Pubdate: Sun, 17 Jan 2016
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2016 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Ioan Grillo
Note: Ioan Grillo is the author of the forthcoming book "Gangster 
Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields and the New Politics of Latin America."

MEXICO'S NEW BLOOD POLITICS

Mexico City - ON the morning of Jan. 2, a team of hired killers set 
off for the home of 33-year-old Gisela Mota, who only hours before 
had been sworn in as the first female mayor of Temixco, a sleepy spa 
town an hour from Mexico City. Ms. Mota was still in her pajamas as 
the men approached her parents' breezeblock house.

She was in the bedroom, but most of her family was in the front room, 
cooing over a newborn baby. As the family prepared a milk bottle, the 
assassins smashed the door open. Amid the commotion, Ms. Mota came 
out of her bedroom and said firmly, "I am Gisela." In front of her 
terrified family, the men beat Ms. Mota and shot her several times, 
killing her.

Such violence has plagued areas of Mexico during the decade-long 
blood bath we know as the Mexican drug war. But Ms. Mota's killing 
illuminates some worrying features of how this conflict is changing. 
While the global media is fascinated by billionaire kingpins like 
Joaquin Guzman Loera, known as El Chapo, who was recaptured on Jan. 8 
after his second prison escape (and a secret interview with the actor 
Sean Penn), the war is evolving far beyond the drug trade.

Cartels now fight for political power itself.

After arresting two of the men suspected of killing Ms. Mota, the 
police said the murder was part of a regional campaign by Los Rojos 
to control town halls and rob the towns' resources.

Five days after the killing, Ms. Mota's mother, Juana Ocampo, joined 
a march through Temixco along with hundreds of residents dressed in 
white. Ms. Ocampo, a veteran community activist, knew her daughter 
had taken a dangerous job; hired killers, known as sicarios, have 
killed almost 100 mayors in Mexico in the last decade.

But Ms. Mota had been undeterred.

"Since Gisela was a child, she wanted to get into politics, to change 
things," Ms. Ocampo told me. Ms. Mota had called for an end to 
corruption in Temixco and for police reform, which may have made her a target.

Still, Ms. Ocampo said, "I had never imagined that something like 
this could happen." Ms. Ocampo, her face strong, held back her pain 
and tears. "I hope there is justice.

Or we will have to take actions to demand that justice is done and 
the case is cleared up." Marchers held banners proclaiming, "I am Gisela."

Ms. Mota's murder is the latest turn in the evolution of the Mexican 
drug business, a process that American and Mexican officials seem 
unable to grasp.

For a decade, Mexican troops have worked with American agents to 
pursue kingpins, in what is known as the cartel decapitation strategy.

Flamboyant gangsters with nicknames like "Tony Tormenta," "the 
Engineer" and "the Viceroy" have been shot down or arrested. El 
Chapo, or Shorty, has been detained twice in less than two years.

Yet while these kingpins rot in prisons and graves, their assassins 
have formed their own organizations, which can be even more violent 
and predatory.

Morelos State, which is home to Temixco, is a bloody example.

Dotted with green valleys and hot springs, it had long been used by a 
drug lord called Arturo Beltran Leyva, alias "the Beard," to fly in 
cocaine from Colombia before taking it north.

Mr. Beltran Leyva was an ally-turned-enemy of El Chapo who rivaled 
him in his capacity to move product.

But during the early 2000s, while Mr. Beltran Leyva built his empire 
in Morelos, murder rates were relatively low.

In 2009, American agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration got 
intelligence on Mr. Beltran Leyva's whereabouts. The D.E.A. gave the 
address to Mexican marines - an elite American-trained force - who 
stormed in, killing Mr. Beltran Leyva and four of his accomplices. A 
senior D.E.A. official told me they paid their informant a $5 million 
reward for the information that led to the takedown - taxpayer money 
spent to try and win the drug war.

Without their leader, sicarios who had worked for the Beard formed 
their own splinter cartels, including Los Rojos and Guerreros Unidos, 
or Warriors United, and went on a killing rampage.

The two cartels now fight over turf in Morelos and neighboring 
Guerrero State, leaving piles of bodies.

Last year, Guerrero had the highest number of murders per capita in 
Mexico; Morelos was fourth.

These new cartels continue to traffic drugs, some switching from 
Colombian cocaine to Mexican heroin to feed an epidemic sweeping 
parts of America. But they have also used their armies of assassins 
to move into new endeavors: rackets, extortion, oil theft, even 
wildcat iron mining.

And they are now muscling in on one of Mexico's most lucrative 
businesses of all: local politics.

Ms. Mota isn't the first politician to fall afoul of the cartels' new 
business interests.

In a Jan. 11 news conference, the governor of Morelos, Graco Ramirez, 
revealed that Los Rojos had threatened 13 more Morelos mayors in 
recent months, and are using the murder of Ms. Mota as a somber warning.

It was a "deliberate and premeditated action that aims to sow an 
environment of terror, both among authorities and citizens," he said.

The cartel makes telling demands of the mayors, Mr. Ramirez said - 
for example, contracts for valuable building projects or the right to 
name the town police chiefs.

And they are forcing mayors to give them 10 percent of their annual budgets.

As Mexico's government provides much of the financing, this means the 
cartels are feeding from the federal pot - and in turn from the 
United States, which provides the Mexican government with about $300 
million a year in drug-war aid.

Corruption in Mexico is as old as the country itself, and traffickers 
have been bribing politicians during the century that they have been 
smuggling drugs to Americans. Mayors, governors and federal officials 
have turned a blind eye to opium fields and meth superlabs.

In 1997, the federal government's drug czar himself was arrested on 
suspicion of taking bribes.

But now gangsters are flipping this century-old deal. Instead of 
handing out bribes, they are making the mayors pay them. Politics is 
not just a way to help their criminal businesses; it is a business in 
itself. And as they take control of these politicians, the cartels 
transform themselves into an ominous shadow power, using the tools of 
the state to affect anyone who lives or works in its jurisdiction.

With more than 2,000 mayors in Mexico, most of whom have little 
protection, the cartels have a big market to tap. The combined booty 
is potentially worth billions of dollars a year. And, indeed, the 
tactic of shaking down mayors appears to be expanding beyond Morelos. 
In 2014, it was revealed that the bizarrely named Knights Templar 
cartel, based in Michoacan State, was also forcing mayors to hand 
over a percentage of their budgets.

Videos and photos even emerged of the Templar's leader, Servando 
Gomez, also known as "La Tuta," sitting down and talking with various mayors.

Sometimes cartels cut out the middleman and put one of their own 
directly in the town hall. This was allegedly the case in the 
Guerrero city of Iguala, whose mayor, Jose Luis Abarca, is now in 
prison on organized crime charges, accused of being a member of 
Guerreros Unidos. Dozens of his police officers are also in jail, 
accused of being sicarios in uniform.

In September 2014, the Iguala police and sicarios reputed to work for 
the Guerreros killed or disappeared more than 40 students in one of 
the most heinous crimes in modern Mexico. After federal police 
officers arrested the mayor, residents searched for family members 
who had disappeared under his rule. Some 130 bodies have been dug up 
in Iguala since.

These atrocities provoked thousands to march on Mexico's streets.

Some protesters set fire to the Iguala town hall.

International companies continue to operate in such cartel-dominated 
areas, especially in mining and increasingly in gas and oil. They 
have to work with mayors to coordinate operations and regulatory 
compliance; as a result, an American executive for one mining company 
in Guerrero told me, businesses have no choice but to deal with 
suspect officials (though they try to identify and avoid working with 
the worst of them).

Company bosses prefer not to talk publicly about the level of cartel 
control, as it offends their political partners in Mexico. But last 
year Rob McEwen, the chairman and chief executive of the Canadian 
company McEwen Mining, broke the silence after gangsters stole more 
than $8 million worth of his gold from a mine in northwest Mexico.

"The cartels are active down there.

Generally, we have a good relationship with them," McEwen told the 
Business News Network. "If you want to go explore somewhere, you ask 
them, and they tell you, 'no,' but then they say 'come back in a 
couple of weeks, we've finished what we are doing.' " After protests 
from Mexican politicians, Mr. McEwen retracted his statement, saying 
he was referring to a good relationship with local "property owners 
and community members" rather than gangsters.

As cartels have entrenched themselves in Mexico's local politics, 
finding a solution to the drug war mess has gotten even tougher.

Drug policy reform, meaning wider legalization of some drugs, like 
marijuana, and better addiction treatment to reduce the use of 
others, like heroin, can help bleed the gangster financing.

But with cartels now diversified into a portfolio of crimes and 
taking over the political establishment, it won't stop them.

The most obvious response is to build an effective justice system to 
crack down on sicarios.

Police reform, including incorporating Mexico's city-level officers 
into unified state forces, a step that Ms. Mota had supported, could 
help confront cartels.

City police alone are too weak against the firepower of the gangster 
militias. Such a reform would also take some heat off mayors - if 
they didn't command their own police forces, they would be of less 
use to the crime bosses.

Yet, Mexico also needs to fight the narco corruption that infests its 
police and politics at state and federal levels.

Tragically, many of the biggest parties have had members with alleged 
links to cartels, including the ruling Institutional Revolutionary 
Party, or PRI, and the opposition. The fight against this rot needs 
to be a national struggle, and could last a generation. Party leaders 
have to support investigations into their own people.

Groups such as Transparencia Mexicana can help by lobbying for 
politicians to reveal their assets. And the United States should use 
its drug-war aid to push harder for such reforms.

Mexico also needs local politicians who can stand up to both the 
silver of bribery and lead of bullets.

Unfortunately, the sheer brutality of murders like Ms. Mota's is a 
chilling example for those brave young people who might venture to follow her.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom