Monthly Archives: January 2016

Mexico Watch

Beyond El Chapo and Sean Penn

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kateDelCatiilloAmerican media like those in Mexico focus upon celebrities but there are deeper, more complex currents that create the fame of the celebrities. El Chapo’s wealth comes not from his 2nd Grade education but his skills in supplying the drug market in the United States. The money from drugs can corrupt American efforts as a case reported in the Texas Valley provides. From The Monitor in McAllen:

McALLEN — A former Starr County narcotics officer was sentenced to seven years in prison Friday for his role in a scheme that involved stealing drugs from drug cartels.

Noel Peña, 30, was charged with two counts of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than 5 kilograms of cocaine last April. In the scheme, Peña was tipped off to the location of cocaine and then staged a law enforcement operation, the complaint states.

Peña spent seven years as a Rio Grande City police officer, including four assigned to the Starr County High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force, where he worked since 2011.

HIDTA was created in 1990 to diminish drug trafficking in the U.S. Southwest border. Fourteen counties across Texas have HIDTA task forces. The one in Starr County reports to 229th District Attorney Omar Escobar, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy website. Hector Salinas-Hinojosa, of Roma, was also charged with conspiring with Peña in the distribution operation, according to court documents. Both men pleaded not guilty to two counts of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine from April 1 to April 17.

In July, Peña and Salinas-Hinojosa agreed to plead guilty to the first count in exchange for a lighter sentence and had the second conspiracy charge dropped by prosecutors, according to court documents. Salinas-Hinojosa was also sentenced Friday and received five years in prison for his role in the conspiracy, according to court records. Federal agents arrested the duo April 18 after they said the two conspired to hand over a falsified police report to an undercover officer they thought was a cocaine trafficker, a criminal complaint states. The undercover officer told them he needed help stealing the bulk of a 22-pound load of cocaine he was holding for a drug cartel, according to the complaint.

Noel Peña

Hector Salinas-Hinojosa Jr.

Driving much of the chaos in Mexico is the extreme differential between incomes in Mexico compared to the United States. Across decades this differential remained largely unnoticed but the movement of world manufacturers to create factories in Mexico to export finished products to the United States highlights this differential. The differential is apparent in twin border cities like El Paso and Juarez.

This story from The Atlantic illustrates:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — Women and men, more than 70 of them, were fired on December 9th from the factory on the Mexican side of the Mexico-Texas border where they made printers for the American company Lexmark. They say they were terminated because they were trying to form an independent union. The company says they were fired because they caused a “workplace disruption.”

Now, the workers protest by occupying a makeshift shack outside the factory, still advocating for a raise and for a union, even though they no longer have jobs. Outside, a spray-painted banner reads “Justicia A La Clase Obrera” meaning “Justice for the Working Class.” Inside, a wood stove burns as they make coffee and cook tortillas and wait for someone to hear what they have to say.

“We are hungry. Our children are hungry,” Blanca Estella Moya, one of the fired workers, tells me. “You cannot live on these wages in Juarez.”

In the Lexmark maquiladora, or factory, Moya made 112 pesos, or roughly six U.S. dollars, a day. Her shifts were nine-and-a-half hours long, her lawyer, Susana Prieto Terrazas, says. That’s about 39 cents an hour. That wage is a legal one in Mexico, but Terrazas argues it shouldn’t be.

“It’s not possible to live on these wages. It’s not human,” said Terrazas, who has dark, curly, dyed-red hair, and was wearing a plaid checkered blouse and jeans. “They are creating generations of slaves.”

It’s not just Lexmark: Workers at Mexican subsidiaries of FoxConn, Eaton, and CommScope in Juarez have all protested working conditions and compensation in recent months. Women tell of sexual harassment at the factories and of working multiple shifts to make ends meet. The devaluation of the peso has meant their money buys less than it once did. The protests come at an inopportune moment for Mexico. Many companies, especially automakers, are moving production to Mexico after deciding that the costs and logistical headaches of manufacturing in Asia are too great to bear. Mexico is trying to welcome them with open arms.

Signposts To A Failed State

More Signposts

NuevoLaredoHangingsTwo significant features of modern Mexico are the lack of a civic culture and government corruption. A story from the NY Times illustrates both as a mob seizes and kills two brothers. Growing vigilante actions track violence between Cartels using public threats as an attempt to assert control in a country flying apart. This picture is from an action in Nuevo Laredo about 2012 of one Cartel threatening another using lynchings. Such tactics are beginning to appear by outraged publics lacking trust in municipal police. The two brothers were working as pollsters visiting the town, Ajalpan, and were perceived as kidnappers of village children. The community is about 200 miles southeast of Mexico City in the state of Puebla.

The killings raise difficult questions for Mexico, highlighting an alarming development: By some accounts, there were more public lynchings this past year than at any other time in more than a quarter-century. There were at least 78 lynchings last year in Mexico, more than double the number the previous year, according to data collected by Raúl Rodríguez Guillén, a professor and an author of the book “Mexico Lynchings, 1988-2014.”

The mob actions were born of a sense of hopelessness and impotence shared by many in Mexico, where 98 percent of murders go unsolved and the state is virtually absent in some areas. By some estimates, just 12 percent of crimes are even reported in Mexico, largely because of a lack of faith that justice will ever be served.

Signposts To A Failed State

Oil and Mexico

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fut_chart.ashxUnlike Germany, Japan, China and to some extent the United States, Mexico’s economy is not built on manufacturing or the creation of high technology. While the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has moved thousands of jobs from the United States to Mexico and visible in auto and appliance manufacture, the bulk of jobs in Mexico are minimum wage jobs in service like waiters and maids in tourism. Its most important export earnings are from the production of petroleum. The crushing collapse of oil prices felt in Canada and states like the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas is many times as severe for Mexico. Mexico depends on grains, poultry and cattle imports as key food sources for its young population and it must have export earnings to make these purchases.

The drop in the price of oil may reach 20 dollars a barrel and will fuel increased immigration to the United States and enhance the power of the Drug Cartels as earnings from oil fade!

Leadership Failures

The Escape and Capture of El Chapo

Penn-ChapoMonths 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.”