Tag Archives: Drugs

February 17, 2013

MEXICO: Michoacan begins new anti-crime strategy

Jaripo, Michoacan

Mexico’s new president, Enrique Pena Nieto, has begun a new strategy intended to coordinate federal, state and local police forces in the fight against the rampant criminality of kidnapping, robbery, exortion, murder that is the detritus of cartel wars.

Michoacan has been horribly affected by all this — with some areas controlled by squads of roving criminal bands against which the local police are powerless. In one town I visited often, residents tell me a cell from one of the groups disputing control in the state with what amounts to a roadblock at the entrance to town inquiring who is coming through and what their business is.

The state is among the first to receive funds, and federal attention, in EPN’s new plan, which will also include funding for help to the 68 municipios with the highest homicide rates — Tijuana, Culiacan, Juarez, Acapulco, and others.

Michoacan is a great state. I spent dozens of trips wandering through the state, looking for stories about, in those years, mostly immigrants, as so many Michoacanos have migrated to the US.

Those kinds of trips are now impossible due to the spread of the violence.

The idea of combining and coordinating police forces has some appeal — instead of the use of the military, as ex-president Felipe Calderon resorted to. Soldiers aren’t trained or prepared for police work, after all.

Problem is, that many police forces aren’t either.  I’m wondering whether local police forces can be effectively used at all. Or state forces, for that matter. They are not just corrupt in many cases. They are poorly funded, equipped, trained, educated.

This is why, after all, Calderon resorted to the military — something for which he was widely criticized. He had no other weapon at his disposal but soldiers.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had recently with a man in Los Angeles who is from a rancho near Apatzingan. He told me that he returned home and on two corners he saw headless bodies. Whenever a police issue arose, officers sent citizens to the cartel gunmen to get them resolved, as they were the real power.

It’s possible when this new strategy plays itself out, we all may understand better why Calderon acted in the way that he did.

 

 

 

 

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February 12, 2013

MEXICO: Can Vigilante Justice Save Mexico?

Community militias in Mexican state of Guerrero, present suspected criminals in El Mezon plaza.

My homeboys in Mexico, Dudley Althaus and photographer Keith Dannemiller, have a new story up on Global Post asking this question, and visiting places where citizens have taken up where the police have not in the face of rampant criminality.

This town, Ayutla de los Libres, in the Mixtec region of Guerrero, has had a masked militia for a month or so. (More here on the disaster that is Guerrero lately.)

It’s interesting that the militia also is part of the usos y costumbres system under which many Mexican Indian villages are governed — unpaid municipal labor by each member of the community, including policing.

Vigilante justice is nothing new in Mexico. Lynchings have been going on for decades if not centuries. I wrote about one lynching in True Tales from Another Mexico: the Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx.

But I take it as sad commentary on the country that the question the story poses even has to be asked.

Photo: Civilian militia, Ayutla de los Libres; Credit: Keith Dannemiller

 

 

 

 

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February 11, 2013

MEXICO: Is Acapulco Lost? Is Guerrero a Failed State?

These are the remarkable questions asked in its El Palenque column by Animal Politico — a Mexican online newspaper.

The questions are brought on by the rape of six Spanish tourists last week, and by a constant narcoviolence going back to imagesthe real beginnings of Mexico’s cartel war — that being roughly 2004-05, when heads were placed on stakes and that kind of thing.

The state of Guerrero has been infamous within Mexico for its wanton violence, brought on by its intense heat, poverty and caciquismo – a term referring to the political and economic control by certain families and individuals.

Here’s what Jose Carreno Figueras, from the Tec de Monterrey, had to say:

“You have to remember that Guerrero was always a problem state, and that except for a few enclaves — like Acapulco, Taxco and Zihuatanejo –where there were appearances of authority, it was never far from being ungovernable. Political bosses, criminality, banditry, injustice have always been part of the perennial panorama of Guerrero.”

You just never could see much of it from an Acapulco hotel room — until recently, that is.

For those who read Spanish, Jose Antonio Alvarez Lima had the following remembrance of Acapulco in the 1960s’s glory days, and its fall in the 1970s — calling the city “a mirror of our own failure”:

“Durante los sesentas, disfrute Acapulco y mi primera juventud. Era el paraiso. Quizá uno de los sitios más bellos del mundo, junto con Río. En los setentas, el populismo echeverrista llenó los cerros de invasores sin servicios y se inició el deterioro desastroso que hoy conocemos. Acapulco  es el espejo de nuestro fracaso. De la corrupción generalizada, la demagogia, la codicia y la indiferencia.

“El mismo futuro que espera para Cancún y las Rivieras Maya y Nayarita. Nunca tan pocos y tan rápido han hecho tanto daño a la naturaleza.”

 

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January 15, 2013

GANGS: Two illuminating Mexican Mafia tales

In the last week, there’ve been two stories that illuminate the world of the Mexican Mafia prison gang and its influence on the streets of Southern California.

The first was the story of attorney Isaac Guillen, a guy who was in a gang, then left, went to UC Berkeley, got a law degree, only to eventually become a mob lawyer, in a sense.

Guillen’s story is classic. Several gang members have told me of how certain lawyers have gone beyond their duties as legal representatives to become liaisons between incarcerated Eme leaders and the rank and file gang members on the street — passing notes, orders for criminal activity, drugs. All behind the shield of the attorney-client privilege.

These attorneys are part of what allows Eme members to exert their influence and control on SoCal gang streets, even while they’re locked up in maximum security prison.

The second was the sentencing of Santiago Rios and his son, Louie, from the Azusa 13 gang. Rios senior was accused of being the gang’s “llavero” — keyholder, or shotcaller, anointed by the Eme to run its affairs in Azusa.

He presided over the drug business, over taxing drug dealers and of implementing gang policy, established at a meeting (prosecutors say) in 1992, of “cleansing” the city of black people. Azusa went through several years of seeing hate crimes such as murder, firebombing of black residences, beatings, graffiti, etc.

The judge, in sentencing him to almost 20 years in prison, called him a “proponent of the racial cleansing of the city of Azusa.”

A federal RICO indictment in 2011 sent the Rioses and 49 other Azusa members to jail, and now to federal prison.

But the indictment highlights just how much havoc — crime waves, really — can be created in a normally quiet town when its gang begins acting on orders from Eme members who are locked up far away. Often, they don’t know the gang members they are ordering around on the street, who are nevertheless only too willing to do their bidding.

As I mention in the story, numerous other neighborhoods and towns have been gripped by this kind of racial violence committed against blacks by Latino street gang members.

Because of this control, the Mexican Mafia — whose founders are pictured above — qualifies as the only region-wide organized crime that Southern California has known.

(The photo is one I found online without any attribution. If someone can attribute it, I’d be happy to list it, or, if they object, remove it.)

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October 14, 2012

MEXICO: Manuel Torres Felix, “El M1,” killed

Manuel Torres Felix, the head of security for the Sinaloa Cartel, has been killed by the Mexican military – Oct. 13, 2012.

Torres Felix, (photo left) was the brother of Javier “El JT” Torres Felix (photo right), who was the head of the cartel’s security before his arrest and extradition to the U.S.in 2006.

This time Army soldiers guarded his body to prevent it from being stolen — as happened to the corpse of Zeta leader Heriberto Lazcano a week before.

Manuel Torres Felix — also known as El Ondeado — was known to be especially bloody, and became, perhaps for that reason, the subject of numerous corridos by the new wave of corrido singers, most of whom are from Southern California and who seem to have chosen sides (or were forced to do so) in Mexico’s drug-cartel wars.

Check out, for example, Los Sanguinarios de M1 (the Bloodthirsty Ones of M1) by Los Bukanas de Culiacan (who are actually not from Culiacan, Sinaloa, but instead from Downey, CA), with plenty of references to decapitated heads, etc.

(Here’s some lyrics, and I’m not making them up:

With an AK-47 and a bazooka on our heads
blowing off heads that cross our path
We’re bloodthirsty and crazy – We love to kill
Bullets fired and extortions carried out, just like the best of us
Always in a caravan of armored cars, wearing bullet-proof vests and ready to execute people)

Man, where is the oblique, poetic style of Chalino Sanchez and his tales from the Mexican rancho now that we need them?

I find it interesting that M1, and another sicario, El Macho Prieto, became the focus of so many corridos, rather than Chapo Guzman or Mayo Zambada — the Sinaloa cartel’s leaders.

Don’t know, but his death might do something to undermine the idea that the government is in cahoots with the Sinaloa Cartel.

 

 

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October 10, 2012

DRUGS: Is the “Buchon” style here to stay?

An interesting story in today’s El Debate, a daily newspaper in the state of Sinaloa, asks whether buchon style is here to stay.

Buchon is a style of dress and speech — attitudes as well — that is from the bottom of the Sinaloan drug world.

It usually involves slang, very drawled speech — which is how folks from the mountains of Sinaloa speak. It also involves guns, demeaning talk about women, glorification of the bloodthirstiest narcos, money, military garb, tricked-out trucks, and, interestingly, the veneration of Buchanan whiskey — bastardized as “Buchanas.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this somewhere before.

Buchon  is a big deal in the state of Sinaloa, where Mexican drug smuggling began — as the story makes clear.

It’s also a big deal here in L.A., where Sinaloan style has dominated Mexican culture for two decades — since the life and death of narco-balladeer legend Chalino Sanchez.

Los Buchones de Culiacan are a band that plays here regularly, and in Sinaloa. (Can’t play in the state of Tamaulipas as their image is so associated with the Sinaloa Cartel, which is at war with the Zetas, whose stronghold in near the Gulf of Mexico.)

People in the southeast cities of LA County sometimes try to speak like hill Sinaloans even though they’re from states with very different cultures, such as Jalisco or Zacatecas.

As Carlos Monsivais was once reputed to have said: if you provide jobs to people, you become a hero. Or you get all the girls…..

 

 

 

 

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October 9, 2012

MEXICO: Upon the death of a Drug Lord — David Hidalgo, Jackson Browne and Los Cenzontles

This morning’s news that Heriberto Lazcano (pictured here), leader of the bloodthirsty Zeta drug cartel in Mexico, may have been killed by the Mexican military reminded me of a song by Los Cenzontles, the Mexican roots-music band from the Bay Area. (Update below: Lazcano’s corpse stolen.)

The Silence was recorded in February in a session in Echo Park with David Hidalgo, from Los Lobos, who has the vocals on the track, and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who sings backup.

A great, elegant tune about Mexico’s drug violence — one of the few songs whose achingly beautiful feel does some kind of justice to the tragedy.

The song is from the band’s great new CD, Regeneration — for which (full disclosure) I wrote the liner notes. The album mixes norteno, a little sixties rock, some blues and funk — all in a really strong, bold sound.

The band started as part of a grant to get kids involved in music in the East Bay. Years later, it’s an accomplished crew, having recorded several albums  and artists such as Hidalgo, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal.

On a lower note, the Zetas started out as Mexican military special operations commandos and were paid to desert by Osiel Cardenas Guillen, then the leader of the Gulf Cartel, which ran the territory on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande Valley.

Cardenas, now doing 25 years in a US prison, hired them — 31 of them — as bodyguards. It took only a few years for them to realize that they could be a cartel as well. They branched off, recruited heavily among poor youth and returning deportees from the U.S. They formed new cells like amoeba, and became a fearsome force across Mexico and down into Guatemala.

See a Mexican military-issued photo of the corpse of Heriberto Lazcano.

UPDATE: Now there are reports that an armed squad of Zetas broke into the place where Lazcano’s corpse was held and made off with it.

The drama of our times — not good for much, except art sometimes.

David Hidalgo and Jackson Browne

 

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June 27, 2012

DRUGS: Narco Mennonites arrested again

Years ago, I had a run-in with drug-smuggling Mennonites in the area around Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua in Mexico, and wrote about it, and the decay of traditional Mennonite communities there, in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.

A recent narcotics arrest in Canada is about that as well. The Mexican Old Colony Mennonites have been working with drug cartels, and been major importers of marijuana and cocaine to Canada and the U.S. themselves, for years.

They began in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and were able to use their ingenuity as mechanics and welders to fashion new hiding places for drugs in trucks and cars.

For my book, I found that the largest drug bust in the history of the state of Oklahoma up to that time was a Mennonite ring run out Cuauhtemoc. The main informant, now presumed dead, was himself Mennonite.

Used to be a Mennonite family crossing into El Paso would be waved through Customs. Now they get the full treatment — drug dogs, mirrors under the car, etc.

One man I spoke with said a common way to smuggle drugs was to strap them around a senile grandmother, wearing a long dress and a traditional bonnet and looking for all the world like a peasant for the 1800s.

This photo here is from an AA meeting I attended for Mennonites in the communities near Cuauhtemoc.

 

 

 

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May 3, 2012

MEXICO: Three more journalists murdered in Veracruz

The killing of two photographers and a reporter in Veracruz brings the total to four journalists dead in that violence-riven state since the weekend.

Another, Regina Martinez, correspondent for the news magazine, Proceso, was found beaten and strangled to death in her home in Xalapa, the state capital, on Saturday.

Here’s a column from reporter Marcela Turati, from Proceso, on the topic of Mexican journalists who’ve become war correspondents in their own country.

Map source: Wikipedia

 

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May 3, 2012

MEXICO: Fox calls drug war “useless”

Not that it’s necessarily new, but Vicente Fox is again in the news for his blunt characterization of the drug war as “useless” and calling for the legalization of drugs.

He’s said this before, but it’s always interesting to hear a former president of Mexico get into this. Another former Mexican president, Ernesto Zedillo, is on record, along with Cesar Gaviria and Fernando Cardoso (of ex-presidents of Colombia and Brazil, respectively) as saying he thinks legalization should be part of a new approach to drugs.

Of course, it’s not clear how legalizing drugs in Mexico would have any effect on cartel profits, and thus violence, if the U.S. doesn’t do the same, as the market for all that dope is here.

 

 

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April 27, 2012

GANGS: Drew Street acting up?

Drew Street, the once-scary two blocks into which the city of LA has poured enormous resources to reverse a serious gang and drug problem, shows a few signs of reverting to old ways.

A shooting on the street, followed by two others in a rival gang neighborhood, yesterday. A month ago, a Drew Streeter chased a black family down the street with a shotgun; the family left the area immediately. In December, a murder of a Drew Street gang member.

Of course, that would have been a couple days mayhem a few years back. That all of this is noteworthy is a sign of how far the street in Glassell Park, abutting the Forest Lawn cemetery, has come.  Over the last three years, there were major sweeps, prosecutions, the razing of a notorious house, with a community garden in its place. Now, no drug bazaar, no kids in hoodies lurking by cars, very little graffiti.

(Most of the folks on the street are from the town of Tlalchapa, Guerrero, a part of the notoriously violent Tierra Caliente region. Here’s my story in the LA Times about the street’s fascinating history.)

Still, talking with some folks on the street, they seem to see a more brazen attitude among the little gangbangers who remain. Could be a good story, but first I want to talk to the cops about it all, which I wasn’t able to do today. Hoping to do so on Monday.

 

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February 2, 2012

DRUGS: SB County Supe accused opponent of Mexican Mafia ties

A story today in the Daily Bulletin in the Inland Empire is interesting for what it dredges up about an episode in the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

Members of the tribe, each of which earns a ton of money from their casino, feel in with San Bernardino gang members and through them with the Mexican Mafia members in that area. Now it’s become a campaign issue, according to the story.

The Mexican Mafia prison gang remains the most fascinating criminal enterprise in California. It’s able to force street gang members to exact taxes from local drug dealers. When MM members began this system in the early 1990s, it amounted, and still does, to the first region-wide organized crime in the history of Southern California, which had been spared the Italian mafia and others.

Local gang members were ordered to do the bidding of the MM — also known as “Eme”, which is Spanish for the letter M — whose influence in the prison system is vast. Gang members hopped to it, for the most part. The revenue is shared among taxers, shotcallers and the mafioso from each areas of SoCal.

Today, years after its formation, the Eme taxation system is often as ingenius as the member in that area, which is to say sometimes enormously so, sometimes not at all.

In Huntington Park, the Eme member, doing life in Pelican Bay State Prison, ordered gang members to tax popsicle vendors and street drag-queen prostitutes, as well as drug dealers. One transgender told me recently they had to pay taxes to even live in the area, as the considered their presence a besmirching of the barrio’s rep.

Out in SB County, according to fed documents, the local Eme figured out that some members of the San Manuel Band were juicy sources of cash. In 2008, Sal “Toro” Hernandez, the Eme member from San Bernardino, was implicated in the whole thing. A DEA document, according to newspaper reports, said the Eme was extorting money from tribe members, who each reportedly earn $100,000 a month in revenue from their casino.

“Toro” Hernandez pleaded guilty as did his brother, Alfred. (Here’s a reprint of a Press Enterprise article on the case.)

Will be interesting to see how the campaign, and this issue within it, plays out.

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February 2, 2012

DRUGS: Mennonites and Time’s `Flower Girls’

Mennonite one-room school house near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua

Time Magazine has published a set of photos of an Old Colony Mennonite community in Durango, Mexico, titling it The Flower Girls. Check them out. Tell me what you think. I find the photos are sweet, delicate, beautiful, and only hint at the disaster that has befallen most of these Mennonite communities, which have tried mightily to separate themselves from the world.

The Mennonite communities in Chihuahua are replete with severe problems of inbreeding, domestic violence, benighted education, alcoholism, and, in the last 20 years, drug trafficking, particularly in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua, four hours south of Ciudad Juarez.

Mennonites came to Mexico from Canada in the 1920s, invited by the government that wanted to colonize the north to avoid further US depredations. Those who came to escape the world were masterful farmers and cheesemakers. But in time they suffered from the same problems as other Mexican farmers: drought, lack of credit, etc. Many in the Chihuahua colonies turned to drug smuggling — some full time and some to pay an urgent debt. I ran into these folks in 2003 and included a chapter on the harrowing result — the scariest moment of my reporting life — in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.

I like the Time photos immensely, but from them you’d not guess much of the reality of Old Colony Mennonite life in Mexico.

For many of these world-rejecting Mennonites, it always seemed to me that their very attempt to isolate themselves made them  vulnerable to the worst the modern world has to offer. Many I spoke with described their people as lambs, unprepared for what they would encounter outside their community. Some likened it to Indians’ lack of exposure to small pox before the Europeans came.

I’ve included a photo above of a one-room schoolhouse, taught by a man with barely a bad sixth-grade education, which is how Mennonite kids are still schooled in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua. Would  love your comments on the Time photos.

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