The admiralty announced on 6 October that marines had found a total of 32 bodies in three different locations in the city of Veracruz. Five days later the state authorities found another four bodies. The officials said that 96 bodies have been found in the state since the federally backed Veracruz Seguro operation was launched on 4 October. The alarming aspect of the discoveries is that local police may have been behind at least some of the killings. The federal government launched Veracruz Seguro after a self-proclaimed death squad, Matazetas, dumped 35 bodies on a main road in the city on 20 September.
On 6 October, the marines seem to have rolled up a network of safe houses used by the death squad. The death squad appears to have close links to the state police and so the unravelling may have major political implications. Veracruz, the country’s third biggest electoral district, is controlled by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which is on course to recapture the presidency (lost in 2000) in next year’s general elections.
One of the houses, containing 20 of the bodies found on 6 October, appears to be owned by a state police officer. It appears that this policeman also directed the marines to two other buildings: in one they found 11 bodies and in the other, a single corpse.
On 7 October the state attorney general, Reynaldo Escobar Pérez resigned. The governor, Javier Duarte, accepted the resignation. Both men took office together nine months ago. Duarte promoted the deputy attorney general, Marco Antonio Lezama Moo to take over.
Going south
The federal government launched another joint security operation (in which state police are supplemented by navy and army personnel) in the southern state of Guerrero, on 6 October. This state has long been more violent than Veracruz (in the first nine months of 2011 1,303 people have been killed by gangsters in Guerrero, compared with 212 in Veracruz) but the scale of the increase in Veracruz has been much greater this year: in 2010, 59 people were killed by gangsters in the state, according to Reforma’s Ejecutómetro, while in Guerrero 984 people were killed by gangsters in 2010.
Complicating the picture in Guerrero is a struggle between two rival teachers’ unions which has delayed the start of the school year. Dissident teachers from the Coordinadora Estatal de Trabajadores de la Educación en Guerrero (Ceteg) claim that they have been asked to pay protection money: they have refused and so 450 Ceteg schools (of the 1,200 schools in Acapulco) have remained closed, despite the deployment of troops and police outside schools.
The Ceteg teachers claim that the national teachers’ union, the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), which is headed by Elba Esther Gordillo, a hugely influential figure in Mexican politics, is involved in the protection racket.
Even without the trade union rivalry, the security situation in Guerrero is dire. The state government claims that killing in Acapulco, the state’s main resort, has almost quadrupled this year and that the city is now the second most violent in the country (after Ciudad Juárez, on the US border).
Michoacán
Politicians campaigning in Michoacán, which holds gubernatorial, congressional and municipal elections on 13 November, are starting to complain of gangster intimidation. This election is important for two reasons. The first is that all three parties have a chance of winning, unlike most states where elections are invariably two-horse races. The second is that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s sister, María Luisa, is running as the Partido Acción Nacional’s candidate for governor.
- Religious shrine
On 12 October President Felipe Calderón; Marcelo Ebrard, the mayor of Mexico City; Carlos Slim Helú, Mexico’s (and perhaps the world’s) richest man; and Cardinal Norberto Rivera met to start a M$600m (US$42m) project at the country’s main religious shrine Guadalupe in Mexico City. Politically the meeting was important because the cardinal publicly thanked the city government for providing the land for the Plaza Mariana project which will be paid for by Slim. Previously the cardinal and Ebrard have had testy relations, particularly over Mexico City’s liberalisation of abortion.
