The Kingpins Of Mexico

[MexicoJimbo]

At the Guadalajara International Book Fair, Enrique Peña Nieto, who is forty-five, boyishly handsome, and generally expected to be the next President of Mexico, was asked to name three books that had influenced him. He mentioned the Bible, or, at least, “some parts” (unspecified), and “The Eagle’s Throne,” a Carlos Fuentes novel (though he named the historian Enrique Krauze as the author). And, for a few excruciating minutes, that was all he could come up with. The crowd laughed wickedly. Peña Nieto’s wife, a former soap-opera star, squirmed in the front row. His teen-age daughter didn’t help matters when, in a tweet, she scorned “all of the $%&/()s who form part of the proletariat and only criticize those they envy.”

That debacle was in December. It did nothing to slow Peña Nieto’s well-financed march toward the election, which will take place on July 1st, but it did provide a welcome distraction for Guadalajarans, who are justly proud of their annual book fair. It is the second largest in Latin America, drawing more than half a million visitors, nearly two thousand publishers, and hundreds of authors, including, over the years, Nadine Gordimer, William Styron, and Toni Morrison. Guadalajarans sometimes offer it up as Exhibit A for the case that the city is a civilized place where life goes on unmarked by the violence that disfigures large parts of Mexico.

By late 2011, that argument was hard to make. Two days before the fair opened, twenty-six corpses were dumped under the Millennium Arches, a downtown landmark. Near the bodies, which bore signs of torture, was a message—what is known as a narcomanta—signed by the Zetas, the most feared organized-crime group in Mexico. The message taunted the Sinaloa cartel, the country’s biggest crime group, and its leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo (Shorty). Sinaloa has controlled Guadalajara, which is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, for decades. “We’re in Jalisco and we are not leaving,” the Zetas announced. “This is proof that we are deep inside the kitchen.” Most narcomantas (which appear virtually every day somewhere in Mexico) are disinformation, their assertions dubious, their true authorship unknowable. But the Zetas have been pushing westward from their strongholds on the Gulf Coast, and they had already taken the neighboring state of Zacatecas, so there was no reason to doubt that they coveted Jalisco, a rich prize, or that this was indeed their atrocity and their message to Guadalajara.

In Mexico, it is often impossible to know who is behind something—a massacre, a candidacy, an assassination, the capture of a crime boss, a “discovery” of high-level corruption. Either the truth is too fluid and complex to define or it remains opaque to anyone not directly involved in manipulating events. This may help to explain how a city widely understood to be under the control of a leading international crime group—the U.S. Treasury Department recently labelled Guzmán, who is fifty-five, “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker”—can regard itself as a jacaranda-shaded refuge of high culture and legitimate commercial vitality. Both descriptions are true, and both realities are under siege. When Mexicans discuss the news, they talk often about pantallas—screens, illusions, behind which are more screens, all created to obscure the facts. Peña Nieto is depicted, in cartoons, as a carnival mask behind which laughs Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a former President, who is still regarded as enormously powerful. I can’t count the number of times I have asked someone about a news story and been told, “Pantalla.”

This is a problem for journalism. You fish for facts and instead pull up boatloads of speculation, some of it well informed, much of it trailing tangled agendas. You end up reporting not so much what happened as what people think or imagine or say happened. Then there is the entirely justified fear of speaking to the press, particularly to foreign journalists. I have had to offer anonymity, pseudonyms, and extraordinary assurances to many sources for this account. The reprisals that people are trying to avoid would come not only from crime groups but, in many cases, from factions within the Mexican government.

Read more http://www.newyorker...currentPage=all

[MexicoJimbo]

The last five paragraphs of this insightful article:

How was his pay as a cop?

Bad, he said. The AFIs picked up some of his expenses, but he had to work a second full-time job, as a stonemason.

He changed the subject, to politics. “If the PRI wins, everything’s going to change,” he said. “Everybody will start getting paid again. They know how to do it.” He pantomimed a paymaster, counting out cash to a circle of people. “The media, too,” he said, mock paying me.

It was true: the PRI, when in power, paid some journalists extravagantly, and supported many newspapers and other media in return for coverage that suited its purposes.

“There will be just one big group,” Rodríguez said. “Maybe it will be El Chapo. But there will be peace.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/02/120702fa_fact_finnegan?currentPage=all

[MexicoJimbo]

Here is a final excerpt from the article, dealing with the massacre so familiar to those living around Lake Chapala:

On May 9th, Guadalajarans woke up to a new Zetas atrocity—eighteen headless, dismembered bodies left in two vehicles parked near a popular restaurant out past the airport. Then the police found some more body parts in a safe house in Chapala, a lakeside community that is popular with retired Americans and Canadians, about an hour south of the city. Half of the dead were soon identified. They were local people who had recently gone missing. Ordinary citizens, not narcos, kidnapped and murdered. Four were said to have been students at the University of Guadalajara.

That turned out to be only part of the story. It seemed that the Zetas had planned to kidnap and kill fifty people, and to distribute the dismembered corpses around Guadalajara on Mother’s Day. The details of this plan emerged after a kidnapper on guard duty, Laura Rosales Sánchez, fell asleep and a dozen victims, seizing their chance, escaped. It was too late to save the eighteen—and two boys under Laura Rosales’s guard who failed to flee were also killed—but the police managed to arrest four of the kidnappers, who, under interrogation, revealed the grand plan to kill fifty. The kidnappings, their leader confirmed, had been done at random. They just grabbed whomever they could—waiters, a construction worker, a dance teacher in a primary school.

The purpose behind all this carnage? To “cause terror,” the arrested leader, who is twenty-seven, said. He seemed vaguely bored at his perp-show press event, where he nonetheless tried to answer every reporter’s question. He was just following orders, he said, from a Zeta named Fernando, who remained at large. Laura Rosales, who is twenty-five, said that she had been mainly helping her brother, Angel, who also remained at large, and that the Zetas were responding, with this massacre, to the killing, up north, of twenty-three Zetas by Chapo Guzmán’s forces.

After the Mother’s Day massacre, thirty thousand people, led by University of Guadalajara students and dressed in white, marched silently through the city, protesting the ever-rising tide of violence and the government’s apparent helplessness before it.

Around the same time, tens of thousands of students marched in Mexico City in a sudden revolt, launched just weeks before the election, against the constantly reported inevitability of a Peña Nieto victory. Acuerdos between the PRI and the country’s biggest broadcasters, including alleged payoffs exposed by the Guardian, were making this a self-fulfilling prophecy, according to the protesters. There were more marches in June, but the student movement seemed unlikely to stop the return of the PRI.

Read more http://www.newyorker...currentPage=all

[bmh]

It is a well written article but nothing new...