OLLICartel Week 2 Notes for PPT2

Transcription

1 OLLICartel Week 2 Notes for PPT2 PPT Slide 1 The Pax Narcotica is the relatively peaceful early era of the drug cartels in Mexico. It didn t seem great at the time, but in retrospect the different cartels shared an understanding of their plazas, they had an understanding with the government (helped along with bribery) so that they could move their product with a minimum of violence. The assassination of DEA agent Camarena in 1985 was unusual, but singalled that order was beginning to break down. Slide 2-3. The collapse of the PRI destablilized the system. Democracy and active competition in politics are great unless you are trying to figure out who to bribe. It was no longer effective to just bribe the people at the top of the system, party discipline was breaking down. The other problem was that as it became clear that the era of the PRI was over, some corrupt officials began to think about their retirement strategy and were playing groups off against eachother, accepting multiple bribes, etc. Their was chaos in the system. Slide 4-5. The end of the Cold War was great for the US and also for the losers in Eastern Europe. But it was really a lousy time for the developing world. The administration of Salina, was a disaster for Mexico, but much of the disaster was caused by changes after the 1990 end of the Cold War. Investment and development money left Latin America and other regions and moved to Eastern Europe. Aid packages that existed were made contingent on Mexico following neoliberal principles privatizing state companies, cutting social services, deregulation None of these were popular and they contributed to the sense of social and economic crisis. Immersed in economic crisis, Mexico focused on the Nafta agreement. But the US was driving a hard bargain (still focused on the Camarena murder) and demanding judicial reforms. The topic of extradition is terrifying to the Cartels, as are the new financial regulations. And the sharing of information on investigations is a demand. The U.S. had shifted from seeing the cartels as a crime issue to seeing the cartels as a cause of political instability. The way that Colombia had descended into chaos in the 1980s was a lesson in the impact cartels could have. Slide 6. The U.S. invasion of Panama in Dec. 1989, ostensibly to arrest Gen. Manuel Noriega for allowing Panama to become the banking center for the cartels (the timing of the invasion was also motivated by the fear that the U.S. would lose control over the Canal to Noriega). The sight of the US troops ushering an arrested Noriega off to Miami was sobering for the Cartels. Slide 7. The Pax Narcotica really falls apart in the early 1990s. The Cartels begin to infringe on eachother s territory, assassinate eachother, etc. Most of the violence is still focused on inter cartel rivalries, but it is sufficiently gruesome (kidnappings, attacks on vacation homes, exacting revenge on family members) that it captures the public eye. The most dramatic event was the 1993 murder of the Mexican Cardinal Posadas Ocampo, who was killed by gunfire at the Guadelajara airport. The investigation concluded that the Cardinal was in the wrong place at the wrong time, when the hitmen from one cartel expected to find members of a rival cartel, but mistook the cardinal s car for their target.

2 The public anger, and the public refusal to accept the account hinted at the level of mistrust many Mexicans ha for the PRI. Slide was supposed to begin with a celebration over Mexico s entry into NAFTA but the newspapers were instead full of news of an armed revolt (by the Zapatista Army) in the poor southern state of Chiapas. The revolt didn t really affect the cartels, but it did hasten the death of the PRI, which definitely affected the Cartels. The Zapatistas main goal was to bring publicity to the situation of poor Mexicans who had been neglected by the government and abandoned in the NAFTA negotiations. The way they achieved their goal, by using cutting edge technology to broadcast their own version of events with video cameras, satellite phones (a real novelty the size of a suitcase!) and . Control of the image of a group was part of the political strategy, a lesson the cartel members would soon adopt. Slide 10. As if an armed rebellion wasn t bad enough (and it caused an economic slump and a devaluation), the PRI was beset by a scandal of Shakespearean proportions. As the Mexican election season opened, the PRI candidate, reformist Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated. The killer was arrested and claimed to have acted alone. A few months later the President s brother in law, Francisco Ruiz Masseiu, head ot the PRI party, was assassinated. Another Ruiz Masseiu brother, Mario, the Attorney General of Mexico, was arrested after bank accounts worth 17 million in the US were seized, and finally the President s own brother was arrested trying to flee the country with money. He was convicted of the murder of the Francisco Ruiz Massieu, but released in President Salinas insisted on his innocence of the murder, said they were all targeted/and or framed by cartels, but the quantity of money in personal accounts didn t look very good. Slide 11. Over the 1990s the impact of NAFTA was very uneven in Mexico. It did lead to greater investment in the maquiladoras of the north, and an increase in some kinds of agricultural exports, but not all classes benefitted equally. One effect that would impact the Cartels in another decade was the collapse of agriculture in central Mexico. This mountainous region had smallholder farms which produced for local markets, but the corn coming in from the U.S. was cheaper (subsidized by the US govt) and the local markets collapsed. In this graph you can see the collapsing prices for corn, which left many young men without a way of making a living. NAFTA increased migration to the U.S. from these regions which had not previously been involved in seasonal migration to the U.S. It also increased internal migration to the north, where many hope to find maquiladora jobs, but many ended up joining urban poor. The social devastation of the collapse of corn prices will become one of the factors in the rise of new kinds of cartels years later. Slide 12. In 2000 the PRI lost the presidency for the first time since the Revolution. On the one hand it signaled the emergence of a more active and educated citizenry, aware of alternatives. But it was also a protest vote against a party that could not seem to solve the problems of security or the economy. Slide 13. Fox quickly signaled that he was going to work with the US to handle this joint problem, and even approved extradition, which was historically an extremely unpopular topic in Mexico. The US and Mexico initiated joint investigations, the FBI and DEA expanded their offices in Mexico and they focused on the drug kingpins.

3 Slide 14. For the cartels it was the end of an era where they had really only had to fear eachother, not the state. The large, hierarchically organized cartels were vulnerable and they would need to evolve to survive. One of the first to see the new landscape was El Chapo, who had been happily running his drug empire from jail. But with news that he could be extradited, it was time to arrange his escape. Cartels were no longer going to be tolerated by the government (well, corruption remained an issue) and thus government officials, especially police, lawyers, and judges became targets. Slide 15. Something else was changing. Cartels were professionalizing their security. Previously they had relied on small personal guards and hired assassin specialists, but around 2000 they start organizing militias. These hired thugs worked to intimidate, to punish, they served as lookouts, and occasionally they carried product (mules). This served to intimidate rivals and police. One source of recruits for these militias were originally from U.S> based gangs. Cartels had established links with gangs in Chicago, Los Angeles, etc for distribution purposes years before, but now the gangs skill sets were useful back in Mexico. The fact that during these years the US was deporting many violent criminals as a way of reducing jail populations, made the task easier. A lot of the deportees had few links to their supposed homes (many had fled civil war violence in Central America in the s with family) and their only marketable skill was as muscle men for gangs. Slide 16. The most famous militia created by a cartel were the Zetas. The Zetas were orginally founded by the Gulf Cartel in the late 1990s. Early organizers of the group had received training in the GAFES, a special forces unit. They were joined by other trained soldiers who detefected, and even included members of the Kabilies, the Special Forces of the Guatemalan army, who have a pretty uneven human rights record. One reason I chose this photo was because of the professional appearance of the Zeta arms, body armor, etc. IT certainly illustrates the modern wide open global arms bazaar (ad when the US did not renew the Assault Weapons Ban in 2004 it helped militias enormously!), but it also helps explain why some young men (and a few women) may be attracted to these organizations. Its empowering! Slide 17. So on the eve of the Presidential election in 2006 you have an increasingly tense relationship between cartels that are militarizing and turning violence on agents of the state, and a state that is cooperating with the U.S. President Calderon won the presidency with the tiniest of leads, and as he prepared his first press conference he wanted to focus attention on the plans for Mexico s growth. But no one wanted to hear hi speech because the night before armed men had invaded a Michoacan dance club and dumped a bag of heads out. This kind of gruesome violence for display was still unknown in Mexico, but it definitely made its point. In response Calderon announced a war on Drugs and sent Mexican army units into the north to protect highways and key cities. Slide 18. We noted the first class that the problem hasn t exactly been fixed. There is much more violence today (2017 the most violent year yet) and more drug cartels in existence than in Why? Is the massive growth of violence an adaptive tactic of Cartels to the new era?

4 One argument is that by treating the drug trade as a war, not a criminal problem, cartels have no reason to cooperate at all. Militarization had increased the overall socicietal exposure to violent tactics, and eliminated the possibility of negotiated solutions. Another angle is to think about this rising level of gruesome violence as part of a global moment. We perhaps shouldn t just think about why this is happening in Mexico, but why it is happening in so many areas? Iraq, Afghanistan, even school shootings in the U.S. What kind of cultural crisis may it be responding to? Finally, the ease of communication due to new technology may explain the emergence of this kind of grisly violence in many settings. If you want to use violence to send a message (as a cartel establishing an image of power, or even a political actor using terrorism/public violence for political goals) the technology makes it much easier to get your message to people. You don t have to hijack a plane or kidnap someone like Patty Hearst to get the press to cover you, you can do it by creating your own visual presence. You can film grisly murders and post them on Youtube yourself, etc. Slide 19. I posted a chapter from Nathan Jones book on Profit Seeking Illicit Networks because I think his description of how Cartels have fragmented as a business strategy is very helpful. He looks at how Cartels adapted to the new age of increased government cooperation, greater persecution, and finds that the fragmentation is an intelligent response to new risks. Transactional Cartels usually have origins in the older cartels. They keep control of the arrival and logistics of moving the product to distribution networks, but are not involved anymore in distribution. They are involved in cleaning the money. They are the one who have the connections to sources of supply (that is their greatest business advantage) and specialized knowledge of finances and money laundering and front businesses. Transactional cartels like to keep a low profile. They often intimidate the press to stay out of the public eye. They may play the territorial groups off against each other, or even betray one to the state if necessary. In eliminating their involvement in distribution they have eliminated much of the risk of arrest and the discovery of their financial holdings. Territorial Cartels get money not just for distributing drugs, but by extorting protection money from their zones, and through kidnapping. Human traffic is also seen as a good they can control for money. While Transactional Cartels like to avoid publicity, Territorial Cartels need publicity to establish their credentials and make extraction easier. In other words, to terrorize their subjects. They are responsible for the bulk of the violence. Because Territorial cartels are more visible they are a greater threat to the legitimacy of the state. They prove that the state is not controlling security, that the state does not have a monopoly on violence, that they don t even have a monopoly on demanding taxes from the citizens. The territorial PSINs directly compete with the state and for that the state focuses more attention on eliminating them.

5 Finally, Territorial cartels have no significant advantage they are often in competition with eachother for control of territories, and in danger of internal revolts and fragmentation. They rely on cultivating cult like identities to counteract this tendency. Slide We are going to come back to this framework as we examine the current cartels in the next few weeks. We can examine them through political, business or cultural models. We will start with Economics.