The Fight to Save Juárez (7 page)

It was evident that the police killings had not been arbitrary or random: someone had tracked these officers and taken them down one by one. The executions also appeared to be the work of professionals (they'd succeeded despite the fact that all of the assassinated police were experienced and
armed).
In fact, the executions were the beginning wave of a systematic, strategic plan to take over the Juárez cartel's territory by striking at the heart of its operational structure: La Línea, the cartel's enforcement wing, which was composed primarily of the Juárez municipal police and the state ministerial police. For Mayor José Reyes Ferriz, the waiting was over; the assault on Juárez by the Sinaloa cartel had begun in earnest.

C
HAPTER 4

The Strategist

From the remove of Mexico City the developments in Juárez were being viewed with increasing alarm, drawing the attention of president Felipe Calderón's security cabinet, which met weekly at Los Pinos, the Mexican equivalent of the American White House. Guillermo Valdés Castellanos was one of the strategists charged with developing a policy for addressing what was taking place not only in Juárez (the violence was just beginning there) but also in the rest of the country. He was the director of Mexico's national security agency, the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (or CISEN, its Spanish acronym). “There were three drug wars going on when this administration took office,” Valdés observed the first time I interviewed him. He was referring to the violent battles and executions taking place between La Familia and Los Zetas in Morelia; between the Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels in Tijuana; and between Los Zetas/the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa cartel in Nuevo Laredo. These battlegrounds had produced dramatic confrontations that were terrorizing communities and leaving many casualties all over Mexico, and not just in the most contested areas, because the cartels had extensive networks and operations in multiple states. Tijuana alone had claimed in excess of six hundred lives in 2007.

Valdés's office was deep inside a heavily fortified compound on the southern end of Mexico City—the exterior walls were twenty feet high, and there were checkpoints within the compound with heavily armed sentries guarding access to the building housing Valdés's office. My car was met at the gate and escorted to the compound by a CISEN vehicle. A tall man with a pale complexion, Valdés was in his shirtsleeves and not wearing a tie. He has a penchant for chain-smoking Delicados (filterless Mexican cigarettes that are more commonly smoked by factory workers and cab drivers than top government officials) down to a nub. In fact, Valdés seemed to eschew the bureaucrat's penchant for formalism. There was something disarming about his lack of pretension, given that he was one of the most influential men in President Felipe Calderón's administration.

Valdés mapped out the government's three-point strategy against the drug cartels: “Mexico has to recover lost territory,” he told me. That
required
denying the narcos their current ability to operate at will. It was a telling point, for it acknowledged that significant cities and, in some instances, entire regions of Mexico, were effectively under the control of the
narcotraficantes
. The second part of the strategy against the cartels was to “break up their patterns and organizational structures.” Finally, Valdés underscored the need to strengthen the country's institutions, especially law enforcement and the judiciary. Valdés concluded our first interview with a declaration that echoed what president Calderón was saying in his speeches to the Mexican public: “We're going to the root of the problem and there is no turning back.”

The facts on the ground in Mexico made for enormous challenges in implementing the strategy that Valdés outlined that day at the CISEN headquarters. There were three basic tiers to Mexican law enforcement, though some of these had specialized units within them: the municipal police, the state ministerial police, and the federal police. Of these, the federal forces were considered the most reliable by far. For almost a decade, the Mexican government had been attempting to clean up the notoriously corrupt and infamous federal judicial police. Genaro García Luna had spearheaded those efforts during Vicente Fox's previous administration, which had created the Agencia Federal de Investigación, touted as the Mexican counterpart to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation. Cleaning up an institution that for decades had operated in collusion with organized crime when not operating as a criminal organization in its own right was a difficult and challenging task, and there had been several high-profile cases in which AFI agents were found to be working for the cartels. Nevertheless, García Luna moved forward with the implementation of a more professionalized federal law enforcement agency. Increasingly, AFI agents were required to have college degrees, they received better pay, and their careers in law enforcement were not dependent on the whims of new commanders who were changed out every six years with the election of a new president. All this created a more professional atmosphere within federal law enforcement, notwithstanding the intermittent successful efforts by the cartels to enlist the collusion of AFI personnel.

Felipe Calderón decided to focus on cleaning up the federal judicial police. They were consolidated under the Secretariat for Public Security and eventually renamed the federal police, with García Luna at the head, while the AFI remained the law enforcement wing within the federal attorney general's office. A major obstacle to the success of the federal police was the simple fact that there were so few of them: a mere sixty-five hundred officers throughout the country (perhaps ten thousand officers, if one included the agents temporarily assigned to the federal police from the army, CISEN, and other law enforcement agencies). García Luna set out to radically expand
the
force. By law, the federal police are only permitted to work criminal activity that falls within the federal purview, which includes things like organized crime, weapons, and explosives. Ordinary crime such as burglary, car theft, and murder (that is to say, the day-to-day work of local police forces), is outside the purview of the federal police except in cases where organized crime groups are committing these crimes. The federal government could send the federal police to do battle against the cartels, but one obvious problem was that their numbers were small, just 1 or 2 percent of the nation's law enforcement personnel. In addition, it was not always easy to differentiate organized crime from ordinary local criminal activity. If a man was executed in the streets of Juárez, for example, who was to say that it was the work of a cartel (thus bringing it under federal jurisdiction), as opposed to the work of a gang member assassinating a rival gang member in a territorial dispute or even simply a crime of passion (crimes falling under local police jurisdiction)? There were legal structures governing the activities of each of the three tiers of police work in Mexico, but, on a pragmatic level, these legal structures represented significant obstacles to effective law enforcement work given the character of what was taking place in the streets of Juárez, Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, and many other Mexican cities where the cartels were creating significant challenges.

The restrictions on the state ministerial police and local municipal police forces posed similar but actually more grave problems. By law, municipal police, the police in Mexico's cities and towns, were not permitted to investigate crimes. That was considered outside of their area of operation. For this reason, municipal police forces were called “preventive” police, because their primary charge was just that: to prevent crime by patrolling the streets, to arrest people caught in flagrante delicto, and to respond when citizens called to report crimes. The state ministerial police forces were the law enforcement units charged with gathering evidence and collaborating with the district attorneys who oversaw the investigation of criminal cases. In other words, there were legal and structural impediments in place that ensured that police work in Mexico was arbitrary and profoundly inefficient, setting aside the matter of corruption. It was also the case that ministerial and, especially, municipal police were the lowest paid, the least trained, and the most susceptible to influence and corruption. Though the Juárez municipal police distinguished themselves when it came to corruption, corruption was a disease that had spread deeply into every facet of the country's municipal police forces. Even before the rise of the cartels, many of these police agencies had already been operating as criminal organizations.

One problem that the Mexican federal government faced, then, was that it simply lacked the law enforcement resources, in terms of both reliability and raw numbers, to take the now-declared war to the many states and
regions
where the drug cartels were operating. These were significant areas of the country where cartels functioned with impunity and where, typically, they were using municipal and state police forces as proxies and as a private reserve of foot soldiers to carry out myriad activities, from protection to transport to detaining and/or executing adversaries. From a strategic standpoint, in other words, the municipal and ministerial police forces in these areas were not only unreliable; they were, in essence, cartel troops. It was common knowledge that in the states where the drug cartels had the greatest presence, like Sonora, Sinaloa, Michoacán, Chihuahua, Durango, and Tamaulipas, among others, the cartels owned state and local law enforcement; in fact, over the years these police forces had become woven into the cartels' very organizational structures. From the standpoint of the stability and viability of the Mexican state, this arrangement had reached a critical point and there was no force in these areas to serve as a counterweight to the power and influence of the cartels. It was this circumstance that dictated another key strategic decision by Calderón's government: the use of the Mexican Army. The army was the only recourse available to the Mexican government, given that the federal police had insufficient numbers to assume what would have otherwise been its natural role. The army had the numbers (approximately 240,000 troops), and it was far less compromised (though not altogether untainted) by the corrosive influence of the drug cartels.

By 2007, the Mexican cartels had attained unprecedented power. They had emerged as the most important players in Latin American drug trafficking, and, as a function of the massive infusions of American drug profits that were pouring into their coffers, they had unprecedented resources at their disposal. Yet, at that very juncture, the Mexican government lacked the law enforcement resources to carry the fight to the cartels. As the federal government launched a massive effort to recruit and train an expanding federal police force, the army was thrown in as a stopgap, interim measure. Calderón and his security cabinet hoped that this would buy them time, giving them a chance to develop the federal police and begin cleaning up the ministerial and municipal police forces. The latter, as the Juárez experience was about to make clear, would prove to be a daunting challenge.

It has been suggested, both within Mexico and outside of Mexico, that a significant factor influencing Calderón's decision to declare war against the cartels was his narrow victory in the 2006 Mexican presidential election. Such a thesis fails to acknowledge the real problems facing Mexico in relation to the drug trade and the emergent power of the cartels and their control over significant portions of Mexico. The fact is that whomever succeeded president Vicente Fox in 2006 was going to have to address the newfound power of the cartels. They had been a force in Mexico for decades,
but
their strength and influence had entered a new era without parallel. This was, in part, Guillermo Valdés's message.

In the spring of 2008 the American private intelligence firm Stratfor Global Intelligence, issued a white paper titled “Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?” Stratfor noted that federal police, from low-ranking agents to senior officials, were being assassinated in attacks both in Mexico City and in the countryside, “posing a strategic problem for the Mexican government.” The intelligence group further observed that multiple well-armed organized groups had emerged in various parts of the country and that these groups were fighting among themselves as well as fighting the government. The Stratfor report estimated that the drug cartels were collecting approximately $40 billion a year (though they acknowledged that it was impossible to know with certainty how much money was coming into cartel coffers), enough money to increase competition, and therefore violence, amongst themselves, as well as plenty of money to bribe and coerce police and other government officials. In Stratfor's view, the picture amounted to a prescription for a “failed state,” that is, a state where institutions are so dysfunctional, if not under the outright control of criminal elements, that the state could no longer function as a state. The Stratfor report also added this interesting bit of analysis in summing up the stakes: it noted that in 2007 Mexico had exported approximately $210 billion worth of legal goods to the United States. By this accounting, the estimated $40 billion in drug money coming back to Mexico represented more than 16 percent of all exports to the United States. Just as important, the article went on to note, was that while the $210 billion was divided among many businesses and individuals, the $40 billion was concentrated in the hands of just a few fairly tightly controlled cartels. The long-term implication of this state of affairs might well be that the cartels would become so powerful as to be beyond the government's ability to rein in or otherwise control. For Calderón and for Mexico, the time was now. By the spring of 2008 the crisis went beyond politics—except for the fact that within Mexico's budding democracy politics was as hard and unforgiving as the cartel wars themselves.