Episode 153 - How Migration Affects Murders in Mexico

Another record year for murders in Mexico, and what the migrant crisis has to do with that.  All coming up on today's hot zone.

 

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Well there's lots of bad news out of Mexico, where they saw a record number of murders in the first six months of this year, with an average 94 killings each day, or more than 17,000 people already this year.  June saw the most murders of any month on record, with more than 3,000 people killed.

 

This epidemic of violence has been going on for a long time.  I went and lived in northern Sonora state for one winter back in 2012 to report on the wave of killings that at that time was a record. 

 

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That was 2012. But these days, if the mexican president were to get murder rates back to the same level they were back then, it'd be hailed as a big achievement.  

Mexico's Guerrero state is one place where The battle for control of opium-producing areas  has already cost thousands of lives, and the violence just seems to keep getting worse.  Many people thought that the increase in use of fentanyl would depress the opium market and the violence would calm down, but that hasn't happened.

It now appears a new round of violence is only beginning, pitting warring gangs against vigilante squads, fighting over just about everything, including fuel theft, gold mines and routes for precursor chemicals.

In May, new and more violent players burst onto the scene: a car bomb exploded, a drug cartel moved into the outskirts of the state capital, and heavily-armed units of trained killers began fighting vigilantes who moved into the outer neighborhoods of Acapulco.

Thousands have been displaced by the fighting, which you aren't hearing much about in the mainstream media.  But more frighteningly, the toxic mix of drug cartels, hired killers, vigilante police forces and often all three together have essentially neutralized the Mexican military, forcing army troops into the role of mere spectators, or even worse, hostages.

It wasn't supposed to be this way: in the first four months of 2019, homicides fell by 36% in Guerrero, an effect many attributed to a fall-off in disputes between gangs seeking to corner the trade in opium gum, which is bought from poppy growers in poor mountain villages.

But nationwide, murders rose 6.7% in the first four months of the year, and in Guerrero, there was an uptick in violence in May: in once incident eight members of a family were killed and their bodies dumped in the state capital.

In one town near Acapulco, killers sliced up the body of a fallen member of a rival vigilante "community police" group, joking they were going to eat him.

Townspeople confirmed the butchery occurred two weeks ago, when the vigilante group calling itself the United Front of Guerrero Community Police took over the town and ran rival vigilantes out, killing two and carving up the body of one man with bayonet-like knives after he was already dead.

Despite that,  just a few hundred yards away from the vigilantes' base, a detachment of state police and Mexican marines guard the highway and patrol the town, but have made no attempt to arrest the vigilantes even though almost all are openly carrying illegal assault rifles.

Don't forget, almost all weapons are banned in Mexico, even though they have something akin to the 2nd amendment in their constitution.  But the government has just sort of legislated away the right of the people to self defense, along with many other rights, to the point where one mexican man told me "everything is illegal in Mexico, it's just what they choose to enforce."  

 

Daniel Adame is the leader of the group that took over this pueblo near Acapulco by detonating a car-bomb loaded with gas cylinders.  Nothing like a car bomb to say "we're here to bring peace and stability, huh?

Adame is a far call from the vigilante leaders of five years ago; a self-described businessman, he owns a lion and exotic birds, has an expensive and very illegal AR-15 and his son carries a pistol with carved silver handgrips.

He defends the use of the car-bomb, saying other vigilante groups use explosives, so why not?

It something being seen more and more across Mexico: so-called "community police" or "self-defense" groups proliferating and becoming increasingly cartel-like in their tactics.  They are so fed up with the inability or unwillingness of the police to bring security to their towns, that they take matters into their own hands.  And if you ask me, this is what a failed state looks like. 

And time after time, soldiers don't intervene, or are even held hostages, in part because they are afraid of opening fire on "civilians" organized into vigilante groups.

Part of the problem is that vigilante groups, like the one in La Huacana, are often sponsored, formed by or allied with drug cartels, or use similar tactics.

 

And that's what you are seeing here in Guerrero state.  Now don't get me wrong, this is not the norm everywhere in Mexico.  In fact, most of Mexico is actually safer than you might think.  It's really only a few hot zones where cartels want to control the production of opium or pot or whatever that things are this bad.   But that's small consolation to the people who live there.  

 

Salvador Alanis is a former migrant who now serves as strategist and spokesman for the FUP CEG, the group that took over this little town.

Alanis says the FUP CEG has as many as 9,000 men under arms, outnumbering the Mexican army in their state. Actually some of the members of this vigilante group are also members of the military.  So there's some overlap.  And the Mexican police forces and military are getting a huge overhaul by the new government.

Mexican President Manuel Lopez Obrador is betting his entire security strategy on the newly created National Guard, a sort of militarized police force that is expected to be deployed in Guerrero starting in about a month. But if the Guard faces the limits the Army faces, it will be essentially dead on arrival in states like Guerrero and Michoacan. And as the vigilantes grow harder to distinguish from cartels, some in Guerrero are de-facto wings of drug gangs, the cartels are growing bolder.  With no effective government presence in the area, soldiers have stood by as a string of towns were taken over, residents have practically had to erect moats, or put up roadblocks to defend their towns.  Driving the backroads of Guerrero these days means passing dozens of roadblocks manned by men with assault rifles.  And you never know if they are there for your safety, or to extort money from you, or worse.  Probably puts the kibosh on the tourist trade, I'd say.

And lots of residents are packing up and leaving.  Like many residents of the mountains, David Barragan, a resident of Los Moros who was forced from his village by the incursion of Alanis' FUPCEG forces, depended on planting an acre or two of poppies to bring in cash income.

But since prices dropped a couple of years ago, Barragan has turned to his stand of avocado trees, the new 'green gold' in the mountains of southern Mexico.

But now, the FUPCEG vigilantes have seized his avocado orchard and are harvesting the fruit he has waited for two years to mature.

Barragan, like hundreds of his neighbors, and thousands throughout the state, have voted with their feet, taking refuge in abandoned houses or sports stadiums in Guerrero, or fleeing to other states. Barragan has spent seven months living in exile, and he says people won't take it much longer.  But what are they going to do about it? 

The new National Guard created by Mexican President Manuel Lopez Obrador was intended to be used to secure areas like this and bring down the record homicide rates. But now instead it has been tasked with patrolling the border to placate President Donald Trump, who has demanded Mexico stem the flow of U.S.-bound Central Americans that pass through the country or risk tariffs on Mexican goods.  Obrador ran on a platform of being friendly to these migrants and helping them make the long journey across Mexico and enter the United States.  But the threat of tarrifs by the Trump administration put those plans in check, because Mexico depends heavily on cross-border commerce with the United States, and those tariffs could cause irreparable harm to the way business gets done in Mexico.  Meaning lots of companies who base some or all of their operations in Mexico to take advantage of the lower labor rates, could see that advantage disappear with the addition of tariffs and decide to move their operations back into the US.  If the deployment of some 21,000 National Guard troops at Mexico’s northern and southern borders can reduce the flow of migrants, Lopez Obrador will have successfully kept Trump’s tariffs at bay and averted opening up another front in the global trade war. 

Border Patrol Commissioner Kevin McAllennan was on Fox recently talking about the fact that this is actually a pretty big deal.

 

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But using almost a third of the National Guard’s total ranks for migration duties means fewer security forces to tackle one of Mexico’s most pressing issues, spiraling violence, which last year cost a record 33,000 lives.  So Mexico finds itself in a real quandary.  Add to that the fact that many of the Mexican Federal police are walking off the job in protest because Obrador's plan is to fold many of them into the new National Guard, which apparently involves a pay cut and an entrance exam many of the Federal Police can't pass.  

So in the meantime, mexican citizens like these are taking up illegal arms and increasingly taking the law into their own hands.   We'll keep an eye on this to see how it plays out.

 

That's all I have for today folks.  If you are enjoying the podcast, please share it with your friends.  Don't forget you can watch the podcast for free over at Opslens.com.  I'll be back again tomorrow.  Thanks for watching the Hot Zone.

 

 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mexico-murder-rate-soars-to-average-94-per-day

https://nypost.com/2019/07/05/mexico-murder-rate-spirals-out-of-control-hitting-94-killings-a-day/

https://ijr.com/mexicos-new-national-guard-was-created-to-fight-crime-but-now-its-in-a-face-off-with-migrants/?utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=74409722&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8OX5CojUYez9KoBLt2QWZnB885XhVHUoCMXOZImCvXiLtxJ5hB7xRhtHCiPGzccQQTTwsDDKJGIrng2RYNREkuNR-bAg&_hsmi=74409722