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.
And finally, the news clip about El Gil:
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