The long arm of the cartels

After seizing leadership of the cocaine trade between Colombia and the US, Mexican cartels seem to have all the weaponry and information they need for many years of successful business

Nobody knows who is really who in Mexico. Governors, judges, intelligence officials and policemen of every rank have been found guilty of corruption in the past few years, most of them bought by the gangs who smuggle cocaine into the United States.


“Nationwide, every time we recruit policemen, we know that some of them are narco-agents trying to infiltrate the system, and that some others are, soon or later, going to collaborate with the narcos, either because they accept their money or because of pressure on their families”, says an interior ministry official who does not want to be named.


Life in the police is a vicious circle. An honest policeman is under threat. A dishonest one is not any luckier; if he joins one of the four main drug cartels, he will become a target for the other three. A young policeman can earn 5,000 pesos ($366) a month, but the gangs will promise him ten times that plus a brand new automobile. But as his family’s standard of living rises, his life expectancy falls.


The law running scared


The war between the cartels has already killed more than 7,000 people this year, 160 of them by decapitation. The violence reaches into the US itself, with cartel-backed kidnappings on the rise in Arizona and other southern states. In January, a police commanding officer’s head was dropped off in front of the police station just outside Ciudad Juarez, the twin city of El Paso in Texas, with a message saying “for the Sinaloa Cartel."


In Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa State, cradle of the narco-dynasties, fewer and fewer people want to join the police. Bodies are picked up in the streets every day, making mortuaries the fastest-growing businesses in this dusty city. In February, in the Caribbean seaside resort of Cancun, the head of the local police, Francisco Velasco, nicknamed ‘The Viking’, was arrested on charges of murdering a retired army general.


Corruption is taken for granted in Mexico, but President Felipe Calderón says “the same phenomenon of corruption of the authorities is happening” on the other side of the Rio Grande. And so Mexicans were pleased to hear US President Barack Obama say during his first visit to the country that the US “could not pretend this is Mexico’s responsibility alone”.


Formerly acting as subcontractors and considered as such by Colombia’s Pablo Escobar and his colleagues, the Mexican cartels are now the masters of the game. They control the entry points to the US along a 3,200km border. The cocaine may still come from Colombia, but the Colombians are now only the suppliers.


Calderon’s ‘cancer’


The Gulf, Sinaloa, Juarez and Tijuana cartels are well-supplied with weapons, from traditional ‘macheta’ (to decapitate opponents) to automatic rifles, rocket launchers and even anti-aircraft machine guns, like the one seized in mid-April in Sonora State, just a few weeks after the US said it would pay for Blackhawk helicopters to tackle the cartels under the three-year, $1.4bn Merida Initiative.


Thanks to inside agents, the narco-gangs are generally one move ahead. When he was elected president in 2006, Calderón launched an aggressive offensive against the drug barons, sending 36,000 troops and policemen into the most conflict-ridden areas. The government claims to make regular arrests of the heads of the cartels and to be delivering fatal blows to the trade, but this does not seem to have weakened them.


The drug traffic is like “a cancer”, says Calderón. And in spite of the measures taken by the authorities, no significant change has been seen in drug availability on the US side of the border: the price of cocaine has been stable, which means supplies are still getting through.