Another chapter written in the twisted story of teachers college kids massacre in Mexico

Or, more news about your harmless drug habits

Yesterday, Mexican federal police reported the capture of Gilardo “El Gil” López, apparent director of last year's kidnapping and massacre of the 43 normalistas in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico (near Acapulco).  El Gil is apparently a high-ranking lieutenant in the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.  Interesting timing really.  A few days ago I posted a note about Mexican Independence Day.  I suggested that in order to celebrate, Americans should ensure that the drugs they use are locally produced.  My point was not, in fact, to encourage drug use but rather to link what people may perceive as their harmless recreational habits to the deaths of many many Mexicans.  

To illustrate I mentioned the case of the murders of the young teachers in training in Iguala, Guerrero in September of last year. It was a case that shook Mexico even as Mexicans have grown used to reports of drug-related, stranger-than-fiction, horrifying violence. The people killed were mostly indigenous, Spanish and Nahuatl-speaking students at a teachers college.  On the morning of their capture and eventual death, they were commandeering busses to take protestors to the annual commemoration of the student massacre of 1968 in Tlatelolco, Mexico City.  It’s an annual ritual that is certainly strange to American eyes but the backstory is a fascinating piece of history and culture that you can read about using the link to The Borderlands piece below. 

So yesterday, narco sub-boss El Gil was captured.  In November of last year El Gil posted a narco-manta, a kind of twitter post used by narcos as part of their PR campaigns—except rather than post them on a computer and limit themselves to 140 characters they’re typically scribed by hand onto bedsheet-like banners and hung from places where they’ll be seen.  Same idea anyway—even narcos need marketing apparatuses.  Confusingly, the manta is signed by El Gil and on it he claims to have been the author of the killings and then goes on to implicate local government office holders and local and state police in the act.  More confoundingly he claims to be willing to turn himself in after the government captures 80% of his own gang. 

I’ll wait for more well-informed narco-experts to explain how a manta like this makes sense for El Gil (he knew the heat was coming and he didn’t want to go down alone?  In some strange turn of conscience he realized that he was just a cog in a wheel of violent and corrupt machinery?  Hey, it’s not just us narcos, we’re all in this together?  Hey world, how stupid are you to believe that we narcos can run the show without the (hired) help of the police and government?...ok, but is he really that concerned about his reputation?  He doesn’t want to be seen as the only bad guy?  Really??).  In the meantime, the punchline is that this guy was caught.  The federal government, a few days past independence day, can claim to have effectively responded to the atrocities in Iguala and count this incident as an exception to the 90% non-conviction rate for crimes in Mexico (assuming El Gil gets convicted).

Cynics may wonder about the timing, about why others implicated haven’t been arrested and tried, about whether El Gil is a scapegoat that will allow the case to be closed without getting too many officials in trouble and thus leave mostly undisturbed the long chain of financial beneficiaries of the drug trade, about whether capturing this guy makes any difference since really, he’s just a symptom (granted a symptom who does bad things--but they all do), about who really was involved, about the basic motive for killing these guys in the first place--oh right, WHY did this happen?  The papers report that it was a simple case of mistaken identity, that El Gil thought the normalistas were part of a rival gang called Los Rojos.  Granted, the normalistas were wearing bandanas over their faces when they were caught but none of them were armed with anything more than rocks!  Sound like a dangerous band of narcos to you?  Seems to me that narcos speak violence pretty fluently and that they would know who was who when it came down to it.  Maybe they realized it but by the time they had them all they didn’t want the normalistas to be able to identify them?

 

Confusion aside, I must confess that I’m glad this guy got caught, especially if we can shed more light on what happened to the dead. I think one of the greatest crimes against the dead is for the living to not be able to tell their story, to not know what happened to their loved ones.  I don’t imagine there will be much peace from knowing that El Gil will be behind bars (hopefully for longer than El Chapo) but I do imagine more pieces to the puzzle are a welcome bit of news for those close to the crime.  And really for all of us who care about Mexico.  

I’m left with the question of what to do about the narcos?  I mean, where do you start?  This is not a case of mediation and dialogue—except maybe to negotiate narco truces, which admittedly, when well negotiated, seem to cause less death.  I don’t even think it’s a case of just enforcing the law.  There is so much money at play and so many people benefiting and the penalties for leaving the scene so high (ie death and dismemberment, probably not in that order) that traditional law enforcement and even government-sanctioned targeted killings just aren’t working.  Billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives later, I don’t think we can say, well, we’re just not fighting hard enough or putting enough force into this.  Seems to me it’s a case of wholesale change of the system and the rules.  Every change in the system and rules brings unexpected and unwanted challenges and obstacles.  But in this case, I think we can all agree that the devil we know is pretty terrible and the devil we don’t know looks good, really good: like a taco al pastor with just the right amount of crisp on the pork and with a super-juicy BIG chunk of pineapple in it all atop a homemade, melt-in-your-mouth tortilla washed down with a chilled apple soda.

Who were the normalistas in Mexico?  Teachers.  From a teachers college.  Here’s a bit of a description: http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2014/10/who-are-normalistas-radicals.html

And if you are curious about how it all went down, The Intercept did an incredible piece of reporting on the events of late September, 2014. It’s both an incredibly hard piece to read and something you can’t stop reading after you start. 

https://theintercept.co/ayotzinapa/

And finally, the news clip about El Gil:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-34287277

September 16th is Mexican Independence Day. Please celebrate by buying your illegal drugs locally.

As long as the US insists on outsourcing the production and traffic of illegal drugs, Independence Day is an illusion

Or

What do Egyptian bombs, black American prisoners and 100,000 dead Mexicans have to do with one another?

Today Mexicans will gather in public squares throughout the country for the Grito de Independencia, Mexican Independence Day.  All of Mexico will be out to celebrate over 200 years of (almost uninterrupted) self-rule after throwing off the Spanish yoke as so many other Latin American countries did after Napoleon decided he would invade the Iberian Peninsula way back in 1807.  Taking advantage of Spain’s compromised ability to hold on, Mexico declared independence in 1810.  So, Viva México!  

It’s an interesting time to love Mexico and its people.  Just yesterday Egyptian military forces blew up a tour bus looking for refreshments in the desert.  The Egyptians were apparently using Apache Helicopters, probably donated by the USA in its never ending effort to bring "stability" to that country by any means necessary.  It brings to light some of the darker ways in which globalization connects us all.  It happened to be Mexican tourists but it could have been anyone from anywhere.  Who is responsible?  Is it a simple case of criminal negligence from an army commander who can’t read a map, understand an intelligence report or follow an order?  Is a certain amount of collateral damage inevitable sooner or later in the quest for a regional balance of power?  Or is it the fault of terrorists and extremist groups for pushing our security efforts to the limit as a result of continually violating the basic norms of trust that are the glue of our global society?  After all, what is terrorism but an exploitation of the spaces we mostly take (or used to take) for granted as safe—the office, the plane, the train, the market, the church, etc.?  It’s all of them of course and on Mexican Independence Day it reminds me that independence is an illusion unless we are all working constructively together on making peace with one another.  The apparently endless appetite for targeted killing and repression of groups who feel differently than their governments seems only to create more dissent, extremism and senseless death.  

But I digress, last year around this time, we were all incredulous at the news of the disappearance of 40 young, rural educators in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico.  There is no public certainty around what happened to these young idealists but it seems to be related to some kind of collusion between local government and narco traffickers.  We’ve grown used to atrocities in Mexico.  Since 2000, there have been over 100,000 Mexican deaths in the war over drugs and drug trafficking.  But the events in Iguala got our attention as the deaths we’ve grown most used to are from the warring armies of the drug lords and the Mexican government, police, journalists, government officials and the occasional innocent bystander, not the young idealists out to bring hope and knowledge to the forgotten parts of Mexico. 

Which brings me back to the issue of Independence.  Why are so many Mexicans dying?  They are dying because of the endless and looping turf wars among the drug manufacturers and distributors.  And here’s the kicker, while we have a thriving demand for drugs in Mexico, we are neighbors to the biggest drug addicts in the world, the inhabitants of the United States of America.  So in Mexico we are dying by the thousands because in the US we need our fix.  Our fix of anything and everything we can get our hands on.  And similar to our response to the security threats posed by certain groups around the world, rather than take an approach to that seeks to understand people’s needs and demands, we choose to punish and punish hard in order to deter the activity we fear and detest.  But it’s not working.  There are more drugs than ever available in the market today and our prisons are full and they are mostly full of black people and other people of color (60% of those imprisoned are people of color according to the NAACP).  But who is using the drugs for which Mexicans are dying and people of color in this country are going to prison?  Here are a couple of startling facts from the NAACP:

·       Five times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites. 

·       African Americans represent 12% of the total population of drug users, but 38% of those arrested for drug offenses and 59% of those in state prison for a drug offense. 

So what we have is a deep ambivalence towards our drugs.  We want them, we demand them and we crave them.  We can’t stop using them (though truthfully, have we ever tried?  Have we ever invested in prevention and treatment the way we invest in bombs, surveillance and armaments of all kinds?).  Because we don’t like the social fall out of drug dealing and drug use, we’ve decided to imprison people of color in this country (because as whites it’s harder to imprison our friends, family and neighbors—the ones most likely to use drugs) and we’ve decided to let the Mexicans kill themselves over who can provide us with our precious product.  

So while we are walking around trying to find the best local, organically produced fruit and vegetables and meat, may I ask you all to take the same care with your drugs?  Do whatever you like in your homes, but please, buy local.  Otherwise that joint you light up or that MDMA you take to the party might be the death of someone far, far away or lead to the imprisonment of someone you'll never meet.

I was once opposed to the notion of legalizing drugs in the United States, thinking that it would create more demand from users who might have previously abstained for fear of legal consequences.  I thought this demand would cause an increase in production and trafficking in Mexico which would in turn cause more death and social destruction.  The legalization of pot in Colorado and Washington has proven me both right and wrong.  For one thing, usage has increased among teens in Colorado, gang-related crimes have increased and trafficking to neighboring states has increased and Nebraska and Oklahoma are irritated.  But interestingly, there has been a drop in imports of marijuana from Mexico.  There are varying numbers and the precise amounts are never known since what is captured is always a percentage of what is trafficked but it seems that imports of Mexican pot have fallen by 20% to 40%.  That’s a lot less money in the pockets of Mexican cartels, less money to buy American weapons, less money to buy American trained Mexican soldiers and less money to invest in things like human trafficking and other nasty business.  So yes, let's take ownership of the drug problem, let's legalize drugs and be smarter about how we're going to deal with the consequences.  Let's invest in prevention and treatment, in proper regulation and taxation and make law enforcement smarter with what we know about who uses, when and where.  

Anyone who says we're too stupid to notice that the Mexican government is cleverly sending us their rapists and murderers misses the subject (and just about everything else but let's focus on the subject): it's us, we bankroll them every day through our bad habits.  You don't want them here?  Stop funding their business.



So at the stroke of midnight between September 15th and 16th when Mexicans are celebrating their independence from Spain as a result of French greed, I’m looking forward to a day when the US can be free from its dependence on Mexican drugs which will be the day Mexicans can truly get to work on their own drug problem and we in the US can too.

http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

http://time.com/3801889/us-legalization-marijuana-trade/

http://www.newsweek.com/unexpected-side-effects-legalizing-weed-339931