Collateral Damage

The Cartels’ Effect on Mexico’s Daily Life

Something seems to get lost in the mix of murders, shootings, narcotics, and corruption.

The people of Mexico, who have nothing to do with the drug trade, must endure what the war is doing to their communities and their country. To put this problem into perspective, compare Mexico’s death rate to the war in Afghanistan. The war there has been dragging on for a decade. The total number of US personnel lost is 2,200, and the best estimate of total lives of Afghan forces and civilians lost is at around 25,000. In Mexico over 60,000 people have lost their lives to the cartel, and that has happened in half the time.

—A town meeting at a local church, members of the community discuss the on going violence.

In Culiacán Mexico lives Alma Herra. She had lived with her two sons César, twenty-eight, and Cristóbal, sixteen. César was a stocky, friendly young man with meaty hands and thick black hair. Cristóbal was a slim, gregarious teenager.

One night, the brakes busted on the family SUV. César was good with cars, but couldn’t fix a brake system. He promised to take it to the mechanic the next day. First thing in the morning, he and Cristóbal carefully drove the SUV down to the car shop. It was a blazing-hot Wednesday; a perfectly ordinary morning. There was a queue at the mechanics, and César and Cristóbal waited. They talked and joked with other customers. In total, ten people were in the yard.

Suddenly, at eleven A.M., a commando troop of gunmen stormed the car shop. At the moment they entered, César was under his SUV looking at the brakes. His brother Cristóbal, the other customers, and the mechanics were all exposed. Bang. Bang. Bang. The assassins sprayed everyone in sight, unleashing hundreds of bullets around the workshop. In seconds nine people, including Cristóbal, were shot dead.

“Bang. Bang. Bang.”

“The assassins sprayed everyone in sight.”

César was under the SUV so the assassins didn’t see him. This saved his life, but two bullets hit him in his leg. He couldn’t even feel the wounds. All he could think was, “If these assassins see me, I’m dead.” He felt his cell phone in his pocket. If it rang, the gunmen would hear it and he would be dead. If he tried to turn it off, it might make a bleep, and he would be dead. One of the assassins dropped a circular ammunition clip right next to the SUV. “If he ducks down to pick it up,” Cesar thought, “I will be dead.”

Minutes seemed like hours. The gunmen paced around the car shop, checking that there were no survivors who could identify them. By a miracle, they didn’t see César and they marched out. César waited for more eternal minutes to pass. Then he crawled out from under the SUV and stared at the corpses around him. There were nine bodies, two more than in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago. This was just one forgotten incident in the Mexican Drug War. One of the corpses was Cristóbal. César could do nothing for his younger brother, the sibling that he saw grow from a baby to a sixteen-year-old.

Over the last three years, two hundred and thirty thousand residents of Juárez–roughly eighteen percent of its population–has left the city to escape the violence. The primary destination of about half of these refugees is El Paso, Texas. Others have moved to the neighboring Mexican states of Durango, Coalhuila, and Veracruz. A poll of residents has shown the primary reason for the mass exodus of Ciudad Juárez was the Cartel related violence.

Those who have stayed in Juárez have had to make profound changes to their daily lives. Over seventy percent of the total city population is no longer venturing out at night. Most of them have stopped carrying cash with them. The city’s government has all but given up trying to quell the violence. In 2010, the city did not put on the Grito de Independenica. This is a night festival where thousands flock to city hall to celebrate Mexican Independence. It was canceled for the first time in a century due to a huge spike in Cartel related deaths.

The youth of Juárez are growing up in a hostile environment. One that gives them minimal choices, and one that has very little respect for their lives. Today, only about 55 percent of the youths of Juarez are enrolled in any kind of education program, or have any formal employment. This leaves a hundred thousand poor uneducated teens unemployed and at the disposal of the Cartels. These youths form gangs that operate under cartel control. They fight over turf and drug routes. They murder each other and massacre any unlucky civilians that get caught in their path. The killing has gotten so out of hand, and willing assassins are so plentiful, that today the market price for a Cartel hit in Juárez is just 85 dollars. The price of a human life in Mexico is less then a pair of shoes. This is not unique to just Cicudad Juárez. There are millions of these youths around Mexico. With decent paying jobs hard to obtain, more and more are drifting toward the Cartels for work.

The cartels don’t just affect the poor of Mexico. The wealthy fall prey to the cartel violence as well. Monterrey is Mexico’s second wealthiest city. It has the highest per capita income in the country and is one of the most important business centers in Mexico. It has often been called “The most Americanized City of Mexico”. Monterrey is hundreds of miles from the border, but it still falls into the sights of the cartels. Monterrey acts as a distribution hub for the cartels. Highways from the south bring drugs up into the city, and from there they can go any number of ways north to the US border. This makes Monterrey an extremely important territory for the Cartels to control. Both the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas are fighting for control of the city. This explosion of violence in the city has left the residents of Monterrey caught in a bloody war.

—Medical workers stand next to the bodies of 10 men and one woman.

—A mother tries to shield her daughter from a gruesome scene.

Cartels don’t just make money through drugs. One of their secondary sources of income is kidnapping and extortion. The wealthy of Monterey are prime targets for this. This, coupled with the random violence, has made Mexico the largest importer of custom made armored cars and bulletproof casual wear.

The Cartels interest in Monterrey isn’t all business. The heads of the cartels are billionaires, and If you are a billionaire in Mexico Monterrey is one of the best places to live. As a result, a fair amount of cartel leaders live in and around Monterrey. And when the boss is moves in, he brings his protection. This raises the stakes of controlling this area and has set tensions high.

Murder statistics of 2010

Washington D.C.

(pop 0.6 mil)

Los Angeles

(pop 3.7 mil)

Philadelphia

(pop 1.5 mil)

Chicago

(pop 2.7 mil)

New York

(pop 8.6 mil)

Juárez

(pop 1.4 mil)

131 Murders

297 Murders

304 Murders

435 Murders

532 Murders

2,700 Murders

The sight of blood stained streets or decapitated bodies in public are a constant reminder of the Cartels and the methods of violence they employ. These bodies act as bloody propaganda for the Cartels, reaffirming their dominance. They show how powerless the government is in the face of the Cartels. The Cartels will also post banners around the cities. These banners either blame other cartels or governments for recent violence, or claim just how powerless the government is to stop them. This kind of intimidation has been working. Many people will not talk to the police about illegal activity that they have witnessed or heard about, because they are scared for their lives. Often, they are just as scared of the authorities as they are of the Cartels.

The police in Mexico are nothing like the police forces in the United States. Each police force is local and operates more or less autonomously from other forces. There is very little to no oversight from the state and federal governments over local police. This system of Police Force is left over from the old PRI’s power structure. This is a power structure that is fed on corruption. Now, with these lines of corruption open, it is extra-ordinarily easy for the Cartels to step in and start bribing the police. On average a Mexican police officer makes around three hundred dollars a month. The Cartels can easily match that, if not double it. The corruption does not just include the police officers. The higher ups are also easily bought off. Police chiefs, prosecutors, judges and politicians are all susceptible to Cartel bribe money. There is a common saying in Mexico that roughly translates to “If you have the angels why do you need god? And if you have god why do you need the angels.” Its alluding to bribing off the higher ups as a “god” figure, and the day to day law enforcement as the “angels”.

“If you have the angels why do you need God?”

“And if you have God why do you need the angels?”

The Mexican media has come into the cross hairs of the Cartels. Over seventy reporters have fallen victim to the cartel hit men. These deaths are not accidental. Like most of the civilian deaths of the drug war, they were targets. Cartels don’t like it when reporters and the media talk abut their actions. The Cartels want to control what gets said about them in the media. Reporters tend to come into direct conflict with this, so the Cartels use the same methods of death and intimidation on the media as they do with the Mexican people. Any reporters that speak out against the cartels are putting themselves in harms way.

In 2006 Felipe Caldrón was elected president of Mexico. He ran on the platform that he was going to fight the cartels and corruption. He would put an end to the bloodshed that was plaguing the people of Mexico. He had a plan. His plan didn’t work.

—Photojournalists place their cameras on the floor during a demonstration condemning the alleged murder of fellow journalist Regina Martinez in Mexico City.

—The casket of a young woman about to be buried in a cemetery outside mexico city.

He planed to crush the cartels with the Mexican Army and its newly formed federal police force. The Cartels outmatched him in violence. Before Felipe Caldrón called in the troops, Mexico was facing around 2,000 Cartel murders a year. In 2008 it more than doubled to 5,000 murders. Then in 2010 it doubled again to over 11,000 and has only been growing worse each year.

This deployment of troops has caused even more collateral damage. The Mexican army is not well equipped with fighting criminals that use guerrilla tactics. The Mexican army is better equipped with disaster relief. This has lead to many civilian deaths at the hands of the military. There have also been instances of the army raiding houses in the country under the guise of hunting Cartel members, but in reality they are just looting.

With few options, the Mexican people have been weathering this storm for the past seven years. The government’s attempts at fighting the Cartels just caused more death and little hope for the Mexican people.

—Continue reading “The Land of the Cartels Part.1”