The brutal shooting down of another Mexican musician, Ernesto Barajas this week has provoked more discussion focussing on drug consumption and narco-culture.
Understanding how violence has developed in Mexico has to take us beyond yellow headlines and the morbid fascination with violence. The crisis and violence of organized crime is not simply a conflict between the state and the cartels, it is a conflict in which political and economic interests are intertwined.
From the exploitation of precarious youth by criminal organizations, to money laundering in the global financial system, to major geopolitical conflicts in which the cartels play a role, the country faces a structural violence that benefits the Mexican bourgeoisie.
As long as superficial discussions focus on issues such as drug consumption and narco-culture, the real roots of the problem will remain unaddressed, leaving the Mexican working class as the main victim of a class war.
Official complicity
The Guerreros Buscadores collective, a group searching for missing persons, victims of organized crime in Mexico, entered the Izaguirre Ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco on March 5. The National Guard had previously carried out an operation at this site against elements of the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation. The collective found more than 1,300 items of personal belongings, including clothing, backpacks, suitcases, and nearly 200 pairs of shoes. In addition, there were 3 cremation ovens and skeletal remains.
The matter is more complicated than it seems. According to reports and investigations after the March 5 discoveries, the National Defense Secretariat and the National Guard had been aware of the criminal activities in Teuchitlán. But the local public authorities and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office turned a blind eye to what was going on at Rancho Izaguirre, and hindered any forceful action to protect the cartels operating in the town.
Key figures in local politics have interests which lie in the complicity and cover-up of what is happening in Jalisco. In this way, a vicious circle is formed between the violence that occurs in the streets and mainly affects the working class, and the impunity that permeates all political and security structures that should prevent these kinds of events from occurring. Later, in July, in the ejido Las Agujas, another mega mass grave was discovered with the remains of at least 200 people. These are huge fields of forced disappearances, and it seems that they are not the only ones.
Trump’s imperialist aims
The yellow journalism and political bashing has not been long in coming. The Mexican right wing, emboldened by Donald Trump’s designation of the cartels as terrorist organizations and with aspirations of an American intervention in Mexican territory, has held the government of Claudia Sheinbaum directly responsible for the security crisis.
Meanwhile, the discussion of what has happened has focused more on calls for individual actions such as preventing people listening to narcocorridos* or reducing marijuana consumption, to the technicalities of what constitutes systematic extermination and the etymological root of the word holocaust. An example of this has been the role of characters such as Congressman Gerardo Fernández Noroña, who obfuscated the discussion by reducing it to a semantic debate on whether or not these disappearance camps classify as ‘extermination camps’, diverting attention from the concrete facts and the structural context that allows the existence of these sites of horror.
*narcocorrido – Mexican musical style relating tales of the narcotrade
This narrative of a rampant security crisis in Mexico only feeds the coup aspirations of the national and international right wing that is now desperately trying not to lose the privileges they used to enjoy. The exaggeration of the chaos and the minimization of security advances only seek to justify the destabilization of the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The appointment of US Ambassador Ronald Johnson, who had suggested invading Mexico to put an end to the narco, as well as his reception and the constant calls to support a US invasion by sectors of the Mexican right, and Donald Trump’s foreign security policies towards Mexico all point in that direction. They want to drag the political conflict in which they have been defeated at the polls and public opinion into the realm of more open violence. The murders of Ximena and José in Mexico City are a clear example of this: the Mexican right wing dreams of being able to retake political control in defense of capitalist interests through open political violence.
The “war on drugs”
While it is true that the violence that plagues the country is not new, since the 1990s it has been on the rise with the governments of Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo, and shot up with the imposition of Felipe Calderón and his War on Drug Trafficking, it is important to recognize that the number of intentional homicides attributed to organized crime is clearly on a downward trend. This is a fact measured and corroborated by international entities such as the Crisis Group, not only by national groups.
The current territorial conflicts between cartels are a far cry from the strategy of chaos and widespread terror at the beginning of the War on Drugs in 2006. While every disappearance is painful, and no attack should go unnoticed, we must recognize that the decline in homicides is a fact as well as the record of disappearances. Although it is far from enough.
But despite what some voices that individualize and moralize the problem try to do with their calls to stop listening to narcocorridos (although some of these are a source of money laundering and build the image for the cartels), at the root of the problem of the crisis of violence is a structural issue that goes beyond individual decisions.
Capitalism complicit
Mexico is the neighboring country of the largest drug and arms market on the planet. UNAM studies estimate that the annual gross revenue of organized crime in Mexico was about $33 billion in 2018. Money that is not transported in briefcases and cannot just stay under the pillows of the big cartel kingpins any more than tons of drugs are transported without a logistical system that includes land, sea, air transport as well as customs and distributors. As President Claudia Sheimbaun has correctly pointed out, the problem of drug trafficking is not only Mexico’s problem but also that of the United States where thousands find in the sale of drugs and weapons a way of life.
But also, where the most powerful financial system in the world is complicit in the transfer of millions of dollars absolutely legally and without disturbing the system as a whole. How can millions of dollars be transferred without generating the slightest suspicion or interest in investigating their origins?
The proceeds of the drug market are managed by some of the largest banking institutions on the planet. Not only CIBanco, Intercam and Vector, it is difficult to think that large institutions such as Citibank and Banamex do not have the intelligence to recognize the multi-million dollar operations of the big organized crime bosses. In fact, in 2012, HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, was one of the banks denounced and fined for money laundering in the United States. This is just a small sample of the complicity of the system with drug trafficking businesses.
And now the United States finds itself in a battle between pharmaceutical companies that are trying to maintain their monopoly of the opioid market and Chinese pharmaceutical companies that supply the precursors to satisfy the demand for opioids in the United States.
Workers and the poor suffer most
The unfortunate thing about the situation in Mexico is that among the biggest losers in this context are the most precarious people in the country, who have already paid the price of living on the drug superhighway with 350,000 murdered since the beginning of the War on Drugs. Officially making it the bloodiest non-interstate conflict in the world today.
The cartels operate as fragmented networks of local cells with varying degrees of autonomy under the “brand” of large cartels. The image of monolithic criminal structures responds more to a media and political construct than to the reality of how cartels operate in the country. This fragmentation not only shapes the way cartels operate at the local level, but also the responses of the Mexican and U.S. state, which, far from having noble intentions, obey their own political and economic interests.
This explains why the so-called War on Drugs is not simply a war on crime, but a mechanism of social and political control that perpetuates state violence for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Since 2006, then President Felipe Calderon’s War on Drugs has served as a tool to terrorize society and keep peasants and workers in Mexico in a permanent state of siege.
Cases like the extrajudicial execution of 157 people in Nuevo Laredo since 2018, the Apatzingán Massacre in 2015, the arbitrariness with which certain cartels are repressed or allowed to operate in states like Chiapas or Zacatecas, where the cartels constantly threaten the localities where they operate in favor of the interests of the bourgeoisie.
The disappearance of the 43 normalistas (teachers) of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, with the complicity of elements of the Army and the local and state police, makes it clear that we cannot only look for sides in this crisis and point to “the good guys” and “the bad guys”, but that we have to understand who benefits and who is harmed by this security crisis, not as a peculiarity of the Mexican state, but as another expression of class violence of the capitalist system.
Iran-Contra scandal
Moreover, it is clear that in all this hodgepodge of violence, the U.S. does not play the role of the world’s policeman. Facts such as that the Colombian and Mexican cartels were originally structured by the CIA to divert money to Iran and weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras in the conflict with the FMLN, or that elements of the Zetas Cartel have had special operations training at the School of the Americas to fight against the Zapatista Army, make clear the class interests behind the so-called drug war.
In all of this, the role of the U.S. state in the crisis of violence and its geopolitical interests is evident. According to an investigation by SinEmbargo, between 135 and 200 thousand weapons cross the U.S. border illegally from the United States to Mexico every year. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, more U.S. manufactured weapons arrive annually in Mexico than go to Ukraine.
Hence the complexity of unveiling and understanding how organized crime operates and perpetuates itself in Mexico. Cutting off heads at the top would leave us with nothing but rivers of blood in the streets, thousands of dead and hundreds of communities in ruins if the objective conditions that make the horrible acts of violence against Mexican society real and profitable are not addressed.
To speak of the drug war and the security crisis is to speak of multiple crises: the opioid crisis fomented by the pharmaceutical companies that in their eagerness for profit distributed opioid analgesics without any control, the mental health crisis that affects millions of young workers who look to drugs as an easy way out of their desperation, the economic crisis that hundreds of families are going through in which thousands of workers are forced to strenuous working hours in which drugs can be a relief or reinforcement to mitigate fatigue and exploitation, and a long etcetera.
The fight against drugs needs a fight against the system
If we want to reduce the number of intentional crimes perpetrated by organized crime, all of these crises must be addressed. In addition to the legalisation of recreational drug use, a radical change is needed in the quality of life of the country’s working class and peasants, who are the sectors and communities that swell the ranks of organized crime and who are cannon fodder for these organizations and the government, whose bodies fill the lists of homicides and missing persons in our country.
It is not only about improving wages depressed for decades, but also about improving the housing and neighborhoods of working families, reducing working hours and increasing rest days, building parks, sports and other recreational centers in all the popular neighborhoods of the country, providing comprehensive attention to addictions as a public health problem and with it making the universal and free right to physical and mental healthcare a reality.
This is a struggle against the capitalist system as a whole, and it cannot be carried out in isolation in a single country. The organized international struggle of the working class, which can locally confront U.S. imperialism, the pharmaceutical monopolies and their political class, which benefits from the criminalization of the most precarious peoples is necessary.
The recent history of Mexico is plagued with acts that hurt us as a group of workers and oppressed, therefore we must turn pain into strength to strike at the system that causes millions of victims of organized crime, inside and outside our borders. Only the strength of the organized working class that addresses the objective conditions that put our country on a silver platter in the hands of the most ruthless people in our society can confront this, defeating the system at its roots.