November 11, 2012, 5:41 p.m. ET
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The Real Victims of Mexico's Drug War
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Not all who die at the hands of the cartels are criminals—and
not all who work for them do so willingly. .
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
With voters in Colorado and Washington state approving the legalization of
marijuana use on Tuesday, there is hope that the U.S. may be at the beginning of
the end of the long, tortuous and fruitless federal war on drugs.
If the U.S. Constitution means anything, the federal government was never granted the power to regulate intrastate drug use. That prerogative belongs to the states, though Barack Obama's Justice Department has already announced that it plans to defend the Beltway's nanny-state view that the feds have to protect individuals across the country from themselves.
Meanwhile, south of the border, countries seem to be going through their own paradigm shifts on the subject. As in the U.S., the impetus for change is bubbling up from civil society, not trickling down from big government.
During six years of bloody confrontation with Mexican drug-trafficking cartels, the government of President Felipe Calderón has often tried to play down the horror by insisting that the overwhelming number of victims were gangsters killed by other gangsters. But how could officials know who killed whom? Only about 4% of all crime in the country is ever solved. No one understands this better than relatives of the dead, who in many cases have objected to the characterization of their murdered loved ones as criminals.
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Getty Images
Now evidence is surfacing that drug violence is affecting Mexican society
more broadly than government officials want to admit. One example is that
"working" for the mob in Mexico, in many cases, may not be voluntary. Some
cartel employees, particularly individuals with technical and engineering skills
that the mobsters need, seem to have been recruited at gunpoint.
Telecommunications specialists who know how to install antennas and transmitters are in particular demand. Underage adolescents are also targeted for employment. Meanwhile, a Nov. 4 report in the Mexican daily Reforma said that doctors and nurses in rural areas feel threatened by an overwhelming sense of insecurity and many want to quit.
President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who takes office Dec. 1, has already subtly signaled a change of course. In an interview in New York before the July election, he told me that he intends to make reducing violent crime—specifically homicide, kidnapping and extortion—a priority. Of course, when I asked him, he added that he would continue to go after drug traffickers. But that sounds an awful lot like the U.S. model, where drugs move easily from, say, San Antonio to Chicago, and gangsters know what they can and can't do in the process of getting their product to market.
The new president may get support from his predecessor, a formerly zealous antidrug warrior who seems to have had an epiphany. In a speech to the United Nations in September, Mr. Calderón explained the "fundamental problem" with fighting drug use by "legally combating the offer" to young people:
"Huge black market gains, led by the ban, have exacerbated the ambition of criminals and increased massively the flow of resources toward their organizations. This allows drug traffickers to create powerful networks and gives them an almost unlimited ability to corrupt; they are capable of buying governments and entire police forces, leaving societies and governments defenseless, particularly in the poorest countries."
We now hear less of the claim that Mexico's drug-war victims are almost always themselves hoodlums. Even the government has had to abandon that line of reason as human-rights groups together with families of those who have died or disappeared have organized to push for the truth about what has happened to their loved ones. The belief that criminal organizations—sometimes with help from corrupted law enforcement—have taken to kidnapping individuals with specialized training is gaining credibility.
According to an Oct. 29 report posted on the Mexican website Animal Politico, the pattern in these kidnappings is notable because the families do not receive ransom demands, and they often take place in areas dominated by the cartels. Meanwhile, the military has discovered many sophisticated "clandestine" telecom networks in remote locations where the cartels operate.
"I don't see how this is going to turn out to be a coincidence," Felipe González, secretary of the bicameral commission on national security, told Animal Politico. "For example, none of the systems engineers who disappeared have been found, but last year armed men stopped a bus and forced two people who said they worked for a systems company to get off. The problem was that they weren't technicians; they were [bill] collectors. They turned up quickly, though murdered."
Americans are beginning to understand that prohibition is not an effective way to discourage drug use. But if Mr. Peña Nieto wants to make Mexico a more just society, he had better not wait for the huge American federal bureaucracy that lives off the "war" to step aside. They are deaf to the message that Colorado and Washington state voters sent last week.
If the U.S. Constitution means anything, the federal government was never granted the power to regulate intrastate drug use. That prerogative belongs to the states, though Barack Obama's Justice Department has already announced that it plans to defend the Beltway's nanny-state view that the feds have to protect individuals across the country from themselves.
Meanwhile, south of the border, countries seem to be going through their own paradigm shifts on the subject. As in the U.S., the impetus for change is bubbling up from civil society, not trickling down from big government.
During six years of bloody confrontation with Mexican drug-trafficking cartels, the government of President Felipe Calderón has often tried to play down the horror by insisting that the overwhelming number of victims were gangsters killed by other gangsters. But how could officials know who killed whom? Only about 4% of all crime in the country is ever solved. No one understands this better than relatives of the dead, who in many cases have objected to the characterization of their murdered loved ones as criminals.
.
.
Getty Images
Mexico's President-elect Enrique Peña
Nieto.
Telecommunications specialists who know how to install antennas and transmitters are in particular demand. Underage adolescents are also targeted for employment. Meanwhile, a Nov. 4 report in the Mexican daily Reforma said that doctors and nurses in rural areas feel threatened by an overwhelming sense of insecurity and many want to quit.
President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who takes office Dec. 1, has already subtly signaled a change of course. In an interview in New York before the July election, he told me that he intends to make reducing violent crime—specifically homicide, kidnapping and extortion—a priority. Of course, when I asked him, he added that he would continue to go after drug traffickers. But that sounds an awful lot like the U.S. model, where drugs move easily from, say, San Antonio to Chicago, and gangsters know what they can and can't do in the process of getting their product to market.
The new president may get support from his predecessor, a formerly zealous antidrug warrior who seems to have had an epiphany. In a speech to the United Nations in September, Mr. Calderón explained the "fundamental problem" with fighting drug use by "legally combating the offer" to young people:
"Huge black market gains, led by the ban, have exacerbated the ambition of criminals and increased massively the flow of resources toward their organizations. This allows drug traffickers to create powerful networks and gives them an almost unlimited ability to corrupt; they are capable of buying governments and entire police forces, leaving societies and governments defenseless, particularly in the poorest countries."
We now hear less of the claim that Mexico's drug-war victims are almost always themselves hoodlums. Even the government has had to abandon that line of reason as human-rights groups together with families of those who have died or disappeared have organized to push for the truth about what has happened to their loved ones. The belief that criminal organizations—sometimes with help from corrupted law enforcement—have taken to kidnapping individuals with specialized training is gaining credibility.
According to an Oct. 29 report posted on the Mexican website Animal Politico, the pattern in these kidnappings is notable because the families do not receive ransom demands, and they often take place in areas dominated by the cartels. Meanwhile, the military has discovered many sophisticated "clandestine" telecom networks in remote locations where the cartels operate.
"I don't see how this is going to turn out to be a coincidence," Felipe González, secretary of the bicameral commission on national security, told Animal Politico. "For example, none of the systems engineers who disappeared have been found, but last year armed men stopped a bus and forced two people who said they worked for a systems company to get off. The problem was that they weren't technicians; they were [bill] collectors. They turned up quickly, though murdered."
Americans are beginning to understand that prohibition is not an effective way to discourage drug use. But if Mr. Peña Nieto wants to make Mexico a more just society, he had better not wait for the huge American federal bureaucracy that lives off the "war" to step aside. They are deaf to the message that Colorado and Washington state voters sent last week.
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