To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War Read Online Free PDF Page A

social mobilizations such as the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign and the teachers’ rebellion in Oaxaca. Calderón staked his presidency on sending the army into the streets to wage “war” on drug traffickers and send an unequivocal message of military might to the massive protest movements that had surged throughout the country in the preceding months.
    Calderón’s “war,” however, has mostly targeted the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas, the Carrillo Fuentes, or Juárez Cartel, the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, and the Familia Michoacana, and has left the Sinaloa Cartel more or less alone. A National Public Radio analysis of 2,600 drug-related federal arrests between December 2006 and May 2010 found that members of the Sinaloa Cartel accounted for only 12 percent of arrestees. According to Mexican federal government statistics the Sinaloa Cartel is responsible for 84 percent of the recent drug-war murders. In November 2008 federal police arrested Noé Ramírez Mandujano, the director of Mexico’s national counter-narcotics agency, for accepting a bribe of $450,000 from the Beltrán Leyvas’ Pacific Cartel, then the archenemy of the Sinaloa Cartel. In December 2009, navy commandos stormed the high-end Cuernavaca apartment complex where Arturo Beltrán Leyva, leader of the Pacific Cartel, was hiding out. The soldiers killed him, stripped his body naked, and carefully laid out his money and jewelry over the bullet-ridden corpse.
    His war has also created a climate of such overwhelming violence and impunity that assassinations of political opponents—indigenous rights leaders, human rights advocates, anti-mining activists, guerrilla insurgents—are quickly swept into the ever rising body count without much attention or outcry. Paramilitaries shot and killed Beatriz Cariño and Jyri Jaakkola in broad daylight as they participated in a human rights caravan taking food and medical supplies to the besieged Triqui indigenous community of San Juan Copala in the state of Oaxaca. No one has been arrested; the federal government did not send police to break the paramilitary barricade on the highway leading to Copala. Raúl Lucas Lucía and Manuel Ponce Ríos, two indigenous rights activists in Guerrero state were tortured an executed in February 2010. No arrests were made. Activists have been murdered in Chiapas, Sinaloa, Baja California, and Chihuahua states; all the cases remain unsolved.
    In the United States, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have sent money, arms, and military aid to Mexico’s army and federal police to help them “combat” drug trafficking. U.S. officials and most of the major U.S. press outlets forget the long list of federal police and generals who later became known as top-level narcos—Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, Amado Carillo Fuentes, Osiel Cárdenas, Guillermo González Calderoni, Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo—when approving or covering U.S. aid to the Mexican federal government, such as the $1.4 billion Mérida Initiative. U.S. officials and the press routinely neglect to mention that the Mexican army and federal police very often are drug traffickers.
    Drugs are big business. The United Nations 2010 World Drug Report estimates that the global cocaine and opiates markets generate $153 billion a year. The U.N. estimates the global drug industry to generate between $300 and $500 billion. Cannabis is the most widely consumed illegal drug, but it is more difficult to estimate its annual revenues since it can be grown and sold locally worldwide in small amounts. The quasi-legal marijuana crop in the State of California alone was worth an estimated $17 billion in 2008; the value of all of California’s legal field crops in 2008 was $4.19 billion. The 2010 U.S. Department of State’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report estimates that Mexican drug-trafficking organizations move up to $25 billion in earnings across the U.S. border into Mexico every year. The Mexican federal