Pubdate: Sat, 22 May 2010
Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU)
Copyright: 2010 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/letters.html
Website: http://www.montrealgazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274
Author: Bruce Livesey, Freelance

DRUG WAR OR DRUG DEAL?

Mexico's Biggest Cartel Banks on Powerful Friends

Like most cops in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Jesus 
Manuel Fierro-Mendez was dirty.

In fact, soon after being promoted to the position of captain, he was 
smuggling enormous quantities of cocaine into the United States. And 
when Fierro-Mendez quit his job in the spring of 2007, after someone 
tried to kill him, he went to work for the Sinaloa drug cartel, 
Mexico's most powerful drug-trafficking organization, run by Joaquin 
(El Chapo) Guzman, the richest drug lord in North America and the 
second most wanted man in the world after Osama bin Laden.

Juarez is a city of 1.3 million people that sprawls across the border 
from El Paso, Tex., and is a key entry point for narcotics shipped 
from Mexico into the lucrative American and Canadian black markets. 
It's also a wild west killing field, the most dangerous metropolis in 
the world, where on average seven people are now murdered every day 
and 5,300 have been gunned down since January 2008 - the result of a 
vicious war between the Sinaloa and Juarez drug cartels, who are 
fighting for control of this prized gateway.

Fierro-Mendez's career as a drug smuggler was short but spectacular: 
He was arrested in El Paso in 2008 for transporting 50 kilos of 
cocaine a week across the border. Earlier this year, his audacity 
cost him a 27-year prison sentence.

But that's not really what's interesting about the former Mexican 
police captain. This winter, the 47-year-old Fierro-Mendez testified 
in an El Paso court against Fernando Ontiveros-Arambula, his former 
boss in the Sinaloa cartel in Juarez - and one of Chapo Guzman's top 
lieutenants. And Fierro-Mendez's testimony contained some unexpected 
bombshells.

When asked about his own role in the Sinaloa cartel, Fierro-Mendez 
replied: "I took control over one part of the Mexican army through an 
inactive captain, a member of the army."

He said he contacted this captain through another army source, a man 
nicknamed El Pantera. Fierro-Mendez's cellphone even contained 
Pantera's number. The prosecutor asked why it was necessary for the 
Sinaloa cartel to control the army?

"The basic objective was to try to terminate, eliminate (the Juarez 
cartel)," answered Fierro-Mendez. "So that (the Juarez cartel) would 
disappear, so that its strength would be reduced, and Chapo's cartel 
could take control."

To this end, Fierro-Mendez fed sensitive information to the army 
whose soldiers, in turn, would apprehend Juarez cartel members. "When 
I had control of the army, of part of the army, I was known as the 
leader of (the Juarez region)," he declared.

The drug dealer also noted that Chapo Guzman favoured those who could 
transport the most drugs across the border into the U.S. "And was 
influence with the military an important factor (in moving drugs)?" 
the prosecutor asked him.

"Very important."

"And what efforts, if any, were being made to get control of the military?"

"Well, I already had it," boasted Fierro-Mendez. "I had it, for free, 
I had it."

sss

To put Fierro-Mendez's remarks in context, consider the following: 
Most of the cocaine, marijuana, heroin and crystal meth entering the 
U.S. and Canada - a trade valued at up to $50 billion a year - 
transits through the hands of Mexico's seven drug cartels. In 2007, 
Felipe Calderon, the newly-elected president of Mexico, announced he 
was setting the Mexican army loose against the cartels, sending 
45,000 Mexican soldiers into the cities and towns to wipe out these 
criminal gangs.

The U.S. government liked this strategy so much that it's been 
spending $1.4 billion U.S., through something called the Merida 
Initiative, to help arm and train the Mexican military in its fight 
with the cartels - making Mexico the largest recipient of U.S. 
security aid in the Americas.

Yet an investigation conducted by The Gazette, CBC Radio and 
America's National Public Radio (NPR) has found that powerful 
elements within both the Mexican government and army have no 
intention of ending the narcotics trade. Instead, these senior 
government and military officials are assisting the Sinaloa cartel 
and its leader, Chapo Guzman, become the dominant drug trafficking 
organization in Mexico. They are helping the Sinaloa cartel take out 
its rival cartels. Which would mean it will likely become the most 
powerful organized crime group on the continent.

"The (Mexican) government went from being a controller of 
narco-trafficking - to the armed wing of the cartels," declares 
Anabel Hernandez, one of Mexico's leading investigative reporters who 
has spent five years researching a book about the Sinaloa cartel and 
Chapo Guzman. "This is what's happening here. Portions or sectors of 
the military, the Federal Investigations Agency, the federal police, 
and Secretariat of Public Security, are at the service of the cartel 
of Sinaloa. ... Guzman and the Sinaloans have been protected for the 
past nine years by the federal government."

This contention is given weight by Manuel Clouthier Carrillo, a 
senator in the ruling National Action Party (PAN), who triggered an 
uproar this winter when he gave an interview to a Mexican newsweekly 
accusing his own president and party leader, Felipe Calderon, of not 
going after the Sinaloa cartel. The magazine's cover had a picture of 
Chapo Guzman with the headline "The Untouchable." And Clouthier 
should know: He represents the state of Sinaloa, where Guzman and his 
cartel are based.

"It's inconceivable that organized crime has the power that it has in 
Mexico without support from our legal institutions," Clouthier said 
in an interview with NPR. "The Calderon government, which has been 
fighting organized crime in many parts of the republic, has not 
touched Sinaloa. I know this. I'm Sinaloan. My family lives in 
Sinaloa. Every weekend I'm in Sinaloa, and I can say it as a Sinaloan 
that Sinaloa is not being touched."

When NPR crunched the numbers from Mexico's attorney-general's 
office, they showed that of 2,604 cartel members prosecuted since 
Calderon became president in 2006, less than 12 per cent were from 
the Sinaloa cartel - despite it being the largest and most powerful 
cartel in Mexico. And Edgardo Buscaglia, an internationally-renowned 
law professor, economist and UN adviser who teaches at the Mexico 
City-based university, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, says 
he's been leaked government statistics on charges laid against cartel 
members that reveal the same pattern. Buscaglia believes the 
Sinaloans have corrupted Mexico's political system.

"They have been able to infiltrate the higher levels of the state, 
and have been able to bribe and distort their way through the higher 
levels of decision-making," he maintains. "The money the politicians 
get for political campaigns comes from organized crime, which is why 
they are not touched."

Evidence of such corruption is mounting:

n Earlier this month, internal cartel documents obtained by Mexican 
authorities from a suspected associate of Guzman, and leaked to a 
Mexican newspaper, showed that Guzman has a sophisticated 
counterintelligence operation and is a master at buying off top 
police officers and soldiers; he has detailed information of those 
pursuing him, and has police officers on his payroll protecting 
members of the cartel.

n Last summer, 10 Mexican army officers were arrested, including a 
captain and seven lieutenants, who were working for the Sinaloa cartel.

n Then there is Jose Gomez Llanos, who is on the U.S. Treasury's list 
of Foreign Narcotics Kingpins and is suspected of being a money 
launderer for Guzman. He's currently the top federal prosecutor in 
the state of Tamaulipas.

n And in 2008, the Mexican government arrested, among others, the 
chief of the federal police, the representative to Interpol, an 
officer in the Presidential Guard, an army captain accused of selling 
military weapons to the Sinaloans, and Noe Ramirez Mandujano - the 
former drug czar who allegedly pocketed $450,000 U.S. for passing 
information to the cartel.

Yet Buscaglia believes there's method to the government's apparent 
madness in favouring the Sinaloa cartel. Given that narcotics might 
well be Mexico's second-biggest export after oil, and an estimated 78 
per cent of the legitimate economy is infiltrated by organized crime, 
Buscaglia says the country's weak government is finding it difficult 
to crush the drug traffickers. Instead, he feels they've embraced a 
strategy used by governments in Colombia and Russia: encouraging the 
emergence of one dominant criminal group.

"They are hoping, behind closed doors, that one organized crime group 
will consolidate itself nationally," says the law professor. "By 
having a national organized crime consolidation, you will see less 
violence taking place. You will see less competition among the 
organized crime groups. Instead of fighting seven or eight organized 
crime groups they will be fighting one or two. That's the hope they have."

sss

The ties linking the Mexican state, army and cartels are visible in 
places like Juarez.

Once heralded as a model of neo-liberal globalization, with its 
low-wage, union-free factories pumping out goods for the American 
market, today Juarez is a frayed shell of this dream, a municipality 
of broad avenues and ubiquitous fast food joints and chain stores, 
where heavily-armed soldiers and federal police roam the streets in 
pickup trucks.

It's a dying city: 100,000 people have fled, 25 per cent of houses 
stand abandoned and 40 per cent of businesses have closed, and where 
the murder rate keeps going up and up. In 2007, there were 300 
murders, before it shot to 1,600 in 2008, and 2,650 last year.

Juarez, and the outlying regions, have long been controlled by the 
Juarez drug cartel, currently led by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. This 
gang once ran the local and state police and city government, and 
permitted drugs from other cartels to pass through the city into the 
U.S. for a fee.

But its fortunes are now on the wane. Why? Up until 10 years ago, 
Mexico was ruled for seven decades by the Institutional Revolutionary 
Party (PRI), which kept a firm hand on the cartels in return for 
graft. The PRI, police forces, army and cartels all worked closely 
together in a tango of corruption.

This was underlined in 1997 when an army general, Jesus Gutierrez 
Rebollo, Mexico's top drug czar under president Ernesto Zedillo, was 
arrested for protecting and taking money from Juarez cartel kingpin 
Amado Carrillo who earned his nickname - Lord of the Skies - for 
flying DC-6s loaded with Colombian cocaine into the country under the 
nose of the Mexican military. "Organized crime groups in Mexico were 
up until 10, 15 years ago managed by the state," explains Buscaglia. 
"The groups couldn't compete with one another."

In 2000, however, the PRI's long reign ended and Vicente Fox and his 
PAN party swept to power. PAN was unwilling to continue the corrupt 
relationship with the cartels, allowing a vacuum to emerge. Soon the 
cartels began vying with one another for the growing profits of the 
drug trade and violence among them flared into warfare.

One of the enduring mysteries of this period is how Chapo Guzman, the 
head of the Sinaloa cartel, escaped from a maximum-security prison a 
few months after Vicente Fox's election. He'd been jailed in 1993. 
"After five years of investigation," says investigative reporter 
Hernandez, "I have the journalistic conviction that Chapo didn't 
escape from Puente Grande prison. He was released by the authorities 
to be reinserted into cartel life in Mexico."

Whatever the case, Guzman's reputation as a Robin Hood folk hero has 
only grown. Now listed on the Forbes list of billionaires and as the 
41st most powerful person in the world, Guzman is the informal CEO of 
one of the world's biggest drug-trafficking organizations, which 
smuggles a big part of the marijuana, heroin, cocaine and meth that 
ends up on U.S. and Canadian streets and has links to organized crime 
in 23 countries. He's feted on YouTube videos and by musicians and 
lives with a $7-million U.S. bounty on his head somewhere in the 
mountains of Sinaloa, a central state that hugs the Pacific Ocean.

The collapse of the old order and rise of Guzman was bad news for the 
Juarez cartel. Now its territory is up for grabs. Indeed, according 
to a former Juarez police commander, who fled the city more than a 
year ago and now lives in El Paso, Tex., the Sinaloans were invited 
into Juarez by a group of smaller drug trafficking organizations in 2007.

The commander, who spoke to The Gazette in his lawyer's office on 
condition of anonymity, says these smaller gangs once worked with the 
Juarez cartel to smuggle drugs through the city into the U.S. But 
three years ago, the Juarez cartel ended this arrangement. So, says 
the former cop, the smaller groups appealed to the Sinaloans for 
help. "They went to Chapo and united forces with Chapo and that's how 
he got involved in this," says the former commander.

With the Sinaloans' backing, these gangs, which go by names like the 
Mexicles and Artist Assassins, begin killing members of the Juarez 
cartel. And vice versa. Soon the violence in the city spun out of control.

In turn, the murders spurred the Mexican government to send in 7,000 
troops, ostensibly to end the violence. The military occupied the 
city in March 2008. Yet the killings only got much worse. (In fact, 
nearly 24,000 Mexicans have died in cartel-related violence since 
Calderon was elected four years ago.)

When the former police commander is asked about the Mexican army's 
role in Juarez, he replies: "The military came here and is protecting 
Chapo. ... They are here to get rid of the Juarez cartel and put in Chapo."

Moreover, says the commander, the decision to help the Sinaloa cartel 
"was the policy of the military zone because the officers would 
change but the policy would remain in place."

sss

Is the army protecting and helping the Sinaloan cartel in Juarez? "I 
would characterize the Mexican military as a kind of protection 
racket," says Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of 
Texas El Paso who's studied the drug cartels. "That is, the Mexican 
military is not a cartel per se, sui generis, and it's not strictly 
on the payroll of the Chapo Guzman cartel directly. But they allow 
the Guzman cartel to bring drugs through Juarez in order to extract 
their cut and their percentage by performing their role, which is to 
protect the routes of smuggling for the Guzman cartel and attack 
their opponents, the Juarez cartel."

In fact, even before the current war between the Juarez and Sinaloa 
cartels erupted, there was evidence the Mexican army was assisting 
drug smugglers. In January 2006, the sheriff's department in Hudspeth 
County, a region that runs east of El Paso along the U.S.-Mexico 
border and is a main drug smuggling corridor, heard that three SUVs 
filled with marijuana were crossing the border. After the trucks 
passed into Texas, the sheriff's deputies gave chase. One of the 
trucks was captured while the other two dashed back into Mexico. But 
one of those vehicles got stuck in the Rio Grande river.

Mexican soldiers driving a Humvee materialized on their side of the 
border to rescue the marijuana. "The Mexican military flanked the 
deputies in order to protect the load of marijuana that was stuck in 
the river," Arvin West, sheriff of Hudspeth County, testified in 
Washington during a hearing into the incident. "The Mexican military 
spread themselves out to the east and to the west on either side of 
the vehicle in the river, concealing themselves in the foliage on the 
Mexico side of the river. The deputies on the scene observed as the 
marijuana was unloaded onto another vehicle. Once the marijuana was 
unloaded, the vehicle was set on fire."

Moreover, according to a 2008 Mexican intelligence document obtained 
by the Wall Street Journal and shared with The Gazette and NPR, over 
the past few years, Guzman has regularly visited a ranch in the 
mountains of Chihuahua to check on his marijuana crop. "On at least 
three visits, he has arrived with a caravan of at least six vehicles, 
under the protection of some authorities in the Mexican army," the 
document says.

In Juarez, meanwhile, people who follow the battle between the 
cartels say the army is arresting primarily the foot soldiers and 
leaders of the Juarez cartel. "There are certain aspects that point 
to that direction, when most of the people that are being arrested 
belong to one of the cartels," says Edgar Roman, the news director of 
an independent TV station, Canal 44, whose crews cover the daily 
murders in Juarez.

"The army lacks the will to end violence, they don't do what you 
expect, they don't arrive and pursue and do investigations," observes 
Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, a lawyer who runs the Juarez office of 
the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, "and their role is being 
spectators and permitting the cartels to kill each other off. I 
believe this is an act of omission ordered by president of the 
republic and the office of the attorney-general."

At the same time, human-rights complaints against the army have 
skyrocketed. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and 
Hickerson's organization have documented hundreds of cases of 
torture, disappearances and human-rights activists being killed at 
the hands of the military. After Hickerson brought 170 cases of 
alleged abuse to the army's attention, he received a death threat 
last fall and fled to the U.S. seeking political asylum. Today, he 
lives in El Paso but goes into Juarez most days to continue to run the office.

How does the Mexican army respond to the allegation it's favouring 
the Sinaloa cartel and is committing human-rights abuses? "The army 
is fighting all of the criminal organizations and if you see more 
arrests from (the Juarez cartel), it's because they are from the city 
but we have struck all of them in important ways," says army 
spokesperson Enrique Torres. "The army has no predilections to any of 
the groups. . We are suggesting to people who have suffered abuses by 
the army to file their complaints with the proper authorities so they 
can be investigated."

The Mexican government also denies it is showing favouritism to Chapo 
Guzman. "By God's sake, never in this country have we made such 
efforts," says Francisco Barrio Terrazas, Mexico's ambassador to 
Canada and a former mayor of Juarez. "We are really trying to stop 
this problem (of the cartels). I have talked with President Calderon 
with this issue and I can tell you he will never, never be in deals 
with those criminals! Never, ever!"

And the U.S. government? Does it know that it might be giving money 
and training to a foreign military that's working, in part, for North 
America's most powerful drug lord? The U.S. State Department and Drug 
Enforcement Administration dismiss this notion and express qualified 
confidence in the Calderon government.

Nevertheless, when drug dealer and former police captain 
Fierro-Mendez testified in an El Paso court this winter, he explained 
that when he was smuggling kilos of cocaine into the U.S., he was 
also working as an informant for the U.S. Immigration and Customs 
Enforcement (ICE) service - which investigates drug smuggling.

"And was Chapo Guzman aware that you and others were giving 
information to ICE?" he was asked by the prosecutor.

"Yes."

"And what information did he authorize you and the others to share with ICE?"

"Unlimited, as long as it didn't affect him."

And why, Fierro-Mendez was asked, would Guzman want his people to 
feed information to the American authorities?

"The objective was to eliminate (the Juarez cartel) in any possible 
way, whether legally or not. So it was - whether through the army or 
by providing information to ICE, that was the legal way."

"So was the Sinaloa cartel trying to use ICE to eliminate its rivals 
in the Juarez cartel?"

"That's right."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom