More Buses, More Darkness

by Inside the Border/Gary Moore

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The riddle is as big as Mexico:

What really happened to the Hartsells?

Sure, this was just one more doomed passenger bus, hit by one more explosion of horror. But it’s also an emblem–because it’s one more time when the real nature of the violence raging through Mexico has remained a baffling mystery.

Consider the sheer range of the unanswered questions:

Was this family savaged because cartel terrorists were sending a national-scale message?
……….Or were ordinary local robbers simply wild on alcohol or drugs?
Was this a conspiracy, reaching out to a whole nation of 113 million people?
……….Or was it simply a small, grisly accident of fate?

AAAThe Hartsell case appears as a pastiche of missing puzzle pieces–the usual mix in Mexico’s time of troubles. But there are a few more clues this time, because, unlike local victims of such violence, the Hartsells were U.S. citizens. They were visiting family in Mexico from their home in Cleburne, Texas, near Ft. Worth. They didn’t seem to be targeted because they were Americans, but their status has allowed some pivotal witness input to emerge in relative safety, north of the border.

When the resulting clues are pieced together, they don’t point to the most reasonable-sounding explanation, the one saying that ordinary thugs on a Mexican backroad must have gone a little crazy. They point instead toward the crazy conspiracy theory, the great shadow: organized terrorism.

AAAThe first puzzle piece was the typical Mexican government announcement–cryptic as a mumble in the dark. On December 22 itself, almost as soon as the crime had gone down, the Mexican Army proudly announced catching a mysterious band of five men, said to be the attackers of that particular Transportes Frontera bus, which was stopped around dawn some 300 miles south of the U.S. border, three days prior to Christmas 2011.

But, the government added solemnly, the five suspects had resisted arrest. They had fired at arriving troops. And so naturally the troops fired back. And the suspects were all killed. And that, said the government, left no way to learn just who these mysterious marauders might possibly have been–or WHY they had gone into a frenzy of killing.

Case closed. By January 3, the Mexican daily El Universal was parsing it like this: “Chief state prosecutor Amadeo Flores Espinosa said it had been determined that the five dead criminals committed the attack on December 22. Therefore, he said, the investigation has been closed and concluded”–though the five suspects were never publicly identified.

Whoever the attackers were, they had required only a few hours to strike not only three separate passenger buses but two cargo vehicles, all on or near Mexican Highway 105, where it backtrails the northern fringe of the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz. The almost frenetic pace of multiple attacks left a trail of carnage stretching well beyond the Hartsell encounter. But like the Hartsells on the Frontera bus, all the victims seemed to share one trait. They were chance bystanders, not drug-war combatants. And–crucially–the scant evidence that has been allowed to surface seems to demonstrate that the central reason for the attacks was not robbery. Any fragmentary statements about robbery in the press seem to have reflected media assumptions, not investigations. But if so, what WAS the motive? Why this merciless rampage?

This part of northern Veracruz lies in a beautiful but notorious region of green foothills called the Huasteca. AAAAnd the Huasteca, especially in the vicinity of the attacks, is Zeta country. The Zetas Cartel could be called Mexico’s most openly terroristic drug trafficking group. Their massacre patterns remind of their origins among miltary deserters. But were the five mystery men Zetas? The lack of firm answers to this question was essentially buried.

A Zeta trademark is the commission of general acts of terror without overt explanation. Few subtitles say things like: “This is a message to the public at large, showing what will happen if you don’t knuckle under,” or “This is a message to the government, showing what will happen to your citizens if you anger us.” Instead, gloating silence may alternate with the occasional explicit taunt, adding to public anxiety. But did it happen in this particular case? The Zetas themselves took the trouble to deny it.AAA In a town called Tantoyuca, 30 miles south of the attacks, a public banner appeared on December 27–the kind of “narco-message” often seen in the drug war. Neatly signed, “Sincerely, Zetas Unit,” it said primly of the bus attacks: We didn’t do it. Even in a labyrinth of liar’s poker, this did mean something. But what?

The Zetas aren’t the only thugs in those hills. Smaller groups of ordinary highwaymen have appeared. In 2010, another government announcement told of another band of mysterious bus hijackers–also five in number–but arrested alive, named, photographed and sent to prison, after the murder of a bus driver and three rapes. And apparently those bus bandits weren’t Zetas. The government said they were escaped convicts. Nor does this exhaust the possibilities. At times, cartel enemies of the Zetas have been known to stage black-bag jobs to make the Zetas look bad. Did it happen here?

In the festive air of December 21, 2011, the big bus terminal at Reynosa, the metropolis of Mexico’s eastern border, was thronged with ticket buyers. Reynosa’s populous border strip lies some 300 miles north of greener Veracruz, in a different region of Mexico–with different safety dynamics at the end of 2011.

AAAIn 2010 and early 2011, the environs of Reynosa had seen so many cartel-war massacres that by mid-year thousands of troops were surged in–enforcing a new period of local peace–nervous, but very welcome. Earlier in 2011 that border area had convulsed as more than a dozen long-distance passenger buses were attacked in bizarre killing sprees–undoubtedly the work of the Zetas Cartel, though here, too, the motives were hauntingly obscure.

In April, bus traffic lay paralyzed, but by August the troops had chased the Zetas away, pushing them into other strongholds–one of which lay 300 miles south in Veracruz. AAA
By December, bus company spokesmen in Reynosa were gushing about the Christmas rush, saying enthusiastically that people had found the confidence to travel again. Three million U.S. residents were said to be coming home to Mexico for the holidays.

On December 16, Mexican President Felipe Calderon weighed in with Operation Winter 2011, beefing up holiday highway security across Mexico, assigning 12,000 extra federal police. Calderon was down 20 points in the political polls because of his drug war, fought bravely but disastrously since his inauguration in 2006. His political party, nearing July 2012 elections, badly needed the good news of Christmas peace on the eastern border. Anyone who ruined this silent night would be striking Calderon a personal, Grinch-like blow.

Reynosa ticket lines were spilling out the terminal door. In the crowd were five travelers making border connections, beaming in group photos they snapped. Maria Hartsell and her four children had had a long day’s bus journey from greater Ft. Worth to the border. AAAAnd they were still a long way from the deep hill country of the Huasteca. Maria Hartsell Sanchez, 39, had been born in those storied hills amid lingering traces of old-style pistoleros and robber barons (as opposed to new-style cartels like the Zetas). By 2011 she was a middle-aged mom in working-class Texas, married into a circle of affection and religious devotion in the Hartsell family, and working in a school cafeteria. That road, too, had been long. Her Cleburne husband, Michael Hartsell, suffered from Huntington’s disease and its tragic mental side-effects, which, the family said, lay behind his history of domestic flare-ups, severe enough for prison time. The strains had climaxed in early December. Maria sought a change of scene.

Relatives pleaded. Did she really want to drag four adolescents on a nostalgic holiday trip into Mexico’s drug war? But her own aging mother, nearly a thousand miles south in the Huasteca, had health problems. And the children seemed to relish the adventure: Facebook-posting Karla, a high-school senior, 18; beaming Angie, 15; impish Cristina, an eighth-grade library aide, 13; and bubbly, teasing Mike, 10. Logistics were eased by Maria’s brother, who lived at the border in Reynosa. There, at least two cousins joined the trip for the last leg, down through Veracruz to the flank of the Sierra Madre, into the mountain state of Hidalgo. They were now a hopeful group of at least seven.

AAAThe logistics were not small. Angie suffered from Down syndrome–so severely that she would later be exempt as a witness to the horrors at the end of the road. Any lapse in her daily medication was said to be life-threatening–yet she was riding into an environment that would leave her younger brother, Mike, with infection from the water, a sore throat and a skin rash–aside from the final nightmares.

Two hours south of Reynosa they slid routinely past a northern Mexican town called San Fernando. In March 2011, this “town of death” had hosted “the bus massacres,” becoming world famous. AAABus after bus was stopped by unexplaining cartel gunmen; passengers were picked out, lined up in lonely acacia scrub and many were killed–not with guns but slaughterhouse-style, with a sledgehammer. This almost indescribable enormity made news but not a proportional mark on continental consciousness–not least because the Mexican government hid many of the particulars. In both that spree in March and in a still larger San Fernando atrocity in 2010, when 72 immigrants were massacred, the killers were proved to be Zetas.

AAABut by May 2011, government reaction had placed more than 80 alleged local Zetas behind bars for the San Fernando episodes. The town’s Zeta headquarters, at a hunting lodge just east, was taken over by Mexican Marines. The flashpoints moved to greener pastures.

In darkness bridging December 21 to 22, the Transportes Frontera bus rumbled south beyond San Fernando, then finally across the Panuco River into Veracruz. A day later and just east, this state-line area would produce ten dumped corpses, said to be Zetas killed by the rival Gulf Cartel. In two more days, 13 more corpses were said to represent Gulf Cartel personnel killed by Zetas. No play-by-play told why, exactly, the Panuco basin was burning. The Zetas had apparently been hijacking vehicles there for a long time, with barely a peep of publicity.

AAA In the port of Veracruz, the big city of Veracruz state, December 21 was fateful. The entire metro police force, more than 800 personnel, was disbanded by Mexico’s exasperated central government, to be replaced by soldiers and federales–in order to root out Zeta influence. Twelve days earlier, state Zeta commander Raul Lucio Hernandez, “El Lucky,” was arrested. Also caught, on November 14, was the Zeta boss of adjoining San Luis Potosi state. If the Zetas wanted to send a back-off message, they had plenty of reasons.

The holidays were pushing a flood of buses down cracked old thoroughfares like Highway 105. The strain showed. Ten minutes after midnight as December 22 arrived, a bus a few hours ahead of the Hartsells, belonging to the Estrella Blanca line, “spectacularly” caught fire, apparently having been rushed out of the shop after repairs.

News items on Estrella Blanca, with its nationwide fleet, suggest the vulnerability of bus traffic. December 7: dispatch rejects a driver because he looks drunk, then he is found dead outside. December 7 on the other side of Mexico: bus stopped by armed men resembling soldiers; two passengers disappear. December 17: bus hijacked, not by cartel gunmen but by student protestors, one of at least 16 buses thus taken. Not as much news dogged the Frontera line, though in February a sleeping driver had hit the back of a semi-trailer, then leaped out and fled, leaving 38 passengers to break out windows for escape. The vast majority of bus trips in Mexico are safe and uneventful, but the sheer size of the traffic can bring the unforeseen–or create a target.

Thirty miles from where the Estrella Blanca bus caught fire and at about the same time, according to local rumors, some mysterious men were on a drinking binge. Their subsequent behavior first manifested outside the town of El Higo around 5:00 a.m. On an entry road from El Higo to Highway 105 they made their AAApresence known by spraying gunfire at three locals loading a vegetable truck–killing all three, for no apparent reason, and leaving them spread-eagled on the pavement. Before getting to the highway they hit a second cargo truck with a tossed grenade, causing another death. They reached the highway at a junction called “the Y,” and didn’t have to wait long for a bus–though the bright green motorcoach they stopped, belonging to the Vencedor line, was not the one carrying the Hartsells.

AAAIt was a logical place to stop buses. “The Y” was an old chokepoint for roadblocks, run not by outlaws but by the Mexican military. Bygone bunkers and sentries there can still be seen in file photos on Google Maps. Where these sentinels were on December 22, 2011, was not announced.

The Vencedor bus was boarded. Some accounts said there were not five attackers but eight. A young couple on the bus was going home to the sierra from job-hunting in the city of Monterrey, carrying a three-month-old baby. Florentino Hernandez and Ericka Cortes were both 19, drawing the gunmen’s attention because their baby was crying, according to vague reports. They were told to shut the baby up. Apparently they couldn’t. Then they were sprayed with automatic weapons fire. Both were killed–at such close range that the baby had powder burns, but somehow survived. The death toll in the strange spree was now six. The number of wounded was not announced.

The gunmen drove up the highway from the Y, soon meeting a white bus with red markings, apparently still in the darkness around dawn. This was the Hartsell bus. Again at least one of the attackers boarded. And again the seeming search for provocation. This time the irritating factor, seized upon by a shooter as an excuse to fire, was an outcry from a child-like 15-year-old, disoriented Angie Hartsell, the sufferer of Down syndrome. A gunman slapped her and said to shut up. Her mother and sisters rushed in. Maria Hartsell tried to explain Angie’s handicap, then reportedly threw herself against the attacker as he kept slapping. All were machine-gunned.

AAAThe ten-year-old, Mike Hartsell, was in another seat, restrained by an older cousin. But a second cousin, Emmanuel Sanchez, 14, of Reynosa, was with Maria. Emmanuel was killed. Beside him, Maria, Karla and Cristina Hartsell also lay lifeless.

Angie and Mike survived. In Texas their grandmother Margaret Schneider heard media suppositions that all this must have been due to a robbery. She was unconvinced. Her voice trembled as she said: ““I just don’t understand why they would kill those girls. I just don’t understand.”

In quick succession a third bus stopped to offer aid. Reportedly the driver’s coming down the steps was provocation enough for the heated shooters, and he was killed. A tightly compressed rush of violence was now complete. Total fatalities: 11. When soldiers, mobilizing on the same day, December 22, reported killing five perpetrators (leaving stories about a total of eight lost in the shuffle), the final reported death toll was 16.

In the media furor back in Texas, grandmother Margaret Schneider insisted on airing a telling clue, pointing out that after it was all over, Maria Hartsell was found to have been carrying nearly a thousand dollars on her person–which the “robbers” didn’t seem to search for or touch. Interviewer Randy McIlwain of DFW5 News said of Schneider: “She rejects reports that this was just a robbery. She says the gunmen were out for blood, the only reason for killing women and children.”

There was a tapestry of clues: the drive-by at the vegetable truck, scarcely a robbery. The grenade tossed almost incidentally but fatally at the other cargo truck–revealing an arsenal a bit heavy for robbers. And then the two bus invasions with their similar themes, as if seeking out incidental provocation to jump-start execution that was really random. If cartel gunmen had been instructed by higher-ups to create a blood trail of a certain size, the face-to-face execution of innocents might not have been entirely effortless. On both boarded buses, remarkably similar small irritants helped to nudge the trigger: the crying of an infant, the outcry of a handicapped girl.

AAAAnd then there was location. Only 50 miles away lay the magnificent Huasteca grotto called El Sotano de las Golondrinas, publicized internationally just four months earlier by a lofty pitchman: President Calderon himself, as he sought to boost violence-eroded tourism in Mexico. Calderon was filmed dashingly rappeling down into the cavern on a spelunker’s hoist, for a Public Broadcasting System travel show in September. If anyone had sought maximum affront to Calderon during his push for a safe Christmas holiday, Highway 105 offered certain attractions.

The Zetas are known in Mexico for extortion perhaps as much as for drug smuggling. The emergent question can only be viewed as a possibility, not a certainty–one more loose end in the shadows: Were orders sent to lower-level, expendable Zeta grunts, saying that a whole nation was to be pressured by sacrificing a few random pawns?

There are always the other possibilities: that another cartel–or other shadowy players–staged a false-flag massacre to pin it on the Zetas. Or that some ordinary thugs had found a drug-alcohol mix that blew their stack. But the evidence doesn’t point that way. Moreover, a history of other atrocities, originally wreathed in such questions but later proved to the Zetas, reinforces the picture.

Did Zeta leaders decide to send a message a little bloodier than their we-didn’t-do-it banner in Tantoyuca?

And did a government then suppress the implications because they might help spread a message of fear?

AAA

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Secrets of the 42: #10. OUTLAWS’ ROOST AT SÁRIC

by Inside the Border/Gary MooreAAA
AAAThe tiny municipio of Sáric, with its 27 miles of desert frontage opposite the Arizona border, is a case study in Mexico-The-Invisible.
Sáric brims with secrets, but few observers stumble in to view its exotic mazes.

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Like Sáric, some border municipios are tiny. Others are wide, but have few people.

And some are urban giants. More than 1.5 million people crowd into the municipio of Juárez, facing El Paso, Texas. And, hemmed in by California and the Pacific, the municipio of Tijuana has more than two million. So municipio police work both city beats and rural patrols like deputy sheriffs–amid many pressures.

AAAFor one thing, municipios also form basic building blocks of a non-governmental kind. Their boundaries trace out “plazas,” turf areas for organized crime. Many of the 42 border municipios–perhaps all–hide an unlisted celebrity somewhere in the shadows. A plaza boss supervises smuggling–and more violent crimes–for a large trafficking cartel. When two or more warring cartels overlap their plazas in a single municipio, the plaza bosses can get a little testy.

AAAOn July 1, 2010, such tensions at Sáric wiped out at least 21 cartel gunmen in a single Wild-West-style ambush. This was big enough to make nationwide news in the United States. But only for a moment, and with almost no details. The dangers of Sáric’s lonely backroads kept U.S. media from venturing near–or even finding out what the battle was really fought over. Unreported in the background was a classic outlaws’ roost.

AAAThe hideout village of Cerro Prieto nestles in a natural stronghold of majestic desert upland. Secluded at the southern edge of Sáric municipio, it is less than 30 miles south of Arizona. The name “Cerro Prieto” translates as “Dark Hill,” like a page out of Tombstone and Zane Grey, or Butch and Sundance with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The “hill” is a high, gaunt butte with a flat top and steep sides of dark stone, hugging the back of the village. Off a narrow paved road (blocked at times by rockslides in the gulches), an entry lane trickles toward the brooding butte, crossing the dry riverbed of the Rio Planchas. A derelict rope bridge sags overhead, strung for the occasional weather shift and desert flashflood. The rope skeleton frames a smear of rooftops and yard shrubs farther on. Banana leaves and scrawny fan palms mark a sudden oasis. The Mexican census managed to find this place in 2010, though some maps can’t: official population 353.

AAABy early 2010, Cerro Prieto/Dark Hill formed the violent nucleus of a fifty-mile north-south splinter of no-man’s land leading up to the U.S. border: a “plaza” covering two tormented municipios, Sáric at the border and, just behind it, slightly more populous Tubutama. A renegade trafficking organization had carved out this turf between main pathways controlled by the most powerful of Mexico’s crime syndicates, the Sinaloa Cartel. Rejected, the Sinaloa Cartel was not happy.

Dark Hill was said to have a small army in its craggy hideaway, AAAcaptained by a mysterious local, Arnaldo Del Cid, known as “El Gilo.” To defy the big guns of Sinaloa and pull in drug loads from farther south, Gilo’s band made a counter-alliance. They joined a new national cartel run by three violent brothers, the Beltran Leyvas. The tent had many actors, but one main show: The fabulous profits of drug smuggling led to epidemics of backstabbing, and grabs for the spoils.
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In 2010, just after the big battle at Cerro Prieto/Dark Hill, I chased its riddles. Desert residents warned that if I dared approach the village, cartel sentries would come out for a little greeting. And sure enough, right at the dry riverbed guarding the entry lane, a gray double-cab pickup roared up, decked out with a rollbar and smoked windows. The driver’s window slid down, like a dark stage curtain unveiling the holder of my fate: lean face, neatly clipped string goatee–and a baseball cap. The voice demanded: “What is your business in Cerro Prieto?”

AAAThe subtext was sadly standard for cartel lookouts. On the pickup’s dashboard flashed an angry bubble light: red-blue-red-blue. “We are municipales,” announced the questioner, meaning Sáric municipio police, on rural patrol. “We” referred to shadowy silhouettes, secreted behind tinted glass on the back seat.

According to an area military source, a particular Sáric municipio police officer was moonlighting as chief halcon, or lookout, for cartel interests at Dark Hill–an officer known tartly as El Zorro. The pickup driver fit the description, and I didn’t ask. He studied my press card intently–then suddenly relaxed: “Well, welcome,” he said at last, apparently satisfied. “Feel free to look around.”

This, too, is oddly standard. Even in an atmosphere of casual murder–including the murders of many Mexican journalists–a U.S. press card, at least at certain times, can exempt an intruder, under the label: “Not a Threat–And Not Worth the Trouble His Disappearance Might Bring”–which is a fragile cocoon, ready to dissolve in a heartbeat. Later I caught glimpses of the truck preceding me to village houses, as if making sure nobody got so carried away with the welcome as to actually say anything.

They needn’t have bothered. The place was ghostly quiet, like a discarded movie set. Many natives were said to have fled. AAAThe few who came to their doors smiled wanly, repeating the script: We know nothing.
A youth strolled out of desert glare in dusty heat, wearing a military-style beret, shirttail out–and he gave a little wave. After the big battle, most of Gilo’s boys were said to be laying low in the hills.

El Gilo had consolidated his hold here months earlier. The stories about his ravages were seldom verifiable or definitively traceable to him, but they set a tone: The wife and daughter said to have been raped in front of husband and father because the gang wanted their ranch; the horses stolen from an impoverished ranching commune to carry bales of pot; the killings for unknown reasons; the houses burned as intimidation, revenge or turf marking; the flood of carjackings; the demands for protection money.

A thousand miles south, the rise of El Gilo was being watched by an irritated presence. “Shorty” (“El Chapo”) Guzmán, the myth-enfolded top boss of the Sinaloa Cartel, was reportedly barricaded in much higher outlaw mountains, down in Durango. With a billion-dollar revenue stream and outlaw armies of his own, El Chapo surveyed a chessboard the size of Mexico. As 2010 deepened, he had brushfire wars going against varying cartel rivals all along the border’s 2,000-mile length. The simple story of Dark Hill–as simple as backstabbing for the Treasure of the Sierra Madre–was being endlessly warmed over, in an alphabet soup of new names, dates, ever-new faces.

AAABut for Dark Hill, a breakpoint was nearing–in the summer of 2010–with a twist. Finally fed up with the Dark Hill competition, Chapo, along with his contractors in the smuggling corridors on either side of Dark Hill, took action. They launched a Convoy of Death–sometimes known in those days as an X-Command. When the Sinaloa Cartel sent a parade of stolen SUV’s and quad-cab pickups to clean out a rival stronghold, the vehicles might be ceremonially marked, by painting large X-marks on the windows with a handy medium, white shoe polish.

AAAAs Mexico’s largest, most-business-like cartel, El Chapo’s Sinaloa syndicate could publicize itself as being the least violent–the “protector of the people” against massacre-mad loose cannons (while ignoring its own massacres). In February 2010, X-convoys had crossed the whole of Mexico to the Gulf coast, smashing at the Zetas Cartel.

On the night of June 30, a convoy of perhaps 50 or more vehicles moved toward the municipio of Sáric. At the Tubutama crossroads, only ten miles short of the den at the butte, a Mexican Army checkpoint was conveniently discontinued, just in time for the Sinaloa convoy to pour through.

Assault rifles bounced in the darkness against cup-holders and upholstery, as a blitzkrieg army prepared to clean El Gilo’s clock. They seemed not to notice that the desert road was rising into narrow gulches with no road shoulder, between overhanging cliffs: no room to maneuver or even turn around, and perfect lines of fire from the clifftops. They were apparently counting on complete surprise–a stunningly naive hope.

AAASomebody had talked, and the clifftops were crowded. When automatic weapons fire began pouring down from vantage points over the road, ranchers across the flats thought it sounded like a war movie. Before ever reaching Dark Hill, the convoy was cut to pieces. The authorities, military and police, arrived after the rather customary delay, once there was daylight. They found a ghastly graveyard of bullet-riddled X-vehicles abandoned along a long stretch of road, in the vicinity of a settlement called La Reforma. Bodies were strewn about. Sinaloa Cartel gunmen had sought to dive out and take cover under the vehicles, to no effect.

Dark Hill had beaten off what had seemed a certain Sinaloa victory. In a Mexican crime war without coherent annals, almost without a public history, it was not publicly noted that this desert showdown seemed to mark the end of an icon. There would no more X-convoys–at least not with the ostentatious white markings. Apparently never again would Mexico’s largest cartel daub its attack vehicles with convenient bullseyes.

The 21 dead acknowledged by Mexican authorities did not include any bodies carted off by retreating survivors. At dawn the confusion was great enough to let a sprinkle of local reporters get in, from Mexican media in towns nearby, though picture-taking was soon stopped. Customary government secrecy closed in: another milestone in the dark.

AAASoldiers and state police surged to the area–after the fact, establishing a massive government presence once the shooting was done. The victorious occupants of Dark Hill melted away to outlying ranches. Then all was quiet.

A month later, on July 29, the Sinaloa Cartel would strike again, this time more judiciously, burning some Dark Hill vans and smuggling camps on the Planchas riverbed, and killing a few Gilo gunmen (or many, said the rumors).

So then the question: Who, at last, had become the enduring ruler of Dark Hill? Three more bodies would turn up, arranged symbolically at the three different roads leading into Tubutama, the gateway to Dark Hill. Was this a message from El Gilo, saying he was still running things? Or was it the reverse, a little something from the Sinaloa Cartel, saying they had sent Gilo packing? Nobody seemed able to say.

El Gilo, the Khan of high-desert house burnings, was never reported arrested or killed–or even seen or photographed. Under the brow of a dark-rocked butte, at a ragged suspension bridge hanging uselessly above dry sand, the questions go unanswered–and the world seldom asks.

The municipio of Sáric is only one small, beautiful, tormented sister, in the border’s great family of 42 municipios, large and small. Their history is often a wan smile.
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Drop That Dime on a Hot Plaza–It’s Their Loss

by Inside the Border/Gary MooreAAA

Cartel Spanish 101:

Dropping a dime
is like heating up the plaza:
You burn your villages on retreat…

In back-street English, “dropping a dime” on someone means snitching to the cops.
But the drug war in Mexico adds a layer to this, because it’s not just a two-sided fight.

As Mexico’s cartel hit squads shoot at one another, they are also in conflict with the third leg in a war triangle: the not-always-perfect forces of law and order, represented by government troops and police. This means that snitching can be used tactically, as a weapon.

AAAAAAThe result looks like three-dimensional chess. Mexico’s triple-sided combat opens an extra dimension of possible moves for cartel players. Like an aerial dogfight, the action doesn’t just go side-to-side, but can shoot up vertically.

AAAIf Cartel A loses a chunk of turf to Cartel B, then Cartel A can, in effect, scorch the earth it is leaving. There are two ways to do this, both by luring law enforcement into the fray as Side C, and poisoning the spoils won by Side B.

The first way is the dime. You simply tell the cops (sometimes corrupt ally cops) where Cartel A is hiding out, to prompt a raid. But the second way is more subtle. There is a kind of jiu-jitsu called “calentando la plaza”–”heating up the turf”–if that turf is held by a rival.

AAA This takes us back to the cartel dictionary. The ground won or lost is a “plaza”—a term nobody has been able to translate very well. It doesn’t mean a palm-lined village square. In underworld parlance in Mexico, a plaza is a geographical area of influence. Nor is it limited to border staging areas for drug smuggling. A plaza can be deep inside Mexico. It can be the size of an entire Mexican state, or a group of states–or just a city or county-sized area within a state–or only a section of a city. But the core meaning remains: a plaza is where you squeeze out profits. No other gang is supposed to move in (unless they pay “derecho de piso”—a user’s fee, or turf tax—also not translating very well).

Plazas are useful because, even if drug smuggling goes badly, you can turn to the ordinary citizens in your plaza and push some meth or AAAmarijuana onto the vulnerable. Or, more directly, you can extort the populace under threat, pulling in a monthly protection fee from the scared guy in the corner shoe store, maybe even the taco stand on the street. Cartel battles are fought over such captive areas, like medieval spoils. This is one of the open secrets of Mexico’s drug war: an uneven slide toward anarchy, with “taxes” collected by the boys down the block.

If a plaza is lost–if another gang comes in a bigger caravan of SUV’s and newly stolen quad-cab pickups–there is still the wild card: You can lure in “the heat.” Crime news from Mexico is laced with acccusations that one or another sour-grapes gang faction has been “calentando la plaza” (“heating up the turf”) by committing acts of violence. These may look random and pointless, but there is the hidden gain: they may force law enforcement to crack down by hitting the easiest targets, your surprised rivals.

Maybe you massacre a few civilians. This might pressure an embarrassed government to send in the Marines. If it’s a plaza you don’t control anyway, what do you have to lose? AAAThe troop surge will keep your rivals from doing business. The word for this–“calentar” (“to heat up”)–equates law enforcement with a warm reception, like an old Chicago gangster flick with Joey or Louie musing: “We gotta lay low. Da heat’s on.”

But Joey or Louie were seldom so successful at dominating large swaths of society as to need the extra geographical word: “plaza.” The drug war has seen efforts to carve up Mexico like a pie (a Cuernavaca cartel summit in 2007 sounded like the dons in The Godfather carving up 1950s Cuba). There is something timeless in the idea of the plaza. Warlords in the Dark Ages might have called it a fiefdom.

Even the simpler form of 3-D cartel chess, the dropped dime, is an art. The throwaway cell phone rings up the confidential government tip line. The heat is sent directly to the victorious rival’s celebration party. Soon Mexican Marines are swarming the ranch or restaurant, backed by the grim thump-thump-thump of a U.S.-supplied Black Hawk helicopter. The spectacular mass arrest may be followed by a stern government press release, announcing primly: “The Marines acted upon information from a concerned citizen.” But was it really a heroic passerby–or a knife from Joey or Louie?

AAAIt can come thick and fast. At present the remnant Gulf Cartel, cornered in an urban strip of border Mexico just below South Texas, is dismembering itself so rapidly—in a feud between the R’s and the M’s (also not translating very well)—that police and soldiers practically have to use dump trucks to cart off the gunmen getting fingered by vengeful colleagues. Nearly every month—almost every week—some new plaza boss seems to get his birthday party busted—perhaps through shrewd intelligence work by the authorities. But perhaps also through that mysterious phone call.

Of course, such tactics are only a side issue. Dwarfing them are the overall effects of the gang conflicts.

For example, the small border municipio of Miguel Aleman (a municipio is akin to a combined city-county unit) has fewer than 30,000 inhabitants. AAABut it has 12 miles of U.S. border frontage along the Rio Grande. Well positioned for smuggling, this municipio is said to define a “plaza,” or area of influence, for the Gulf Cartel. Their rivals, the Zetas, were also established here, but were largely driven out in the “New Federation” cartel war of 2010. The Zetas sometimes return on disastrous raids, “heating up the (lost) plaza.

AAAAs a Gulf Cartel plaza, Miguel Aleman is watched over by a plaza boss, in charge of illegal profits. But who is this boss? The answer–or lack of an answer–reveals the chaotic nature of Mexico’s drug war. The line-up shifts quickly:

1. Eudoxio Ramos, arrested Oct 27, 2011, was said to have been plaza boss of Miguel Aleman in the past, presumably in early 2011 or before.

2. Gilberto Barragan (“El Tocayo”), arrested May 20, 2011, was called the plaza boss of Miguel Aleman at the time of his arrest.

3. Samuel Flores (“El Metro Tres”), a major regional operative, was found dead on September 2, 2011. At the time, he was called the plaza boss of both Miguel Aleman and much larger Reynosa next door.

4. Ricardo Salazar, arrested Oct 8, 2011, after an hours-long firefight killed ten gunmen, was said to be Miguel Aleman plaza boss at that time.

5. “Pepio” Muñetonez, apparently never apprehended, was reportedly named by Eudoxio Ramos, above, as the current plaza boss of Miguel Aleman at the end of October.

So who runs the Miguel Aleman plaza? The specifics are a blur.
Much of the Mexican violence can be seen only as a chaotic silhouettte.

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Spillover – The Riddles Grow

by Inside the Border/Gary Moore

Is Mexico’s drug war spilling into the United States?
Two recent cases bring new prominence–and new confusion–to this old question.

AAAThe two current cases of spillover violence, on October 30 and November 24, occurred more than 300 miles apart in Texas. Both produced murky and conflicting reports. Each involved a different Mexican crime cartel, on different kinds of missions. These probes by foreign criminals onto U.S. soil were apparently unrelated, and only coincidentally close in time.

But there is still the deeper riddle. Could the incidents be predictors? Do they foreshadow a general willingness to bring violence north across the border?

For decades Mexican drug smugglers have had marketing links inside the United States, but the large cartels have kept most of their fighting in Mexico. There has been the unwritten rule: antagonizing U.S. law enforcement isn’t worth the risk. But this is only a custom, and customs can change. The drug war itself might be defined as a gradual breakdown of norms and inhibitions. The two recent incidents ask once again: How far will the cartels go?

The first case, on October 30 north of Edinburg, Texas, was labeled as a milestone by a convincing skeptic on spillover alarms. Hidalgo County Sheriff AAALupe Treviño has long urged moderation in this tricky debate, reminding that crime in his border county is mostly homegrown, coming from U.S.-side perpetrators, not from a phantom invasion out of Mexico.

But the October 30 case–in which Treviño’s deputy Hugo Rodriguez was wounded–was a milestone, according to the sheriff: a clear case of Mexican organized crime on a violent cross-border mission.

The clash involved three groups: 1) local street-gang operators in Hidalgo County, 2) cartel muscle coming from Mexico to strike at the street gang, and 3) Sheriff’s Department responders reportedly drawn into the fray by a cryptic call for help. Such confusing three-way battles have long been standard in Mexico.

On October 30, a pickup containing at least four hitmen from Mexico was sent across the Rio Grande bridge, then traveled 20 miles into the United States. The truck came from the Gulf Cartel, a badly battered remnant organization, holding onto influence in a 150-mile urbanized strip of borderland in Mexico, facing Texas. As the Gulf Cartel has melted down–in battles with the rival Zetas Cartel, and with the Mexican government, and among its own factions–a load of marijuana reportedly fell into renegade hands, and crept across the border as a freelance operation. The cartel hierarchy wanted the pot back, and, reportedly, they ignored traditional caution to go after it, sending a squad into the U.S. to do battle for the goods.

The hit squad soon targeted a mobile home in rural Hidalgo County, where parts of the disputed load were allegedly being peddled by luminaries in a Texas street gang, the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (the name only sounds political; it originated in a Texas prison). Three of the mobile home entrepreneurs were taken prisoner, but before the cartel kidnappers could get very far with them, one escaped and called the sheriff’s department. Mysteries multiplied. The kidnappers’ pickup truck was somehow identified by arriving sheriff’s deputies, and there was a traffic stop. Two of the captives reportedly were being held in the cab–which must have been crowded. As a deputy got out and walked up to them, the head gunman, Daniel Gonzalez, 19, was said to open fire, then was killed in the ensuing firefight.

This was when Deputy Rodriguez caught three slugs, though his armored vest stopped two, leaving only a third to draw blood, at a wound that was variously described by official statements as being in the stomach or in the thigh. At least six persons, including a woman, Salma Arellano, were arrested and charged with various crimes–raising more questions. The gunman Gonzalez was the only fatality, but a murder charge was brought against one of his apparent kidnap victims, under Texas’s “law of parties.” Official narratives had Perez exchanging fire only with deputies. This, too, sounds like the confusing battles in Mexico.

The questions would linger–as the second case arrived.

Not quite a month later, on November 21, a semitrailer was rumbling into northwest Harris County at the fringe of metro Houston, a long six hours north of the border. The big rig was carrying a hidden marijuana load, but that wasn’t all. This was a decoy operation run by undercover law enforcement, designed to flush out waiting recipients of the pot. The truck was bird-dogged by lawmen in disguised vehicles. Then suddenly three other vehicles swooped in, apparently having followed this singular parade still more secretly from the border. The new vehicles opened fire, strafing the truck and killing its driver, Lawrence Chapa, an undercover informant.

Again there was a firefight. Again a sheriff’s deputy was wounded, this time in the leg, apparently as another officer fired in the confusion. Again, one of the attacking gunmen was killed. Four more were arrested. Confessions said they were operatives of the Zetas Cartel in Mexico. Three were reportedly Mexican citizens.

Theories arose. Only 300 pounds of marijuana lay in the truck, a small load to try and rip off at such a risk. Plus, the attack came not on a lonely road in the countryside but in more chancy urban terrain. Some theorists said the Zetas were sending a message, that this was not an attempt to rip off a drug load but a pinpoint assassination of an informant, performed inside a U.S. city to show the Zetas’ reach. Famed as the most violent Mexican cartel, the Zetas are known for sending terroristic messages via bursts of violence that are never overtly explained.

Both these cases suggest that if the drug war does spill onto U.S. soil, the smoke of battle may hide much of the field.

AAA

The map above suggests why law enforcement officials are nervous in South Texas. Spillover from Mexico’s violence has been happening there for some time.

But if the map is examined closely it also shows why U.S.-side nervousness remains mostly at the preparedness stage, and not in full cry of alarm–at least not among many knowledgeable front-line officers on the ground. Spillover has made a pattern of isolated dots. U.S. law enforcement has kept it from forming a unified wave.

Typically, U.S.-side arrests of drug bosses (green letters on the map) have occurred not as cartels tried to conquer U.S. territory, but as they used U.S. border areas as safe havens, escaping Mexico when feuds closed in. This occurred in 2010 with some escaping members of the Zetas Cartel, and again in 2011 with the Gulf Cartel as it was rocked by infighting. Some of the sanctuary-seekers became well established before they were caught (B, C and D on the map), some were caught almost immediately (A, E, F) and one (G) turned himself in to U.S. authorities at a border bridge, the day after his battle group was smashed in Mexico ten miles away. Escapees in hiding can bring extra problems, as their Mexican foes cross to the U.S. and shoot at them (red numbers on the map).

Will such isolated dots connect in the future, to trace out a crisis?
The answer is a matter of passionate opinion–and intense debate.

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Flying Blind

by Inside the Border/Gary Moore.
AAA

The weather trap closed quickly. The Super Puma helicopter carrying eight persons, including “the second most powerful man in Mexico,” Internal Security Minister Francisco Blake Mora, took off from Mexico City in what appeared to be acceptable flying conditions. There were ominous low clouds, but not low enough to form confusing ground fog–at least not at the take-off site.

However, Mexico City lies cupped in a mountainous bowl. The helicopter’s planned route, to Cuernavaca just south, had to climb past a big triple peak called the Three Marias, up in the clouds, where low visibility presented nightmare obstacles.

The pilot, Lt. Col. Felipe Bacio, was a veteran aviator in what appeared to be a well-functioning craft. He seemed to decide on an end run. Only minutes after take-off, reportedly near the prominent landmark of Azteca Stadium in southern Mexico City, Bacio turned away from his planned course. Aviation officials said later that he appeared to opt for a backdoor route to Cuernavaca, trying to stay under the cloud level by sticking to lower ground.

One solution to the Tres Marias problem, with its fog on the heights, would be to navigate along a nearby series of basins. Just east of the planned route, old Aztec lakebeds pointed south toward the Valley of Cuautla. It was a logical course–if had it been followed.

Unfortunately, just after the helicopter veered southeast, away from its planned route and toward the basin area, something happened. Accumulating evidence seems to show that it was nothing as spectacular as a bomb–or a fire, or, seemingly, any sort of mechanical malfunction. The fateful event seems to have involved an indefinable chain of decisions.

AAAA radar image of the craft was recorded (though such helicopter flights are not guided by control-tower instructions). The Super Puma can be seen continuing straight and level at a routine speed of about 130 miles per hour, with no known distress chatter on the radio. The straightness of the new course was precisely the problem.

AAAAlmost immediately after deviating to the southeast, the copter should have veered once again, this time to the south, in order to begin following the basin area. But no second turn came. Eerily, the southeasterly course continued unbroken. In the bowl of mountains enclosing Mexico City, such a straight and level course inevitably meant reckoning with the bowl’s far wall, to the east. Once the basin country had been missed (perhaps the clouds had closed and the craft was already flying blind, or the basin corridor itself was fogged in), the ground elevation began rising under the eight seatbelted occupants as the east wall drew nearer.

Why did the copter continue this course, at this altitude, when it was certain to intersect with the ground? This is the riddle (barring any possible revelations that could emerge in the future). The riddle suggests severe disorientation.

Helicopter TPH-06 (one of six VIP transport helicopters serving Los Pinos, the Mexican White House) was moving toward mountains so high that in the background was Popocatepetl, the eternally snow-crowned volcano more than three times higher than mile-high Denver. TPH-06 would never get that far.

At a thickly-fogged lower hump called Ayaqueme, and an elevation of about 2,600 meters (8,530 feet), the ground’s upslope converged with the copter’s straight and level path. Radar seemed to capture only a slight slowing before impact, at the last moment.

In 2009 a similar Super Puma helicopter, also flown by a veteran pilot, was ferrying workers to a British Petroleum oil rig in Europe’s North Sea–when a fog trap began to close. Flying conditions had seemed acceptable at first–and almost to the end–as the pilot spotted the rig ahead in open ocean. But the fog was capricious, seeming to envelope the copter on its approach. Witness accounts grew confused. One had the pilot emerging from a blind patch to find the rig much closer than he had thought. Another had a passenger never guessing anything was wrong at all, expecting a rig crewman to open the hatch as the copter finished easing down, only to find seawater entering instead, for the craft had ditched in the waves. That crash was not against a mountainside, and the occupants survived.

There is reason for special scrutiny of the last flight of TPH-06, on November 11, 2011, for, unsettlingly, it came three years almost to the day after another Mexican Internal Security Minister was killed in a Mexico City plane crash, also under puzzling circumstances. The other crash, on November 4, 2008, came around the time of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, and its three-year anniversary in 2011 was memorialized personally by Internal Security Minister Blake Mora. When Blake himself met a mirror-image tragedy seven days later, various coincidences stirred suspicions.

Francisco Blake Mora was the most visible point man on his government’s drug war, which is now said to have cost 50,000 lives since its beginning in late 2006, though official counts have stopped being issued. In a dark time for Mexico, with many blind turns, unexplained riddles are sometimes the only clues that deeper forces are at work. Sometimes–but not always. At a point between Azteca Stadium and Ayaqueme Mountain, just past 8:50 a.m. on November 11, 2011, there was only the riddle. A course toward disaster was left to play out its hand.

The eight persons on TPH-06, besides Minister Blake Mora, were pilot Bacio; his co-pilot, Lt. Roman Escobar; Mexican government Sub-Secretary for Judicial Affairs and Human Rights Felipe Zamora; departmental public relations director José Alfredo García; administrative secretary Diana Miriam Hayton; and departmental chief of security René de León. Response teams on the moutainside confirmed the bleak outcome, finding no survivors.
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The Hundred-Year Ghost

Mystical calendar cycles are all the rage here in the weary, wary end-days of 2011.

AAAAnd it’s not just That Maya Calendar Thing. Hollywood has joined the calendar fad, loudly, by promoting a new action movie as premiering on 11-11-11 (November 11, 2011)–though few ticket-buyers will recall the bigger 11-11-11 of yesteryear, when AAAthe official end of World War I in 1918 was intentionally set at 11:00 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month (November), with the armistice signed in a soon-famous train car.

MEXICO, seeming at first glance so far from all this (“so far from God,” as the 1910 dictator probably never really said), manages nonetheless to come full circle into the middle of the tea leaves. This is because of global excitement (at least in some circles) over That Maya Calendar Thing. Enthusiasts can tell you that the ancient Maya civilization of southern Mexico, peaking before the Aztecs, had evolved a pictographic calendar which, the interpretations say, accurately looked all the way forward to the year 2012. But there (cue the Dragnet music: dum-duh-DUM-dum), the Maya calendar ominously stops.

In a world nervous about techno-speed and banking disasters, the Maya end-point has become a rallying cry, oddly melding fundamentalist rapture and New-Age chic. It’s the big warning: The Old Global Order is going to come crashing down, right in the End Year, 2012. This is a lot to lay on the unsuspecting ancient Mayas–Nostradamus meets the Celestine Prophecies under jungle palms.

AAABut Mexico invites such mystical musings, some not so ancient. The violence of its presentday drug war has become a symbol of the ways that seemingly impossible social breakdown can burst from what seems a clear blue sky.

And again, there’s a Cycle Ap for that. The application of mystic numbers works even on the drug war–with a little hocus-pocus math, and a few more facts than Maya Envy.

In short, Mexico has endured particular chaos once every hundred years. And such chaos, symmetrically, tends to last about a decade.

AAAThe first glimpse (leaving aside older precedents for the moment) was the Mexican Independence War, looming suddenly in 1810, then devastating a new-born nation until 1821. At the time, the decade of chaos could scarcely be viewed as part of a cycle–because the other shoe hadn’t yet dropped. Another hundred years would have to pass before the next great explosion began to suggest a pattern.

Then came 1910, a round century after 1810. Mexico was witnessing festive parades and monumental statues to commemorate the anniversary of the long-ago Independence War–when suddenly the old ghost rose. As if the monumental parade images were coming to life, 1910 brought the Mexican Revolution, which would rage for a disastrous decade, until 1920–as the recorded national population fell by a million.

Then another century passed. Understandably, the combined memories–the 1810 war and the 1910 war–would stir comment in a much more modern Mexico as it passed into a new millennium. In 1999, millennial imaginings were everywhere. Up north, the United States was alive with fears of the supposed Y-2K Bug in computer networks, or possible Times Square bombings on New Year’s 2000. But there was a time lag. This millenniun wouldn’t produce its American nightmare for another year, not until 9/11. Meanwhile in Mexico, the delay switch on millennium fear ran even longer. The natural moment of reckoning would be 2010, because of 1810 and 1910. Could it possibly happen a third time?

In 2000 the idea seemed laughable. Political change was coming peacefully to Mexico. The 2000 presidential election proved that reform was possible; democracy was robust. But the reformers, once in power, started to meet some old ghosts–who at first AAAseemed barely noticeable. These were the gang fights and drug-smuggling conflicts that Mexico had always known. By about 2004 they were mushrooming. By late 2006 there was official declaration. The government declared an unprecedented military crusade against organized crime: the “drug war.”

By 2008 the nation was shocked by growing combat–though this was still barely a blip compared to what was coming. As 2008 kicked off, the Sinaloa Cartel was making a full-court press along a great swath of the border, just south of the United States, attacking rivals in a thousand-mile span from Tijuana, bordering California, to Ciudad Juarez bordering El Paso, Texas. On the other half of the border’s 2,000 miles, the eastern half, epidemics of cartel extortion and mass killing had at least cooled a bit after 2007, but would have stunning renewal–in 2010.

It was 2007, in one of the more remote and peaceful-looking border towns, when I first heard the Hundred-Year Theory and its omens for 2010. The small city of Piedras Negras, opposite Eagle Pass, Texas, is so deep in the inland brush country, and so far from the big border cities, AAAthat in 2007 it seemed a sleepy, friendly sanctuary. But then a midnight cab driver loomed into my experience. Like the Ghost of Christmas Past, he said suddenly into the rearview mirror: “Mexico no tiene pena que dura cien años” (roughly: “Mexico never lets a problem last more than a hundred years.”) I had to ask him to repeat. What did he mean by this riddle?

He sighed. The corruption builds up, said the philosopher taxista, until the volcano has to blow. And like Old Faithful, its steam erupts on a schedule. In the darkness of the cab, on silent streets where nothing moved but your shadow, it was a long way to 2010. By that time, peaceful Piedras Negras would be rocked by so much combat that U.S. advisories said don’t go there.

In both 1910 and 1810 the steam had began building in the summer, so naturally the summer of 2010 invited scrutiny. Would there be signs of a big breakpoint? Well, yes and no. By July 2010 the eastern borderlands of Mexico had descended into the “New Federation” war, with formalized combat a bit different from anything before. But the death toll per incident still stayed at old levels, no more than about 20 dead even in the worst clashes. The record in outright massacres in the Mexican violence still seemed to be held by La Marquesa near Mexico City, when 24 men were mowed down–way back in 2008. The summer of 2010 brought ragged fits and starts, scant confirmation of any kind of eerie patterning, and no great burst to mirror 1810 or 1910.

Then it came. On August 24, 2010, the Mexican military issued an obscure announcement. In a single humble sentence, it admitted that an enormity had been discovered. The San Fernando Massacre soon shocked the world, fantastically upping the ante on Mexican violence. Cartel gunmen had killed 72 people–non-combatant immigrants, including 14 women–in a single, war-sized orgy. It proved not to be an isolated exception. The same town would produce another frenzy AAAa half-year later, massacring so many victims–surprised bus passengers, this time–that to this day many of the details are suppressed by the Mexican government. There were more: the 200 occupants of mass graves on the other side of Mexico, in Durango; the 55 terrified civilians killed in the casino hit at Monterrey.

It could be interpreted many ways. Our wisdom deals poorly with rhythms that lead beyond our knowledge. The response is either tidy, mystical prophecy, or head-in-the-sand denials, scoffing that the earth can’t move (Galileo probably never really said those famous words–“E pur si muove”–”It does TOO move”–when the Inquisition told him that God’s world couldn’t move in cycles).

In Mexico the questions go back farther than 1810 (to segue back to That Maya Thing).
It was 1519 when Hernan Cortes (or Hernando Cortez) sailed to the coast of Mexico on some AAAvery unlikely winds of doom, which seemed to come out of a clear blue sky. His arrival would destroy Meso-American civilization too completely for much thinking about future cycles (though the grandfathered myths about the bearded Quetzalcoatl and the eagle-eating-the-serpent might be viewed as shell-shocked Aztec versions of Celestine closure-seeking).

AAAIt didn’t take a decade for Cortez’s entrepreneurial genius to destroy Mexico that first time. The years 1519-1521 weren’t a precise calendar parallel to 1810-1821 or 1910-1920. But not so far off. Like the War to End All Wars delaying the real dawn of the 20th century until 1914, and the Y2K disaster getting predicted a year too early, the calendar of communal nightmares doesn’t always cooperate precisely.

The remnants of the Aztec empire, reduced to a smidgeon by European diseases, could still transmit worlds of experience in the misty realm of symbol, on an unbroken stream from the old monumental rites and sacrifices (which had made the Aztecs themselves look rather nightmare-ridden, long before Cortez). There was the mystical closure offered by the Virgin of Guadalupe (Did she really appear, a decade after conquest, to an humble, shell-shocked Aztec who had been renamed Juan Diego, with her supernatural proof left in the form of a puzzlingly ordinary oil painting?) Meanwhile, Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were poured into venerated saints. To watch some of the folklore dances that would cross the generations is to marvel at how much symbolism never gets put into words: the rigidly erect, heel-pounding male dancers encircled by the swirling petticoats that nobody is so crude as to call anatomically-correct symbols like the can-can. There is a power in pre-literate symbol (to borrow a bit from Octavio Paz), and it isn’t reduced by a crushing history of endurance and pain.

So who’s to say, at last, that such power can’t set a deadline on what it has to endure–by tapping into that ordinary, everyday mystery called hope–while the volcanic cycles seem to come out of nowhere, and wipe the books clean?

AAA
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The Un-Failed State: Geography Lesson

AAA*The Mexican government “has lost territorial control, and, in sum, governability…in more than 50″ percent of Mexico’s land area.–Jorge Carrillo Olea, the founder of Mexico’s lead civilian intelligence agency, to EFE news service on August 28, 2011.

AAA*“Let’s talk about 40 percent of the national territory where the State no longer governs, a 40 percent that is slowly spreading.”–retired Mexican Major General Luis Garfias Magaña, in the newsmagazine Proceso, May 5, 2011.

AAA*“Mexican authorities are in control throughout Mexico, in all its states.”–U.S. State Department, official release, quoted in the Mexican news medium Milenio, September 17, 2011.
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How are the above statements to be reconciled? Under the stresses of the drug war and organized-crime violence, how much of Mexico has become a no-go zone?
How wide is the danger?

The statements are all serious assessments of an elusive reality. The violence in today’s Mexico forms a twilight zone. It is not an all-consuming apocalypse, but it is also not the relative peace of Mexico a generation ago.

For example, take the third statement, from the State Department. When translated into Spanish in the Mexican media it sounded absolute, but the original form in English was: “Mexican authorities assert control throughout Mexico, in all Mexican states.” This is less absolute, and is true. Everywhere the Mexican government has sent massive troop surges, criminal resistance has tended to melt before them. But then the problem simply moves, and sets up shop around the corner.

It was Dec. 11, 2006, when a new Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, officially declared war against his nation’s organized-crime cartels. Cartel activity was expanding from drug smuggling into pitched battle, and preyed on the Mexican public through extortion, protection rackets, armed robbery and local drug pushing. This had ballooned over time. The previous president, Vicente Fox (from the same reformist political party as Calderon), had declared long ago–in 2003–that one of the mightiest cartels had been successfully destroyed. That was the Gulf Cartel–which then regrouped, split into factions and came roaring back, with its heirs now blasting through 2011. The premature declaration of the death of the Gulf Cartel (and its soon-multiplying branch called the Zetas) was made on April Fool’s Day, 2003. It was a time for boastful bubbles. A month later President Bush would declare “Mission Accomplished” on Iraq, on May 1, 2003.

AAA Mexico has always had isolated “outlaws’ roost” areas, where even locals warned travelers not to go. Through the mid-20th century these were small and often exaggerated by legend. A main one was in the impoverished and politicized highlands of Guerrero state, flanking Acapulco. Other storied mountain hideout zones dotted Mexico’s high sierra both east and west, from Durango to Veracruz. Some involved drug farming; some had seen guerrilla warfare; some were merely remote and attractive to fugitives.

AAAIn the 1980s it was natural to assume that these throwback bandido areas were shrinking and soon would disappear, as the march of development brought education, opportunity and civilization.

AAA
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The harsh news from the drug war is that the reverse has occurred. The landscape of no-go zones has swelled across Mexico, as at no time since the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920.
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“Millions of U.S. citizens safely visit Mexico each year, including more than 150,000 who cross the border every day for study, tourism or business and at least one million U.S. citizens who live in Mexico.”–U.S. State Department, April 22, 2011 (statement made in the context of a travel warning)

“I feel as safe here as I do at home, possibly safer. I walk the streets of my Vallarta neighborhood alone day or night….Do bad things happen here? Of course they do. Bad things happen everywhere, but the murder rate here is much lower than, say, New Orleans…There are good reasons thousands of people from the United States are moving to Mexico every month, and it’s not just the lower cost of living, a hefty tax break and less snow to shovel. Mexico is a beautiful country, a special place.”–Linda Ellerbee, journalist and frequent resident of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, May 15, 2009

“Drug-related violence does not encompass all of Mexico and much of the country remains safe for visitors and residents alike…According to the British Embassy, the majority of homicides in Mexico have occurred in…less than 3.5% of the country’s 2,438 municipalities. And of these homicides, 9 out of 10 are suspected narco-traffickers killed in fighting over control of drug trafficking organizations and routes…While the issue of narcotics-related crime in Mexico is a serious concern and there are definitely areas of the country one should avoid, it is helpful to keep a reasonable and rational perspective…”–”Living and Loving Mexico,” website by expatriate residents, 2011

“Wages have risen in Mexico, according to World Bank figures…educational and employment opportunities have greatly expanded…Per capita gross domestic product and family income have each jumped more than 45 percent since 2000…Over the past 15 years, this country…has progressed politically and economically in ways rarely acknowledged by Americans debating immigration…Democracy is better established, incomes have generally risen and poverty has declined…Birth control efforts have pushed down the fertility rate to about 2 children per woman from 6.8 in 1970, according to government figures….Quality of life has improved in other ways, too.”–New York Times, July 6, 2011 (In 2009, though previously unthinkable, a $250-million rescue loan to the New York Times Company from controversial Mexican investment helped place near-controlling interest in the company in Mexico.)

“The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (affiliated with the Norwegian Refugee Council) warned that because of the violence unleashed by the drug war, some 230,000 persons in Mexico have been forced to leave their places of origin.”—La Jornada, March 26, 2011

(Mexico’s underworld has gone through) “radical transformation from drug smugglers into paramilitary death squads… a criminal insurgency that poses the biggest armed threat to Mexico since its 1910 revolution.”–Ioan Grillo, correpondent for Time magazine, in his book “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” quoted in Time, Oct. 23, 2011
AAAAAAAAA

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