Mexico in Focus

Violence metastasizes in Mexico

Like the metastasis of a terminal disease, the violence in Mexico is spreading throughout the entire country with a speed that makes it almost impossible to keep the smallest bit of hope.

Last week, Monterrey –the third largest city in Mexico and the capital of Nuevo León state– broke a bloody record with 33 people killed in one single day.  It was the goriest day of a war that has left more than 650 people dead this year. Two of the state governor’s bodyguards were also killed and mutilated during the week.

Monterrey is the industrial capital of the country and it is also Mexico’s wealthiest city.  It generates around 7.5 percent of the national gross product and houses offices for foreign companies such as John Deere, Caterpillar, BASF, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes Benz, General Electric, Siemens and Mitsubishi, just to mention a few.

Monterrey used to be synonymous with progress and entrepreneurial spirit. Its residents used to boast about being part of a first-world and Americanized city. But now that’s in the past.  While two cartels –the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel– battle each other over the control of Nuevo León’s trafficking routes, authorities seem to be stunned by the violence and the citizens are disheartened.

As most of the cities in the country, Monterrey also has problems of police corruption and impunity. It also has a huge problem of unequal distribution of wealth and a growing problem of neglected population. In few words, it has everything to become another Ciudad Juárez with its thousands of killed people every year.

Just a few years ago it would have been inconceivable to think that Monterrey, the center of economic power in Mexico, would be so affected by drug-trafficking violence. The flawed logic behind that naïve idea was that the government, the authorities and Monterrey’s upper crust wouldn’t allow the cartels to touch their interests and risk the flow of foreign investment into the city.

But that thought proved to be wrong. And as one executive of Femsa told Reuters recently, “if we can’t deal with the problem in Monterrey, with all the resources and the people we have there, then that is a serious concern for the rest of Mexico”.

To this day there isn’t a clear strategy to fight crime in Monterrey. The federal government has sent some troops to help the state and municipal police, but there isn’t any evidence that crime is declining. And despite all the noise coming from the state government regarding their new police forces, corruption still reigns within the corporation.  In fact, 22 officers were arrested recently because of their alleged participation in the torture and killing of the governor’s bodyguards.

It seems that Monterrey is falling apart and unfortunately there is nothing to suggest that the trend is going to stop.

As with a terminal disease, the cancer is attacking a vital center.  The tumor had already provoked irreversible damage to places such as Michoacán, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Durango, Sinaloa, Coahuila and many more...Now is getting worse in Monterrey, tomorrow will be Guadalajara and later on Mexico City. When it happens, the country will be screwed up.

 

Transparency, a big challenge of Juarez's new police chief

Julian Leyzaola is a controversial man.

The Ciudad Juarez’s new police chief is seen as a hero by many because of the way he crackdown crime in Tijuana, when he was the chief of police. For many others, his methods of fighting criminals are concerning, especially for human rights related issues.

Leyzaola likes to call things by their names. He proposes to take out the fancy names and the paraphernalia that surrounds criminals: “A hit man is an assassin… an armed group is a group of delinquents… executions are homicides,” he said in an interview with reporters early this week.

He doesn’t evade any of the questions and he seems to have a response for all of them. On the allegations of human rights abuses, for instance, he says that those allegations came from people who he fired from the Tijuana’s police force after he discovered their involvement in corruption and crime activities.

At least 24-fired Tijuana’s police officers accused Leyzaola of torture. In their testimonies before human rights commissions they said they were beaten and had electric shocks to their genitals. They said they were obliged to sign confessions that they were not allowed to read. Some of them said Leyzaola was present during the torture.

Leyzaola denies the accusations and he even says that if authorities are involved in torture, they are not different from criminals. He asks human rights commissions to investigate all sides of the story and he insists that some people use human rights organizations “as a blanket” to cover and protect themselves from justice.

In countries like Mexico, the line between law enforcement and respect for human rights is very fine, but it can turn almost invisible in situations where crime is as outrageous as it is in Ciudad Juarez right now.

For that reason Leyzaola’s affirmation that some criminals can’t be considered human is concerning.  “A criminal is a criminal”, he said. “Some of them call themselves human, which I doubt considering the aberrations some of them commit, like chopping up women or locking them up and torturing them for days. And they still demand that their rights are respected? I believe that the punishment of criminals has to be in the in direct proportion to the harm they caused.”

Yes, everybody agrees that criminals should be punished. But they should be punished after a trial that clearly demonstrates their plenty responsibility and guilt in those criminal acts. People can’t be punished before with methods such as torture, forced disappearance or any other antidemocratic and barbaric strategies that have inflicted so much pain to the society in the past years.

Mexico’s justice system is far away of being perfect. Countless of cases of innocent people being detained, tortured and imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit have shown the pitfalls of the system.

Leyzaola seems to have good intentions to fight crime and that is absolutely necessary not just for Juarez, but for the entire country. But there must be a balance between law enforcement and respect for human rights. If that balance doesn’t exist, all of his efforts are going to fail because of the lack of credibility.

That balance could be achieved through transparency. If there is transparency in the ways that the police conduct their investigations and arrests, if the society can trust the intelligence of the corporation, then, we could start talking about the beginning of the change.

Leyzaola has been just three months in the position. He is careful about delivering promises, but he says that by mid next year there must be some visible changes. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

 

Caravan for Peace brings hope to Juarenses

The last time Roberto Galván heard of his son was on Jan. 25 this year.

That day, his 34 year-old son, also named Roberto, was relaxing in the central square of General Terán, a small town in the state of Nuevo León, when a group of state police officers arrested and took him to an unknown place.

Since then, Galván has been looking for his son in all the possible places. As many other parents of people who have disappeared, Galván has become an investigator. He has collected testimonies from people who saw the officers taking his son, he has interrogated police officers and he has obtained a lot of evasive responses from the local authorities.

Galván is one of the many parents who have joined Javier Sicilia, the man who heads the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity that arrived yesterday to Ciudad Juárez.

Sicilia, a poet and journalist, has been traveling through the country heading a national movement that demands justice and an end to the government-led war against drugs. He started the movement after his son was brutally killed March 28  in the city of Cuernavaca, Morelos.

 “When I met Sicilia I told him:  ‘le dieron en la madre a mi hijo igual que al tuyo’ (they screwed up my son the same way they screwed yours)…and the third time that I told him the same, he gave me a hug and we cried together,” told me Galván while we were waiting for the beginning of the Caravan’s first demonstration of the day at the cotton field in Juárez this morning.

After his son’s disappearance, Galván abandoned his job as an entrepreneur and decided to devote himself exclusively to find him. He has been moving with the Caravan since June 4, where he has met many desperate parents just like him in states such as Michoacán, San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, Zacatecas, Mexico City and now Chihuahua.

“I decided to leave everything because this is really important. It is not just the loss of my son…it is the loss of all of our children,” he said. “Our country is falling to pieces and if we don’t stop it, we are going to lose it.”

Sicilia has brought some hope to hundreds of people who have lost relatives or friends during the five years of the government’s drug war. Today, he was saluted by the parents of dozens of women who have been killed or have been missing for months or even years. All of them share the pain and mourn for their loved ones.

In Galvan’s case, he is determined to follow up with the commitments that the authorities of the state of Nuevo León made with the members of the Caravan last Wednesday, which included an investigation of the cases of eight missing people, including his son Roberto.

“We should have a preliminary report on these cases in eight days, and later on, in 30 days, they should give us a complete report on what happened to these people. If we don’t get it, we will put more pressure on them,” he said.

In his speech this morning, Sicilia said that the pain shouln’t become a wall of woes. On the contrary, he said, it should be the seed for something different. He and the civic organizations integrating the Caravan will sign an agreement this evening demanding the end of the drug war and a more integral strategy to fight organized crime.

Tomorrow, Sicilia and the Caravan will be in El Paso.

 

Juarenses will receive the Caravan for Peace this Thursday

This coming Thursday, the people of Ciudad Juárez will greet and receive the Caravana for Peace with Justice and Dignity.

The Caravana, headed by poet Javier Sicilia and more than a dozen civic organizations, will arrive to Juárez on June 9 after a journey of more than 1,800 traveling miles and several meetings in some of the cities most affected by drug-trafficking violence. Massive events in the city are planned for Friday.

Sicilia became a public figure after the brutal murder of his son, Juan Francisco, along with other six young men on March 28 in the city of Cuernavaca.  Sicilia, who is also a journalist from the prestigious magazine Proceso, has become a strong voice demanding justice for all the victims of drug-trafficking violence and an end to the government’s drug war.

In its traveling route, which has included Mexico City, Morelia and San Luis Potosí, Saltillo and Monterrey, the Caravana has attracted hundreds of people who have suffered the kidnapping, the disappearance or the assassination of one or several of their family members. It is expected that more people will join it as the caravan moves through to Torreón,  Chihuahua and finally to Ciudad Juárez.

It is significant that the civic organizations integrated into the Caravana chose Juárez as the place to sign a national civic agreement to pressure the Mexican government to change its strategy to fight organized crime.

With more than 7,000 killings in the last three years, Juarez is an emblematic place for drug-related violence. In Sicilia’s own words, Juárez symbolizes all the pain and the suffering that the country is going through as the result of a war that is not its own.

Sicilia and the civic organizations are calling for a more integral strategy that would include policies to crackdown on the finances of organized crime, money laundering, corruption and impunity, as well as actions to restore the social fabric and political reforms to advance democracy.

Although is highly unlikely that the government would make changes to its militarized drug war strategy –especially when election time is around the corner– the civic organizations’ pressure could generate some significant developments in the short term.

Yesterday, for example, members of the Caravana had a meeting with the attorney general for the state of Nuevo León. As a result of the meeting, the local government made the commitment to reopen the investigation of dozens of people who have disappeared without leaving any trace. The attorney general even appointed an official to follow up all the cases and to investigate theit legal status.

With little steps like this, civic organizations can force the local and federal government to fight impunity and to give answers to thousands of people who are still demanding justice for their relatives. Hopefully they will have similar answers from the authorities of Chihuahua.

 

 

Making the police job a honorable profession in Mexico

For years and years, Mexicans citizens have distrusted their police forces.

Countless cases of corruption, brutality, lack of preparation and inefficiency have affected the police’s image for decades. It would be a waste of time to recall the scandalous cases in which police officers have been involved in kidnappings, extortions, drug trafficking and many other crimes.

Efforts to cleanup Mexican police forces can be traced back as far as 1991, when the Mexican government, still under control of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), announced a complete reorganization of the Federal Judicial Police, which included the creation of a special anticorruption force and some internal affairs units.

The reform in 1991 and the subsequent attempts to fight corruption within police forces have failed for several reasons, but most importantly because corruption is so deeply rooted in corporations that eradicating it would mean the destruction of the entire organization and the creation of a new one.

In that sense, the saying “one bad apple destroys the bunch” is more appropriate today than ever.  Any and all genuine efforts to cleanup the police forces have been unsuccessful because those bad apples have been stronger and resistant to any kind of pesticides.

President Felipe Calderón has consistently talked about the need to reform the police forces. Yesterday, during the celebration of the Federal Police Day, he called on young people to join the police corporations as a public service to their country. He even said that the police profession should be seen as a “civic priesthood”.

What Calderón was emphasizing was the need of making the job of police an honorable profession, a public service that can be recognized and trusted by the majority of the citizens as it is in other countries of the world.

It would be absolutely naïve to think that that transformation could happen in a couple of years, or even in a decade. To achieve a change of this magnitude would require an entire generation and a government’s iron will to stay on the top of the issue and keep it as a national priority.

Some efforts have been made and some others are on their way. Just recently, the International Police Academy was inaugurated in the state of Puebla, with funds from the Merida Initiative. In theory, the students there should be better prepared to deal with issues such as intelligence, criminal investigations, ethics and others.

As I mentioned above, it could take generations to change the structure of the Mexican police forces. Maybe we won’t see that, but hopefully the children of our children will. But it is absolutely necessary to start right now, because as one political analyst from the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City has said “you cannot fight a war like this without a very clean and professional police structure”.