Letter from Juarez: Calderon's War, by Cecilia Balli, Harpers, January 2012

[molly]

Here is a link to the online version of this recent article:

http://www.box.com/s/i81pj310xyt353oxl3k6

Letter from Juarez: Calderon's War: The Gruesome Legacy of Mexico's
Antidrug Campaign

[molly]

For some reason, I was asked to respond to the January 2012 article in
Harpers by Cecilia Balli and posted online by the author at this URL:
http://www.box.com/s/i81pj310xyt353oxl3k6

Unfortunately, the article is no longer available at that link, but it
is on the Harper's website here:
http://harpers.org/archive/2012/01/0083753

I did write a response to the article, but it was not accepted for
publication. So, I'll post it here for Frontera List members and I
welcome your comments:

Writing in the January Harpers, Cecilia Ballí laments the fate of the
“nameless citizens” victimized by “Calderón’s War,” while at the same
time giving names and voices to several (three to be exact) of these
victims from Ciudad Juárez—a city of 1.2 million people where more
than 10,000 have been murdered since 2007.

Ballí interviews the surviving parents of law student Jaime Irigoyen
Flores and Javier Eduardo Rosales, both victims of abduction, torture
and murder by the Mexican army, and Benjamin Medina Sanchez, now
serving a prison sentence after soldiers ransack his house, find a
joint and force him to confess to drug dealing after beating him
unconscious and giving him water laced with acid to drink. Despite
hearing such evidence (that is multiplied hundreds of times by daily
reports in Mexican media with names, dates and other details on the
ordinariness of thousands of victims), the writer never challenges the
central idea that “Calderón’s War” is anything but a steadfast and
heroic campaign against drug cartels and that the atrocities her
subjects experience are aberrations or unintended consequences of
President Calderón's earnest—though sometimes badly executed—war.

This idea is false. The hyper-violence in Mexico is an intentional and
systematic effort by the Mexican government to exert control (or to
regain control) over the huge profits generated by the drug trade—
money that is a necessary part of Mexico’s economy. And, Mexican
civilians—most of them struggling to survive in a failing economy—are
the overwhelming majority of the dead in this war.

In December 2011, Army spokesman Col. Ricardo Trevilla reported that
since 2006, a total of 126 soldiers had died in confrontations with
criminals. Estimates of deaths from homicide in Mexico from December
2006-December 2011 range from 51,000 to more than 80,000. While
President Calderón claims that 90 percent of those killed are
“criminals being killed by other criminals,” at the same time, his
government admits that at least 95 percent of the crimes are not
investigated.

In August 2011, El Diario de Juárez reported that in 3,203 homicide
case files in Chihuahua dating from January 2010-July 2011, the
evidence collected at crime scenes showed that in less than 2 percent
of these murders were weapons found near the bodies of the victims and
this indicates that they were unarmed and unprepared to defend
themselves at the moment they were killed, hardly the custom of
professional criminals.


There is ample evidence of the Mexican Army and/or paramilitary
commandos harassing, abducting and killing people even before public
announcement of the Joint Chihuahua Operation in March 2008. Juárez
activist Josefina Reyes-Salazar publicly accused the Mexican Army of
abducting and killing two relatives in April 2008. She was murdered in
August 2010 and by the middle of 2011, five more members of the Reyes-
Salazar family had been hunted down and murdered. Several surviving
relatives are now seeking political asylum in the United States,
claiming that Mexican security forces are systematically persecuting
social activists under the smoke screen provided by the war on drugs.
Journalists have also been targets of the Mexican army , and though
the military sits at the pinnacle of the impunity pyramid in Mexico,
it is one of many powerful groups that abduct, torture and kill
Mexicans. Drug trafficking gangs kill. Street gangs kill. Municipal,
state and federal police kill. And drug cartel operatives often kill
from the inside of these security forces. As former Chihuahua
governor, Jose Reyes Baeza, declared in March 2008, “"All of the
public security agencies are infiltrated—all of them, pure and
simple…” The governor predicted a “return to normalcy” as soon as
these agencies could be cleaned up. Five years on, more than 10,000
people in the city of Juárez alone are dead and so far this year,
another 3.4 people are added to the tally each day.

Just this week, a mother in Ciudad Juárez said: "For me, the police
are like an epidemic. They are the ones who are killing and torturing
and after that, they accuse [their victims] of being criminals.”
Juárez police chief Julian Leyzaola, a former army officer, was seen
beating this woman’s 24-year-old son to death after his arrest for
suspicion of involvement in another murder. Eyewitnesses testified
that the chief then ordered police to dump the body outside the city
to destroy the evidence. A few days after the mother testified in the
investigation of this son’s murder, while she was working a second
shift in an assembly plant to support her other 7 children, four
hooded men entered her house, shot 2 more of her sons (aged 14 and 20)
in their beds and set the bodies on fire in front of her other 5
children.

There is growing evidence that killings were and are carried out by
groups with military training. Reuters recently reported on a former
professional killer who said that he had been trained on an army base
and that he and other hitmen collaborated with soldiers to carry out
their jobs. Reforma, (a conservative national newspaper) reported
that the killings of 35 supposed “Zetas” in Veracruz in September did
not conform to the usual patterns of narco-killings, noting that the
bodies showed signs of materials and techniques usually associated
with the Mexican Army and Marines.

As Ballí’s article notes, President Calderón stands firm in his belief
that he and his security forces hold the moral high ground in this
war. Indeed, just last month, in a speech at an armed forces ceremony
in Mexico City, President Calderón called the criminals “cockroaches
and animals that have infected the country and that can only be
eliminated through social cleansing.”

The alleged war between the Mexican army and the drug world has killed
at least 51,000 ordinary Mexicans and less than 200 soldiers. This
same war has done nothing to curtail drug deliveries to the US, nor
has it raised prices paid by drug consumers. US taxpayers supply $500
million dollars a year to the Mexican army, thus contributing to the
creation of the largest human rights catastrophe in the hemisphere. US
citizens seldom hear these facts and Mexicans who flee north with
tales of government horror to seek asylum are ignored or shipped
back.

Molly Molloy
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, NM
Editor of the FRONTERA-LIST, http://groups.google.com/group/frontera-list
molly...@gmail.com

NOTES:

[1] AP story published in many news media:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=143988721

http://articles.boston.com/2011-12-20/news/30538940_1_durango-mexican-army-clandestine-graves



[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/world/americas/mexico-updates-drug-war-death-toll-but-critics-dispute-data.html



[3] See: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1005/19/sitroom.01.html

and http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/689120.html



[4] http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/07/we-bring-fear

A reporter flees the biggest cartel of all—the Mexican Army.
—By Charles Bowden
|


[5] Police infiltrated by narco-traffickers, El Diario de Juárez, May
25, 2008.

[6] Por miedo a represalias contra sus otros hijos, renuncia a exigir
justicia, Diario de Juárez, January 10, 2012,
http://www.diario.com.mx/notas.php?f=2012/01/10&id=96c4dc53337083bb8c837fec7c61ab28


[7] Special Report: Federal forces sully Mexico’s war on drugs,
Reuters, December 27, 2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/27/us-mexico-ciudadjuarez-violence-idUSTRE7BQ0BN20111227



[8] Evidencian ejecutados huella distinta al narco - Afirman que la
forma en la que mataron a 35 nocorresponde al crimen organizado /
Murder victims show evidence distinct from narcos – sources affirm
that the way the 35 were killed did not correspond to organized crime
methods. Reforma, September 30, 2011.


[9] Compara Calderón a criminales con “cucarachas”, Proceso, December
14, 2011, http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=291301