Mexico, land of mass graves

[Byker]

The Paradox of Mexico’s Mass Graves

Ioan Grillo
JULY 19, 2017

VERACRUZ, Mexico — The Colinas de Santa Fe neighborhood on the outskirts of
this port city looks like hundreds of other residential housing developments
built across Mexico in recent decades. Streets are lined with identical
brick homes — bungalows with two bedrooms, painted pink, blue or green and
advertised as being close to a shopping mall. Yards are cluttered with
children’s bikes, basketball hoops and satellite dishes. But on the edge of
the estate, investigators announced in March, fields for grazing cattle hid
thousands of decaying body parts, including more than 250 skulls, buried in
a number of pits.

Drug cartels are widely believed to be behind the mass grave. Most of the
victims are yet to be identified. A mother living a few blocks from the
field said she had no idea it was there. In April, residents filed a
complaint that the smell of rotting corpses being unearthed was seeping into
their homes.

I’ve covered Mexico’s violence since 2001, but I am still dumbstruck by the
extent to which normal life seems to carry on next door to such terrors. A
study released last month found that at least 1,400 bodies were dug up from
mass graves across the country between 2009 and 2014. And those are just a
fraction of the 176,000 murders that police have counted here over the last
decade.

At the same time, Mexico has a trillion-dollar economy and is the
eighth-most-visited tourist destination on the planet. The government denies
there is an armed conflict going on.

How can we understand this paradox and classify this bloodshed? Is it simply
a horrendous crime problem, or is it an actual war? The question is not
merely academic — it affects real-life decisions, like those of judges who
decide whether people fleeing the violence can be classified as refugees.

The truth is that the conflict is neither just crime nor civil war, but a
new hybrid type of organized violence. We will never understand its nature
until Mexico truly investigates how these mass graves came about. And that
investigation includes the role of the state itself.

On Monday, the former governor of Veracruz, Javier Duarte, was extradited
from Guatemala to Mexico to face charges of working with organized crime and
embezzling state funds during his tenure from 2010 to 2016, when the mass
grave at Colinas de Santa Fe was discovered. Some of his top aides have also
been arrested. When the size of the grave was revealed, the new state
prosecutor, Jorge Winckler, told reporters: “It’s impossible that nobody
knew what was going on here, with vehicles coming in and out. If that wasn’t
with the complicity of authorities, I don’t know how it was done.”

The site was discovered not by the police but by mothers searching for their
disappeared children. One of them, Maria de Lourdes Rosales, was trying to
find her son, a 25-year-old customs worker who was abducted by a group of
gunmen in 2013. After the police found no trace of him, she joined other
family members of the more than 30,000 people who have disappeared across
the country to demand justice. “You live with great pain every day,” Ms.
Rosales told me. “You are missing something in your life, in your heart, in
your soul, and your only goal is finding them.”

One day, when a group of mothers were marching in protest, a car drew up and
a mysterious man got out to give them a hand-drawn map showing where the
mass grave was. The mothers went to the site and began digging. Only after
they unearthed clothes and human bones did the state forensics teams take
over.

In June, the mothers found yet another mass grave in Veracruz State, after
somebody sent a map to one of them on Facebook.

These cases illustrate key features of Mexico’s drug war. Most of its
victims are not killed in battles — shootouts between armed groups, or
clashes with the police and soldiers — but are dragged away by gunmen or are
assassinated in hits. When the Mexican government last released a breakdown
of cartel-related murders back in 2011, the data showed that 79 percent were
those types of killings.

Justice is rare. One study found that four out of five murders in Mexico go
unpunished. Security forces do take on the cartels in parts of the country,
but the police and officials are also caught working with the criminals, and
even killing for them. Days before Mr. Duarte’s arrest, a former governor of
the neighboring Tamaulipas State was arrested in Italy, after being indicted
in Brownsville, Tex., on several charges, including drug trafficking.

The cartels make billions smuggling heroin, cocaine and crystal meth to
America, as well as from a portfolio of rackets from kidnapping to oil
theft. That money is used to bribe police and politicians, who in turn help
the cartels to eliminate anyone who stands in their way to making more
money. The victims are not only rival cartel operatives but also include
customs workers who won’t take bribes, inconvenient journalists and many who
simply witnessed the wrong thing at the wrong time — “civilians,” all.

Yet at the same time, for many Mexicans, life goes on in apparent
normality — with no tank battles or aerial bombardments. This is what
separates the conflict from a civil war, even though the death toll is
comparable. The pattern of killing is perhaps most similar to that of the
death squads of a dictatorship. And in Colinas de Santa Fe, children could
play obliviously while at their doorstep was a mass grave akin to those left
by the Islamic State.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/opinion/mexico-mass-grave-drug-cartel.html

[sswe...@sweeneyhospitality.com]

How can all the cartel violence be stopped or reduced???