Over the past week the government’s security policy has been criticised on three different fronts. The most important attack came from the US where Republicans are losing patience with the Mexican government’s demonstrable lack of success in defeating gangsters. The second attack came from Mexico’s leading peace activist, Javier Sicilia, who claimed first that the Mexican government was trying to undermine him and then announced that he would travel to the US to lobby Congress to change its security policies towards Mexico. The third attack was tangible: the gangs have become much more active in the important state of Veracruz and prompted the debut of the country’s first paramilitary death squad which calls itself the Matazetas. This development, belatedly, led to a joint response from the federal and state government.
The Republicans’ attack on Mexico’s security strategy is being driven by two politicians working distinct agendas. In Washington, a congressman, Connie Mack (R, Florida), who chairs the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the House International Affairs committee, is becoming increasingly strident. On 4 October he argued that Mexico is now facing a criminal insurgency and that “criminal organizations are capturing the allegiance of the population through economic and social programs, and as they undermine institutions they have no desire to replace them.”
Mack made these incendiary comments at a joint hearing of two other House subcommittees, (Government Organization, Efficiency and Financial Management and National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations) to discuss the Merida Initiative. Mack is vice-chairman of the first committee. He said that the way the gangsters were operating in Mexico made the threat they posed to governmental democracy more worrying than any other insurgency.
The US government’s line is that Mexico is not facing a narco-insurgency. William Brownfield, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, argued that Mexican gangsters had no political ambitions and so were different from the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc). Brownfield is a former US ambassador to both Colombia and Venezuela.
Mack argues that the US should beef up its Merida Initiative, launched in 2007 which supports the Mexican government’s efforts to combat the gangs. In particular he wants the US to deploy more drones and improve its intelligence-gathering in Mexico.
The other politician is Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas, and a leading candidate for the party’s presidential nomination in 2012. He went further on 2 October, calling for the US to consider sending troops to Mexico. Perry said that the US and Mexican governments should work together against the drug gangs and that such an alliance could require US military forces to work with the Mexican military “to kill the drug gangs and keep them away from our borders”.
Perry’s threat to intervene demonstrates that Mexico’s security situation will be at the top of the agenda in both the US and the Mexican 2012 presidential campaign. Perry made the deployment-of-troops suggestion while on the presidential nomination campaign trail in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Sicilia adds US to itinerary
On 5 October Javier Sicilia, a prominent Mexican peace activist, announced that he would lobby the US Congress to end the Merida Initiative on the grounds that it was worsening the security situation in Mexico. Sicilia, a poet and Roman Catholic activist who set up the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (MPJD) after his son was killed along with six other youngsters by gangsters in Morelos last March, said that he is working with Global Exchange on the Washington trip which will take place either later this month or in early November. Sicilia will argue that the militarisation of Mexico is only increasing the death toll in the country.
Sicilia made the announcement at the launch of his latest book, triggered by the gang violence and entitled ‘Estamos hasta la madre’. (The title is a pun on being fed up and in a mess). The decision to go to the US will add to the already considerable pressure Sicilia exerts on the government of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa.
Sicilia’s US trip follows his accusation, made on 29 September, that the Mexican government is trying to undermine him and his movement. Sicilia was annoyed that the government appears to have gone back on its promise to meet him every quarter. This promise was apparently made at his last meeting (his third this year) with Calderón on 23 June, but the government said on 28 September that it was changing the format and wanted to bring in more people from other NGOs at the next meeting, on 7 October, in Chapultepec castle, Mexico City.
Sicilia claimed that the change showed that the government still did not understand the scale of the national emergency. Officially, at least 34,000 people have been killed since Calderón declared his war on organised crime when he took office in December 2006, but the MPJD claims that the true figure is above 50,000.
Sicilia said that the government’s policy was driven entirely by the media. Media coverage of Sicilia’s second peace march, south of Mexico City to the Guatemalan border, was much less laudatory than its coverage of the first, which was to the (more violent) northern border states.
If Sicilia is right about the media driving the government, the government has made a misjudgment, because Sicilia has soared back into the headlines with the publication of his new book and then the announcement of his Washington visit.
Sicilia’s comment on the Merida Initiative was almost an aside. Sicilia said that the main goal of his trip to Washington was to halt the sale of high-powered weapons in the US, which are often acquired by gangsters in Mexico. The difficulty Sicilia faces is the political clout of the US gun lobby and its (convincing) argument that although high-powered weapons are legal in the US, only two people per 100,000 are murdered in El Paso, Texas, but 100 metres across the Rio Bravo in Ciudad Juárez, the murder rate is close on 200 per 100,000.
In Mexico, Sicilia wants to lead a national movement to change Mexican security policy and thus the country. Sicilia accused Mexican politicians of “ignoring the national emergency” facing the country. He claims that at least 50,000 people have been killed since Calderón launched his war on organised crime.
Sicilia’s arguments are being strengthened by the government’s failure to stop the gang violence spreading. The latest upsurge in violence has come in Veracruz, the country’s third most populous state. After 35 bodies were found dumped beside the road from Veracruz to Boca del Rio by the self-proclaimed death squad, Matazetas (Zeta-Killers), on 20 September, parents stopped sending their children to school in large parts of Veracruz.
The government is always politically vulnerable when children stop going to school. Earlier this year Calderón argued that there was no way Mexico could be considered a failed state because children still went to school. When he said that, he was right. The fact that children are not now going to school in parts of Veracruz, shows how much worse the gang violence has become over the past six months.
The worsening lies not in terms of numbers of people being killed but in the fact that the gangs are operating in new areas, away from their traditional stamping-grounds along the drug routes, up the coasts to the US border. This is despite the fact that the army and marines are now deployed in more and more states (they are now regularly on the streets in at least 15 of Mexico’s 31 states). Simultaneously human rights abuse complaints, aimed at the military, are mounting.
The death toll in Veracruz is already three times what it was in the whole of 2010. To date this year (to 30 September), 212 people have been killed in the state, up from 59 in calendar 2010.
So far only in Tierra Blanca have schools been effectively closed because parents have stopped sending their children. There are also reports that schools in some of the state’s bigger cities (Boca del Río, Xalapa, Poza Rica, Córdoba and Coatzacoalcos) are virtually empty because parents are too frightened to send their children in.
Matazetas
Exactly who the Matazetas are is far from clear. What seems clear is that at least one of the people killed on 20 September probably had nothing to do with the Zetas, one of the main gangs in Mexico. One of the 35 killed was Alan Michel Jiménez Velásquez, a youngster who was arrested by the state police on 14 September. His mother identified his body on 22 September. The authorities claim that all 35 of those killed had criminal antecedents: the local media in Veracruz contradict this, saying that at least 24 of those killed had never been in trouble with the police. The state authorities are refusing to investigate the discrepancy.
On 4 October the federal government of Mexico and the state government of Veracruz did announce a joint scheme, Veracruz Seguro, to improve security in the state. The new initiative should stop any further death squad activity as it sets up a single command for state and federal security forces operating in Veracruz.
- Peña Nieto
The opposition Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which according to the opinion polls will recover the presidency (lost for the first time in 2000) in 2012, is lining up behind its frontrunning candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto. On 8 October the PRI is due to elect a new national political committee. Of the 31 nominees from each of the 31 states, 28 are Peñaistas.
- Spendthrift
A survey suggested that 43% of Mexican workers regularly spend more than they earn. The survey for Trabajando.com found that 34% of respondents said that sometimes they spent more and only 24% said that they never did.
