Mexico's Drug War - Page 62

...the family left Creston on March 13 and drove to St. Louis, where they stayed the night before boarding a non-stop flight to Cancun the following day. The next day, the family had planned to rent a car and drive to Tulum, Mexico, where they were renting a condo, Hoyt said.

CHILPANCINGO, Mexico (Reuters) - For the past 12 years, Mexico has fought violent drug gangs by deploying thousands of police, soldiers and intelligence officers to crack down on cartels and their leaders.

If its new president-elect gets his way, however, negotiation may replace the hard-line strategy that critics say has only perpetuated violence.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist who won on Sunday after two previous attempts at the presidency, wants to rewrite the rules of the drug war, aides said, suggesting negotiated peace and amnesties for some of the very people currently being targeted by security forces.

“The failed strategy of combating insecurity and violence will change,” Lopez Obrador said in his victory speech Sunday night, repeating his call to address the socioeconomic ills that push people toward the drug trade and other crimes.

“More than through the use of force, we will tend to the causes that give rise to insecurity and violence,” the president-elect added. He said his team will immediately begin consulting with human rights groups, religious leaders and the United Nations to develop a “plan for reconciliation and peace.”

So far, his proposals remain vague. And any move toward amnesty, while aimed at lesser and non-violent offenders, is sure to face opposition from the general public, rivals in Congress and U.S. allies who helped Mexico orchestrate its force-based approach.

Still, Olga Sanchez, Lopez Obrador’s proposed interior minister, said the new administration would move fast to reconsider drug policies and a militaristic approach that, despite toppling some high-profile kingpins, failed to prevent more than 200,000 murders since first adopted in 2006.

“As soon as we get in, we’re quickly going to take some dramatic decisions,” Sanchez told Reuters in an interview before the election.

She conceded that any shift, like the demobilization of the military troops fighting drug gangs, would need to be gradual. Longer-term goals, Sanchez added, include decriminalizing the recreational use of marijuana and the cultivation of opium for medicinal purposes.

To consider the possibility of negotiated peace, she said, her team has studied Colombia’s peace process with its biggest guerrilla group, which allowed rebel leaders to avoid prison. Aides have also begun planning legislation for “transitional justice.”

Typically, such justice involves leniency for those who admit guilt, truth commissions to investigate atrocities and the granting of reparations for some victims. Any clemency, Sanchez said, would be aimed toward farmers, drug couriers and other non-violent lawbreakers caught up in the trade – not assassins.

Sanchez said any plan for an amnesty would go to a public referendum. If it received public support, she added, the administration would then put it before Congress, where Lopez Obrador’s National Regeneration Movement and allies also gained seats on Sunday.

The mere notion of amnesty disturbs many.

One recent newspaper poll found that seven in 10 Mexicans oppose it. Victims’ rights groups are also opposed.

“I want to see the guilty behind bars,” said Laura Flores, whose husband, Daniel Velasquez, is believed to have been murdered along with 15 other people in 2015.

MEXICO CITY — The governor of Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca is condemning the slaying of a local mayor shortly after he took office.

Gov. Alejandro Murat confirmed the killing of Tlaxiaco Mayor Alejandro Aparicio Santiago via his Twitter account Tuesday. He promised a thorough investigation and said a suspect was already in custody.

The state prosecutor's office said in a statement that Aparicio had just been sworn in and was headed to a meeting at city hall when an unknown number of gunmen opened fire at him. He was taken to a hospital, but died there later.

Four other people were wounded in the attack.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico’s Senate on Thursday approved President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s plan to create a new national guard, a central plank of the government’s strategy to subdue gang violence that has claimed tens of thousands of lives over the past decade.

The bill was passed unanimously by 127 senators but only after Lopez Obrador’s party agreed to put the new security force, which will be made up of soldiers and police, under civilian instead of military control.

The step caps weeks of wrangling over the so-called Guardia Nacional after initial plans to give the military control of the force met with resistance from human rights groups, opposition lawmakers and some close political allies of Lopez Obrador.

The change to a civilian-led force was part of a compromise from Lopez Obrador to win Senate support after he personally argued that generals should be in charge.

In a first phase, the guard will consist of some 50,000 members transferred from military and federal police forces.

Critics argued that giving control of the guard to generals would increase the militarization of Mexico, whose reputation has been battered in the past few years by notorious rights abuses carried out by security forces.

Lopez Obrador’s leftist National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) opted to modify the legislation, a constitutional change requiring a two-thirds majority in Congress.

“We need the support of the army and the marines to confront the grave problem of safety and violence,” Lopez Obrador said in a regular news conference ahead of the vote. “We’re going to guarantee peace and tranquility in the country because the people are asking for it.”

The legislation will now return to the lower house of Congress, where final approval should be a formality. It must then by ratified by a majority of state legislatures, most of which are controlled by MORENA and its allies.

Successive Mexican governments have tried to overhaul the security forces to tackle gang violence, which has been blamed for more than 250,000 homicides since former President Felipe Calderon sent in the army to take on drug cartels in late 2006.

Previous President Enrique Pena Nieto, who left office on Nov. 30, established a gendarmerie to oversee the fight against gangs, but that force was later massively scaled back.

A federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., has sentenced drug kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán to a term of life in prison plus 30 years for his role in leading Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. A life sentence was mandatory; U.S. prosecutors had asked that three decades be added onto Guzman's punishment.

One of the only suspenseful questions that remained Wednesday was whether Guzmán, who did not speak during his long trial, would speak in court in what's expected to be his last public appearance before heading to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo.

"Guzmán told U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan before he was sentenced Wednesday that he was denied a fair trial," The Associated Press reports, adding, "He said Cogan failed to thoroughly investigate claims of juror misconduct in the case."

Guzmán, 62, was extradited from his native Mexico to the U.S. in January 2017. The terms of his extradition included a pledge that U.S. authorities would not seek the death penalty.

A federal jury convicted Guzmán in February, finding him guilty of a raft of serious charges, from 26 drug-related violations to a murder conspiracy. His conviction included crimes such as narcotics trafficking, using a firearm in drug crimes and money laundering.

At Wednesday's sentencing, Guzmán's attorneys reiterated their call for a new trial, asking for a hearing to go over their complaints about the jury.

"This case was simply an inquisition. It was a show trial, and how it ended is exactly perfect for that description," attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said. He said the government's witnesses had included "lunatics and sociopaths and psychopaths" and that "up to five jurors broke the law — violated the law while they were judging Mr. Guzmán for crimes."

After Guzmán was convicted, his defense team said the trial was tainted, claiming that members of the jury had ignored the judge's orders not to read about the trial outside of the court proceedings.

Guzmán plans to appeal, Lichtman said.

"I'm not here to tell you that Joaquín Guzmán is a saint," he said, speaking to journalists outside the courthouse. "All we asked for was fairness. And no matter what you think of Joaquín Guzmán, he still deserves a fair trial."

The U.S. sentence was announced 18 years after President George W. Bush formally declared Guzmán a drug lord, imposing U.S. sanctions on him under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act.

The drug kingpin has repeatedly made headlines during his criminal career — first for the vast power he ruthlessly amassed and later for his seeming ability to break out of any prison in Mexico. In 2015, he escaped from a maximum security prison for the second time, after spending more than a decade eluding Mexican authorities. He lived outside the law for an additional six months, before he was captured in a high-profile operation in early 2016.

Guzmán's lucrative and extensive criminal network extended well beyond Mexico's borders. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says his Sinaloa cartel put an exceptionally potent methamphetamine into illegal drug markets in "virtually every corner of Colorado, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming." During his trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Guzman sent methamphetamine to numerous U.S. locations, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis and from Ohio to Tucson, Ariz.

The agency also said the cartel supplied cocaine and fentanyl in the U.S. "through sophisticated and efficient transportation and distribution networks."

To elude detection, Guzmán paid $1 million to an information technology engineer to set up what authorities called an encrypted communications network to operate his global drug-trafficking operation. By using encrypted cellphones and encrypted apps, prosecutors said, the drug lord could communicate freely with his partners in Colombia, Ecuador, Canada and the U.S.

In the bloody churn of the global drug trade, there are no fixed, permanent characters. Cartel leaders are seldom more than temporary players, rising and falling with unfailing predictability as a new cast rushes in to replace them.

So it goes even with Joaquin Guzman Loera, the infamous drug lord known as El Chapo, who was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday in New York for smuggling tons of drugs into the United States and leaving a trail of death in his wake.

The sentencing was the final act for Mr. Guzman, a poor farm boy who turned a small-time drug racket into one of the largest, and most violent, criminal enterprises in history. His trajectory was one of Houdini-like escapes from prison, mountains of cash and bottomless blood lust.

For nearly 20 years, his story loomed large in Mexico and around the world, a remarkable stretch of time for him to bask in the dubious glow of being the most recognized drug lord in the world.

Now, Mr. Guzman’s legacy will fade behind the walls of a maximum-security prison, along with the dozens of other cartel leaders already confined to history.

But for all the public fanfare of his downfall — the pursuit through the mountains of the Sierra Madre, the narrow escapes under the noses of federal authorities, the jubilation at his final made-for-TV capture — the larger narrative of the drug war remains unbroken.

Many here in Mexico would argue, in fact, that the war has only grown worse since his extradition. And judging by the staggering homicide figures of the last few years, which continue to set records, it is easy to see why.

“We are experiencing so much violence,” said José Luis Córdoba, 47, who works at a private security company in Mexico City. “So, no, it definitely won’t stop or change because he got sentenced to life in prison.”

Kingpins fall, new ones rise, and the traffic of drugs to the United States continues uninterrupted. Through it all, the death toll mounts, especially in Mexico, where the majority of the blood is spilled.

The lives lost in the violence have now surpassed the levels reached when Mr. Guzman was on the street, overseeing a vast empire of killers.

Taking out the drug trade’s most dangerous leaders has not ended the trafficking. It has been all but proven that the so-called Kingpin Strategy pushed by the United States — in which the authorities try to cripple drug cartels by going after their leaders — has failed.

Instead of destroying the cartels by cutting off their heads, the policy has spawned multi-headed hydras, smaller, less disciplined and often-deadlier spinoffs.

“Unfortunately, Mexico does not have the capacity to deal with the splintering of the cartel and the vast network that is the Sinaloa Cartel,” said Giovanni Márquez, 27, a Mexican economist, referring to Mr. Guzman’s cartel. “At the end, it’s not great news for us.”

So one of the grand disappointments of Mr. Guzman’s capture is that it has been a major catalyst of the violence consuming Mexico.

Before his capture, his Sinaloa cartel was the dominant player in the drug market. With fewer enemies to kill off, homicides were on a downward glide path until 2014.

But after his capture, the struggle to challenge Sinaloa’s dominance of the business has intensified, helping fuel a war for control.

In Mexico, a new force has emerged in the drug trade, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and it is in a fight with others for dominance of the trade routes through Mexico into the United States. Homicides are surging in all of the predictable hot spots, including Acapulco, Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.

But they are also spiking in previously quiet areas, like in the coastal state of Colima.

“It is precisely because he was removed from the game that we are seeing the level of violence we are seeing now,” said David Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego and director of the Justice in Mexico program there. “Had he remained at large, and the organization continued to dominate the drug trade as they were in 2013 and 2014, we might have seen a decline to some of the lowest levels of violence in Mexico’s history.”

Still, analysts said it was important to jail leaders like Mr. Guzman, who drugged and abused girls as young as 13-years-old while at the helm of his organization, according to trial testimony.

“In the long term, not pursuing leaders sends a message of impunity,” said Jorge Chabat, a security expert at the University of Guadalajara.

But his capture has done nothing to dampen violence, or even reduce the overdose deaths plaguing the United States, experts said.

“It is almost like a Pyrrhic victory,” said Tony Payan, the director of the Mexico Center at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice Unviersity.

“The fundamental underlying dynamics of the war on drugs have remained the same for going on half a century,” Mr. Shirk added. “I don’t want to call it a futile struggle, but what else can you call it?”