Mexico becoming one of world's more dangerous countries
Pastor Dale Morgan
Mexico becoming one of world's more dangerous countries*
September 27, 2007
By Jay Root McClatchy Newspapers
MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Felipe Calderon's tough new war on drug
trafficking, which has sent thousands of Mexican Army troops into the
countryside and a record number of drug suspects to the United States
for trial, failed to quell violence in the first half of the year.
Federal crimes such as gangland-style murders and kidnappings have
reached record levels, according to a new report from Mexico's Congress,
making Mexico one of the world's most dangerous countries.
One analyst who worked on the report said Mexico's murder rate now tops
all others in the Western Hemisphere.
"In a global context, we suffer from more homicides, that is to say,
violent deaths, than any other region in the world except for certain
regions on the African continent," said Eduardo Rojas, who helped put
together the crime report at the Center for Social and Public Opinion
Studies, a research arm of the Mexico's Chamber of Deputies.
The report, made public last week, said that major federal crimes, which
include homicides, kidnappings and arms trafficking, rose 25 percent in
the first half of 2007 over the same period last year. In 2006, the same
crimes had risen 22 percent over the previous year.
Gangland style executions have risen 155 percent since 2001, according
to the congressional report.
Crime has been on the rise in Mexico throughout the last decade as drug
cartels battle for control of lucrative smuggling routes. But the new
findings come at a politically charged time for the Calderon
administration, which is also confronting a new threat from an old foe —
the shadowy Popular Revolutionary Army or EPR, its Spanish acronym.
EPR's coordinated bombings of natural gas pipelines, first in July and
then in September, have exposed government intelligence failures and the
vulnerability of the petroleum infrastructure in Mexico, the second
largest oil exporter to the United States.
"The reality is the government has been pursuing the top EPR leaders for
at least five years, and they haven't been able to catch them," said
Mexican political commentator Raymundo Riva Palacio.
The attacks have been unexpectedly sophisticated. The September blasts
caused millions of dollars in economic losses when the state-owned oil
company, Pemex, had to cut off gas supplies to thousands of businesses,
including major multi-national companies such as Grupo Modelo, the
makers of Corona beer, and Vitro, the largest glassmaker in the world.
"These people that are placing these devices know something about the
flow of the oil and gas," said one American official who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment
publicly. "They didn't just place it randomly in the middle of the valve
system."
Experts believe the EPR, a Marxist group that traces its origins to the
armed guerilla movements of the 1970s, finances its activities with
ransom from kidnapped businessmen. The guerillas say the attacks will
continue until authorities release two comrades who disappeared in
Oaxaca in May; state and federal officials say they're not in government
custody.
The group's reach appears to be countrywide. The first blasts struck
multiple locations in central Mexico. The second set hit coastal
Veracruz. On Wednesday, security was beefed up around pipelines in
northern Chihuahua state after EPR graffiti was discovered on
installations there.
Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora recently told reporters
that the guerrilla bombings "distract" authorities from their battle
against organized crime.
Calderon, who took office in December after a contentious election that
saw him win with less than a third of the vote, had vowed to curb
Mexico's drug violence.
In January, he ordered a huge military and legal offensive, sending more
than 20,000 soldiers to hot spots throughout the country and dropping
Mexico's traditional hesitancy to send accused drug traffickers to face
charges in the United States. By August his administration had
extradited a record 64 accused drug traffickers.
The offensive won praise from the Bush administration and Mexicans, but
gangland-style executions have surged, with the report counting 1,588 in
the first half of 2007. For the full year of 2001, there were 1,080 such
crimes, the report said.
Mexico's violence is often spectacular and lurid, with tales of street
shootouts, decapitations and bomb blasts often filling Mexico's news
pages and airwaves. No place is immune, including the buildings of the
country's news outlets.
In May a severed head wrapped in newspaper was left in a cooler outside
the office of Tabasco Hoy in Villahermosa, where drug violence is on the
rise. Grenades have been tossed into newsrooms from Cancun to Nuevo
Laredo in the past 18 months. The Paris-based organization Reporters
Without Borders reported that Mexico was the most dangerous country for
journalists in 2006, after Iraq.
On May 14, suspected drug traffickers on motorcycles gunned down Jose
Nemesio Lugo, a senior federal investigator in charge of gathering
intelligence on drug traffickers, in Mexico City's upscale Coyoacan
neighborhood. Two days later in Sonora state, about 20 miles south of
Arizona, a five-hour shootout between heavily armed commandos and police
left 20 people dead.
The bloodbath continued unabated this month, with the assassinations of
two state police chiefs. The first was Jaime Flores of San Luis Potosi
state, shot in the head multiple times in front of his wife on Sept. 13.
Then on Wednesday came news that Marcos Manuel Souberville, the state
police chief in Hidalgo, had fallen in a hail of bullets during an
afternoon drive-by shooting.
Many prominent Mexicans have sought refuge in the United States, but
that is no guarantee of safety. Mario Espinoza Lobato, a businessman and
city councilman from Ciudad Acuna, was gunned down Wednesday at his home
in neighboring Del Rio, Texas, authorities said. He was an outspoken
critic of the criminal gangs that he said had tried to kidnap him.
Kidnapping is a multi-million dollar industry in Mexico. The report from
Congress indicates there are about 4,500 kidnappings a year, about a
third of which are reported.
Greg Bangs, head of the kidnapping and ransom unit at the Chubb Group of
Insurance Companies, said Mexico has rocketed past Colombia to become
the world's ransom capital.
"Mexico is now very definitely No. 1 in the world in terms of the
numbers of kidnappings," Bangs said. "Kidnappers are indicating how
serious they are by sending parts of ears and noses and fingers and
various bodily parts . . . they didn't used to do that so much, but that
seems to be more prevalent."
Top officials here continue to insist their efforts are paying off even
if the numbers don't show it. At a news conference last week, Medina,
the attorney general, told reporters "there is a decrease" in organized
crime murders.
But then Medina provided figures for "violent execution" in January and
February — 175 and 208, respectively.
"They're going down?" one reporter asked.
"I wish they were lower than last year," Medina responded. "But in the
first months of this year there were more than in the same period last
year."