monday. Figures vary, but around 12,000 Mexicans were killed in this US-backed drug war in 2011.
How Operation Fast and Furious and a U.S. government informant benefited Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel
A Mexican army commander sent to protect a region of villages and ranches in northern Mexico from the Gulf Cartel and Zetas can describe, in detail, the profile of his assigned enemy, the country’s notorious drug cartels.
“These guys are sick in the head,” he says, gazing at the brush and mesquite from behind his aviator sunglasses, toward the camps of the “enemy.” “They follow a sick ideology, they’re animals.” Without missing a beat, he continues, “Look, there’s no jobs, the poverty is bad; there aren’t enough schools. There is nothing for these boys and the cartels offer them a job. They tell them, ‘You can have any kind of pickup truck you want,’ he says. “They get paid more than we do!”
The commander and his soldiers have staked out a lakeside park near this colonial village, providing security for the annual fishing tournament. Bureaucrats from the state tourism department and soldiers, some manning gunners mounted on military trucks, vastly outnumber the few tourists. Even so, reporters from TV Azteca prepare a promotional report about the event, an image that makes an effort to convince tourists that the “frontera chica” (small border), the nickname for this swath of the border, is secure and ready for tourists. Last year when the Gulf Cartel and Zetas launched their siege on the frontera chica, the then governor of Tamaulipas dismissed the reports of decapitations, incinerated cars and shootouts as merely a “collective paranoia.”
Such is the panorama of Mexico’s violence, a distorted battleground of propaganda, impunity and duplicity amid death. Such is the conflict in which the U.S. government has become firmly entrenched over the last four years since newly elected President Felipe Calderon launched his controversial U.S.-backed “war against the drug cartels.” The conflict has cost between 40,000 and 50,000 lives and violence has worsened with the U.S.-Mexican military deployment, according to a recent report on global violence by the Geneva Delegation. Violence in some parts of Mexico now outstrips the levels of many war zones.
In what may go down as a major turning point in the movement to end Mexico’s drug war, Human Rights Watch published a report on Wednesday exposing the fallacies supporting this military-led offensive.
The 212-page report titled, “Neither Rights Nor Security: Killings, Torture, and Disappearances in Mexico’s ‘War on Drugs,’” surveyed 5 Mexican states, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Nuevo Leon, Baja California, and Tabasco, and found 233 instances of human rights abuses at the hands of Mexico’s security forces. These include: 170 cases of torture, 39 “disappearances,” and 24 extrajudicial killings.
“Instead of reducing violence, Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings, torture, and other appalling abuses by security forces, which only make the climate of lawlessness and fear worse in many parts of the country,” said Human Rights Watch’s Americas Director José Miguel Vivanco.
Recent attacks on students and journalists in Ciudad Juárez (as shown in the photo above) illustrates how such a heavy-handed approach from police often turns violent, sometimes in broad daylight.
Possibly the most damning of Human Rights Watch’s findings was data that contradicted Calderón’s often repeated 90 percent figure on drug war deaths. Of the 35,000 deaths officially recognized by the PGR, 997 have been investigated. Of those, only 22 defendants have been convicted for homicide or other crimes. Such figures call into question the very legitimacy of Calderón and this drug war being fought on civilian streets.
People across Mexico are marking the Day of the Dead, a time to remember deceased family members.
One woman, Katiushka Rodriguez, lost two family members in an incident which saw 18 men killed when a drug gang mistook them for rival gang members. The men were kidnapped, killed, and then buried in a mass grave.
One year after the crime was committed, Rodriguez says state and federal authorities have failed to investigate the murders and the crime remains unpunished, despite promises by President Felipe Calderón that those responsible would be brought to justice.
The family of Edgar ‘La Barbie’ Valdez is speaking out against harsh mistreatment they say their brother is receiving at Altiplano Prison, a maximum security facility in the State of Mexico.
Among the allegations are claims that officials in the Mexican government are conspiring to kill Edgar Valdez. “They’re probably planning an assassination against my brother as we speak,” said Abel Valdez, brother of Edgar Valdez, in a recent interview with the San Antonio Express-News.
“They’re using tactics to keep my brother’s mouth shut because he knows too much,” said Abel Valdez, referring to knowledge of high-level corruption in the Mexican government involving narco-trafficking. Other reports reaffirm this claim.
Abel Valdez also says his brother, a U.S. citizen, has been “punished” by American consular officials who he has spoken with regarding his unsafe conditions.
Mexican federal troops captured Edgar Valdez on Aug. 30. He is awaiting trial in Mexico or extradition to the United States. Valdez has reportedly been on a hunger strike since Sept. 26 in protest of his alleged mistreatment.
See video of Edgar Valdez’s interview with the SSP:
Mexican Lawyer Netzaí Sandoval is seeking to prosecute Felipe Calderón at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“Mexico is experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe and we must stop it. It is essential to end impunity and bring to justice before the International Criminal Court in The Hague [those] responsible for the bloodshed, violence, the fifty thousand dead and ten thousand missing,” said Mr. Sandoval in a recent interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide.
An official death toll has not been released in almost a year. However, an independent account from Tijuana’s Zeta magazine supports Mr. Sandoval’s figures.
”We are asking the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, to investigate the violence in Mexico and the humanitarian crisis that has left more displaced [people than anywhere else] in the world,” said Mr. Sandoval.
Mr. Sandoval cited Article 8 of the Rome Statute, treaty that established the ICC, in an editorial published in La Jornada earlier this year.
Also named in the complaint are drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, Mexico’s Secretary of Public Security Genaro García Luna, Secretary of National Defense Guillermo Galván Galván, Secretary of the Navy Francisco Saynez Mendoza along with other drug traffickers and government officials.
Mexico has been the scene of several mass killings in the almost five years since Calderón first declared war on drug trafficking organizations in December 2006, many of them taking place in recent months.
An online petition launched in May calling for the ICC to investigate Calderón has so far collected more than 9,100 signatures.
A new program enacted in the Mexican state of Chihuahua hopes to lure marijuana farmers into the avocado business.
The small aircraft touches down in a tiny dirt track airstrip, hidden in the folds of the surrounding mountains. A crowd of men wait for us in pickup trucks. They are heavy set, clad in jeans and trucker hats. Strong hands grasp ours in greeting before we all clamber onto the pickups, and the strange convoy sets off. Our destination is a three hour ride away over a dirt road, weaving around the edges of giant canyons and plunging through clear mountain streams.
We are in the Sierra Madre, the ‘Mother Mountains’ of Northern Mexico. In a country currently struggling against a wave of drug led violence, these rugged lands have long been the apex of all that is wild, violent and illegal.
Here, blood feuds regularly erupt that can wipe out entire families. It’s not an uncommon sight to see farmers work with rifles swung on to their shoulders. Many of them are employed in producing the only crops that really pay here: marijuana and heroin poppies.
In the latest chapter of drug war absurdity, the wife of one of the world’s most wanted men, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, gives birth to twin daughters in a Los Angeles County hospital, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Emma Coronel, a U.S. citizen, reportedly traveled to Southern California in mid-July, delivering daughters Emali Guadalupe and Maria Joaquina on August 15.
The mystery in this story is how U.S. authorities tracked Coronel from Mexico to a hospital in Lancaster, California without ever detaining her for questioning. Moreover, why would the pregnant wife of a billionaire travel several hundred miles to give birth in a county hospital?
This story only adds further credibility to the many reports alleging duplicity between El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel and the United States government. The absurdity is that while the United States spends billions to equip and train Mexican troops to apprehend Guzmán, somehow, Guzmán is seemingly able to arrange for his wife to travel to the United States to give birth without any trouble.
While it sounds like Emma Coronel and Joaquín Guzmán’s twin daughters were born healthy, this relationship between the United States and Mexico is leaving thousands dead on arrival.
