Mexico has reached a turning point: Will it destroy the cartels or itself? – AZCentral

Opinion: The slaughter of women and children caught America's attention, but the real turning point for Mexico came with cartel violence weeks before.

Mexican soldiers patrol around the city of Culiacan on Friday Oct. 18, 2019.(Photo: Augusto Zurita/Associated Press)

We were the only two people sitting at a very long backyard picnic table,because our kids and wives had become great friends. All around us kids were running and playing.

The topic was culture, or actually the contrast of cultures.

He and his family are citizens of Mexico, who, because of his work, live in Arizona. He was describing to me the differences between our two countries.

He pointed to the end of the picnic table, to a cellphone I hadnt noticed, but that one of the kids or moms must have left there. He said, If this were Mexico, that would be gone.

If there is an important distinction between the two nations, it is the petty corruption that permeates daily life south of the border. People do not have much, he explained, and thus would not pass up the opportunity to take something of value that could put food on the table tomorrow.

I dont believe he was making a value judgment. He is a proud Mexican, and once put his culture on full display at an outdoorquinceaera for his 15-year-old daughter. There was music, dancing, food, all redolent of a culture fully alive. When it was over, I told him, In my next life, I want to be born Mexican.

But he and his wife are Mexican living in the United States, separated from their families and enjoying the relative peace from the troubles down there.

Mexico today is becoming more and more a narco state on the road to collapse. Wide swaths of the country have been taken over by drug gangs, who if they dont overtly tell you who is in charge, will in a moment settle the question with guns.

This is a seminal year for our neighbors down south, not because a family of white European fundamentalist Mormons was gunned down in broad daylight nine mothers and children murdered.

That kind of slaughter is all too common in Mexico.

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The people of Mexico are unsettled and sensing a turning point because of what happened only weeks earlier inCuliacn, the capital city of Sinaloa State. There a patrol of about 30 soldiers from Mexican President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obradors newly formed National Guard was moving through a residential area, probably with intent, when someone started shooting at them.

They followed the gunfire to a home where they found four men, one of them Ovidio Guzmn Lpez, the 29-year-old son of drug lord Joaqun El Chapo Guzmn, once considered the worlds biggest drug dealer.

DIAZ: Culiacn gun battle proves (again) that Mexico can't fight the cartels

El Chapo, the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel is now rotting in a maximum-securityprison cell in Colorado, serving multiple life sentences. Two of his sons, including Ovidio, have been indicted, and so Ovidio was taken into custody.

Very soon after the soldiers found themselves surrounded by an armed force of some 400 sicarios, the Spanish word for hitmen or drug-gang militias. Vehicles outfitted with large-caliber automatic weapons descended on the city. The narcos were taking over.

They set tanker trucks and other vehicles on fire in major intersections to make it hard for national security forces to respond and started firing upon the National Guard troops.

The people of Culiacn were horrified by the piercing sound of large-weapons fire and took cover. Black clouds boiled up over their city and made Culiacn look like hell on earth.

The origin of the place name Culiacn is uncertain, but it may have been taken from the wordcoahuacanor "palace of snakes."Surrounded by snakes, the National Guard decided this was not the time to go to war with the Sinaloa cartel. They stood down. The drug lords held the town for a while and used that time to break out 30 of their compadresfrom jail.

Lpez Obrador, the president the Mexicans call "AMLO," said, This is no longer a war."

AMLO was elected in part to end the policies of two prior Mexican presidents, Felipe Caldern and Enrique Pea Nieto, who had declared war on the cartels and had pursued, with the help of the United States, a decapitation strategy of taking out the cartel bosses.

"This isno longer about force, confrontation, annihilation, extermination, or killing in the heat of the moment, AMLO said.You cant put out fire with fire.

When you take fire to the cartels, fire erupts and the murder rate leaps even higher, as it did to record levels. AMLO came in promising a new tactic abrazos no balazos or hugs not bullets.

His strategy is social programs to fight poverty, a ban to end corruption, a call to all Mexicans to exemplify good behavior.

But how do you hug the men who have completely corrupted your institutions, your courts, your police departments? How do you exhort to good behavior those who would kidnap 43 young college students from Iguala and murder them all at once?

How do you communicate with men who communicate by rolling five severed human heads onto a dance floor in Uruapan? Or who ambush and murder 14 police officers in Michoacn?

How can you ever make peace with those who would fire more than 200 rounds from assault weapons atwomen and children, killing nine of them?

The only way you do is to surrender. And that is what AMLO did.

If Caldern and Pea Nieto relied solely on enforcement, Lpez Obrador has chosen to give up the legitimate power of the state,"wrote Mexican journalist and Univision anchor in Los Angeles in an op-ed in theWashington Post.The Mexican government capitulated. Cartels will surely take notice.

Thats an absolute destruction of the rule of law and its going to get worse, said Derek Maltz, former chief of special operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, to theWall Street Journal.

What we saw in Culiacn, said Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on organized crime at Columbia University to the (London)Guardian, was the parallel state showing itself.

And in Mexico, this was a watershed, said Ismael Bojrquez, editor of the investigative Sinaloa weekly Ro Doce to theGuardian. Life goes on, yes, but not in the same way. We dont know if this will now be the reaction every time criminal groups feel threatened and we know even less what the federal government intends to do about it.

Those who believe marijuana legalization in the United States will end this scourge need to understand that marijuana is not the cash crop it was once believed to be for the Mexican mob.

In 2009, the Rand research organization found that the estimates of marijuana incartel exports were wildly overstated:

The claim that 60 percent of Mexican DTO (drug trafficking organizations) gross drug export revenues comes from marijuana is not credible. There is no public documentation about how this figure is derived, and government analyses reveal great uncertainty. RANDs exploratory analysis on this point suggests that 1526 percent is a more credible range.

The range of drugs and drug markets are expanding and diversifying as never before, reports the UN World Drug Report for 2018. And Mexican cartels are pushing out in the trafficking of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, fentanyl.

The United States will not in our life time legalize those dangerous street drugs.

That means Mexican cartels will control market share. In fact, they have become diversified conglomerates.

[In] this global business logic through franchises, Sinaloa resembles the hamburger chains we all know, and thats why we say this cartel is a multinational drug company, Jorge Hernndez Tinajero, author and researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, toldSmall Wars Journal.

So the Mexicans have a problem. They dont have security. They dont control their state. They face an elemental struggle to be a civilized societyand it wont be achieved by words or safety nets.

The cartel bosses and their minionsare not Mexicans. They are enemies of the people and the state. They have to be destroyed. Defeating them will require force, yes, but also shrewd tactics and policies.

Mexico will need leadership from the top and from the grass roots.

Leadership at the top needs to shore up the court system so it actually dispenses justice. Theyll need to build up the army and local law enforcement to start protecting the Mexican people. Today they do not. Ninety-eight percent of all violent crime in Mexico nowgoes unsolved, reports theWashington Post.

Leadership from the bottom, from the Mexican people, needs to declare that the casual corruption in daily life is no longer tolerable. That a cellphone that disappears from a backyard picnic table ultimately gives license to bulletsthat fly in Culiacn.

Phil Boas is editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic. He can be reached at 602-444-8292 or phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

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Mexico has reached a turning point: Will it destroy the cartels or itself? - AZCentral