Months ago Mexico’s most notorious Cartel Leader, Joaquin “el Chapo” Guzman Loera escaped from Mexico’s nationally most secure prison and met early in October in the Golden Triangle of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa with the Mexican soap opera star, Kate del Castillo and the Hollywood actor, producer and sometimes journalist, Sean Penn to discuss a biographical film that Guzman had discussed with Castillo and she in turn was the connection to Penn.

Looks like el Chapo is ready to be retired as a cartel and media feature. In many ways he is of the bandit variety of national hero in Mexico extending back to Pancho Villa. There are a thousand standing in line to take his place. As long as addiction is a central theme in our country and Mexico’s corruption continues unabated the line of Pancho Villa, Felix Gallardo, Pablo Acosta, etc. continues.

The only new thing I can add is that the drop in oil prices and automation in manufacturing removes the two other, than drugs, central exports of Mexico to earn money: energy and human labor.

The interview which appeared in Rolling Stone received this editorial remark from the NY Times(January 10, 2016):

“But widespread support for Mr. Guzmán’s extradition to the United States, after years of governmental resistance to the move, was an acknowledgment of continued concern about government corruption and weakness.

“It draws the frivolous interest of many people, the story by Sean Penn,” said Enrique Krauze, a prominent historian in Mexico. “But the main point is that we have an immense problem with drugs and crime in Mexico, with impunity and with the lack of the rule of law in the criminal system.”

“The underlying thing is — here is El Chapo, but what about the other protagonists of Mexican impunity and violence, the politicians and police forces that for decades have been their allies and partners?” he added.”

“The government so far has struggled to assert itself through the wave of celebrity fascination and chaos that came after the news of Mr. Guzmán’s arrest. The accounts by officials left many details unclear. Conflicting reports, about who knew what and when, and what intelligence led to the raid that took down Mr. Guzmán, have emerged.

With Mr. Guzmán placed back in the same prison he escaped from last July, the government did release a statement assuring the public that he would be well guarded this time. Some news reports claimed that Mr. Penn and Kate del Castillo, the actress who helped orchestrate the interview, were under investigation, without specifying anything further.

Mr. Penn’s turn as a journalist prompted hard feelings among those who recalled all too well how many Mexican reporters have died covering the drug war. To some, Mr. Penn’s account felt less like journalism than mythmaking, an extension of the Hollywood machine that Mr. Guzmán seemed eager to leverage.

Both the capture and the publication of the interview have fed the persistent international image of Mexico as a nation hopelessly trapped in the vicious tides of a drug war. The kingpins, with their resources, egos and catchy nicknames, never fail to capture the imagination of the world.

That all comes as bad news to people who have been remaking Mexico as something different: a country in the midst of reforms with a more responsive government and a growing center of culture and tourism.

The theatrics also distracted from the nation’s real and persistent problems. Analysts asked why, if the government could hunt down El Chapo, it could not locate 43 students who disappeared from a teachers college in the state of Guerrero. Or why it could not halt the peso’s slide against the dollar, down nearly 20 percent in the past year.”

Bypassing El Paso

Since Prohibition in the 1920’s twin cities on the Mexico-United States border have been entry points for prohibited/contraband items. After Prohibition those cities switched to drugs and human trafficking. Becuase of the media presence in Los Angeles, Tijuana, has been prominent in fiction and media reports about drug running but other locations along the border are far more prominent in terms of amount and organization.

There are important reasons why the Cartels cross the border east of El Paso. It is open country, scantly patrolled and important from the Cartel-business perspectives leads to large markets. College towns are always a draw for drugs particularly cocaine as it is more of an “upper class” item with meth for the farmworkers, construction guys and waitresses. Texas Tech is a key.

Juarez is a known drug plaza and one that is again in play between the local cartel and the Sinaloa. Crossing east is less likely to run into other Cartel groups nor as visible to American law enforcement. One has to “connect some dots” though to see how the Cartels are moving beyond traditional plazas at the Twin Cities of the Border to other paths. This news report in August from Lubbock is clear evidence of the movement of drugs through more remote areas of west Texas from Mexico. The drug in this case is methamphetamine. There was a time a decade ago when meth or speed was made from chemicals commonly available in American communities. However controls on chemicals like anhydrous ammonia have opened a lucrative market for the Mexican Cartels. They source original chemicals from China and bring them to one of the two or three large commercial ports on the Mexican west coast, typically in the states of Sinaloa and Michoacan. The Cartels then move the chemicals as meth to border crossings. This report from Lubbock shows evidence of this path and the likelihood that it came in somewhere east of El Paso perhaps in the Big Bend.

A new, unusually pure form of Crystal Methamphetamine has been found in Lubbock, and Sheriff Kelly Rowe is seeking new funding to fight it.

“Crystal Methamphetamine is a one-time addiction drug. It’s a type of drug if your kids get hooked on it, you might as well kiss them goodbye because you probably won’t get them back,” said Sheriff Rowe.

He said crystal meth is the biggest threat facing this area.

“It’s coming in in such a high degree of purity; it’s right out of the Breaking Bad series,” Sheriff Rowe said.

In the television series Breaking Bad, the main character builds an empire by making meth that is 99.1 percent pure.

“We just got test results in a couple of days ago from a load that was 100 percent pure. None of us have even seen that before,” Sheriff Rowe said.

Sheriff Rowe says his department seized 800 percent more crystal meth in 2014 than in 2013.

The New York Times published an examination of one of the United States’ fastest growing new technology companies, Amazon, on August 15, Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace that describes a highly competitive and caustic place that looks like the early Darwinian character of capitalism where “only the strong survive”! Quoting from the story,

“You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Thanks in part to its ability to extract the most from employees, Amazon is stronger than ever. Its swelling campus is transforming a swath of this city, a 10-million-square-foot bet that tens of thousands of new workers will be able to sell everything to everyone everywhere. Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.

The story has stirred more than just the readers of the NY Times and Bezos has been quoted to the effect that this is not Amazon and he would leave a company that treated its people as the story relates. The coming months will be interesting as this will start a leaking process and the world will learn more about the culture of working at Amazon as well as Bezos’s character and the ability of the Amazon leadership team to deal with questions about its culture.

Organizations are more than the abilities and visions of those at the top and an Amazon culture to the extent the NY Times story is accurate across the warehouses and order centers is as much a story of the depressed employment market for American workers as it is about the current success of Amazon.

I have long been involved in a different approach to creating and building organizations and much of that effort is with agencies of the State of Texas. Part of that story comes from a telephone call I received from a new Texas Governor, William Clements, in 1979. He was the first Republican elected to office since the Civil War and came to the office as a wealthy man from oil drilling concerns. He had heard of some of my organizational research and asked if I could survey state employees to determine how they felt about working for the State of Texas. I met with him after the phone call and he said that while he used the regular reporting lines coming up through state agencies’ leadership to his office, he wanted an additional direct route to his office. I designed a survey for this task and have expanded it with a remarkable staff skilled in organizational assessment and the use of the internet over the years to gather most of the data from the internet and from all state employees. The year we started the survey it provided an immediate benefit to Texas in that employees were energized that the Governor would be interested in their perceptions and experiences.

There are two returns from this survey activity. One is the way that opening up channels in an organization creates a more innovative and powerful organization. It pushes people to think and create.

The second return is that this builds a broader culture in every community of the state where there are state employees that push for openness and transparency. If there is one antidote to the failed state of Mexico, this is it. Indeed much of this website looks at a natural experiment underway comparing Mexico to Texas and perhaps the United States. One is called a democracy but lacks transparency and trust between state and citizens. The second is called a democracy as well and strives to be open and transparent.

You may read more about the survey here: Survey

Michael Lauderdale

Two Years After The Return Of The PRI

Our southern neighbor of 120 million and ^4th largest economy in the Americas has ended the second year of the return of its dominant political party of the 20^th Century, the PRI. The PRI (Party of the Institutionalized Revolution) came out of the Mexican Revolution of the second decade of the 20th century and functioned much as similar authoritarian regimes in the Soviet Union and China. There were elections but the Party chose the candidates and competing parties served as “stick figures” to promote the appearance of genuine elections and competing parties.

However by the 1970’s there began an awakening in Mexico to a world beyond its borders. This was especially true for Mexico City, geographically in the center of the country, and isolated from borders. The awakening came from travel and electronic media and especially was sparked by comparisons to Western Europe and the United States. The population was moving in Mexico from rural homesteads to the urban areas with Mexico City growing from a million in the 30’s to over 20 million by the 1970’s. Mexican leadership was recognizing that an urban Mexico would need factory jobs and eagerly responded to the overtures from George H.B. Bush and William Clinton to join the U.S. in a North American common market. Essentially the three countries watching Europe and Japan saw an opportunity to harness the raw materials of Canada, the educated labor of the United States and the young low wage labor of Mexico in an economic combine. Bush and Clinton promoted the idea of a “service economy” with the American workforce providing services and factory manufacturing being moved to Mexico. The wage differential was immense such as in electronics where hourly wages were 25 dollars to Mexico where daily wages were 3 dollars.

As Mexicans moved to the cities they spurred consumer markets for food, clothing, cars and apartments and homes. These consumer tastes were more accelerated in northern Mexican cities like Monterrey, Juarez, Reynosa, Veracruz where visits to the United States were common as were American media. The new consumer tastes included more equality for women, class mobility and competitive alternatives in politics. The politics were reflected in genuine electoral contests at the city and state levels and the more conservative National Action Party (PAN) won municipal elections in the north as more socialist parties won elections in rural farming communities of the south. These forces culminated in 2000 with the first Presidential election since the 1930’s of a President that was not a PRI candidate. The successful party was the PAN and one more closely allied with the North American Free Trade Agreement of Bush and Clinton. That President Vicente Fox was followed by a second successful PAN candidate, Felipe Calderon. Calderon implemented many of the NAFTA accords with Obama and Harper of Canada.

Calderon was more of a progressive activist than Fox and sought to respond to concerns in the north of Mexico for more honest and transparent governments. Ultimately this meant taking on municipal power structures in cities like Tijuana, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Matamoros. But these cities, long part of the PRI structure, were also involved in issuing franchises to local crime organizations that would traffic in drugs and people across to the American side. These were valuable properties, plazas, that adjoined the border on the major streets and highways in these border cities. Local governments rather than let warring gangs fight for the plazas would award them to the high bidder. In some cases local municipal police were serve as the  enforcer if another gang tried to muscle in.

Calderon seeing that the local PRI and the gangs—as they consolidated and grew in power and size were termed cartels—were in partnership brought in Federal police and both the Army and the Navy’s Marines to break the police-cartel alliances. This ushered in 6 years of open bloody conflict and in one major city-plaza- Juarez resulted in 2010 of about 100 murders daily!

With the election of Enrique Peña Nieto to the Presidency in July of 2012, the PRI returned to power. Pena promised honest government and less violence. Violence may or may not have declined but reporting did. Following the precedence of Mexico’s past, murders went unsolved but once again unreported. After two years international pressure created movement to remove Mexico’s most notorious Cartel boss Joaquin Guzman but in less than a year, he walked out of Mexico’s highest security prison even as the United States pressed to extradite him to face American charges. Now just two years after the inauguration of the PRI, cracks are appearing in the newly restored peaceful face of Mexico. Signs such as the torture and killing of members of the press even in what is thought to be a safe enclave of Mexico City and Cartel attacks becoming visible in the North as competition for the control of plazas along the American border heighten.

Mexico News Photographer Found Slain in Capital

MEXICO CITY — A photographer for the Mexican investigative magazine Proceso, who had fled his home state after being harassed, was among five people found slain early Saturday in an apartment in Mexico City, according to the magazine.

The body of Ruben Espinosa, who collaborated with Proceso and other media, was identified by a family member at the morgue Saturday afternoon, Proceso reported, adding that he had two gunshot wounds.

Espinosa had recently gone into self-exile from the Gulf coast state of Veracruz, where he felt under threat, according to Proceso.

Eight family members decapitated in north Mexico

Ciudad Juarez (Mexico) (AFP) – Eight people from the same family, including two minors, were kidnapped by masked gunmen and their decapitated bodies were found days later in northern Mexico, authorities said Wednesday.

The bodies were found after a ninth member of the Martinez family escaped Sunday’s abduction near Casa Quemada, in the state of Chihuahua, and alerted the authorities, prosecutors said.

The disappearance triggered a massive military operation in the region and the bodies were found this week.

On Saturday, July 11, Mexico’s wealthiest and most violent Drug Cartel chief, Joaquin (el Chapo) Guzman escaped from the nation’s highest security prison about 45 miles west of Mexico City. The escape is providing a powerful insight into how fully the Mexican state is failing. Already weakened, the return of the ancient PRI authoritarian system is accelerating in decline. The nation’s decline has become topic number one in Republican Party campaigns as Donald Trump accuses the Mexican state of shipping its criminals to the U.S. much as Fidel Castro did as he emptied Cuban prisons.

In our book, Mexico-Path to a Failed State, we explained how the lack of a civic culture and growing distrust of the Mexican state was part of the failed state process. It is accelerating and will receive growing attention from a world stunned at the brutality of the Mexican state and now its brittle response to failures!