¡Hay caramba! Le Mexico en vois de devenir un État déchu

[B~E]

Voici une série d'articles qui illustrent la thèse selon laquelle le crime organisé est inarrêtable, l'État impuissant, et les ramiffication s'étendent jusqu'aux États-Unies.

The Fall of Mexico

Poor Mexico. So far from God and so close to the United States.—Porfirio Díaz, dictator of Mexico from 1876 to 1880 and 1884 to 1911

In the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drug cartels, border towns in Mexico have turned into halls of mirrors where no one knows who is on which side or what chance remark could get you murdered. Some 14,000 people have been killed in that time—the worst carnage since the Mexican Revolution—and part of the country is effectively under martial law. Is this evidence of a creeping coup by the military? A war between drug cartels? Between the president and his opposition? Or just collateral damage from the (U.S.-supported) war on drugs? Nobody knows: Mexico is where facts, like people, simply disappear. The stakes for the U.S. are high, especially as the prospect of a failed state on our southern border begins to seem all too real.

Those famous words came to mind when another man named Díaz offered me an equally concise observation about the realities of life in the country today: “In Mexico it is dangerous to speak the truth. It is even dangerous to know the truth.”

His full name is Fernando Díaz Santana. He hosts two AM-radio news-and-commentary shows in the small Chihuahuan city of Nuevo Casas Grandes. A stocky, broad-faced man in late middle age, he projects an air of warmth, openness, and intelligence. As he tells me that it’s dangerous to speak or know the truth, the half-rueful, half-apologetic expression in his eyes makes it plain that he’d rather not keep his mouth shut and his mind closed.

He’s received text messages from listeners cautioning him to be careful of what he says on the air. He takes these friendly warnings seriously; failure to heed them could bring a death sentence like the one meted out to Armando Rodríguez, a crime reporter murdered by an unidentified gunman in November 2008 in Juárez, the violent border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The fear of suffering a similar fate is a powerful incentive for self-censorship, for training a naturally inquisitive mind to acquire ignorance.

“So now we give just the objective facts,” Díaz says as he sits facing me in a stuffy, windowless rear room of the radio station, in Nuevo Casas Grandes’s central business district. He and the co-host of his afternoon show, David Andrew (pronounced Da-veed An-dray-oo), explain that the “objective facts” are those reported by the police or city hall or some other official source. Though the accuracy of such facts is often questionable, no questions dare be asked. “We say nothing more,” Díaz adds. “As long as we don’t get too deeply into a story, we are safe.”

I am reminded of Winnie Verloc, the character in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent who “felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.”

More than 14,000 people have been killed in the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón mobilized the army to fight Mexico’s half-dozen major drug cartels. Virtually none of those homicides has been solved, partly because witnesses suffer short-term memory loss when questioned, and partly because the police, for various reasons, also feel profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.

Rodríguez’s death is illustrative. His colleagues believe he was killed for an article he wrote linking relatives of Patricia González, the Chihuahuan state attorney general, to narcotics trafficking.

That is not idle theorizing. Jorge Luis Aguirre, a writer for LaPolaka.com, an online Juárez news service, had written extensively about corruption in the Chihuahuan state government, and did not spare González either. On the night of November 13, 2008, as he was driving to Rodríguez’s wake, he got a call on his cell phone. The male caller said, “You’re next, son of a bitch!” and hung up.

Aguirre immediately packed up his wife and sons and fled to El Paso, where he sought asylum. In March, testifying at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, he stated that he’d identified the source of the threats:

“Victor Valencia, a representative of the governor of the state of Chihuahua, had sent people to warn me to ‘tone down’ my criticisms of the prosecutor, Patricia González, because if I didn’t, he was going to kill me, using the Juárez cartel’s preferred method of kidnapping followed by execution.”

The aftermath reveals a lot about today’s Mexico. Patricia González remains in her post. Victor Valencia has been promoted to chief of public security in Juárez. The federal deputy attorney general handling the Rodríguez murder case, Jesús Martín Huerta Yedra, was shot to death in his car, along with his secretary. The investigation has since gone nowhere, to no one’s surprise. As the newspaper El Diario editorialized,

Friends of the journalist, who preferred not to give their names for security reasons, mentioned that they do not feel frustrated by the lack of advances in the case since from the beginning, they felt that the authorities had no intention of doing anything to clarify the crime.

To clarify the crime. Of the many things Mexico lacks these days, clarity is near the top of the list. It is dangerous to know the truth. Finding it is frustrating. Statements by U.S. and Mexican government officials, repeated by a news media that prefers simple story lines, have fostered the impression in the United States that the conflict in Mexico is between Calderón’s white hats and the crime syndicates’ black hats. The reality is far more complicated, as suggested by this statistic: out of those 14,000 dead, fewer than 100 have been soldiers. Presumably, army casualties would be far higher if the war were as straightforward as it’s often made out to be.

What, then, accounts for the carnage, the worst Mexico has suffered since the revolution, a century ago? To be sure, many of the dead have been cartel criminals. Some were killed in firefights with the army, others in battles between the cartels for control of smuggling routes, and still others in power struggles within the cartels. The toll includes more than 1,000 police officers, some of whom, according to Mexican press reports, were executed by soldiers for suspected links to drug traffickers. Conversely, a number of the fallen soldiers may have been killed by policemen moonlighting as cartel hit men, though that cannot be proved. Meanwhile, human-rights groups have accused the military of unleashing a reign of terror—carrying out forced disappearances, illegal detentions, acts of torture, and assassinations—not only to fight organized crime but also to suppress dissidents and other political troublemakers. What began as a war on drug trafficking has evolved into a low-intensity civil war with more than two sides and no white hats, only shades of black. The ordinary Mexican citizen—never sure who is on what side, or who is fighting whom and for what reason—retreats into a private world where he becomes willfully blind, deaf, and above all, dumb.

Which brings us back to Fernando Díaz and his avoidance of truth.

I have come to see him at the suggestion of Emilio Gutiérrez, who fled to the U.S. because army officers threatened him with death. During an interview at his hiding place north of the border, Gutiérrez told me about a mysterious event that occurred on February 12, 2008. Teams of gunmen, riding in SUVs and pickup trucks and described by witnesses as “dressed like soldiers,” swept through Nuevo Casas Grandes and six neighboring communities between midnight and dawn, kidnapping and executing people.

The convoys covered 170 miles altogether, rolling through military checkpoints unimpeded. In Nuevo Casas Grandes, the “armed commandos,” as they were called by the Mexican media, set fire to the house of a police subcommander and shot him to death as he ran outside. Two other people, one of them the uncle of a midlevel narcotics trafficker, were also executed. The press reported that 14 more were abducted, but the actual number was believed to be much higher. All the victims, except two who were apparently snatched by mistake and later released, vanished without a trace.

Gutiérrez, a reporter in El Diario’s Ascensión bureau, covered the operation. From what he’d seen with his own eyes and from interviews with eyewitnesses, he concluded that the perpetrators were dressed like soldiers for the simple reason that they were soldiers. An operation on that scale, he reasoned, could not have been conducted by gangs of pistoleros hastily thrown together: it required thorough planning, accurate intelligence, discipline, and coordination. Nor could pistoleros have driven through army roadblocks without being stopped. If the raid wasn’t military, it must have been conducted with the army’s cooperation.

That wasn’t what Gutiérrez reported, however. He told me that his boss, José Martínez Valdéz, the editor of El Diario’s editions in northwest Chihuahua, instructed him to “not cause problems by writing that this was military.” Gutiérrez’s silence did not win him any points with the army. Five months later, he was warned that the military was going to kill him, and he was forced to leave the country.

But why, I asked, would soldiers maraud the countryside on a murder-and-kidnapping spree? He replied that the raid was not part of the Mexican government’s war on the drug cartels but a struggle between two powerful cartels: the Juárez organization, headed by Vicente Carillo, and the Sinaloa federation, whose boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, is the most-wanted man in Mexico. Gutiérrez said that in this instance the gunmen, whoever they were, had been after people they thought were working for the Juárez cartel.

“It’s an open secret in Mexico,” he said, “that the army is fighting the [Juárez] cartel to weaken them and pave the way for Guzmán.”

Open secret or no, an allegation that soldiers may have acted on behalf of a drug lord needs to be substantiated. After all, Calderón’s counter-narcotics strategy relies, with U.S. support, almost exclusively on the military.

With a short list of contacts provided by Gutiérrez, my interpreter, Molly Molloy, and I enter Mexico through the Palomas border crossing and head south into the Chihuahuan Desert. I have just been in Juárez and am relieved to not be going back to that industrialized border city—utterly charmless in the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Juárez’s main product now is the corpse. Last year, drug-related violence there claimed more than 1,600 lives, and the toll for the first nine months of this year soared beyond 1,800, and mounts daily. That makes Juárez, population 1.5 million, the most violent city in the world. Two lines of graffiti summed up a place where not only law and order but civilization itself has broken down: Mi ciudad pide clemencia en su dementia (“My city asks for mercy in its madness”), and Mi ciudad es un negro lamento un aullido infinito (“My city is a black lament, an eternal howl”).

Nuevo Casas Grandes lies on a plateau near a fertile valley—cowboy-and-farmer country where cattle graze on the high desert ranges and apple and pecan orchards form tidy ranks on the city’s outskirts. The city itself, with some 51,000 people, is known to archaeologically minded tourists for its proximity to Paquimé, the site of ancient pueblo ruins. It looks prosperous by the standards of interior Mexico, with wide streets, a few decent hotels and restaurants, an airport, and several auto dealerships selling Fords and Jeeps and other familiar makes. If it weren’t for all the Mexican license plates, I could believe we were in a town in the southwestern United States.

Our first call is at the offices of El Diario, housed in a whitewashed villa on the main drag. Molloy and I are hoping to meet with José Martínez Valdéz, who is Gutiérrez’s former editor, and the news director, Victor Valdovinos. They can answer some of our questions and provide introductions to city officials. But repeated attempts to see Martínez are unsuccessful—he manages to dodge us all afternoon. We do get a very brief audience with Valdovinos. When we tell him what we are there for, he flinches and says, “You don’t want to talk to me,” then vanishes.

That leaves Fernando Díaz, whom we find at the radio station as he and David Andrew wrap up their afternoon show. They are willing to talk to us, and we go into the back room. Andrew, a heavyset, 30-ish man with dense carbon-black hair, shuts the door, either to muffle the noise from outside or to make sure no one overhears our conversation.

In the Mexico Mexicans have to live in, Díaz begins, life is “very hard, very bad,” a statement he underscores with a statistic: last year, 115 homicides were committed in Nuevo Casas Grandes and its surrounding communities. That works out to a murder rate more than 20 times as high as New York City’s.

It’s at this juncture that he makes his comment about the dangers of speaking or knowing the truth. I begin inquiring about the February 2008 incident, but Díaz and his younger colleague aren’t eager to discuss it.

I don’t get anywhere, though Díaz casts doubt on Gutiérrez’s assertion that the raid was a military operation. All of this talk about human-rights abuses by the army is “a myth,” Díaz insists. He is in fact cheered that an army battalion has been making rounds to bolster security in Nuevo Casas Grandes: “We are abandoned and unprotected here in northwest Chihuahua. It is a very big wish that the soldiers will bring peace. The army is the only group we can trust.” He adds by way of illustration that several sicarios, as professional assassins are called in Mexico, were arrested and confessed to killing 19 people in town.

Two of the sicarios, Andrew interjects, were his neighbors: “One guy worked in a car wash, the other guy was an army deserter.” Two others turned out to be auto salesmen—“nice guys in the day, killers by night,” Díaz says, as if he’s voicing over a trailer for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “You are talking to me, a radio announcer, but you can’t be sure that I’m not a sicario,” Díaz adds. “You say you’re an American reporter, but I don’t know that you’re not a sicario. You cannot trust anybody.” He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s contradicted his earlier remark that only the army can be trusted.

The question is, can the army be trusted, and if so, can it win this latest—and biggest—battle in the seemingly endless “war on drugs”? Calderón has deployed more than 45,000 troops (out of a total force of 230,000) throughout the country. Of that number, about 7,000, reinforced by 2,300 federal policemen, occupy Juárez as part of Operación Conjunta Chihuahua—the Joint Chihuahuan Operation. The army has taken over all the policing functions. The city is under undeclared martial law.

Although many ordinary Mexicans welcome the army’s intervention, certain that things would be far worse without it, approval has been far from universal. Claims of grievous abuses by the armed forces—unlawful detentions, disappearances, thefts, rapes, and murders—have increased sixfold in the past three years, according to Human Rights Watch. One hundred and seventy complaints have been filed in Chihuahua alone, says Gustavo de la Rosa, the former Chihuahua state ombudsman for Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission.

Leaving aside the question of whether militarizing the anti-narcotics campaign is the best way to go about things (a similar strategy in Colombia has been only partially successful), the fact is that, by destroying public trust in the armed forces, military misconduct undermines the entire effort, as I learned from a 50-year-old cleaning woman who now lives in Arizona and who asked to remain anonymous. She was visiting her aunt in Juárez last December when soldiers broke into a neighbor’s house, claiming that they were looking for a suspect.

“They didn’t say who,” the woman told me. “They tore her house apart, took her jewelry and her money, and said that if she complained about what they did they were going to come back and kill her. People are more afraid of the police and soldiers than they are of the narcos, because they’re very mean guys—not all, but many.”

The fear goes beyond undisciplined soldiers running amok. In an interview, de la Rosa told me that the president, elected in 2006 by a margin as thin as an ATM card, called out the army not merely to fight the cartels and eliminate a threat to national sovereignty but to consolidate his power and confer legitimacy on his presidency. “Calderón wants to show the Congress that the military is with him,” de la Rosa said. “And the military promised to support Calderón in exchange for being allowed out of the barracks, because the army wants to govern. Chihuahua is an experiment. What is happening here is in essence a military coup, a regional coup.” To support this contention, he cited a change he has had to make in his own work. Under normal circumstances, he would file complaints of abuse with the state governor, but now, he said, “the governor is ineffective, so I have to go to General Felipe de Jesús Espitia, the comandante of the 5th Military District.”

I was somewhat incredulous that the military was staging a creeping coup. To what end? I asked.

De la Rosa shrugged. “Actually, nobody really knows or understands what the military is up to,” he answered, hedging a bit. Then he asserted that the army intends not to stamp out drug trafficking but to “control” it. “So now if a drug cartel wants to move drugs into the U.S., who would they go to? To the governor? No, to the general.” (El Universal, Mexico’s largest newspaper, reported in September that de la Rosa had received death threats from the army, apparently because of his sharp criticisms; sources have told me he has taken temporary refuge in the U.S.)

As de la Rosa suggested, there is a dismal history of collusion between the armed forces and organized crime. In the late 1980s, the Mexican defense secretary was caught peddling protection to three drug organizations, which paid him a total of $10 million. In 1997, Mexico’s chief anti-narcotics officer was indicted for providing the Juárez cartel with classified drug-enforcement information in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes. In a 2001 essay in the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, a University of Texas criminologist, Patrick O’Day, cited several instances of Mexican soldiers’ guarding narcotics shipments and transporting them into the United States in military vehicles or by other means. These operations were so extensive and went on for so long that O’Day concluded that the army was a cartel unto itself.

But let us make the risky assumption that today’s army is no longer involved in drug trafficking. The belief that it is exploiting a weak government to advance agendas beyond its declared mission is widespread, and not without reason. While many of the crimes alleged to have been committed by the armed forces appear to be the random acts of rogue troops, others may be part of a directed campaign with three possible objectives.

One objective is laudable—to get information about drug trafficking. The problem is that, in de la Rosa’s words, “the army’s investigative techniques are kidnapping and torture.” But according to Cipriana Jurado, a veteran labor organizer and women’s-rights activist, the military has another purpose: trying to stifle dissent, she said, citing numerous arrests of political troublemakers. And, as Gutiérrez’s case indicates, the generals also may be seeking to clamp down on Mexico’s freewheeling press.

In seeking, much less speaking, the truth about what the army is up to, one often runs into the paradox of the Mexican reality: something dreadful happens and is then treated as if it hadn’t happened. Facts, like people, simply disappear.

I experience this myself as I tour the ruins of a Juárez drug-rehabilitation center with my friend Julián Cardona, a photographer and Reuters correspondent. The rehab clinic is in a shabby two-story building on an unpaved street lined with cinder-block hovels, old cars, and derelict buses. A wind-whipped urban grit that feels dirtier than desert dust pelts our faces as we enter the rectangular patio strewn with rubble, its walls gouged by bullet holes. Small rooms lead off the patio, each with a hand-painted phrase above its door—Cocina for kitchen, Sala de Juntas for meeting room, D-Tox, which needs no translation.

We enter the meeting room. Votive candles gutter in glass jars arranged around an image of Jesus Christ propped up in one corner. The walls are peppered with bullet holes and spattered with dried blood. Cardona tells me what happened here on a Wednesday evening, August 13, 2008, as an Assembly of God pastor named Socorro García and her deacon, Joel Valle, conducted a service for the patients. After they and about 20 addicts gathered in the meeting room to sing hymns and hold a prayer service, García took the podium for altar call. “Is there anyone here who was a Christian in the past,” she asked, “but who fell away into drugs and who would like to reconcile with God?” Several patients raised their hands. García summoned them.

Outside, a Ford pickup carrying a detachment of Mexican paratroopers was parked at an intersection no more than 50 yards away. Two other trucks pulled up in front of the rehab center. Eight men armed with assault rifles and 9-millimeter pistols and wearing bulletproof vests and ski masks piled out of the vehicles and rushed inside.

The shooting started in the patio, just as the patients were walking up to the podium in answer to García’s call. Some flung themselves to the floor, others ran for their lives or huddled against a wall. García stood at the podium, crying out, “Muchachos! Ask God for another chance to live!” At that moment, four gunmen burst inside and, in her words, started “shooting in all directions.”

García raised her hands and hollered above the gunshots, “Lord, send your angels to protect us!” A gunman looked at her through the eyeholes of his ski mask and she looked back. He stopped shooting. “I was right there in front of him,” García told Cardona. “He had already shot a lot of people, and one more life would have meant nothing to him, but he didn’t shoot. Why? Maybe God did not allow it.”

Neighbors called the Emergency Response Center, the equivalent of 911, but got no response. Accounts of the actions taken by the soldiers parked at the street corner differ. According to one, the soldiers stood by passively as the assassins jumped in their trucks and fled. According to another, they drove past the rehab center at high speed while the massacre was going on. People shouted to them to put a stop to it, but the soldiers kept going. This led one of the neighbors to conclude that they “were guarding the killers or came with them so that the police would not intervene.”

In all, nine people were killed and five wounded. Among the dead was Joel Valle, the deacon. It was the worst mass murder in Juárez in years, Cardona says as I gaze at the flickering votives, the bloodstains and bullet holes framing the picture of Christ.

Of course, I have questions: Were any of the killers identified or captured? No. Was their motive determined? No, although there were rumors that they were after members of a street gang, the Aztecas, said to be hiding in the facility. Were the soldiers involved in the massacre? That’s what eyewitnesses claimed, Cardona replies. I keep grasping for facts, but realize it’s futile. Cardona says, “This is the black hole of Mexico. You cannot see inside of it, and nothing gets out.”

Despite the heavy military and police presence, six rehabilitation clinics have been attacked in Juárez over the past two years. The deadliest incident occurred on September 2, when 18 people were executed. Government authorities claimed the massacres were part of a war of extermination between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels.

The conduct of the Mexican military goes to the heart of U.S. counter-narcotics policy. In the past year, experts like General Barry McCaffrey (the drug czar in the Clinton administration) and political figures have warned that if the cartels are not contained, Mexico could become a failed state and the U.S. could find itself with an Afghanistan or a Pakistan on its southern border. Such forecasts are hyperbole, but the fact is that drug trafficking and its attendant corruption are a malignancy that has spread into Mexico’s lymph system. To extend the metaphor, Calderón is attempting to perform radical surgery with the only instrument at his disposal—the army. It may be a tainted instrument, so the reasoning goes, but it is less tainted than the law-enforcement agencies.

Washington supports, indeed encourages, this approach through the Mérida Initiative, a security-cooperation agreement between the two countries that Congress passed and George W. Bush signed into law. Its aim is to provide $1.4 billion in funding, spread over several years, for military and law-enforcement training, equipment such as helicopters and surveillance aircraft, and judicial reforms. The aid package also includes conditions for improvements to Mexico’s less-than-enviable record on human-rights issues. Fifteen percent of the funds can be withheld if Mexico fails to show progress on matters such as prosecuting human-rights violators and prohibiting the use of torture to obtain evidence and testimony.

And that is where U.S. policy becomes contradictory. It calls for a military solution to the trafficking problem. But there are very few, if any, civil safeguards on the actions of the Mexican military. Its soldiers are subject only to military law, even when deployed in their current crime-fighting capacity, and the country’s military-justice system is, to understate things, opaque.

A good example is the case of Javier Rosales, a medical technician who died after he and a friend were captured and tortured by soldiers. Members of his family went to the state justice office and the federal attorney general’s office to file a complaint against the soldiers and demand an investigation. They were turned away because, the officials said, charges of army misconduct fall under military jurisdiction. However, Enrique Torres, a spokesman for the Joint Chihuahuan Operation, told me that the army looks into such allegations only through internal investigations or when formal charges have been filed by state or federal prosecutors. It’s pure catch-22: state or federal authorities will not receive complaints against soldiers, and the army will not investigate unless charges have been filed by state or federal authorities.

That is among the reasons why, out of the more than 2,000 complaints brought before Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, not one has resulted in the prosecution of a single soldier.

The provisions of the Mérida Initiative would appear to give the U.S. considerable leverage in compelling the Mexican army to act with more restraint and greater respect for the civil rights of the country’s citizens. Financial leverage, that is. The moral authority of the U.S. has been eroded by accusations that it has employed torture and illegal detentions in the “war on terror,” as well as by its status as the drug cartels’ biggest market and its singularly unsuccessful efforts to dry up demand.

Every year, under the Foreign Assistance Act, the State Department is required to certify that its southern neighbor is fully cooperating in efforts to stem the export of illegal narcotics into the United States. Without certification, Mexico would be ineligible to receive the vast majority of American aid. But the U.S. government often soft-pedals criticisms of Mexico on matters such as corruption and human-rights offenses, for two reasons. One is U.S. sensitivity to the Mexican elite, which can be thin-skinned about what it regards as infringements from the north on its national sovereignty. The second is money. In the highly unlikely event that Mexico were decertified, the cutoff in U.S. aid would strain bilateral relations, trade agreements would be imperiled, and American businessmen would find it harder to operate south of the border. Also, of all the countries that export oil to the United States, Mexico, at 985,000 barrels a day, ranks third, behind Canada and Saudi Arabia.

That makes speaking the truth about Mexico politically and economically dangerous in official U.S. circles.

But a larger question arises. Even if tomorrow the Mexican military began waging its anti-narcotics campaign with the probity of, say, the Swiss Guard, could it overcome the power of cartels? The drug bosses and their organizations have become integrated into Mexican society, corrupting every aspect of the nation’s life.

The U.S. government estimates that the cultivation and trafficking of illegal drugs directly employs 450,000 people in Mexico. Unknown numbers of people, possibly in the millions, are indirectly linked to the drug industry, which has revenues estimated to be as high as $25 billion a year, exceeded only by Mexico’s annual income from manufacturing and oil exports. Dr. Edgardo Buscaglia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute in Mexico City and a senior legal and economic adviser to the UN and the World Bank, concluded in a recent report that 17 of Mexico’s 31 states have become virtual narco-republics, where organized crime has infiltrated government, the courts, and the police so extensively that there is almost no way they can be cleaned up. The drug gangs have acquired a “military capacity” that enables them to confront the army on an almost equal footing.

“This in itself does not prove that we are in a situation of a failed state today,” Buscaglia wrote. He seemed to be suggesting that the situation could change tomorrow—and not for the better.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/05/ciudad-juarez-mexico-prison-riot-deaths

At least 20 dead in Mexican prison riot

Massacre in border city the latest of a series of bloodbaths in jails that have killed 83 prisoners in six months

Jo Tuckman in Mexico City

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 5 March 2009 01.23 GMT

At least 20 inmates died inside the high security area of a prison in the border city of Ciudad Juarez yesterday in what looks to have been a massacre carried out by members of one gang against rivals.

This is the latest of a series of bloodbaths in Mexican jails that have killed 83 prisoners in six months. They are associated with the drug wars outside which killed over 6,000 in 2008 and well over 1,000 so far this year.

The different cartels are fighting each other for supremacy in strategic cities and states around the country, as well as fighting an unprecedented military-led crackdown launched by president Felipe Calderón two years ago. Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas, is currently the most violent front in the wider war.

"The external conflict is being transferred to inside the prisons," said Enrique Torres, spokesman of the federal government's security operation in Juarez. "Organised crime looks for any space it can fill."

Torres said that the massacre started shortly after 6am when 14 members of a gang calling itself the Aztecas were escorted back to their cells after conjugal visits. Arriving at their module in a relatively low-security part of the building, they produced knives and forced the guards to unlock about 150 fellow gang members.

Taking the wardens hostage, the Aztecas went directly to the high-security block and forced guards to open cells containing members of rival gangs called the Mexicles and the Artistas Asesinos. They then set about killing them.

Some of the victims were murdered with the knives, others beaten to death and others killed with a home-made gun, Torres said.

Local media reported several corpses where thrown from the roof of the three story prison, while the terrified family members crowded outside the prison gates looked on.

The situation was eventually brought under control three hours after it started. Around 200 special forces agents from the militarised federal police, 50 soldiers, two helicopters, a plane, and unspecified numbers of state and municipal police were involved in the operation.

They found 17 Mexicles and Artistas Asesinos already dead. Three more perished on their way to hospital. A fourth survivor remains in critical condition and five others were seriously injured.

The massacre came while Juarez was waking up to a rare experience of 24 hours without a drug war related death. The calm had come after a large military build-up at the weekend.

With 383 people killed in January and February despite 2,500 troops and federal police on the streets, the government decided to send 5,000 more last week. Most have already arrived.

Prior to the Juarez massacre, the bloodiest recent incidents in Mexican jails included 19 killed in September 2008 in a jail in Tijuana, near San Diego, California. A further 21 died the following month at a jail in Reynosa on the other extreme of the Mexican border across from McAllen, Texas.

Typically fights in Mexican prisons involve inmates struggling to control the jail who are directly identified with the main cartels fighting the turf war outside. Groups such as the Sinaloa Cartel, headed by the infamous Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, and the military-deserters-turned-drug lords known as The Zetas.

Torres insisted that while the Aztecas, the Mexicles and the Artistas Asesinos are associated with organised crime they are not cartel members themselves. This raises speculation that the drug bosses paid the Aztecas to prove that the authorities cannot fully control the situation in Juarez, even behind bars.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN03469058

Mexico troops move in to retake warring border city

By Robin Emmott

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico, March 3 (Reuters) - Hundreds of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across Mexico's bloodiest drug war city on Tuesday, trying to prevent a collapse in law and order just south of the U.S. border.

Sirens blared as the army staged one of its biggest troop build-ups in years in Ciudad Juarez, a desert city across the border from El Paso, Texas, where near-daily clashes between drug gangs and police have terrified residents.

Infamous in the 1990s for the unsolved murders of hundreds of women, Ciudad Juarez is now engulfed in the worst drug violence in Mexico as cartels in league with corrupt cops fight over one of the country's most profitable smuggling routes.

More than 2,000 people have been murdered in the area over the past year and drug gang hitmen showed their power last month by forcing the city's police chief to resign with a threat to keep killing police officers until he quit.

"We've got to show we can achieve security in Juarez, for Mexico's sake, for its economy, for people's lives, for our international reputation," said Victor Valencia, the Chihuahua state governor's representative in Ciudad Juarez.

Ciudad Juarez is prized for its location smack in the middle of the 2,000 mile (3,200 km) border with road and rail links deep into the United States. The Pacific-coast Sinaloa gang, led by top fugitive Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, is one of several fighting for control of the city.

Mexico's police forces are tainted up to the highest levels by corruption and direct links to the drug cartels, and President Felipe Calderon has staked his reputation on a nationwide army-led crackdown on cartels.

Ciudad Juarez is now the most crucial battleground of a war that killed more than 6,000 people across Mexico last year and is scaring off investors in cities near the border.

"The solution is with the military. The federal, state and municipal police are infiltrated by organized crime," Valencia told Reuters.

The army expects to have 7,500 soldiers and federal police stationed in Ciudad Juarez by the end of the week, with a further 2,000 troops in the rest of Chihuahua state. Six local bishops pleaded in newspaper ads this week for an end to the killings that are "staining the state with blood".

Troops rolled past U.S.-style shopping malls in Ciudad Juarez on Tuesday to set up checkpoints at bridges running over the border and at the city's international airport, briefly shut last week after bomb threats.

GANGS PILE IN

Calderon has about 45,000 soldiers across Mexico fighting cartels but has never before sent so many troops to one city.

At least four main cartels are fighting for control of Ciudad Juarez, and gangs of unemployed youths have joined the fray to extort businesses, kidnap residents, rob banks and work as hitmen.

Residents fear the city could go the way of Colombia's Medellin at the height of the drug war there in the 1990s, when murder rates hit 6,000 deaths a year.

"Juarez is prisoner to an infinity of groups fighting for the territory, and others who are making the most of the confusion for easy money," said army spokesman Enrique Torres.

Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted man, wants to seize Ciudad Juarez from local drug boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, and officials say the shadowy La Linea cartel from the western state of Michoacan and the feared Zeta hitmen from the Gulf of Mexico cartel are also at war here.

The jump in killings in the city to around 10 a day in February has put Calderon under intense pressure.

Some U.S. officials have publicly asked whether Mexico is becoming a failed state and voiced concern about a spillover of executions, kidnappings and extortions into the United States.

Last month, gunmen killed two city councilmen and forced out Ciudad Juarez's police chief by killing his deputy and vowing to murder an officer every 48 hours until he stepped down.

A former soldier attacked a convoy carrying Chihuahua's state governor in what many believe was an attack linked to drugs. Spooked by a series of death threats, the city's mayor now lives over the border in El Paso.

Ciudad Juarez, which boomed in the U.S. Prohibition era and now bulges with factories making goods for export, has pockets of normality during the day. Cars cram its shabby streets, residents sit in parks or walk their children to school.

But at night, the city once famed for its sex and tequila-fueled party life is ghostlike and residents adopt a self-imposed curfew from dusk till dawn.

"The drug hitmen are in control here. Things are out of control, there's so much death," said textile salesman Valente Salazar in Ciudad Juarez's main square as troops swept past in Humvees. "At six o'clock I go home and I don't go out at all after that. There are so many killings." (Editing by Catherine Bremer and Kieran Murray)

Basiquement, prennez Gotham City dans le Dark Knight, multiplié le body count par 100, et ça approche quelque chose qui ressemble à la réalité.

Ciudad Juarez est une ville d'environ 2.5 millions de personne. L'État a déployé près de 10 000 soldats il y a un peu moins de 4 ans, parce que c'est la seule option qui reste. Et ça ne fonctionne tout simplement pas. L'armée est forcée d'employé la même tactique de fouille porte-à-porte qu'en Irak et en Afghanistan, et les soldats doivent faire leur job cagoullé pour préserver la sécurité de leur famille. Saufe que le crime organisé emploie maintenant la même tactiques; cagoullé et déguisé en uniformes militaires, les criminels débarquent dans tels ou tels maisons et butent tout le monde.

Mexique: Ciudad Juarez enterre les lycéens massacrés par un cartel

Ciudad Juarez enterrait mardi les 16 lycéens massacrés deux jours plus tôt lors d'une fête, un carnage exceptionnel même dans cette ville mexicaine qui enregistre jusqu'à une dizaine de meurtres par jour, derrière lesquels plane l'ombre des cartels de la drogue.

C'est à Ciudad Juarez, à la frontière américaine du Texas, en face d'El Paso, que se concentre la guerre sans merci entre les cartels pour le contrôle du trafic à destination des Etats-Unis, premier client mondial de la cocaïne: plus de 2.500 morts l'an dernier dans cette ville de 1,3 million d'habitants.

Au plan national, ces affrontements quotidiens entre les grands cartels ont déjà fait plus de 15.000 morts depuis la prise de fonctions du président Felipe Calderon fin 2006, en dépit du déploiement de plus de 50.000 militaires en renfort de la police.

Les tueurs des lycéens, qui fêtaient un anniversaire et une victoire de leur équipe de football, appartiendraient au gang des "Aztèques", à la solde du cartel dit de Juarez, un des plus connus du pays, indique-t-on au Parquet.

Une cérémonie en l'honneur des victimes devait débuter mardi à 15h00 locales (22h00 GMT).

Ce massacre a marqué le début d'un week-end prolongé particulièrement sanglant dans le nord du Mexique: 46 victimes, toutes tuées par balle, à Ciudad Juarez, Torreon et Magdalena, dans les trois Etats de Chihuahua, Coahuila et Sonora, qui couvrent la totalité des 3.000 kilomètres de la frontière américaine.

M. Calderon, qui a condamné "le lâche assassinat" des lycéens depuis Tokyo, où il était en visite officielle, a érigé la lutte contre les cartels en priorité nationale, sans encore avoir réussi à les neutraliser.

Sa méthode, basée sur une militarisation systématique dont les populations locales souffrent souvent, soulève des critiques dans les milieux politiques, qu'il ne peut ignorer: la présidentielle de 2012 approche et sa réélection n'est pas garantie.

Dans cette perspective, il a toutefois marqué des points récemment.

En décembre, Arturo Beltran Leyva, chef du cartel qui porte son nom, a été tué dans un raid mené par l'infanterie de Marine, et un de ses frères, Carlos, a été arrêté peu après.

En janvier, Teodoro Garcia Simental, dit "El Teo", a été arrêté dans une opération conjointe armée-police. Réputé pour sa cruauté, considéré comme une force montante des cartels, il figurait, comme Arturo Beltran Leyva, sur la liste des 24 responsables des cartels pour la capture desquels le gouvernement a offert jusqu'à l'équivalent de 2,3 millions de dollars (1,4 million d'euros).

La mort ou la capture de tel ou tel chef de cartel ne signifie pas forcément la disparition de son organisation, mais sûrement son affaiblissement momentané et entraîne presque automatiquement une intensification des assauts des bandes rivales, expliquent les experts.

C'est le cas ces dernières semaines le long de la frontière américaine, selon eux, d'autant qu'on assiste actuellement à une restructuration des cartels mexicains en deux grands groupes ennemis: d'un côté Sinaloa et La Famille, de l'autre Beltran Leyva, Golfe, Zetas, Tijuana et Juarez.

Apparemment, les 16 individus ont été tué parce que parmit eux, il y avait une témoin dans une affaire de drogue.

[Mâle Alpha]

La légalisation de toutes les drogues mettrait fin à tout ça.

[John de Gray]

La légalisation de toutes les drogues mettrait fin à tout ça.

C'est pas au Canada que ça va arriver de sitôt, avec Harper au pouvoir. Aux États-Unis par contre, il y a de l'espoir.

[MackBlack]

Merci pour les articles. Je les lirai plus tard ou demain.

[White Light]

La légalisation de toutes les drogues mettrait fin à tout ça.

Oui et non...il va continuer d'y avoir des guerres de territoires.

Je suis cependant pour une légalisation partielle (sinon presque totale...) des drogues. En fait, je serrais pour une réglementation et une prise en main par l'état de la vente des drogues (comme pour l'alcool), mais je doute que le crime organisé laisserais faire, dans ce cas-ci.

Modifié 7 février 2010 par White Light

[Pixel]

La seule façon que je vois de rendre ça légal ça serait d'en faire un monopole d'État, parce que la drogue crée des effets néfastes dans la société (problèmes de santé, criminalité, prostitution). En économie on parle d'externalités négatives, c'est pour cette raison que le jeu et la vente d'alcool c'est sous le contrôle du gouvernement.

La meilleure façon de lutter contre la drogue et la criminalité en général c'est en s'attaquant aux inégalités dans la société. C'est plate mais c'est ça.

Modifié 7 février 2010 par Pixel

[John de Gray]

La seule façon que je vois de rendre ça légal ça serait d'en faire un monopole d'État, parce que la drogue crée des effets néfastes dans la société (problèmes de santé, criminalité, prostitution). En économie on parle d'externalités négatives, c'est pour cette raison que le jeu et la vente d'alcool c'est sous le contrôle du gouvernement.

La meilleure façon de lutter contre la drogue et la criminalité en général c'est en s'attaquant aux inégalités dans la société. C'est plate mais c'est ça.

C'est sensé ce que tu dit. Dommage que dès que quelqu'un a une opinion différente de la tienne, tu lui enlève de la rep et tu lui dise "lol, non.".

[Running With Spoons]

B-E sérieusement, pis sans vouloir te planter, ni t'humilier d'une quelconque façon, cette longueur d'introduction: c'est impossible. Très amicalement. (Té celui qui a le plus de bon sang dans ta clique)

T'as une bonne plume. Fais un résumé. Tes photos, l'autre fois, c'était accrocheur.

Jusse à éditer et référer, le thread est jeune , je vais effacer celui-ci. Ça va bien se lire.

Salut.

(Bon, encore une volée de reps négatifs accompagnant votre silence coupable, les tigas.....)

Premièrement, tu peux choisir toi-même de lire autant d'articles que B~E a posté que tu veux, t'es pas obligé de tout lire du tout.

Deuxièment, tu vois les lignes en gras dans les textes de B~E? Avec les genre 20 lignes en gras, tu peux avoir une idée des faits importants (ou du moins, les faits les plus choquants) des articles.

[vlad_drac]

C'est drôle, l'été dernier je passais avec un potte à El Paso, où on a séjourner 1 nuit.

Le soir, après quelques bières, on s'est dit: "Man ! on pourrait aller faire un tour à Ciudad Juarez !". La ville est juste l'autre côté d'une rivière et on peut y aller à pied du centre-ville.

On était pour s'y rendre, pour finalement réaliser qu'un de nous n'avait pas son passeport sur lui, tout juste à côté de la frontière.

Un peu plus tard j'ai réalisé que c'était la ville la plus dangereuse du monde et je suis plutôt heureux de ne pas y être allé.

J'ai aussi catché pourquoi El Paso c'était aussi crados et pourquoi il y avait des gens aussi louche dans notre motel miteux.

_

Autre anecdote juteuse, pendant le même voyage, moi et mon pote on faisait du camping dans un parc national appelé Big Bend, qui est collé sur le Mexique. Alors qu'on faisait à souper, nos voisins de camping, visiblement latinos, semblaient capoter légèrement: il regardaient partout, restaient dans leur auto, pour finalement sortir rapidement, bouffer en vitesse et rentrer dans la voiture.

Bon on prête pas trop attention. Mais le lendemain, on réalise qu'à 8 heures ils sont déjà partis et qu'ils ont laissé aucune trace !

Un peu plus tard, un ranger vient nous voir et nous demande si on a remarqué quelque chose de louche avec nos voisins, nous demande des les décrire physiquement, eux et leur voiture. Il lâche alors quelque chose du genre "all police cars on blue van" dans son walkie-talkie, met la main sur son gun et cours vers son char. Je sais pas si ils ont survécus. Mais je sais qu au Texas, on lésine pas avec le contrôle douanier.

[iEatGLass]

Légaliser la drogue dans un pays qui fonctionne plutôt bien, ça peut effectivement couper les vivres aux crimes organisés. Mais dans un pays aussi peu fonctionnel?

Je ne crois pas que les diverses milices vont troquer leurs armes pour des vestons cravates. Le gouvernement n'est même pas en mesure de prendre le marché, donc, ce serait les mêmes joueurs qui le feraient, maintenant de façon légale. Mais je ne crois pas que ça change grand-chose à leur méthode. Au pire, ça risquerait de les mettent au pouvoir ou dans des rôles importants au gouvernement.

[Modern Boredom is Life]

La meilleure façon de lutter contre la drogue et la criminalité en général c'est en s'attaquant aux inégalités dans la société. C'est plate mais c'est ça.

C'est définitivement plate comme réponse.

[PetQuiFermente]

C'est définitivement plate comme réponse.

Surtout qu'il n'y a pas seulement des pauvres qui achètent, consomment et vendent des narcotiques. Inégale ou pas, la société occidentale avec tout ses problèmes (professionels, financiers, relationnels.etc) est terrain fertile pour une clientèle régulière. Aucune tranche socio-économique n'en a le monopole, donc c'est vraiment une solution en l'air Pixel.

Modifié 8 février 2010 par PetQuiFermente

[Mâle Alpha]

Légaliser la drogue dans un pays qui fonctionne plutôt bien, ça peut effectivement couper les vivres aux crimes organisés. Mais dans un pays aussi peu fonctionnel?

Je ne crois pas que les diverses milices vont troquer leurs armes pour des vestons cravates. Le gouvernement n'est même pas en mesure de prendre le marché, donc, ce serait les mêmes joueurs qui le feraient, maintenant de façon légale. Mais je ne crois pas que ça change grand-chose à leur méthode. Au pire, ça risquerait de les mettent au pouvoir ou dans des rôles importants au gouvernement.

Le principal marché étant les ÉU, c'est aux ÉU que ça changerait quelque chose. Sinon, même si le Mexique rend ça légal, ça prendrait quand même toute une organisation criminelle pour l'importation illégale aux ÉU.

[B~E]

Légaliser la drogue dans un pays qui fonctionne plutôt bien, ça peut effectivement couper les vivres aux crimes organisés. Mais dans un pays aussi peu fonctionnel?

Je ne crois pas que les diverses milices vont troquer leurs armes pour des vestons cravates. Le gouvernement n'est même pas en mesure de prendre le marché, donc, ce serait les mêmes joueurs qui le feraient, maintenant de façon légale. Mais je ne crois pas que ça change grand-chose à leur méthode. Au pire, ça risquerait de les mettent au pouvoir ou dans des rôles importants au gouvernement.

Si les cartels mexicains devraient faire compétition contre le gouvernement américain advenant la légalisation de la drogue, alors ces cartels verraient leurs revenue baisser, etc etc. Peu importe s'ils ne troqueraient pas le urs armes; ils ne pourraient plus les payer. Et ça se traduirait inévitablement par un avantage pour le gouvernement mexicain.

[Orphelin du Crazy]

Cinq ans déjà ! Certains états américains ont commencé à légaliser la marjiane. Il y a eu cette histoire d’enlèvement d'écoliers qui a scandalisé le pays. Et puis récemment le chef d'un puissant cartel a été arrêté. C'est pas le premier et c'est pas le dernier.

2011

2013:

20??

Modifié 8 mars 2015 par Rococo pas Rocco