Pubdate: Wed, 10 Feb 2016
Source: Independent  (UK)
Copyright: 2016 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/209
Author: Ioan Grillo
Note: 'Gangster Warlords' by Ioan Grillo (UKP12.99, Bloomsbury) is 
published tomorrow

DRUG CASUALTIES

Billionaire warlords, who started as small-time weed smugglers, have 
swathes of Latin America under their bloody rule, and the chaos is 
creeping north. But, says IOAN GRILLO, they owe their power to 
white-collar crooks from the States, who first set up their deadly networks

A chain of crime wars is currently strangling Latin America and the 
Caribbean, drenching it in blood. And the first link in the chain is 
found in the US. Specifically, in a Barnes and Noble bookshop in a 
mall in El Paso, Texas.

I am sitting in the bookshop cafe, nursing my third cup of coffee and 
flicking through a pile of new books. As you do with new books, I am 
eyeing the photos, skimming the intros, just feeling and smelling the 
paper. I am also waiting for a drug trafficker who has spent four 
decades delivering the products of Mexican gangsters to all corners of the US.

The man I am waiting for is no criminal warlord controlling a fiefdom 
in Latin America; he's a white New Yorker with a university 
education. That is why I want to start the story here. Latin American 
journalists complain that the US side of the equation is never 
examined. Who are the partners of the cartels wreaking havoc south of 
the Rio Grande, they ask? Where is the American narco? Here, I found one.

A curious twist of fate led me to this meeting. A fellow Brit was 
cycling through the south-west US on an extended holiday. Texas was 
nice, but he fancied something edgier, so he slipped over the border 
to Chihuahua, Mexico. Unwittingly, he entered one of the most violent 
spheres in the Mexican drug war, venturing into small towns to the 
west of Ciudad Juarez, at the time the world's most murderous city. 
He didn't do too badly, hanging out in cantinas and raising glasses 
with shady locals  until some gangsters held him in a house, 
threatened to cut his head off and got him to call his wife in 
England and plead for a ransom payment.

Attacks on wealthy foreigners in Mexico are actually very rare, but 
there have been sporadic cases, some of them deadly. In this case, 
the thugs had jumped at an opportunity that fell in their laps. 
Thankfully, they released the Brit on receipt of the cash, and he 
made it home unscathed. He kept in contact with one of the people he 
had met on the border, an older man called Robert. While Robert knew 
the kidnappers, he apparently wasn't involved. He is the man I am 
going to meet now, one of the gangsters' US connections.

The British cyclist put us in touch, and I talked to Robert by email 
and then phone to arrange the get-together. He lives on the Mexican 
side of the border. But I told him I didn't want to go there after 
the kidnapping, and suggested we meet in El Paso, a stone's throw 
from Juarez, but one of the safest cities in the US. In a Barnes and 
Noble bookshop. Who would hold you up in a Barnes and Noble?

As I finish my drink, I spy Robert strolling toward me. He is in his 
sixties, in jeans and a baseball cap, with sun-worn skin and a raspy 
voice. I get yet more coffee, and we chat. He's good company. Soon we 
decide we want something stronger and move on to a cowboy-themed bar 
in the mall where they serve local brews in ridiculous-size glasses. 
I hear Robert's tale as we sip from the flagons.

It goes back to 1968, when the US was in the midst of the hippie 
movement and fighting its hottest Cold War battle in Vietnam; when 
dictatorships ruled most of Latin America, and a recently martyred 
Che Guevara inspired guerrillas across the continent. Robert is from 
upstate New York, but in 1968 he went to university in New Mexico. 
There he had the fate of landing a roommate from El Paso with a 
cousin in Ciudad Juarez. His roommate told him he could buy marijuana 
for $40 a kilo from his cousin. This lit a fuse in Robert's mind: he 
knew that, back home in New York, this amount sold for $300.

The basic business of importing is buying for a dollar and selling 
for two. But with drugs, Robert realised, he could buy for a dollar 
and sell for more than seven. And he didn't even need to advertise. 
This was after the summer of love, and American youngsters were 
desperate for ganja from wherever they could get it.

It is hard for most of us to fathom a business with a mark-up of 650 
per cent. You put in 1,500 bucks and you get back more than 10 grand. 
You put in 10 and get back 75. And in two more deals you can be a 
multi-millionaire. Narco finances turn economics inside out. Robert 
bought houses and nightclubs with suitcases of cash.

However, his drug-dealing dream hit a wall in the late 1970s when he 
was nabbed by agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration. This 
is the flip side of narco-economics. Robert splurged on lawyers, got 
his assets seized and served close to a decade in prison. Yet after 
he got out, he went back into the trade, moving ganja and a little 
cocaine with a new generation of Mexican traffickers. He carried on 
past middle-age, through marriages and divorces, booms and busts, 
through the end of the Cold War and the opening of democracy across 
the Americas. By the time he hit his sixties, he suffered from 
chronic asthma and heart disease. And he was still smuggling weed.

When Robert started trafficking drugs, his Mexican colleagues were a 
handful of growers and smugglers earning chump change. They needed 
Americans like him to get into the market. But over the decades, the 
narco networks grew into an industry that is worth tens of billions 
of dollars and stretches from Mexico into the Caribbean to Colombia to Brazil.

South of the border, the cartels spent their billions building armies 
of assassins who carry out massacres comparable to those in war zones 
and outgun police. They have diversified from drugs to a portfolio of 
crimes including extortion, kidnapping, theft of crude oil and even 
wildcat mining. And they have grown so much that they control the 
governments of entire cities in Latin America.

"Back in the old days, it was nothing like this," Robert says. "They 
were just smugglers. Now they prey on their communities. They have 
become too powerful. And many of the young guys working for them are 
crazy killers who are high on crystal meth. You can't deal with these people."

I ask Robert if he feels guilty about pumping these organisations 
with cash year after year. They could never have grown so big without 
working with Americans. He looks into his glass for a while and 
sighs. "It is just business," he says. "They should have legalised 
many of these drugs a long time ago."

Flip from El Paso over the Rio Grande and 1,400 miles south onto a 
hillside in southern Mexico. I am in the mountains where traffickers 
grow marijuana and produce heroin. The fate of these hills is locked 
with that of smugglers in Texas and drug-users across America by the 
pretty green and pink plants here. The hill is beautiful, thick with 
pine trees and bright orange flowers.

The smell of death is overwhelming. It's like walking into a 
butcher's shop stuffed with decaying meat: putrid, yet somehow a 
little sweet. While I would describe the smell as sickening, it's not 
noxious. It's a movie cliche that people throw up when they see or 
smell corpses. That doesn't happen in real life. Corpses don't make 
you physically nauseous. The sickness is deep down, more an emotional 
repulsion. It's the smell and sight of our own mortality.

The stench of rotting human flesh is all over this hill from a series 
of pits where police and soldiers are pulling out corpses. They are 
dank, maggot-ridden holes that the victims probably dug themselves. 
The corpses are charred, mutilated, decomposed.

In Mexico, they call this a narcofosa, or drug-trafficking grave. But 
many of the victims here are neither drug traffickers nor in any way 
connected to the world of narcotics. They are shopkeepers, labourers, 
students who somehow ran afoul of a local cartel called the Guerreros 
Unidos, or Warriors United, and the corrupt police officers on their 
payroll. The troops dig up 30 corpses on this site, near the town of 
Iguala. And it's just one of a series of narcofosas dotting these hills.

Some of the corpses have been here for months, but no one came 
searching  until an atrocity that made world headlines. On 26 
September 2014, Iguala's police and their colleagues, the Warrior 
gunmen, attacked student teachers, killing three and abducting 43. 
The global media finally learned where Iguala was. How could 43 
students disappear off the face of the earth? It sounded like Boko 
Haram in Nigeria kidnapping schoolchildren, but this was right next to the US.

Thousands of troops poured in, uncovering graves like the one I am 
standing in. They followed the trail to a dump 10 miles away. 
Mexico's attorney general said the Warriors murdered the 43 there, 
burning their corpses on a huge bonfire and throwing the remains into 
a passing river. But family members refused to believe the 
government, which has a history of cover-ups to protect corrupt 
officials. A panel of independent experts also criticised the 
findings and urged a renewed investigation.

Mexico seemed to have become numb to murder. Between 2007 and 2014, 
drug cartels and the security forces fighting them killed more than 
83,000 people, according to a government count. Some claim it was 
many more. As a reporter, I covered massacres where nearby residents 
seemed eerily detached. When an individual goes through a traumatic 
experience, the gut reaction is to block it out. Communities do the 
same. People became weary of killers, cartels and carnage. Victims 
become statistics.

Iguala changed that. The fact that the victims were students, the 
blatant police involvement, the inept government response  all shook 
Mexican society. People took to the streets in hundreds of thousands 
to protest against narco corruption and violence. The faces of the 
disappeared students filled posters on Mexico City walls and were 
held up in solidarity from Argentina to Austria to Australia. They 
were humans, not numbers.

The bloodshed in Mexico has grabbed the world's attention as it runs 
right up to the Rio Grande (and sometimes into the US). But fighting 
between shady criminal gunmen and trigger-happy troops rages in many 
corners of the Americas. In the favelas of Brazil, the crime 
"commandos" are in close urban combat with police and rivals, a 
conflict that has killed even more than in Mexico  and where US Navy 
Seals go to train. Honduras became the most murderous country outside 
a declared war zone as Mara gangs displace thousands, some who flee 
to the US as refugees. The ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica, are the 
killing fields of posses, along with one of the most homicidal police 
forces in the world.

Why are the Americas awash in blood at the dawn of the 21st century? 
How, after the US declared Cold War victories in the region, did it 
unravel so fast? And why are US politicians so quiet about these 
battles that have killed more than many traditional war zones?

In this landscape, a new generation of kingpins has emerged along 
with their own cult followings and guerrilla hit squads. These 
super-villains, from Mexico to Jamaica to Brazil to Colombia, are no 
longer just drug traffickers, but a weird hybrid of criminal CEO, 
gangster rock star and paramilitary general. They fill the popular 
imagination as demonic anti-heroes. Not only do they feature in 
underground songs in the drug world; they are also recreated in 
movies and even video games.

Between 2000 and 2010, murder rates rose 11 per cent in Latin America 
and the Caribbean, while they fell in most of the world. Eight of the 
10 countries with the highest homicide rates are now in the region, 
as are 43 of the world's 50 most violent cities. When you tally up 
the total body count, the numbers are staggering. Between the dawn of 
the new millennium and 2010, more than a million people across Latin 
America and the Caribbean were murdered. It's a cocaine-fuelled holocaust.

Politicians are confounded about how to handle this gangster power 
and bloodshed. Governments from Mexico City to Brasilia send out 
troops with shoot-to-kill policies while denying they are fighting 
low-intensity wars. After shocking attacks on police in Sao Paulo, 
officers went on a revenge killing spree and are alleged to have 
murdered almost as many people in 10 days as Brazil's military 
dictatorship did in two decades. In some cases, politicians are in 
league with the gangsters and are part of the problem. But 
politicians aren't the sole cause of this mess. Others may not be 
allied with narco kingpins but genuinely struggle to find a policy that works.

Washington has no coherent strategy. The US continues to spend 
billions on a global war on drugs, while there is little enthusiasm 
at home for the fight. It bankrolls armies across Latin America - and 
US courts give asylum to refugees fleeing those same soldiers. 
Diplomats cosy up to their Latin American counterparts by saying they 
face only generic gang problems, but then Pentagon officials rock the 
boat by screaming that Mexico is losing control to cartels. Faced 
with such contradictions, politicians often take refuge in the 
default option: ignoring it.

But this is no longer a problem that politicians can afford to 
ignore. The gangster economy affects people now: from the petrol in 
your car, to the gold in your jewellery, to your tax pounds (or 
euros, or dollars) financing the war on drugs. The web of the crime 
families stretches across the hemisphere, leading to all kinds of 
unlikely places. It spins off to lime prices in New York bars, 
British secret agents, World Cup soccer stars, bids to hold the 
Olympic Games and questions over the start of the London riots.

In the summer of 2014, it was linked to 67,000 unaccompanied children 
arriving at the US southern border, causing what President Barack 
Obama called a humanitarian crisis. While not all had run from 
bullets, some showed clear evidence that they would be murdered if 
they went home. Less publicised was that tens of thousands of adults 
from the region were arriving on the southern border asking for 
political asylum. Some people ask why it matters if neighbouring 
countries fall to pieces. This is one of the reasons.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom