David Pratt: A horrific week in Mexico's war for drugs

During those two decades, Grillo admits himself to having been in danger countless times, including once being threatened by drug cartel members with a grenade and on another occasion being told they were going to raid his hotel for potential ransom victims.

So, when Ioan Grillo says that what happened last Thursday in the Sinaloan city of Culiacan was not simply “gangster action” but “mass insurrection”, it’s time to sit up and take notice.

Even by the often-brazen standards of Mexico’s drug wars, what happened last week was extraordinary. Described as one of the most important operations in Mexico against organised crime in years, at almost every step it went badly wrong and the repercussions will be felt for a long time to come.

It all began when Mexican security forces moved to enforce a federal judge’s arrest warrant for Ovidio Guzman, the 28-year-old son of infamous jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

It was shortly after 3.30pm last Thursday in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, that the Mexican security forces stormed a home in the Tres Rios neighbourhood. It was there that Ovidio Guzman was staying in a sprawling compound behind 15-foot concrete walls.

Ovidio Guzman

The younger Guzman is a leading figure in the Sinaloa Cartel, and seen as the heir apparent to one of the world’s most powerful criminal organisations built from Culiacan by his father until his arrest in 2016.

In some scarcely believable bungling, it was not until the Mexican security forces had begun their operation that they were then told they did not yet in fact have an arrest warrant for the young Guzman and needed to wait.

It was a delay that was to prove catastrophic as hundreds of Sinaloa cartel gunmen rapidly mobilised on to the streets in a “mass insurrection” to block Guzman’s arrest on a scale never before seen in Mexico’s drug wars.

In the ensuing chaos up to 35 police and troops were surrounded by cartel members and one official and seven soldiers were taken hostage.

Cartel gunmen, some in pick-up trucks mounted with .50-calibre heavy machine guns, staged 14 attacks on the armed forces and blockaded main roads with burning trucks while shooting up a state helicopter.

In addition, a large group of inmates escaped from Culiacan city prison. Residents cowered in shopping centres and supermarkets as the city was turned into an urban war zone.

In what is seen as a humiliating defeat for the Mexican government, the country’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as “AMLO”) was eventually forced to approve the release of the young Guzman.

Lopez Obrador took office in December, promising not to repeat the “failed policies” of past administrations that have done little to stem a tide of drug-related violence that cost some 29,000 lives last year alone.

The scope of the violence on Thursday, and the decision to release the son, was stunning even in Mexico, where life is frequently punctuated by drug-related violence and impunity by cartel fighters.

The disaster was, for many Mexicans, the most vivid distillation of Obrador’s security policy, which still includes high-level targeted operations, but also entails a willingness to concede to a criminal organisation to avoid violent retaliation. Since Thursday, President Lopez Obrador has been at pains to justify his actions.

“Decisions were made that I support, that I endorse because the situation turned very bad and lots of citizens were at risk, lots of people, and it was decided to protect the life of the people,” Lopez Obrador said. “You cannot value the life of a delinquent more than the lives of the people,” the president also insisted.

But the whole incredible episode and bungled operation in Culiacan marked one of the most embarrassing moments of Lopez Obrador’s presidency and is also certain to drive a wedge between the United States and Mexico on counternarcotics and security strategy. Lopez Obrador himself admitted that Guzman’s arrest was meant as a first step towards extradition to the United States.

Last Thursday’s clashes, said the Washington Post, again also provided stark proof that “in parts of Mexico the government can be outmanned, outgunned and outsmarted by drug cartels.”

It marked too a serious escalation of violence after two major clashes elsewhere in Mexico last week. On Monday, cartel hitmen shot dead at least 13 police in an ambush in Aguililla in the western state of Michoacan, long convulsed by turf wars between drug gangs, latterly the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), viewed by some cartel watchers as Mexico’s most aggressive.

Relatives of police officers killed in Michoacan last week mourned

The following day, a gunfight left 14 civilians and one soldier dead in Tepochica, near Iguala, a city notorious for the 2014 disappearances of 43 student teachers.

Tuesday’s mass killing in Guerrero raised questions about whether the armed forces used excessive force, reviving the spectre of past executions, then came Thursday’s bungled arrest.

GLADYS McCormick, a security analyst at Syracuse University in the United States, told Reuters news agency that the news from Mexico sounded like it was in “the throes of war”.

“What is incontrovertible is that the Sinaloa Cartel won yesterday’s battle,” she said. “Not only did they get the government to release Ovidio, they demonstrated to the citizens of Culiacan as well as the rest of Mexico who is in control.”

While it never really went away, analysts say that Mexico’s drug war appears to be back and is possibly worse this time around than in the bloody years of the government’s 2006-2012 offensive against the drug cartels.

It was back then that Mexico’s “War on Drugs” really kicked in with former president Felipe Calderon, who sent in armed forces to tackle the increasingly powerful cartels, which had shifted gears from smuggling cocaine for the Colombian cartels to becoming full narcotrafficking operations themselves.

Since then, more than 200,000 people have been killed in gang-fuelled violence and more than 40,000 are missing.

The crackdown led to the splintering of Mexico’s cartels and some notable wins for the government, including the arrest of “El Chapo” Guzman, father of Ovidio. He escaped twice from jail in Mexico before being extradited to the United States, where he was found guilty in February of smuggling drugs and sentenced to life in prison.

But even after Guzman was locked away for life in a Colorado prison known as “the Alcatraz of the Rockies”, the cartel he founded has flourished.

While back at the height of the country’s “War on Drugs” the worst of the violence was largely confined to a few cities, now it has spread throughout Mexico.

“Right now you’ve got a lot of fragmentation. You’ve got the Sinaloa, the oldest and most infamous cartel, run by Chapo Guzman and his sons (‘Los Chapitos’), and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, based out of Guadalajara,” explained journalist Ioan Grillo in a recent interview with Vice magazine “Then there’s Los Zetas, the first paramilitary cartel, who have now split into factions; and the Gulf Cartel in Tamaulipas and Veracruz; the Juarez Cartel; and the Tijuana Cartel. Then we come to the smaller cartels, the cartelitos: the Guerreros Unidos, Los Rojos, Los Caballeros Templarios, and La Familia Michoacan. There are dozens of these,” Grillo continued, underlining the range and scale of cartel operations.

The largest of these cartels are reported to have envoys everywhere from the US and Caribbean to Britain, mainland Europe and even Russia and China.

In Mexico itself, meanwhile, there is virtually no area of society untouched by the tentacles of El Narco, as they are known.

They have a saying in Mexico: “Plata o plomo.” It means “silver or lead”. For someone unlucky enough to be presented with the expression, it usually means they face an unpalatable choice: take a bribe or a bullet.

The cartels have countless politicians, police and judges on their payroll. The fate that befalls anyone opposing them is horrendous.

Violence, often incredibly gruesome, is an intrinsic feature of the trade and used to settle disputes, to maintain employee discipline and a semblance of order with suppliers, creditors and buyers.

In August, the latest macabre spectacle produced by the cartel turf wars came with the discovery of 19 mutilated corpses, nine of them hung semi-naked from a bridge, in the city of Uruapan west of the capital, Mexico City.

The massacre was claimed by the increasingly dominant Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which posted a large white banner beside the dangling bodies of its victims.

“Lovely people, carry on with your routines,” it read, beneath the group’s capitalised red initials, CJNG.

Such killings are often accompanied by narcomensajes (narcomessages), usually banners left by the perpetrators at the crime scene. Narcomensajes may contain warnings to rivals and enemies, lay claim to territorial control or make threats to the media. They are always aimed at intimidation or compelling the authorities to change policies.

Such is the prevalence of cartel-inspired violence in almost every sphere of Mexican society that it has also given rise to a narcocultura, a value system glorifying brutal violence and adding a spiritual meaning to actions such as ritualised killings, beheadings and torture.

According to Antonio Sampaio, a research assistant at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, some cartel members have even developed a spiritual interpretation of criminality, associating their methods with cults of folk saints not recognised by the Catholic Church, such as Jesus Malverde (Angel of the Poor) or La Santa Muerte (Saint Death).

In the past few years decapitated bodies, heads burned in ritualised fashion and bowls of blood have been found near shrines to La Santa Muerte.

According to Ioan Grillo while many cartels don’t have a political ideology, other strange ritualistic traits are not uncommon.

“For instance, Los Zetas (cartel) take the US Marines’ philosophy of ‘never leave a man behind’ to new levels – ‘never leave the dead behind’ – and steal back their fallen brothers from morgues,” he explained in his interview with Vice.

“Many cartel leaders, such as Nazario Moreno (the Knights Templar Cartel), are quasi-religious, or suffer from a type of Jerusalem syndrome in which they think themselves gods. There’s also a Robin Hood angle, standing up for the little man and the poor, which is celebrated by the narcocorridos (ballads or folk songs),” Grillo continued.

All of this gives some idea of the extent to which cartel culture, influence and violence is now embedded across Mexico and rising again in even more grotesque form.

As a measure of this, some observers point to the fact that in the past it was not uncommon for gangs to kill adults but leave children unharmed. Now, the killing of children alongside their parents has become all too frequent.

They point also to perhaps the most disconcerting change. For while bloody cartel violence outraged Mexicans and captured international attention for the drug war, which saw 27,000 homicides during its peak in 2011, today, even though the number of murders soared to near 35,000 last year, the bloodshed seems to draw less attention and indignation.

For the moment many, Mexicans still remain prepared to give President Lopez Obrador the benefit of the doubt that the focus needs to be more on the root causes of drug violence, such as poverty and a lack of jobs.

“You can’t put out fire with fire. Our strategy is different to that of previous governments. We don’t want deaths. We don’t want war,” Lopez Obrador insisted following criticism that he caved in to the cartels in Culiacan on Thursday.

Only time will tell whether ordinary Mexicans caught in the crossfire of the cartels will continue to agree. What Ovidio Guzman and other kingpins like him among El Narco think is something else again.