IXTEPEC, MEXICO -- As the Mexican government condemns a new immigration law in Arizona as cruel and xenophobic, illegal migrants passing through Mexico are routinely robbed, raped and kidnapped by criminal gangs that often work alongside corrupt police, according to human rights advocates.
Immigration experts and Catholic priests who shelter the travelers say that Mexico's strict laws to protect the rights of illegal migrants are often ignored and that undocumented migrants from Central America face a brutal passage through the country. They are stoned by angry villagers, who fear that the Central Americans will bring crime or disease, and are fleeced by hustlers. Mexican police and authorities often demand bribes.
Mexico detained and deported more than 64,000 illegal migrants last year, according to the National Migration Institute. A few years ago, Mexico detained 200,000 undocumented migrants. The lower numbers are the result of tougher enforcement on the U.S. border, the global economic slowdown and, say some experts, the robbery and assaults migrants face in Mexico.
The National Commission on Human Rights, a government agency, estimates that 20,000 migrants are kidnapped each year in Mexico.
While held for ransom, increasingly at the hands of Mexico's powerful drug cartels, many migrants are tortured -- threatened with execution, beaten with bats and submerged in buckets of water or excrement.
"They put a plastic bag over your head and you can't breathe. They tell you if you don't give them the phone numbers" of family members the kidnappers can call to demand payment for a migrant's release, "they say the next time we'll just let you die," said Jose Alirio Luna Moreno, a broad-shouldered young man from El Salvador, interviewed at a shelter in the southern state of Oaxaca.
Luna said he was held for three days this month in Veracruz by the Zeta drug trafficking organization, which demanded $1,000 to set him free. He said he was abducted by men in police uniforms and taken to a safe house with 26 others.
Of the 64,000 migrants detained and expelled by Mexico last year, the Mexican government granted only 20 humanitarian visas, which would have allowed them to stay in Mexico while they testified and pressed charges against their assailants.
"We have a government in Mexico that emphatically criticizes the new immigration law -- which is perfectly valid, to criticize a law with widespread consequences -- but at the same time doesn't have the desire to address the same problem within its own borders," said Alberto Herrera, executive director of Amnesty International in Mexico.
"The violations in human rights that migrants from Central America face in Mexico are far worse than Mexicans receive in the United States," said Jorge Bustamante of the University of Notre Dame and the College of the Border in Tijuana, who has reported on immigration in Mexico for the United Nations.
U.N. officials describe the kidnapping of illegal migrants in Mexico as "epidemic" in scope.
"We have definitely begun to see a greater degree of violence in the shipping of migrants north to the United States," said Juan Carlos Calleros Alarcón, a director of policy at the National Migration Institute, which is responsible for detaining and deporting illegal visitors.
He said local authorities appear to be involved in the kidnappings.
The migrants are preyed on by roving gangs that operate along the Guatemalan border. Once in Mexico, many migrants ride on dangerous freight trains to bypass immigration checkpoints. Local police, taxi drivers and city officials often demand bribes or deliver them to kidnappers, according to the migrants and research by government and human rights workers.
Amnesty International says that as many as six in 10 women experience sexual violence during the journey.
Mexican government officials stress that only a handful of complaints are filed against federal immigration agents. The government has sped up the process of returning illegal migrants to their countries. Detention centers are newly built buildings; the migrants ride home in air-conditioned buses.
At a meeting Wednesday, Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Mont, the U.S. ambassador and the governors of the southern Mexican states pledged to work harder to protect migrants.
Like 'merchandise'
The small city of Ixtepec in the humid hills of Oaxaca is a crossroads for illegal migrants moving north on trains. At the edge of town, along the tracks at a shelter for migrants run by the Catholic church, 100 migrants slept on cardboard in the shade, waiting for an afternoon meal, before they move on.
Sergio Alejandro Barillas Perez, a Guatemalan at the shelter, said he was kidnapped in the gulf state of Veracruz this month and held for three days by men who said they worked for the Zetas.
He said his kidnappers demanded $10,000 for him and his girlfriend. "They told me if you don't give us the phone numbers, we'll kill your girlfriend," said Barillas, whose face was still bruised. "We were all in a house, a normal house. When they beat us, they would put a rag in our mouths and they turned on the music, loud, like they're having a party."
He said the kidnappers knocked out his girlfriend's teeth and dragged her away. He and others escaped. He said he does not know what happened to his girlfriend.
"These migrants aren't people -- they are merchandise to the mafias, who traffic drugs, weapons, sex and migrants," said Alejandro Solalinde, the Catholic priest who runs the Brothers of the Road shelter in Ixtepec. "They suck everything out of them."
The priest said that federal authorities do not protect the migrants and that local officials also look the other way, or take their cut from the robbers and traffickers.
Solalinde has battled local authorities who want to shut down his shelter, which feeds as many as 66,000 passing migrants in a year. More than 100 were at the shelter last week.
The priest said many Mexicans are distrustful of the outsiders. In 2008, townspeople became enraged when a Nicaraguan man who was living in Ixtepec was accused of raping a young girl. As police and the mayor were outside the gates at the shelter, Solalinde said, 100 angry protesters got inside.
"They had stones and sticks and gasoline," the priest said. "They wanted to burn us down."
Researcher Michael E. Miller in Mexico City contributed to this report.
By Steve Fainaru and William Booth Thursday, December 31, 2009; A06
The Flores brothers had never looked like much in the eyes of local narcotics agents. But by the time it all came crashing down this year, the drug-distribution network allegedly run by the 28-year-old twins from the Mexican American barrios of Chicago was one of the largest and most sophisticated ever seen in the U.S. heartland, according to interviews and federal indictments.
Pedro and Margarito Flores allegedly operated as an American annex to a major Mexican drug mafia, and their arrest and the dismantling of their purported network opened a window on how powerful Mexican cartels operate in the United States, distributing cocaine and heroin with the corporate efficiency of UPS, while back home competitors are tortured and beheaded.
The fortunes of the Flores twins changed because the war on the cartels being waged in Mexico with U.S. help has reshaped the criminal landscape in both countries, generating unprecedented violence but also contributing to the kinds of vicious splits and betrayals that helped in the brothers' arrests, according to narcotics agents and federal indictments.
The sprawling drug operation was essentially a $700 million-a-year distributorship for the Sinaloa cartel, the largest criminal organization in Mexico. It used tractor-trailers to import two tons of cocaine each month for distribution from Chicago warehouses, with cash proceeds shrink-wrapped and shipped back across the border.
The crackdown launched by Mexican President Felipe Calderón has cost more than 16,000 lives and been widely criticized in both countries as ineffective in reining in the drug barons and slowing the flow of drugs into the United States. But the campaign has exposed networks such as the one allegedly run by the Flores brothers, which shipped cocaine from Los Angeles to Chicago and then distributed it to cities across the Midwest, according to interviews and the indictments.
Other than the indictments, few court papers have been filed in the case. The Flores brothers are in U.S. custody; attempts to reach their attorneys were unsuccessful.
Chicago is hardly alone as a home to Mexican cartels; the traffickers operate in 230 U.S. cities, the Justice Department says. But the competition in Chicago might be unusually fierce, with each of the five major Mexican cartels vying for business.
"Much like any legitimate corporation, the drug organizations utilize Chicago as both a distribution and trans-shipment point for their product," Stephen A. Luzinski, acting special agent-in-charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office here, said in an interview. "The extensive accessibility to various modes of transportation, as well as the large and diverse population with an established customer base, makes Chicago an ideal location as a hub."
Pedro and Margarito Flores were born into a Mexican immigrant family with strong ties to the narcotics trade. Chicago detectives say their father ran drugs for the Sinaloa cartel, as did an older brother. The family melded into the culture in rough neighborhoods such as Little Village and Pilsen, where the Latin Kings and Two-Six gangs fight for turf.
The brothers eventually took over a barbershop and a Mexican restaurant called Mama's Kitchen. They moved to a more expensive neighborhood and drove better cars. But unlike in Mexico, where high-level traffickers are household names, the twins had low profiles.
In Chicago, "you are only as good as your connection," said a former drug dealer who served 10 years in prison and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. And the Flores brothers reportedly had the best connections in town.
Authorities said the brothers worked for two factions of the Sinaloa cartel. One was headed by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the most wanted man in Mexico, recently named by Forbes magazine as the 41st most-powerful person in the world. The other was by Arturo Beltrán Leyva, whose self-appointed nickname -- the Boss of All Bosses -- frequently appeared on messages displayed next to mutilated corpses.
Factional trade, warfare
As described in court documents, the brothers' reach extended deep into Mexico, where Guzmán, Beltrán Leyva and their associates used Boeing 747 jets, private aircraft, submarines, container ships, fishing vessels and speedboats to consolidate enormous shipments of cocaine from Central and South America, including Colombia and Panama.
The Sinaloa cartel in Mexico was tasked with getting the drugs across the border for pickup in a warehouse outside Los Angeles. The Flores brothers allegedly employed dozens of operators to bring the drugs north, including truck drivers who concealed the contraband amid shipments of fruit, vegetables and other consumer goods, and off-loaded cocaine and heroin in the Chicago area at nondescript warehouses, condominiums and brick duplexes managed by their criminal gang. The drugs were split into smaller quantities and "fronted" to customers, who would pay after they sold the contraband on the street.
But the two Sinaloa factions split last year over the Mexican government's arrest of Beltrán Leyva's brother. The resulting violence consumed several Mexican states and, ultimately, Chicago, as the factions fought over "control of lucrative narcotics trafficking routes into the United States, and the loyalty of wholesale narcotics customers, including the Flores Brothers," according to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The brothers were said to be caught in the middle, with both Sinaloa factions threatening violence against them to maintain control over the critical distribution network. Ultimately, U.S. authorities were able to infiltrate the purported Flores crew, setting up sham cocaine sales to make dozens of arrests and to seize more than three metric tons of cocaine.
Pressure on both sides
It is not clear whether the Flores brothers are cooperating with the authorities, but they face life in prison if convicted, and authorities are seeking the forfeiture of more than $1.8 billion. In August, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the district, called the indictments "the most significant drug importation conspiracies ever charged in Chicago."
Authorities and people familiar with the drug trade say violence in Mexico and increased enforcement -- symbolized by the Flores case -- are having a dramatic effect on Chicago street sales, at least for now. The wholesale price for a kilo of cocaine -- about 2.2 pounds -- has surged in the past 18 months, from $18,000 to $29,000 and often more, according to authorities.
U.S. officials declined to discuss specifics of the case or whether information from the investigation helped lead Mexican authorities to Beltrán Leyva, who was killed this month during a two-hour gun and grenade battle with Mexican forces in the city of Cuernavaca.
But Anthony Placido, chief of intelligence for the DEA, said in an interview that pressure on both sides of the border has forced the cartels to rely increasingly on inexperienced operators such as the Flores twins.
"There have always been gatekeepers -- people who use their familial relationships to facilitate the movement of drugs across the border," Placido said. "Those people used to be gods, and they would control an area for years. Now they often last months before they are arrested or assassinated.
"What that creates is opportunities for a 28-year-old who . . . isn't worried about dying," he said.
Staff writer Kari Lydersen and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
By William Booth and Steve Fainaru Friday, December 18, 2009; A12
CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO -- Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the alleged leader of one of this country's top drug cartels, was killed Wednesday night in a two-hour gun and grenade battle with federal forces, ending the reign of a man who liked to describe himself as the "boss of bosses" in Mexico's criminal underworld.
Beltrán Leyva, born and raised in the lawless mountains of Sinaloa, where fields of poppies and marijuana carpet the hidden valleys, is a household name in Mexico and one of the highest-value targets captured or killed in President Felipe Calderón's bloody three-year-old war on the drug cartels.
At the global climate summit in Copenhagen, Calderón called the raid by marines "an important achievement for the government and people of Mexico." Mexico listed Beltrán Leyva as one of its "most wanted" drug barons and offered a $2 million bounty for his capture.
The U.S. government unsealed an indictment against Beltrán Leyva in August, charging that he and his former partners in a cartel known as the Federation were responsible for smuggling at least 200 tons of cocaine into the United States and shipping $6 billion in cash back to Mexico. The indictment detailed their operation in Chicago, which the cartel used as a hub to distribute drugs throughout the Midwest and as far away as Washington. U.S. officials estimate that about 90 percent of the cocaine sold in the United States comes through Mexico.
Four other members of Beltrán Leyva's organization died in the gunfight, at a ritzy apartment enclave in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City. One killed himself as he was being arrested.
Mexican authorities had been closing in on Beltrán Leyva in recent months, capturing and killing his junior associates. They raided a lavish party in the colonial town of Tepoztlan, near Cuernavaca, last week and killed three alleged Beltrán Leyva cartel members. Performing at the party was Ramón Ayala, a popular Texas-based singer, whose attorney denied that his client had any ties to organized crime. [On Thursday, a judge ordered Ayala jailed for up to 40 days pending investigation, the Associated Press reported.] In another near-miss, Beltrán Leyva associates were arrested after attending a baptism he hosted in Acapulco.
Beltrán Leyva was alleged to have masterminded a corruption racket involving high-level Mexican officials in the attorney general's office and federal police, including a former chief of the unit targeting organized crime, Noé Ramírez Mandujano. Ramírez is suspected to have taken almost $500,000 in bribes from Beltrán Leyva.
Mexican and U.S. drug officials had hinted for two months that authorities would soon capture some "big fish" in Mexico. The death of Beltrán Leyva follows a strategy pushed by officials on both sides of the border to go after his cartel's leadership.
"They are the big thinkers. . . . At the minimum, this will cause quite a bit of dislocation in the organization, and it is possible it could cause a power struggle within the cartel," said Tony Payan, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso and an authority on drug trafficking.
Beltrán Leyva and his brothers were once partners with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa cartel and the most famous drug lord in Mexico. Their bitter feud and split last year sparked a wave of grisly violence, during which foes were routinely kidnapped and tortured to death. Their decapitated bodies were then dumped in public spaces, accompanied by notes taunting officials and their adversaries and signed "the boss of bosses."
"This is a very strong strike against organized crime in Mexico," Attorney General Arturo Chávez said after the killing of Beltrán Leyva.
But, Chávez added, "in this war, nobody really ever wins."
Bold theft of $1 billion in oil, resold in U.S., has dealt a major blow to the treasury
By Steve Fainaru and William Booth washington post foreign service Sunday, December 13, 2009
MALTRATA, MEXICO -- Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico's pipelines over the past two years, in a vast and audacious conspiracy that is bleeding the national treasury, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and the state-run oil company.
Using sophisticated smuggling networks, the traffickers have transported a portion of the pilfered petroleum across the border to sell to U.S. companies, some of which knew that it was stolen, according to court documents and interviews with American officials involved in an expanding investigation of oil services firms in Texas.
The widespread theft of Mexico's most vital national resource by criminal organizations represents a costly new front in President Felipe Calderón's war against the drug cartels, and it shows how the traffickers are rapidly evolving from traditional narcotics smuggling to activities as diverse as oil theft, transport and sales.
Oil theft has been a persistent problem for the state-run Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, but the robbery increased sharply after Calderón launched his war against the cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006. The drug war has claimed more than 16,000 lives and has led the cartels, which rely on drug trafficking for most of their revenue, to branch out into other illegal activities.
Authorities said they have traced much of the oil rustling to the Zetas, a criminal organization founded by former military commandos. Although the Zetas initially served as a protection arm of the powerful Gulf cartel, they now call their own shots and dominate criminal enterprise in the oil-rich states of Veracruz and Tamaulipas.
"The Zetas are a parallel government," said Eduardo Mendoza Arellano, a federal lawmaker who heads a national committee on energy. "They practically own vast stretches of the pipelines, from the highway to the very door of the oil companies."
The Zetas earn millions of dollars by "taxing" the oil pipelines -- organizing the theft themselves or taking a cut from anyone who does the stealing, according to Mexican authorities. The U.S. Treasury Department this summer designated two Zeta commanders as narcotics "kingpins," which allows authorities to seize assets.
The Zetas often work with former Pemex employees, according to Ramón Pequeño García, chief of anti-drug operations at Mexico's Public Security Ministry. The former employees "are highly skilled people who have the technical knowledge to extract oil from the pipelines. They are now under the control of the Zetas," Pequeño said.
Across the border
This year, executives of four Texas companies pleaded guilty to felony charges of conspiring to receive and sell millions of dollars worth of stolen petroleum condensate. U.S. law enforcement officials said in interviews that they have no evidence showing that the men were connected to drug traffickers.
During his September arraignment in Houston, Arnoldo Maldonado, president of Y Gas & Oil, pleaded guilty to receiving about $327,000 to coordinate at least three deliveries of tankers filled with stolen condensate to another Texas company, Continental Fuels, according to a court transcript of the hearing.
Asked by U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr. how the condensate had been stolen from Pemex, Maldonado replied: "I have no idea on that, sir."
Donald Schroeder, a former president of Houston-based Trammo Petroleum, pleaded guilty in May to buying $2 million worth of stolen Mexican condensate, according to a transcript of the hearing. Schroeder re-sold the condensate to another company, BASF, for a $150,000 profit, prosecutors told the court.
A spokesman for BASF, which has not been implicated in the case, said the company was unaware that the material was stolen and is cooperating with the investigation.
In August, U.S. authorities presented the Mexican government with an oversize check for $2.4 million as a repayment.
A sophisticated operation
Pemex reported losing $715 million worth of oil to theft last year. The company said it discovered 396 clandestine taps. This year, Pemex projects it will lose at least $350 million to oil pilfering. Nearly half of the thefts occur in the rugged hills around Veracruz, a largely rural state situated in a region with 2,136 miles of pipeline running from the Gulf of Mexico to refineries in other parts of the country.
To steal the oil, Mexican authorities said, thieves sometimes use safe houses from where they build extensive tunnel networks leading to the pipelines. They fabricate powerful drills that enable them to puncture the highly pressurized steel pipes and extract the oil without causing spills or suspicious drops in pressure. Pemex officials said they have found clandestine taps with as many as five spigots.
In Maltrata, in central Veracruz, Pemex officials showed a reporter a four-foot-deep, six-foot-wide trench ringed by yellow police tape that they said had been dug by thieves to reach an underground pipeline in a clearing near a federal highway last month.
After perforating the exposed two-foot pipeline using a hand-tooled drill and connecting valves to regulate the pressure, the officials said, the traffickers ran a 300-yard hose through the brush to a tanker and filled it with about 200 barrels of crude oil.
"They are very sophisticated -- in some cases, it's three kilometers from the pipeline to the tanker where they deposit the oil," said Mauro Cáceres, who oversees the pipeline network in the region. "It is just constant. They take, and they take, and they take, and they take."
Pemex lost 140,141 barrels of oil to theft last month in the Veracruz region alone, the company reported. At $75 a barrel, the current market price for Mexican oil, the loss comes to $10 million. The company reports that oil rustlers are stealing from the pipelines in all 31 Mexican states.
Defending the pipelines
"When they steal this oil, it's not just a regular crime," said Mendoza, the federal deputy. "It becomes a crime against society, because the people who steal this oil the next day are using it to kidnap us. Tomorrow, with that oil money, they are shipping drugs."
The theft is both a symbolic and financial blow to the Mexican government. Taxes paid by Pemex account for 40 percent of the federal budget. Pemex still owns and operates almost every gas station in Mexico. Juan José Suárez, Pemex's chief executive officer, said in an interview at the company's headquarters in Mexico City that the oil theft is a crime against all Mexican citizens: "This is not taking from Pemex; it's taking from the owners of Pemex. This is the net worth of everybody."
Mexico has launched an all-out campaign to defend the pipelines, drawing in the army, the attorney general's office, the Interior Ministry and the customs service. During the past two years, the government has conducted helicopter overflights, installed electronic detection devices inside the pipelines and beefed up Pemex's private security force.
Suárez estimates that Pemex will spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three years defending its pipelines. With the company's maintenance staff overwhelmed, Pemex assembled 20-man teams this year to repair breaches caused by theft.
"The teams are working day and night," Cáceres said.
Pemex sent out a call for help to the federal government in 2007. In June that year, Mexican customs officials informed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that they had discovered dozens of Mexican companies that appeared to be conspiring with U.S. firms to export stolen petroleum products across the border.
Working closely with the Mexican customs service, ICE investigators said, they soon uncovered a network of Mexican and American companies that shipped stolen oil to the United States in tankers, stored it in aboveground containers in Texas and then shipped it in barges to end users in the United States.
With oil prices then at record highs, the scheme allowed U.S. companies to buy petroleum products at below-market value. The scam involved hundreds of people, according to Jerry Robinette, special agent in charge of the ICE office of investigations in San Antonio, which is overseeing the probe.
"The folks that made the most amount of money are the people who are going to harm us the most, and that was the organized crime in Mexico," Robinette said.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
Poor Mexico. So far from God and so close to the United States. —Porfirio Díaz, dictator of Mexico from 1876 to 1880 and 1884 to 1911
Those famous words came to mind when another man named Díaz offered me an equally concise observation about the realities of life in the country today: “In Mexico it is dangerous to speak the truth. It is even dangerous to know the truth.”
His full name is Fernando Díaz Santana. He hosts two AM-radio news-and-commentary shows in the small Chihuahuan city of Nuevo Casas Grandes. A stocky, broad-faced man in late middle age, he projects an air of warmth, openness, and intelligence. As he tells me that it’s dangerous to speak or know the truth, the half-rueful, half-apologetic expression in his eyes makes it plain that he’d rather not keep his mouth shut and his mind closed.
He’s received text messages from listeners cautioning him to be careful of what he says on the air. He takes these friendly warnings seriously; failure to heed them could bring a death sentence like the one meted out to Armando Rodríguez, a crime reporter murdered by an unidentified gunman in November 2008 in Juárez, the violent border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The fear of suffering a similar fate is a powerful incentive for self-censorship, for training a naturally inquisitive mind to acquire ignorance.
“So now we give just the objective facts,” Díaz says as he sits facing me in a stuffy, windowless rear room of the radio station, in Nuevo Casas Grandes’s central business district. He and the co-host of his afternoon show, David Andrew (pronounced Da-veed An-dray-oo), explain that the “objective facts” are those reported by the police or city hall or some other official source. Though the accuracy of such facts is often questionable, no questions dare be asked. “We say nothing more,” Díaz adds. “As long as we don’t get too deeply into a story, we are safe.”
I am reminded of Winnie Verloc, the character in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent who “felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.”
More than 14,000 people have been killed in the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón mobilized the army to fight Mexico’s half-dozen major drug cartels. Virtually none of those homicides has been solved, partly because witnesses suffer short-term memory loss when questioned, and partly because the police, for various reasons, also feel profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.
Rodríguez’s death is illustrative. His colleagues believe he was killed for an article he wrote linking relatives of Patricia González, the Chihuahuan state attorney general, to narcotics trafficking.
That is not idle theorizing. Jorge Luis Aguirre, a writer for LaPolaka.com, an online Juárez news service, had written extensively about corruption in the Chihuahuan state government, and did not spare González either. On the night of November 13, 2008, as he was driving to Rodríguez’s wake, he got a call on his cell phone. The male caller said, “You’re next, son of a bitch!” and hung up.
Aguirre immediately packed up his wife and sons and fled to El Paso, where he sought asylum. In March, testifying at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, he stated that he’d identified the source of the threats:
“Victor Valencia, a representative of the governor of the state of Chihuahua, had sent people to warn me to ‘tone down’ my criticisms of the prosecutor, Patricia González, because if I didn’t, he was going to kill me, using the Juárez cartel’s preferred method of kidnapping followed by execution.”
The aftermath reveals a lot about today’s Mexico. Patricia González remains in her post. Victor Valencia has been promoted to chief of public security in Juárez. The federal deputy attorney general handling the Rodríguez murder case, Jesús Martín Huerta Yedra, was shot to death in his car, along with his secretary. The investigation has since gone nowhere, to no one’s surprise. As the newspaper El Diario editorialized,
Friends of the journalist, who preferred not to give their names for security reasons, mentioned that they do not feel frustrated by the lack of advances in the case since from the beginning, they felt that the authorities had no intention of doing anything to clarify the crime.
To clarify the crime. Of the many things Mexico lacks these days, clarity is near the top of the list. It is dangerous to know the truth. Finding it is frustrating. Statements by U.S. and Mexican government officials, repeated by a news media that prefers simple story lines, have fostered the impression in the United States that the conflict in Mexico is between Calderón’s white hats and the crime syndicates’ black hats. The reality is far more complicated, as suggested by this statistic: out of those 14,000 dead, fewer than 100 have been soldiers. Presumably, army casualties would be far higher if the war were as straightforward as it’s often made out to be.
Slideshow: Photographer Juliàan Cardona narrates a slideshow of images from the Juárez drug wars
What, then, accounts for the carnage, the worst Mexico has suffered since the revolution, a century ago? To be sure, many of the dead have been cartel criminals. Some were killed in firefights with the army, others in battles between the cartels for control of smuggling routes, and still others in power struggles within the cartels. The toll includes more than 1,000 police officers, some of whom, according to Mexican press reports, were executed by soldiers for suspected links to drug traffickers. Conversely, a number of the fallen soldiers may have been killed by policemen moonlighting as cartel hit men, though that cannot be proved. Meanwhile, human-rights groups have accused the military of unleashing a reign of terror—carrying out forced disappearances, illegal detentions, acts of torture, and assassinations—not only to fight organized crime but also to suppress dissidents and other political troublemakers. What began as a war on drug trafficking has evolved into a low-intensity civil war with more than two sides and no white hats, only shades of black. The ordinary Mexican citizen—never sure who is on what side, or who is fighting whom and for what reason—retreats into a private world where he becomes willfully blind, deaf, and above all, dumb.
Which brings us back to Fernando Díaz and his avoidance of truth.
I have come to see him at the suggestion of Emilio Gutiérrez, who fled to the U.S. because army officers threatened him with death. During an interview at his hiding place north of the border, Gutiérrez told me about a mysterious event that occurred on February 12, 2008. Teams of gunmen, riding in SUVs and pickup trucks and described by witnesses as “dressed like soldiers,” swept through Nuevo Casas Grandes and six neighboring communities between midnight and dawn, kidnapping and executing people.
The convoys covered 170 miles altogether, rolling through military checkpoints unimpeded. In Nuevo Casas Grandes, the “armed commandos,” as they were called by the Mexican media, set fire to the house of a police subcommander and shot him to death as he ran outside. Two other people, one of them the uncle of a midlevel narcotics trafficker, were also executed. The press reported that 14 more were abducted, but the actual number was believed to be much higher. All the victims, except two who were apparently snatched by mistake and later released, vanished without a trace.
Gutiérrez, a reporter in El Diario’s Ascensión bureau, covered the operation. From what he’d seen with his own eyes and from interviews with eyewitnesses, he concluded that the perpetrators were dressed like soldiers for the simple reason that they were soldiers. An operation on that scale, he reasoned, could not have been conducted by gangs of pistoleros hastily thrown together: it required thorough planning, accurate intelligence, discipline, and coordination. Nor could pistoleros have driven through army roadblocks without being stopped. If the raid wasn’t military, it must have been conducted with the army’s cooperation.
That wasn’t what Gutiérrez reported, however. He told me that his boss, José Martínez Valdéz, the editor of El Diario’s editions in northwest Chihuahua, instructed him to “not cause problems by writing that this was military.” Gutiérrez’s silence did not win him any points with the army. Five months later, he was warned that the military was going to kill him, and he was forced to leave the country.
But why, I asked, would soldiers maraud the countryside on a murder-and-kidnapping spree? He replied that the raid was not part of the Mexican government’s war on the drug cartels but a struggle between two powerful cartels: the Juárez organization, headed by Vicente Carillo, and the Sinaloa federation, whose boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, is the most-wanted man in Mexico. Gutiérrez said that in this instance the gunmen, whoever they were, had been after people they thought were working for the Juárez cartel.
“It’s an open secret in Mexico,” he said, “that the army is fighting the [Juárez] cartel to weaken them and pave the way for Guzmán.”
Open secret or no, an allegation that soldiers may have acted on behalf of a drug lord needs to be substantiated. After all, Calderón’s counter-narcotics strategy relies, with U.S. support, almost exclusively on the military.
With a short list of contacts provided by Gutiérrez, my interpreter, Molly Molloy, and I enter Mexico through the Palomas border crossing and head south into the Chihuahuan Desert. I have just been in Juárez and am relieved to not be going back to that industrialized border city—utterly charmless in the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Juárez’s main product now is the corpse. Last year, drug-related violence there claimed more than 1,600 lives, and the toll for the first nine months of this year soared beyond 1,800, and mounts daily. That makes Juárez, population 1.5 million, the most violent city in the world. Two lines of graffiti summed up a place where not only law and order but civilization itself has broken down: Mi ciudad pide clemencia en su dementia (“My city asks for mercy in its madness”), and Mi ciudad es un negro lamento un aullido infinito (“My city is a black lament, an eternal howl”).
Nuevo Casas Grandes lies on a plateau near a fertile valley—cowboy-and-farmer country where cattle graze on the high desert ranges and apple and pecan orchards form tidy ranks on the city’s outskirts. The city itself, with some 51,000 people, is known to archaeologically minded tourists for its proximity to Paquimé, the site of ancient pueblo ruins. It looks prosperous by the standards of interior Mexico, with wide streets, a few decent hotels and restaurants, an airport, and several auto dealerships selling Fords and Jeeps and other familiar makes. If it weren’t for all the Mexican license plates, I could believe we were in a town in the southwestern United States.
Our first call is at the offices of El Diario, housed in a whitewashed villa on the main drag. Molloy and I are hoping to meet with José Martínez Valdéz, who is Gutiérrez’s former editor, and the news director, Victor Valdovinos. They can answer some of our questions and provide introductions to city officials. But repeated attempts to see Martínez are unsuccessful—he manages to dodge us all afternoon. We do get a very brief audience with Valdovinos. When we tell him what we are there for, he flinches and says, “You don’t want to talk to me,” then vanishes.
That leaves Fernando Díaz, whom we find at the radio station as he and David Andrew wrap up their afternoon show. They are willing to talk to us, and we go into the back room. Andrew, a heavyset, 30-ish man with dense carbon-black hair, shuts the door, either to muffle the noise from outside or to make sure no one overhears our conversation.
In the Mexico Mexicans have to live in, Díaz begins, life is “very hard, very bad,” a statement he underscores with a statistic: last year, 115 homicides were committed in Nuevo Casas Grandes and its surrounding communities. That works out to a murder rate more than 20 times as high as New York City’s.
It’s at this juncture that he makes his comment about the dangers of speaking or knowing the truth. I begin inquiring about the February 2008 incident, but Díaz and his younger colleague aren’t eager to discuss it.
I don’t get anywhere, though Díaz casts doubt on Gutiérrez’s assertion that the raid was a military operation. All of this talk about human-rights abuses by the army is “a myth,” Díaz insists. He is in fact cheered that an army battalion has been making rounds to bolster security in Nuevo Casas Grandes: “We are abandoned and unprotected here in northwest Chihuahua. It is a very big wish that the soldiers will bring peace. The army is the only group we can trust.” He adds by way of illustration that several sicarios, as professional assassins are called in Mexico, were arrested and confessed to killing 19 people in town.
Two of the sicarios, Andrew interjects, were his neighbors: “One guy worked in a car wash, the other guy was an army deserter.” Two others turned out to be auto salesmen—“nice guys in the day, killers by night,” Díaz says, as if he’s voicing over a trailer for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “You are talking to me, a radio announcer, but you can’t be sure that I’m not a sicario,” Díaz adds. “You say you’re an American reporter, but I don’t know that you’re not a sicario. You cannot trust anybody.” He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s contradicted his earlier remark that only the army can be trusted.
The question is, can the army be trusted, and if so, can it win this latest—and biggest—battle in the seemingly endless “war on drugs”? Calderón has deployed more than 45,000 troops (out of a total force of 230,000) throughout the country. Of that number, about 7,000, reinforced by 2,300 federal policemen, occupy Juárez as part of Operación Conjunta Chihuahua—the Joint Chihuahuan Operation. The army has taken over all the policing functions. The city is under undeclared martial law.
Although many ordinary Mexicans welcome the army’s intervention, certain that things would be far worse without it, approval has been far from universal. Claims of grievous abuses by the armed forces—unlawful detentions, disappearances, thefts, rapes, and murders—have increased sixfold in the past three years, according to Human Rights Watch. One hundred and seventy complaints have been filed in Chihuahua alone, says Gustavo de la Rosa, the former Chihuahua state ombudsman for Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission.
Leaving aside the question of whether militarizing the anti-narcotics campaign is the best way to go about things (a similar strategy in Colombia has been only partially successful), the fact is that, by destroying public trust in the armed forces, military misconduct undermines the entire effort, as I learned from a 50-year-old cleaning woman who now lives in Arizona and who asked to remain anonymous. She was visiting her aunt in Juárez last December when soldiers broke into a neighbor’s house, claiming that they were looking for a suspect.
“They didn’t say who,” the woman told me. “They tore her house apart, took her jewelry and her money, and said that if she complained about what they did they were going to come back and kill her. People are more afraid of the police and soldiers than they are of the narcos, because they’re very mean guys—not all, but many.”
The fear goes beyond undisciplined soldiers running amok. In an interview, de la Rosa told me that the president, elected in 2006 by a margin as thin as an ATM card, called out the army not merely to fight the cartels and eliminate a threat to national sovereignty but to consolidate his power and confer legitimacy on his presidency. “Calderón wants to show the Congress that the military is with him,” de la Rosa said. “And the military promised to support Calderón in exchange for being allowed out of the barracks, because the army wants to govern. Chihuahua is an experiment. What is happening here is in essence a military coup, a regional coup.” To support this contention, he cited a change he has had to make in his own work. Under normal circumstances, he would file complaints of abuse with the state governor, but now, he said, “the governor is ineffective, so I have to go to General Felipe de Jesús Espitia, the comandante of the 5th Military District.”
I was somewhat incredulous that the military was staging a creeping coup. To what end? I asked.
De la Rosa shrugged. “Actually, nobody really knows or understands what the military is up to,” he answered, hedging a bit. Then he asserted that the army intends not to stamp out drug trafficking but to “control” it. “So now if a drug cartel wants to move drugs into the U.S., who would they go to? To the governor? No, to the general.” (El Universal, Mexico’s largest newspaper, reported in September that de la Rosa had received death threats from the army, apparently because of his sharp criticisms; sources have told me he has taken temporary refuge in the U.S.)
As de la Rosa suggested, there is a dismal history of collusion between the armed forces and organized crime. In the late 1980s, the Mexican defense secretary was caught peddling protection to three drug organizations, which paid him a total of $10 million. In 1997, Mexico’s chief anti-narcotics officer was indicted for providing the Juárez cartel with classified drug-enforcement information in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes. In a 2001 essay in the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, a University of Texas criminologist, Patrick O’Day, cited several instances of Mexican soldiers’ guarding narcotics shipments and transporting them into the United States in military vehicles or by other means. These operations were so extensive and went on for so long that O’Day concluded that the army was a cartel unto itself.
But let us make the risky assumption that today’s army is no longer involved in drug trafficking. The belief that it is exploiting a weak government to advance agendas beyond its declared mission is widespread, and not without reason. While many of the crimes alleged to have been committed by the armed forces appear to be the random acts of rogue troops, others may be part of a directed campaign with three possible objectives.
One objective is laudable—to get information about drug trafficking. The problem is that, in de la Rosa’s words, “the army’s investigative techniques are kidnapping and torture.” But according to Cipriana Jurado, a veteran labor organizer and women’s-rights activist, the military has another purpose: trying to stifle dissent, she said, citing numerous arrests of political troublemakers. And, as Gutiérrez’s case indicates, the generals also may be seeking to clamp down on Mexico’s freewheeling press.
In seeking, much less speaking, the truth about what the army is up to, one often runs into the paradox of the Mexican reality: something dreadful happens and is then treated as if it hadn’t happened. Facts, like people, simply disappear.
I experience this myself as I tour the ruins of a Juárez drug-rehabilitation center with my friend Julián Cardona, a photographer and Reuters correspondent. The rehab clinic is in a shabby two-story building on an unpaved street lined with cinder-block hovels, old cars, and derelict buses. A wind-whipped urban grit that feels dirtier than desert dust pelts our faces as we enter the rectangular patio strewn with rubble, its walls gouged by bullet holes. Small rooms lead off the patio, each with a hand-painted phrase above its door—Cocina for kitchen, Sala de Juntas for meeting room, D-Tox, which needs no translation.
We enter the meeting room. Votive candles gutter in glass jars arranged around an image of Jesus Christ propped up in one corner. The walls are peppered with bullet holes and spattered with dried blood. Cardona tells me what happened here on a Wednesday evening, August 13, 2008, as an Assembly of God pastor named Socorro García and her deacon, Joel Valle, conducted a service for the patients. After they and about 20 addicts gathered in the meeting room to sing hymns and hold a prayer service, García took the podium for altar call. “Is there anyone here who was a Christian in the past,” she asked, “but who fell away into drugs and who would like to reconcile with God?” Several patients raised their hands. García summoned them.
Outside, a Ford pickup carrying a detachment of Mexican paratroopers was parked at an intersection no more than 50 yards away. Two other trucks pulled up in front of the rehab center. Eight men armed with assault rifles and 9-millimeter pistols and wearing bulletproof vests and ski masks piled out of the vehicles and rushed inside.
The shooting started in the patio, just as the patients were walking up to the podium in answer to García’s call. Some flung themselves to the floor, others ran for their lives or huddled against a wall. García stood at the podium, crying out, “Muchachos! Ask God for another chance to live!” At that moment, four gunmen burst inside and, in her words, started “shooting in all directions.”
García raised her hands and hollered above the gunshots, “Lord, send your angels to protect us!” A gunman looked at her through the eyeholes of his ski mask and she looked back. He stopped shooting. “I was right there in front of him,” García told Cardona. “He had already shot a lot of people, and one more life would have meant nothing to him, but he didn’t shoot. Why? Maybe God did not allow it.”
Neighbors called the Emergency Response Center, the equivalent of 911, but got no response. Accounts of the actions taken by the soldiers parked at the street corner differ. According to one, the soldiers stood by passively as the assassins jumped in their trucks and fled. According to another, they drove past the rehab center at high speed while the massacre was going on. People shouted to them to put a stop to it, but the soldiers kept going. This led one of the neighbors to conclude that they “were guarding the killers or came with them so that the police would not intervene.”
In all, nine people were killed and five wounded. Among the dead was Joel Valle, the deacon. It was the worst mass murder in Juárez in years, Cardona says as I gaze at the flickering votives, the bloodstains and bullet holes framing the picture of Christ.
Of course, I have questions: Were any of the killers identified or captured? No. Was their motive determined? No, although there were rumors that they were after members of a street gang, the Aztecas, said to be hiding in the facility. Were the soldiers involved in the massacre? That’s what eyewitnesses claimed, Cardona replies. I keep grasping for facts, but realize it’s futile. Cardona says, “This is the black hole of Mexico. You cannot see inside of it, and nothing gets out.”
Despite the heavy military and police presence, six rehabilitation clinics have been attacked in Juárez over the past two years. The deadliest incident occurred on September 2, when 18 people were executed. Government authorities claimed the massacres were part of a war of extermination between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels.
The conduct of the Mexican military goes to the heart of U.S. counter-narcotics policy. In the past year, experts like General Barry McCaffrey (the drug czar in the Clinton administration) and political figures have warned that if the cartels are not contained, Mexico could become a failed state and the U.S. could find itself with an Afghanistan or a Pakistan on its southern border. Such forecasts are hyperbole, but the fact is that drug trafficking and its attendant corruption are a malignancy that has spread into Mexico’s lymph system. To extend the metaphor, Calderón is attempting to perform radical surgery with the only instrument at his disposal—the army. It may be a tainted instrument, so the reasoning goes, but it is less tainted than the law-enforcement agencies.
Washington supports, indeed encourages, this approach through the Mérida Initiative, a security-cooperation agreement between the two countries that Congress passed and George W. Bush signed into law. Its aim is to provide $1.4 billion in funding, spread over several years, for military and law-enforcement training, equipment such as helicopters and surveillance aircraft, and judicial reforms. The aid package also includes conditions for improvements to Mexico’s less-than-enviable record on human-rights issues. Fifteen percent of the funds can be withheld if Mexico fails to show progress on matters such as prosecuting human-rights violators and prohibiting the use of torture to obtain evidence and testimony.
And that is where U.S. policy becomes contradictory. It calls for a military solution to the trafficking problem. But there are very few, if any, civil safeguards on the actions of the Mexican military. Its soldiers are subject only to military law, even when deployed in their current crime-fighting capacity, and the country’s military-justice system is, to understate things, opaque.
A good example is the case of Javier Rosales, a medical technician who died after he and a friend were captured and tortured by soldiers. Members of his family went to the state justice office and the federal attorney general’s office to file a complaint against the soldiers and demand an investigation. They were turned away because, the officials said, charges of army misconduct fall under military jurisdiction. However, Enrique Torres, a spokesman for the Joint Chihuahuan Operation, told me that the army looks into such allegations only through internal investigations or when formal charges have been filed by state or federal prosecutors. It’s pure catch-22: state or federal authorities will not receive complaints against soldiers, and the army will not investigate unless charges have been filed by state or federal authorities.
That is among the reasons why, out of the more than 2,000 complaints brought before Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, not one has resulted in the prosecution of a single soldier.
The provisions of the Mérida Initiative would appear to give the U.S. considerable leverage in compelling the Mexican army to act with more restraint and greater respect for the civil rights of the country’s citizens. Financial leverage, that is. The moral authority of the U.S. has been eroded by accusations that it has employed torture and illegal detentions in the “war on terror,” as well as by its status as the drug cartels’ biggest market and its singularly unsuccessful efforts to dry up demand.
Every year, under the Foreign Assistance Act, the State Department is required to certify that its southern neighbor is fully cooperating in efforts to stem the export of illegal narcotics into the United States. Without certification, Mexico would be ineligible to receive the vast majority of American aid. But the U.S. government often soft-pedals criticisms of Mexico on matters such as corruption and human-rights offenses, for two reasons. One is U.S. sensitivity to the Mexican elite, which can be thin-skinned about what it regards as infringements from the north on its national sovereignty. The second is money. In the highly unlikely event that Mexico were decertified, the cutoff in U.S. aid would strain bilateral relations, trade agreements would be imperiled, and American businessmen would find it harder to operate south of the border. Also, of all the countries that export oil to the United States, Mexico, at 985,000 barrels a day, ranks third, behind Canada and Saudi Arabia.
That makes speaking the truth about Mexico politically and economically dangerous in official U.S. circles.
But a larger question arises. Even if tomorrow the Mexican military began waging its anti-narcotics campaign with the probity of, say, the Swiss Guard, could it overcome the power of cartels? The drug bosses and their organizations have become integrated into Mexican society, corrupting every aspect of the nation’s life.
The U.S. government estimates that the cultivation and trafficking of illegal drugs directly employs 450,000 people in Mexico. Unknown numbers of people, possibly in the millions, are indirectly linked to the drug industry, which has revenues estimated to be as high as $25 billion a year, exceeded only by Mexico’s annual income from manufacturing and oil exports. Dr. Edgardo Buscaglia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute in Mexico City and a senior legal and economic adviser to the UN and the World Bank, concluded in a recent report that 17 of Mexico’s 31 states have become virtual narco-republics, where organized crime has infiltrated government, the courts, and the police so extensively that there is almost no way they can be cleaned up. The drug gangs have acquired a “military capacity” that enables them to confront the army on an almost equal footing.
“This in itself does not prove that we are in a situation of a failed state today,” Buscaglia wrote. He seemed to be suggesting that the situation could change tomorrow—and not for the better.
KABUL -- A U.S.military hit list of about 50 suspected drug kingpins is drawing fierce opposition from Afghan officials, who say it could undermine their fragile justice system and trigger a backlash against foreign troops.
The U.S. military and NATO officials have authorized their forces to kill or capture individuals on the list, which was drafted within the past year as part of NATO's new strategy to combat drug operations that finance the Taliban. The list is thought to include people with close ties to the Afghan government and others who have served as intelligence assets for the CIA and the U.S. military, according to current and former U.S. and Afghan officials.
Afghan counternarcotics officials expressed frustration that U.S. and NATO military leaders have refused to divulge the names on the list, a decision that they said could undercut joint operations to hunt down opium traffickers.
Gen. Mohammad Daud Daud, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for counternarcotics efforts, praised U.S. and British special forces for their help recently in destroying drug labs and stashes of opium. But he said he worried that foreign troops would now act on their own to kill suspected drug lords, based on secret evidence, instead of handing them over for trial.
"They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes," Daud said. "We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own."
For years, the NATO-led military coalition in Afghanistan ignored the opium trade, saying their mission was to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda, not drug dealers. Afghanistan's poppy fields supply about 90 percent of the world's opium.
At a meeting in Budapest last October, however, NATO defense ministers reversed their strategy and authorized their forces to confiscate narcotics and target drug labs as well as kingpins who provide monetary or other support to the Taliban.
Target list of 50
Since then, the U.S. military has developed a target list of about 50 drug kingpins thought to support the insurgency and has ruled that they can be killed or captured "on the battlefield," according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report released in August.
Two unnamed U.S. generals in Afghanistan told the committee's staff members that the list complies with international law and the U.S. military's rules of engagement because it contains only drug lords with "proven links" to the insurgency. To add someone to the list, the Pentagon requires "two verifiable human sources and substantial additional evidence," according to the Senate report.
U.S. Army Col. Wayne M. Shanks, chief of public affairs for coalition forces in Afghanistan, declined to answer questions about the list or to say whether anyone on it has been killed or captured.
The military "is concerned when we see a nexus between insurgent activity or financing and drug trafficking in Afghanistan," he said in an e-mail. "We regularly conduct operations to limit the insurgents' ability to intimidate, or otherwise threaten the Afghan people."
Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former Afghan interior minister, said that he had long urged the Pentagon and its NATO allies to crack down on drug smugglers and suppliers, and that he was glad that the military alliance had finally agreed to provide operational support for Afghan counternarcotics agents. But he said foreign troops needed to avoid the temptation to hunt down and kill traffickers on their own.
"There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty," he said. "If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?"
Need for secrecy
At the same time, Jalali said he could understand why U.S. and NATO officials would want to keep their target list a secret from their Afghan counterparts. Corruption in the Afghan government is widespread, and some high-ranking officials are suspected to be involved in the drug trade.
Jalali said the Afghan government once kept its own secret list of drug traffickers. The list was considered highly sensitive, he said, because many of the suspects had ties to influential Afghan leaders, while others had served as intelligence assets for the CIA or the U.S. Defense Department.
"Many of these people were empowered by the international community when they were fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda after 9/11," said Jalali, now a professor at the National Defense University in Washington. "There was no political will to go after them."
In general, NATO forces have taken a more aggressive approach against Afghan drug operations in recent months, particularly in southern poppy-growing provinces.
In Kandahar, U.S. and British troops are joining a new task force consisting of Afghan police officers, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and officers from Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency. The task force's mission is to seize heroin stockpiles, blow up drug labs and investigate corrupt Afghan officials.
New approach praised
U.N. officials, who closely monitor the drug trade in Afghanistan, praised the new cooperative approach. They said the joint police-military operations were especially timely because opium production has dropped by more than one-third since 2007 because of a supply glut on the global market.
Jean-Luc Lemahieu, Afghanistan director for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said the decline represented a one-time opportunity to make a permanent dent in production levels. He said NATO's help in going after drug labs and stockpiles had proven effective, but he cautioned the military against taking the fight a step too far.
"Extrajudicial killing is not something you want to see," Lemahieu said. "Let's be very, very clear. Don't expect the military to do the job of a police officer. It won't work."
Afghanistan's nascent judicial system, however, has struggled to enforce the law against traffickers. And when it does win convictions, cases can still fall apart.
In April, five traffickers who had been sentenced to long prison terms received pardons from President Hamid Karzai, who said he intervened "out of respect" for their family members. One defendant was the nephew of Karzai's campaign manager.
"We have some people, powerful people, inside and outside government, who can freely smuggle drugs," said Nur al-Haq Ulumi, a member of the Afghan parliament from Kandahar. "If we had an honest government, the government could track down and arrest these people -- everybody knows this."
But Ulumi said it would make things worse if coalition troops began to kill drug dealers. "Already, people feel that foreigners didn't really come here to reconstruct our country," he said. "They think the foreigners just came here to kill us."
Ahmad Big Qaderi, director general of prosecutions for the Criminal Justice Task Force, which oversees narcotics cases and is financed largely by the U.S. government, said NATO forces needed to trust his agency to prosecute drug dealers.
"We should go through the Afghan legal channels to convict criminals," he said. "We have professional staff here and all the mechanisms to prosecute the big fishes."
UNITED NATIONS — The Afghan opium harvest is feeding a $65 billion global trade in heroin each year, which now kills many more people in NATO countries in a year than the number of NATO soldiers who have died on the battlefield in Afghanistan since 2001, Antonio Maria Costa, the senior United Nations official on drugs and crime, said Thursday.
“If we do not address this, it will be hard to solve all the other problems in Afghanistan,” Mr. Costa said, adding that the lucrative nature of the heroin trade is creating a “narco-cartel” in Afghanistan that includes corrupt government and security officials.
It is easier to try to uproot the heroin trade at its source, where opium is grown, than its destination, he said, particularly because heroin trafficking is disrupted less effectively in affluent Western countries, despite their financial and police resources.
The opium crop from Afghanistan is refined to produce 375 tons of heroin, which makes up the bulk of the trade worldwide.
Drawing on figures supplied by the countries themselves, the United Nations report says that Iran intercepts 20 percent of the 105 tons of heroin that flows through its territory, Pakistan 17 percent of the 150 tons that comes in and Central Asian countries only 5 percent of the 100 tons that enters these nations.
Europeans consume about 88 tons of heroin per year, and the authorities seize only 2 percent of the heroin that enters Europe, mostly through Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, according to the report.
The annual death toll in all NATO countries from heroin overdoses is estimated to be more than 10,000, an annual total that is about five times higher the number of NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan in the past eight years, the report said.
The proceeds from the heroin trade help fuel the Taliban insurgency. When the Taliban were in power a decade ago in Afghanistan, heroin produced $100 million a year in taxes, the report said. The insurgents are now estimated to be gaining $160 million a year from trafficking in the drug.
Mr. Costa recommended that NATO forces concentrate on trying to dismantle the drug cartels in Afghanistan, instead of striking at individual farmers and crops.
By bombing drug laboratories, along with attacking traffickers and open drug markets, NATO troops have had limited success, he said, but they need to extend their reach.
MEXICO CITY -- President Felipe Calderón on Monday replaced his longtime attorney general, one of the key figures in his government's effort to bring Mexico's powerful drug cartels to heel, as the country's drug violence continues to spiral.
In a short speech, Mr. Calderón said Arturo Chávez, a former attorney general of northern Chihuahua state, was replacing Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora. Chihuahua's largest city, Ciudad Juárez, has become the epicenter of Mexico's drug violence. Just last week, gunmen took over a drug rehabilitation center there and executed 18 patients, marking a new and grisly milestone in the country's drug violence.
Mr. Calderón also announced changes at the agriculture ministry and at state oil company Pemex. Mr. Calderón named former Pemex Chief Financial Officer Juan José Suárez Coppel as the company's new chief executive, taking over from Jesús Reyes Heroles, a former energy minister. Mr. Suárez Coppel takes the reins at a tough time for the oil giant: Output has fallen to 2.5 million barrels a day from a peak of 3.4 million in 2004 amid a dramatic decline in output from Mexico's main oil field, Cantarell.
The changes come as Mr. Calderón tries to regain political traction following July midterm legislative elections in which his center-right National Action Party suffered a major defeat to the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, which now has the most seats in the lower house of Congress.
Since coming to power in 2006, Mr. Calderón has made the fight against Mexico's warring cartels the centerpiece of his policy. He has deployed an estimated 40,000 soldiers to cities like Ciudad Juárez to take on the drug gangs, using soldiers instead of often-corrupt local police.
More than 13,000 people have died since Mr. Calderon took office, according to newspaper estimates, most victims of internecine warfare between drug cartels fighting over drug routes to the U.S. and increasingly lucrative Mexican drug markets.
Mr. Medina Mora's departure is a boost for Public Security Minister Genaro García Luna: The two men had clashed over Mr. García Luna's plans to create a single national police force under his command. Mexico's Congress killed that plan, but Mr. García Luna has begun creating a de facto national police, his new Federal Police force.
"This shows beyond any doubt that Mr. García Luna is the one driving the drug-war policy and is closest to Mr. Calderón's beliefs and ideas," said Guillermo Zepeda, a criminal justice specialist at Mexico's Center for Development Studies, a think tank.
Mr. Medina Mora, a corporate lawyer, had been attorney general for the last three years. During the previous administration, he served as head of the CISEN, Mexico's equivalent of the U.S.'s Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Calderón said Mr. Medina Mora will continue to serve Mexico in a diplomatic post. Mr. Medina Mora is expected to be named Mexico's ambassador to the U.K., people familiar with the situation say.
Mr. Medina Mora posted some victories, such as the capture of an alleged methamphetamine dealer together with a record stash of $207 million in cash. Mr. Medina Mora also extradited a record number of alleged drug traffickers to the U.S.
But a year ago, his office was shaken by scandal when it was revealed that several top members of the attorney general's office's antidrug unit had been on the payroll of one of Mexico's most powerful drug gangs. Neither Mr. Medina Mora nor Mr. García Luna have been to recapture an alleged top drug dealer, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
Mr. Chávez, a member of Mr. Calderón's center-right National Action Party, was Chihuahua's attorney general from 1996 to 1998. Jorge Montaño, a former ambassador to the U.S. and a native of Chihuahua, said Mr. Chávez did a good job, but lamented that the president hadn't reached out beyond the ranks of the PAN. "It's all the same gang," he said.
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