Pubdate: Mon, 11 Jul 2011
Source: Time Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2011 Time Inc
Contact:  http://www.time.com/time/magazine
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/451
Author: Tim Padgett

DAY OF THE DEAD

You will hear the voice of my memories stronger than the voice of my 
death -- that is, if death ever had a voice.

- -- Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

This is how Mexican investigators believe gangsters murdered business 
student Juan Francisco Sicilia: Two of his friends had been assaulted 
in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, by a pair of policemen 
moonlighting as muggers for the Pacifico Sur drug cartel. The friends 
reported the criminal cops, who panicked and asked their mafia bosses 
for help. On March 27, eight Pacifico Sur thugs, including a crazed 
psychopath called El Pelon (Baldy), abducted the two accusers, as 
well as Juan Francisco and four other buddies, from a bar. They were 
bound with packing tape, tortured in a safe house and suffocated to 
death. Their bodies were found the next day outside the city.

Both the cops and the killers likely expected the massacre to go 
unnoticed: in Mexico, gangland homicides have claimed nearly 40,000 
lives in the past five years, up from less than 7,000 from 2001 to 
2005. But Juan Francisco was not destined to be a statistic. He was 
the son of Javier Sicilia, one of the nation's best-known authors and 
poets, who has turned the young man's murder into a national movement 
of outrage over the unchecked violence of drug cartels, known as los 
narcos, and the government's inability to put an end to their reign of terror.

With the rallying cry "Estamos hasta la madre!" (a Mexican 
colloquialism that means "We've had it up to here!"), Sicilia has 
helped organize large protest marches in Cuernavaca, Mexico City and 
more than 30 other towns. In June he led a bus caravan to the border 
city of Juarez, where 3,200 were killed last year -- a murder rate of 
more than 200 per 100,000 residents, which makes it the most 
dangerous city not just in Mexico but the world -- and where hundreds 
of families met Sicilia holding pictures of slain relatives.

Sicilia has at least achieved some poignant literary symbolism. In 
one of Mexico's most celebrated novels, Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, 
the victims of murder clamor for rule of law in their lawless land, 
and the poet hears those voices now. "We're finally articulating 
names for the drug war's dead," Sicilia tells me. "We're letting 
their voices rise above ours and be more than just numbers and 
abstractions in this demoniacal tragedy."

Mexico's national horror story is often told as a gangster epic full 
of lurid detail of the lives and deaths of drug kingpins. Or it's 
reduced to dry figures: the cartels make $30 billion a year, equal to 
the economy of a midsize Central American nation, moving marijuana, 
cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine into the U.S. At home they earn 
extra from activities like kidnapping, a crime that's up 317% in 
Mexico since 2005. Protests led by a bereaved poet are giving the 
tragedy a human face, as are the heroic acts of civilians like 
teacher Martha Rivera, who in late May became an Internet star 
because of a YouTube video showing her calming her kindergarten class 
as hit men executed five people with assault rifles outside her 
school in the northern city of Monterrey.

For 22 years, I've covered the rise of Mexico's drug gangs, charting 
their evolution from trafficking mules for Colombian cartels to the 
dominant players of the narcotics trade in the western hemisphere. 
They've morphed from mafiosi who once killed only one another -- I 
remember the national trauma when a Roman Catholic cardinal was 
caught in their cross fire in 1993 -- into monsters who routinely 
slaughter innocents. Last August, Los Zetas, a bloodthirsty gang led 
by former army commandos, executed 72 migrant workers on a ranch in 
northern Tamaulipas state just because they couldn't pay the 
extortion money the gangsters demanded.

The violence is so pervasive, so constant, that only the most 
egregious episodes remain in the memory. Like last year's massacre of 
15 teenagers at a Juarez party by narcos who mistook them for rivals. 
Or the eight people killed in 2008, when thugs tossed grenades into a 
crowd celebrating Mexico's independence day in western Michoacan, 
President Felipe Calderon's home state. Or what happened in 2009 
after Mexican marines killed drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva: his 
gunmen went to southern Tabasco state, to the funeral of a marine 
killed in the shoot-out, and gunned down the man's mother and three relatives.

On June 23, Calderon started a formal dialogue with victims' groups 
designed to lead to the kind of police, judicial and social reforms 
Mexico desperately needs. Inside Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle, 
Sicilia and Calderon butted heads, but they know they are in this 
together. "I join your outcry," said Calderon. "I'm willing to make changes."

A Criminal Insurgency

It has been more than four years since Calderon started a military 
campaign against spiraling drug savagery, backed by a $1.5 billion 
pledge of U.S. aid. The cartels -- there are at least six major gangs 
and several smaller outfits -- reacted by unleashing a wave of 
violence, fighting for turf. Calderon insists this shows the gangs 
are rattled, but his critics say his strategy has often made matters 
worse. Drug lords are now engaged in an arms race, firing everything 
from assault rifles to rocket-propelled grenades at the army, police, 
rival gangsters and any civilians who get in their way. The military 
has scored some victories, taking out the leaders of a few cartels, 
but even those successes usually spawn new, more vicious power 
struggles. The carnage now threatens the fledgling democracy and 
growing economy of one of the U.S.'s most important trade and 
security partners. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has gone 
so far as to describe the cartels as a criminal "ins! urgency" that 
seeks not to overthrow the Mexican government but rather to keep it 
under its blood-soaked thumb.

The U.S. helped create this beast. According to the White House 
Office of National Drug Control Policy, Americans consume $65 billion 
worth of illegal drugs annually, roughly what they spend on higher 
education, and most of those drugs are either produced in Mexico or 
transit through it. The U.S. is also a primary source of the weapons 
the cartels use to unleash their mayhem: the Bureau of Alcohol, 
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives estimates that 70% of the guns 
seized in Mexico in the past two years were smuggled from north of 
the border. "The current flow of weapons," Mexico's ambassador to the 
U.S., Arturo Sarukhan, charged last year, "provides the drug 
syndicates with their firepower."

Calderon's war against the cartels may have been poorly thought 
through, but a succession of U.S. Presidents has pursued equally 
ineffectual policies. Since President Richard Nixon declared a "war 
on drugs" 40 years ago this summer, Washington has opted for a 
sweeping policy of incarcerating drug offenders at home and 
eradicating drug sources abroad. The Obama Administration has begun 
to balance law enforcement with more drug-rehab-oriented policies 
that reduce demand, but it dismisses the recent suggestion of several 
Latin American leaders to legalize arguably less harmful drugs like 
marijuana. Such a move might put a serious crimp in drug-cartel 
finances, but the White House says it would "make it harder to keep 
our communities healthy and safe." However the legalization debate 
goes, the U.S. could at the very least do more to help Mexico develop 
modern investigative police forces in addition to sending high-tech 
helicopters to Calderon's army.

Mexicans don't hold out much hope for constructive help from their 
northern neighbor. They realize that making their communities safe 
again means pressuring their politicians to get serious for once 
about the rule of law -- about ensuring that powerful criminals and 
the officials who protect them are brought to justice in a timely way 
in a legal system that has a broad measure of public confidence. That 
is far from the case now. The corruption watchdog Transparency 
International estimates that Mexicans paid $2.75 billion in bribes to 
police and other officials last year. Meanwhile, 95% of violent 
crimes in Mexico go unsolved.

There are plenty of examples of governments that have driven out, or 
at least greatly diminished, once dominant criminal gangs. Perhaps 
the most appropriate example is Colombia, where powerful cartels have 
been cut down in the past two decades thanks largely to the 
professionalization of the police and judiciary. Calderon himself 
knows his military campaign is not enough. In May he repeated his 
long-term goal of "judicial institutions that Mexico has too long 
lacked and without which the advance of criminals is understandable 
- -- and a future for Mexico is incomprehensible."

But the time for lofty rhetoric is long past. Measured in lives 
claimed, the level of violence in Mexico now surpasses that in 
Afghanistan or Pakistan. And the drug lords are engaged in a macabre 
competition to ratchet up the gore. Groups like the Zetas are fond of 
posting Internet videos of the prolonged torture and murder of their 
enemies. One top investigator tells me that the cartels wage bidding 
wars for the services of the best butchers and surgeons to perform 
beheadings of murdered rivals. The craniums are triumphantly 
displayed in town plazas like Halloween decorations.

Drug thugs killed by their competitors are easily replaced. In a 
country where most workers earn less than $10 a day, the cartels have 
little difficulty recruiting new legions. The Chihuahua state 
attorney general estimates that close to 10,000 Mexicans work for 
drug cartels in Juarez alone, not least because even foot soldiers 
can earn hundreds of dollars a week as sicarios, or triggermen.

It isn't just the unemployed who get sucked into the war. If you have 
a pilot's license, for example, you're useful to a cartel, which 
makes you a target for rival gangs. A few years ago in Culiacan -- 
the capital of northern Sinaloa state, the cradle of Mexican drug 
trafficking -- I arrived at the scene of the murder of pilot Manuel 
Lopez, 29, just as paramedics loaded his bullet-riddled body into an 
ambulance. Gunmen had shredded him and his Jeep Sahara in front of 
his home and relatives -- who told me, in tear-stained shock, that 
they had no idea he was airlifting drugs.

A Slaughter of Innocents

I've seen too many scenes like that. But even the most hardened souls 
were shaken by the discovery in recent weeks of fosas, or mass 
graves, in several locations across northern Mexico. So far, close to 
500 corpses have been recovered. Many were innocent victims, ordinary 
Mexicans grabbed at roadblocks erected by gunmen who shake them down 
and then, in many cases, murder them. Perhaps most depressing of all 
is the fact that the culprits include policemen: 17 cops were 
recently arrested in connection with massacres in Tamaulipas. In 
fact, police in Mexico, who are usually miserably paid and poorly 
trained, often join up precisely because the force is a recruiting 
pool for the cartels.

Human-rights advocates say the fosas recall the killing fields of the 
Balkans in the 1990s or Central America in the 1980s. "I think the 
world should be as worried about what's happening here as they are 
about what's happening in North Africa," says Carlos Garcia, 
president of the human rights commission in the northern desert state 
of Durango, where seven mass graves have been found, many in 
middle-class neighborhoods or near schools. When I arrived with 
forensics officials last month at a newly located fosa in the 
eponymous state capital, I thought we'd gotten bad directions: the 
site was the backyard garden of a house in the upper-crust Jardines 
de Durango neighborhood. State officials wouldn't permit me a records 
search to identify the property's owner because they feared it could 
get them -- and the records clerks -- killed.

One of those buried in Durango may be Victor Camacho, or so his 
family believes. They're among some 350 families who've come to the 
state attorney general's compound to offer DNA samples, hoping to 
identify a relative among the 238 corpses exhumed there so far. 
Camacho, a successful tortilla-restaurant owner in Torreon, northeast 
of Durango, was 39 when thugs nabbed him off the street in broad 
daylight three years ago, in front of his wife. Despite the fear that 
criminal spies known as halcones, or hawks, were listening in on us 
- -- "We don't know who's friend or enemy around here anymore," a 
Durango official says -- Camacho's son Victor Jr., 24, wanted to 
talk. "Anybody can be caught in this now," he told me, "and we're 
tired of being quiet about it."

While Victor Jr.'s mother wept softly behind us, covering her nose 
from the stench of decomposing bodies arriving at refrigerated 
trailers nearby, he spoke of having to leave law school to support 
her and his two sisters after his father vanished. A fierce turf 
battle is raging in Torreon between the Zetas and Mexico's most 
powerful narco-group, the Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquin Guzman, 
known as Chapo (Shorty). "Every part of your life is affected," said 
Victor Jr. "Economically, morally, physically, you live with a daily 
fear of losing your family, your livelihood, everything. And the 
authorities don't raise a hand."

Putting the Economy at Risk

Mexican authorities are prey themselves, sometimes because they are 
in the pay of a cartel, but sometimes because they refuse to be 
co-opted. That seems to be the case with Minerva Bautista, who until 
last summer was the security director in Michoacan, which is also the 
base of a bizarre "narco-Evangelical" cartel, La Familia. After I 
interviewed Bautista in April 2010 -- she had just laid out stricter 
police recruitment guidelines in defiance of La Familia -- I started 
to walk her to her car. A Mexican journalist gently stopped me. 
"She's a target now," he whispered. A few days later, Bautista's SUV 
was ambushed by gunmen who fired 2,700 high-caliber rounds at the 
vehicle. Miraculously, she survived; her two bodyguards were killed.

Despite the high-profile successes of Calderon's campaign -- it has 
since killed or captured La Familia's top leaders, for example, 
including Nazario Moreno, a.k.a. El Mas Loco (The Craziest One), who 
wrote his own "bible" -- most Mexicans feel abandoned by law 
enforcement in this conflict. Perhaps the most painful stop during 
Sicilia's recent bus caravan was the northern city of Chihuahua. 
Marisela Escobedo's 16-year-old daughter Rubi was murdered in 2008 by 
a member of the Zetas, Sergio Barraza. He confessed, but judges 
acquitted him for lack of convincing evidence, a chronic problem in 
Mexico. Critics said the judges feared reprisal. A higher court 
convicted Barraza last year. By then, however, he was on the lam.

Infuriated, Escobedo stood vigil for weeks last year on the steps of 
the Chihuahua state government palace to protest. Just before 
Christmas, a gunman chased her down and shot her. The murder was 
caught on a security camera, but no one has been arrested. Escobedo's 
terrified family is seeking asylum in the U.S. "We want to be as 
courageous as Marisela," a relative, who asks not to be identified, 
tells me. "But how can we not feel that it gets you nothing in the end?"

Not surprisingly, this is all taking a political and economic as well 
as human toll. Mexico is far from being a failed state. Traditionally 
an inward-looking economy, it started to open to the world in the 
1980s, signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, wrote 
trade pacts with 42 other countries and is now Latin America's 
biggest importer and exporter. After a sharp contraction following 
the financial crisis, it enjoyed one of the fastest economic 
recoveries among Latin American countries last year, growing 5.5%. 
Mexico is not a BRIC -- the now ubiquitous acronym for top emerging 
markets Brazil, Russia, India and China, coined by Goldman Sachs 
economist Jim O'Neill. But it is part of O'Neill's latest catchy 
acronym, MIST, which brings together up-and-coming economies Mexico, 
Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey.

The unchecked violence could undermine all that. In Tamaulipas, the 
Zetas are, in effect, the law; they're the top suspects in last 
year's assassination of gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre. In 
once booming Juarez, from where thousands have fled across the Rio 
Grande to El Paso, Texas, the commercial tax base has shrunk 40% 
since 2008, and many business owners refuse to pay taxes since they 
already fork over extortion "tolls."

Drug violence also harrows Monterrey, long Mexico's business capital, 
where kindergarten teacher Rivera soothed her students amid gunfire 
and where victims have been found hanging from bridges and 
overpasses. Commuters in Monterrey can find themselves trapped 
between roadblocks during rush hour, at the mercy of gangsters who 
storm through the paralyzed traffic to steal money or cars at gunpoint.

The gangsters' impact on civil society is just as significant. Garish 
music and fashion celebrating the drug lords are popular. Almost 70 
Mexican journalists have been murdered by the gangs since 2007 -- 
most recently Veracruz newspaper editor Miguel Angel Lopez, 55, 
gunned down with his wife and son on June 20. Many in the media now 
self-censor their drug coverage. The Catholic Church, too, has been 
linked to the cartels: Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, known as El 
Verdugo (the Executioner), funded construction of a chapel in his 
home state of Hidalgo, complete with his name on a bronze plaque.

Solving the Problem of Impunity

Can Mexico pull itself out of this living hell? Much depends on its 
ability to modernize the police and judicial system. As part of 
Calderon's reform package, federal and state courts are beginning to 
conduct oral trials, in which lawyers have to argue before the bench 
rather than simply push papers across a clerk's desk. It is hoped 
that the change will force police and prosecutors to improve their 
methods of gathering and presenting evidence. Mexico's Congress is 
considering Calderon's proposal to incorporate all the police into a 
more unified national network, similar to the one Colombia 
reconstituted to great effect in the 1990s. The belief is that a 
centralized police force will be better able to weed out corrupt 
members and ensure a coordinated offensive against the Hydra-like 
cartels. In April lawmakers passed a bill granting new powers and 
resources for money-laundering investigations: it's aimed at the web 
of corrupt politicians and businessmen who abet the cartels.! And in 
early June, Calderon pushed through a change in Mexico's 
criminal-appeals system that makes it harder for the accused to 
frivolously block or delay prosecutions.

The harder task is changing a culture that was centuries in the 
making. "Mexico's biggest problem," says Sicilia's lawyer, Julio 
Hernandez, "is still the problem that leads to all its other 
problems: impunity." Mexico's lawlessness is often thought to be a 
legacy of the Spanish conquistadors, who were more interested in 
pillaging than policing and who left the country with the warped 
sense that law enforcement is a private rather than a public concern. 
That civic negligence was a boon for the drug mafias that emerged 
after World War II. Their brutality was regulated only by the venal, 
authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled 
for 71 years and was the cartels' tacit partner. When Calderon's 
National Action Party toppled the PRI in 2000, the cartels splintered 
and embarked on an orgy of violence that spawned soulless killing machines.

Tackling them will take a sustained commitment by governments on both 
sides of the border. But for all the horror, there are some reasons 
for hope. The homicide rate in Juarez is down this year. And the 
military recently arrested Jesus "El Negro" Radilla, the alleged 
leader of the gang that murdered Juan Francisco Sicilia and his 
friends. Juan Bosco, the police director in Morelos state, which 
includes Cuernavaca, was also collared for his alleged ties to the 
Pacifico Sur cartel.

That is not enough for Javier Sicilia, who had hoped to watch his son 
receive a business degree this month. Known to readers for his 
Catholic mysticism, he has given up writing poetry. "They choked it 
out of me when they choked Juanelo," he tells me. He's thrown himself 
fully into his movement against the drug gangs. "I'm doing this," he 
says, "because I believe it's the dead who are going to lead Mexico 
to the light." If so, his son, and the countless others in pictures 
being held up across Mexico, will not have died in vain.

- --with reporting by Roya Wolverson
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom