All guns blazing
05 September 2010 By Andrew Lynch At a meeting in the White House last May, US president Barack Obama called his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderón, ‘‘a modern day version of Eliot Ness’’.
As fans of the film The Untouchables will know, this was a reference to the maverick Chicago policeman who brought down Al Capone during Prohibition. What Obama failed to mention was that Prohibition ultimately failed, and the violence of bootlegging gangsters stopped only when alcohol was legalised again.
Obama’s double-edged compliment was a perfect illustration of the dilemma facing Calderón as he steps up his own war against Mexico’s ruthless drug lords. Once seen as a mild-mannered technocrat, the president has set himself up as a hard man who can end the heroin and cocaine smuggling that has blighted his country’s international reputation.
Almost four years since he declared a military crackdown, however, the bloodshed is worse than ever - forcing Calderón to take even more radical action as he struggles to control an increasingly volatile situation.
As he delivered his latest ‘state of the nation’ report to the Mexican congress last Wednesday, Calderón had at least some good news to report. He had already used his Twitter account to hail the arrest of Edgar ‘La Barbie’ Valdez, a notorious drug-gang leader who is alleged to have tortured, beheaded and mutilated many victims.
The president also unveiled an impressive list of statistics, claiming that the authorities had made 34,000 drug-related arrests in the past year, confiscated the same number of weapons and deprived the cartels of narcotics valued at over $2.5 billion.
Despite these successes, the Mexican drugs war continues to produce atrocities on an almost weekly basis. In the last month alone, two mayors have been assassinated, 72 people were found massacred near the US border and a bar in the tourist resort of Cancun was petrol-bombed. The official death toll from the conflict has reached 28,000 - and the mortality rate this year is expected to be twice as high as last year.
On Friday, 27 suspected drug cartel gunmen died in a clash with the Mexican army.
Much of the violence is confined to members of the cartels themselves, operating mostly along the 2,000-mileUS border in cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. Officials estimate that 90 per cent of the victims are gang members, their hit men and security forces. Many are killed in disputes between rival traffickers as they battle for control of narcotics routes, with lurid stories of severed heads being dumped on pavements, beside rubbish bins and even in schoolyards.
The arrest of ‘La Barbie’ came just hours after Calderón sacked around 10 per cent of Mexico’s federal police force for failing a series of lie detector and toxicology tests, a tacit admission that state corruption was an integral part of the problem. He has also proposed new legislation to combat money laundering, by limiting the big-ticket cash purchases through which drug traffickers transfer billions of dollars smuggled from the US every year to buy guns and bribe police departments. This is a particularly brave step, since those illicit funds have also bolstered the economy in a country that has suffered more than most from the global financial meltdown.
Last month, Calderón admitted for the first time that the legalisation of some drugs may be the only way to defeat the cartels. This echoed a similar call from his predecessor, Vicente Fox, who has written on his blog: ‘‘This does not mean that drugs are good - rather, we have to see it as a strategy to strike and break the economic structure that allows mafias to generate huge profits.”
Some people in the US are pushing in the same direction, with Californians due to vote in November on whether to legalise the sale of marijuana to adults.
Mexico’s geographical position means that a close working relationship with the US government is essential to any resolution of the problem. Washington’s state department estimates the annual earnings from drug production and trafficking from Mexico at anything between $8 billion and $25 billion. An estimated 90 per cent of drugs used in the US enter through Mexico, with a similar proportion of the weapons used by cartels moving in the opposite direction.
Mexico’s drug traffickers rose to supremacy on the continent after the demise of several major Colombian gangs in the 1990s.As the extent of their encroachment into the US has become clear, the issue has risen up the political agenda. In 2008, former US president George W Bush launched the Meridia Initiative - which put $1.3 billion worth of military equipment and training at the disposal of the Mexican government, a scheme that Obama has promised to continue.
Obama and Calderón are said to have a close personal relationship, and have met more than a dozen times since the US president took office last year. Michelle Obama also chose Mexico City for her first official trip abroad and is friendly with Margarita Calderón - a former congress woman who is considerably more popular than her husband.
However, the Mexican president has also said repeatedly that he needs more help from the US, urging Obama to reintroduce a ban on assault weapons and adopt a more lenient attitude to illegal immigrants.
The drugs war goes to the heart of all Calderón’s domestic problems, with the economies of some Mexican cities strangled by extortion, kidnapping and roadblocks that the authorities are required to carry out on a routine basis.
Having come into office on a modernising agenda, the president’s attempt to reform labour laws has been blocked by powerful monopolies and trade unions.
The country still suffers from sluggish growth and terrible social inequalities, while remittances from immigrant families in the US are its second-largest source of foreign earnings, after oil exports.
Calderón is the youngest president in Mexican history and,by common consent, the least charismatic. Since he was declared the winner of a bitterly disputed election in 2006, however, he has proven himself to be a gritty political operator who is determined to change Mexico’s backward image in the eyes of the world.
He has the considerable advantage that the constitution limits him to one six-year term, which means he does not have to worry much about the steady fall in his personal approval ratings.
Calderón likes to boast that his first political campaign came when he was still in the womb. His father was a founding member of the pro-business National Action Party (PAN),which ran for public office several times but never won.
While young Felipe’s friends were playing football in the park, he spent much of his childhood putting up posters and riding around in trucks with loudspeakers. Calderón’s critics claim he is a child of privilege with no real understanding of the poverty that afflicts many Mexican lives.
He protests that, as a young man, he devoted much of his time to voluntary work, painting poor people’s homes and even digging latrines. Although he was studious and introverted, one of his schoolteachers remembers him quietly announcing in class that he would be president one day.
After serving as leader of PAN’s youth movement, Calderón became a member of Mexico City’s municipal assembly at the age of 26, and was twice elected to the federal congress. He made an unsuccessful attempt to become governor of his home state in 1995, before serving as PAN’s national president for three years. In 1999, he took a break from politics, moving to Boston and earning a Master’s degree in public administration from Harvard University.
For 70 years, the socialist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had exerted a monolithic grip on Mexican politics. That grip was finally loosened in 2000 with the election of PAN’s presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, a free marketer who wore cowboy boots and exuded a self-confident swagger that endeared him to Texas governor George W Bush.
Calderón became one of Fox’s biggest supporters, backing enthusiastically his pro-capitalist policies of balanced budgets, flat taxes and free trade.
As a reward for his loyalty, Calderón was appointed director of Banobras, a state-owned development bank that awarded lucrative contracts to private developers.
He was briefly embroiled in scandal when he was accused of avoiding the usual procedures when he borrowed three million pesos to pay for a luxury home. In 2003, he became energy secretary in Fox’s cabinet, but resigned after less than a year to concentrate on his own presidential campaign.
At first, Calderón’s lacklustre style made him seem like a rank outsider. However, he proved himself to have superb organisational skills by defeating Fox’s hand-picked successor for the PANnomination.He then ran a harshly negative general campaign, including a barrage of television ads that accused his chief opponent, Andres Manuel López Obrador, of having links to leftist Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.
When Calderón was deemed the winner by 0.5 per cent, Obrador claimed there had been irregularities in several polling stations, and demanded a recount. The electoral court eventually allowed 10 per cent of constituencies to vote again, slightly narrowing Calderón’s majority but still leaving him in the lead. His inauguration in December 2006 was marred by opposition marches, the blowing of whistles and even a brawl in the national parliament.
Despite this inauspicious start, Calderón had some notable achievements in the first half of his six-year term. He eliminated import barriers on wheat, corn and rice, won an agreement from rice farmers to sell their crop at 10 per cent below international market prices and, last year, imposed price caps on tortillas, Mexico’s staple food.
He also passed a controversial pensions bill that reined in the public sector and launched a new scheme of monthly cash subsidies to the 26 million Mexicans who live in poverty.
As Calderón himself admits, however, the outcome of the drugs war is what will ultimately determine his legacy. The polls suggest that, while most people fully support his tough stance, less than 20 per cent of them believe he can succeed. The PAN has been gradually losing ground in regional elections, suggesting that Mexico may abandon its flirtation with neo-liberal economics when the next presidential vote takes place in 2012.
Eliot Ness may be an American folk hero, but in real life he ended up as a broken-down alcoholic who was haunted by his many failures. Calderón is fighting to achieve amore positive outcome - against the best efforts of gangsters who make Al Capone look like a pushover.
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