Pubdate: Sun, 23 Jan 2005
Source: San Antonio Express-News (TX)
Copyright: 2005 San Antonio Express-News
Contact:  http://www.mysanantonio.com/expressnews/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/384
Author: Robert Rivard
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

UNTOUCHABLE DRUG LORDS THREATEN MEXICO'S EMBRACE OF DEMOCRACY

Despairing business owners along the border are wringing their hands, 
watching over shops and stores with few customers. Waiters in the best 
restaurants stand idle amid empty tables.

The week before Christmas, I found myself seated with a friend in Nuevo 
Laredo's plaza, both of us wondering the same thing: Where were all the 
Christmas shoppers and the camouflaged hunters who come south to eat and drink?

Over the course of the day, we didn't see any. The streets, the market and 
the restaurants were ours alone.

Tourist traffic from Laredo has dwindled to a trickle, while long, snaking 
lines of vehicles wait to cross from Mexico into the United States. The 
wait can take hours as Mexicans endure post-Sept. 11 scrutiny that they 
find hard to understand.

The border crossings into Matamoros, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo are only 
hours away from San Antonio, and an easy day's drive from Dallas and 
Houston, but few people are heading south these days. It's easy to see why

A rising wave of violence among competing drug traffickers has spilled out 
of Mexico's prisons and into the streets as the bosses and their henchmen, 
many drawn from the ranks of Mexican law enforcement, vie for market control.

Hardly a day goes by without an official or ex-official turning up dead in 
a car, alongside a road, their hands often tied behind their backs, their 
bodies often exhibiting signs of torture.

I walked from the quiet plaza back across the bridge to my hotel in Laredo, 
and awoke the next morning to this lead headline in the Express-News: 
"Americans are disappearing in Nuevo Laredo; 21 are known to have vanished; 
U.S. Consulate issues a warning."

Of course, many more Mexicans have fallen victim, most of them involved in 
the drug trade, but others caught in the crossfire.

That's why a good table is so easy to get al otro lado, on the other side, 
right now.

Last week's headlines focused on six jailers executed in Matamoros. The 
week before, the headlines focused on the execution-style murder of a 
Mexico City inmate whose brother, El Chapo Guzman, is one of the country's 
major drug lords and, himself a prison escapee, also the most wanted man in 
Mexico.

Guzman bribed his Guadalajara jailers and escaped in a truckload of dirty 
laundry. He is still on the loose, while his former jailers remain behind bars.

The director of the Mexico City prison and his key deputies, also on the 
take, were implicated in the latest killing.

The administration of President Vicente Fox sent in loyal army troops 
backed by tanks and helicopters to wrest control of the prison from corrupt 
guards and the inmates. Dispersing some of the warring drug kingpins from 
Mexico City to the Matamoros facility was part of the government's strategy.

The slain jailers are reminders that the traffickers act with seeming 
impunity, despite get-tough pronouncements from the administration.

The illicit heroin and cocaine trade, driven by demand on our side of the 
border, generates extraordinary amounts of cash, measured in the billions. 
The corruption that kind of money fuels makes it all but impossible to tell 
the good guys from the bad guys.

Law enforcement personnel, who are in their jobs to protect citizens, are 
actually protecting the dealers and their loads.

Privately, top Mexican and U.S. officials know exactly how bad it is. 
Officials in the Bush administration assume that at virtually every level 
of state and local government in Mexico, there are people in the pay of 
drug lords.

Publicly, little is said, except for the occasional citizen advisory and 
the merchants and chamber of commerce types who are left to complain about 
intensifying newspaper coverage.

Jesse Bogan, this newspaper's correspondent based in Laredo, just returned 
from Matamoros, several hours down the Rio Grande, where the six guards 
were executed in cold blood.

Bogan, along with his counterpart in Mexico City, Dane Schiller, filed a 
story last week that quoted a statement issued by the ministry of safety: 
"No criminal is more powerful than the state — the federal government 
has the resources to stop them."

"War was declared a long time ago," Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la 
Concha said.

Mexico watchers and all who live near the border are watching with a 
skeptical eye to see whether the Mexican government is resolute enough to 
shut down the narcotraficantes.

The outcome could prove to be a far more telling indicator of Mexico's 
future as a democracy than anything said or done in the coming presidential 
campaign and election to choose Fox's successor.
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MAP posted-by: Beth