‘Silver or lead’ is biggest bar to fighting Mexico’s drug cartels

Virtually no area of Mexican society goes untouched by the tentacles of El Narco as the traffickers are called.

This week the all-pervasive presence of Mexico’s drug mafias was brought home yet again, when the entire police force in Acapulco was disarmed and put under investigation after authorities suspected the cartel controled them. 

Mexican marines alongside state and federal police took part in the operation, which also led to the arrest of two local police commanders on charges of homicide.

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Acapulco a once popular resort town is just the latest to fall victim to violent turf wars between rival drug gangs, with the murder rate in the city standing at 103 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the highest rates in the world. 

Just as the Mexican government has been fighting a war with the drug traffickers since 2006, so the cartels have fought each other for control of the criminal territory and vast profits that come from it.

While dozens of cartel kingpins have been captured or killed, the number of gangs operating in Mexico has multiplied as new criminal leaders step into the breach.

Almost every fact, statistic and story related to the cartel operations beggars belief.  

It’s estimated that the traffickers take in between $19 billion and $29 billion annually from drug sales in the US alone. 

Violence, often incredibly gruesome, is an intrinsic feature of the trade and used by the cartels to settle disputes, maintain employee discipline and a semblance of order with suppliers, creditors, and buyers. 

In the 12 years since Mexico launched its militarised war on drugs, more than 200,000 people have died and another 35,000 have gone missing. 

At the same time as the authorities were moving against the entire police force in Acapulco this week, another discovery in Mexico’s second city, Guadalajara, also provided a searing insight into the violence underpinning the cartel’s trade.

It came in the shape of a giant 18-wheeler refrigerated lorry discovered in the run down neighbourhood of Paseos del Valle on the outskirts of Guadalajara. 

Inside were a total of 273 corpses that had been dumped there by the authorities after the escalating level of mostly drug related violence left the local morgue without any space for new arrivals.

Many of the bodies were wrapped in rubbish bags and tied with duct tape and the vehicle had been moved around the suburbs of Guadalajara for almost a fortnight before being found and opened.

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The trailer “is just the tip of the iceberg”, warned one representative of a collective of relatives of missing people, adding to the grisly stories of killing that are shocking both quantitatively and qualitatively. 

On the front line of this war brutality knows no bounds, with the nine major cartel perpetrators having created a violent insurgency the impact and influence of which the likes of al-Qaeda or the Taliban could never hope to match. 

The vast profits too at their disposal are the kind of financial resource many terrorist organisations can only dream of. 

The billions of dollars ensures an army of hitmen, assassins and neighbourhood foot soldiers equipped with state-of-the-art technology such as assault rifles, rocket launchers, satellite communications and even parts for building improvised submarines to ferry drugs along coastlines. 

Sophisticated as these networks are, however, at their most basic street level they are crude and barbaric in enforcing their will through torture and killing. 

Over many years’, stories about “El Guiso”– the stew – abound. Depending on the height and weight of the victim, it can take a long time for a body to melt in the flaming diesel of a 55-gallon drum. 

Then there are the documented accounts of severed human heads being rolled on to a crowded nightclub dancefloor, or the victim whose face was sliced off and stitched to a football before it was dumped with an attached warning note to rival gang members: “Happy New Year, because this will be your last.”

Many brutal acts carried out by gang members are often accompanied by narcomensajes (narcomessages), usually banners left by the perpetrators at the crime scene. 

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Narcomensajes may contain warnings to rivals and enemies, lay claim to territorial control or make threats to the media. They are always aimed at intimidation or compelling the authorities to change policies.

Such is the prevalence of cartel-inspired violence in almost every sphere of Mexican society that it has also given rise to a narcocultura. 

This is a value system glorifying brutal violence and adding a spiritual meaning to actions such as ritualised killings, beheadings and torture. As drug related violence rises again in Mexico, President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has vowed to shake up the country’s war on the cartels. 

Aides say he aims to rewrite the rules, suggesting negotiated peace and amnesties rather than a hardline strategy some critics blame for perpetuating violence. 

This though would also mean the Mexican government making a concerted effort to take on the financial industry and corrupt politicians. All easier said than done.

According to Adam Isacson, an expert on security and peace building at the Washington Office on Latin America, it would also mean following the cartels’ money, investigating how it’s laundered and who helps them launder it. 

“It’s never been tried but it would be absolutely effective, if it was carried out with enough resources to really do it right, and by people brave enough to do it right,” insists Mr Isacson.