03/01/13 – Tim Johnson – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers based in Mexico City.
His name is Tim Johnson.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Very fine, Scott.
Thank you.
Good, good.
Thank you for joining us today.
Really appreciate it.
And three articles here I want to focus on about the drug war down in Mexico.
First of all, 27,000 missing, according to Human Rights Watch, in a new report that they put out, disappeared peoples.
Is that right?
27,000?
Yes.
That's actually a figure that Human Rights Watch didn't give that figure out.
It was a figure from the Interior Ministry of Mexico.
So it's the first time that the government of Mexico has actually acknowledged that they have indications that that many people have either gone missing or been reported as disappeared.
Wow.
And then that's on top, you say, of 70,000 estimated dead in the drug war just since 2006.
Is that correct?
That is correct.
So we're talking, you know, basically that there may be as many as 100,000 victims of this really brutal drug war.
Drug cartels fighting themselves, you know, killing civilians and the armed forces and police fighting the cartels.
It's been tremendous.
It's going to go down in the annals of Latin American history as one of the very brutal periods in any country.
Yeah, well, in your journalism here at McClatchyDC.com, you actually go through and compare this to the very political civil wars and dirty wars of Latin America, especially during the Cold War years, right?
And this beats out most of them, or all of them.
Well, certainly right up there with some of the almost forgotten chapters.
For instance, La Violencia, the period in Colombia that was a precursor to the extended guerrilla war there, left hundreds of millions of people dead.
200,000 people died in the Guatemalan Civil War from 1960 till 1996.
Then we got the various civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
They left anywhere from 60,000 to 75,000 dead each.
So, you know, this has been just a terribly bloody period for Mexico.
Yeah, and it's not a civil war over who's going to control the capital city, the left or the right, and how brutally are they going to butcher their enemies when they win, that kind of thing.
It's just a fight over a black market by criminal cartels.
Yeah, but we're talking about billions and billions of dollars of profit.
And so, yeah, it's a war of greed more than a war of power and ideology.
That's amazing.
I mean, you talked about, I'm sorry, would you say 200-something thousand, 250,000 in the Guatemala Civil War?
200,000 I think is a good estimate, yeah.
So, we're at almost half of that in, what, a fifth of the time, or a quarter of the time, something?
That's true.
Of course, Mexico is a much larger country, but yeah, we're talking about a six-year period.
That's the length of the Mexican presidential term.
Yeah.
I mean, Guatemala is sort of, I guess, the benchmark for the worst of those horrible civil wars between the left and the right, and the Cold War down in Latin America, right?
Yeah, it is.
And that, of course, the U.S. played a role in triggering that by helping, sponsoring the deposal, the ouster of a leftist elected president.
All right, now, so, take us back to the Vincente Fox years a little bit, if you could.
I mean, what really changed when Calderón came to power?
Well, just to, you know, for listeners, the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico was the entity that governed this country for 71 years.
It was an authoritarian rule of, you know, one-party state, and they weren't ousted until the year 2000, and there was an awful lot of hope that this former Coca-Cola executive, Vicente Fox, who was the leader of a center-right party, the National Action Party, was going to really sweep away some of the hallmarks of the previous, you know, this decades-long rule of the PRI, as the former party was known.
You know, wipe away the corrupt governors, and really, you know, just change and bring Mexico into a more democratic age.
Unfortunately, it didn't happen.
You know, Fox came in, and he, rather than really sweeping away some of these elements, he ended up sort of co-opted by them, having to use them to, you know, be able to govern to any degree.
He didn't have control of Congress, and so he sort of had to cut deals with the PRI legislators, and just didn't really move against the corrupt union leaders and so forth, and monopolists that have stymied Mexico's growth.
And yet, you know, at the end of his six-year term, his successor from the same party, the PON party, was able to just barely eke out a victory, and so the PON, this National Action Party, has ruled for 12 years.
But, you know, as Mexicans look back, they're pretty disgusted by the fact that there wasn't much change from the PRI in those 12 years.
And in fact, the PRI has come back to power now.
Well, but now, so Calderon, he was from Vincente Fox's party, yeah?
That's correct, his National Action Party.
But then, so what caused the escalation of the drug wars so much under his term, compared to under Fox's term?
Well, Fox, you know, it's really been a long evolution of Mexican drug groups gaining more and more power from the Colombians, you know.
But during Fox's term in the early 2000s, the Colombian president Uribe was really, really, you know, doing a battle against the Colombian groups.
And as that happened, the Mexican drug gangs got more and more power.
So by the time Calderon came into office, there were six to seven, for lack of a better term, cartels, really criminal syndicates, that had control of regions of Mexico and major smuggling routes.
So at least three of the cartels were right on either the Texas border or the California border, controlling routes, you know, up through Brownsville and McAllen or across to El Paso from Ciudad Juarez or from Tijuana into San Diego and California.
So, you know, during Calderon's term, these gangs were just, you know, fighting each other and making buckets of money.
And they just had to be, I mean, Calderon really had no choice but to really use force to try to get these gangs under control.
But in hindsight, the strategy he used wasn't well thought out, and it really made the violence worse.
Well, can you explain the cause and effect there?
Well, you know, he sent 50,000 troops into cities, but mainly along the northern border.
And these soldiers, you know, would patrol the streets, but they also engaged, I mean, they didn't know how to arrest people, really.
They didn't know how to, you know, cordon off a crime scene, help prosecutors get evidence.
So the evidence, the signs are that the soldiers began to get corrupted by the whole process as well and even participated in crimes.
You know, it didn't really stop municipal and state police from allying with the criminal cartels and helping them carry out kidnappings and just horrendous, you know, extortions.
And so the really elements of the state got bought off by the criminal gangs and, you know, helped them commit atrocities.
They got into the whole movement of Central American migrants, extorting them for more and more money, and at times massacring dozens and scores, even 72 migrants in one terrible massacre.
So, you know, Calderon just didn't think that how critical it was to actually develop rule of law as a way to punish gangsters and set examples and say, you know, there's just got to be a vortex of more and more violence.
Well, and they say the Zetas gang actually was just a bunch of soldiers who broke off and made their own cartel, right?
Well, certainly the founders were elite members of paratroop commandos, basically, who got recruited by the Zetas up there.
The Zetas was the armed enforcers wing of the old Gulf cartel, which still exists, but the Zetas, you know, took brutality to a new level.
And they also, you know, didn't want to stay in that corner of Mexico.
They branched throughout, you know, 20 of Mexico's 32 states in the federal district, and then they got into Central America, and then they just, you know, really, and they used, you know, brutality to just a new degree through beheadings and mass killings, and, you know, just going in and slaughtering enemies.
All right, and now, in one of your stories here, you talk about this new paramilitary force.
Now, does that mean that they're going to pull the regular army back, but now what's this new paramilitary force, and how are they supposed to work any better than the army?
Well, it's by, let's see, let me try to explain.
By paramilitary, this is a government-sponsored militia, or they call it a gendarmerie, taking the French word.
It would be kind of, you know, for lack of a better description, they're like Texas Rangers.
They're trying to create this force that's going to be specialized in rapid response, going to where there's, you know, there's a lot of criminality in cleaning things up, but better trained to do things like gather evidence and work with prosecutors to capture and convict gangsters.
They're going to come from the ranks, as far as we're told, from the ranks of the army.
There's an awful lot of skepticism about what's really new.
I mean, isn't it just, you know, dressing up a pig, as it were, and we don't know the answers.
Reporters don't know the answers to that yet, how exactly this force will be created, who its members will be, what kind of training they'll get, what will be the benchmarks for determining if they're successful or not.
I don't know the answers to those questions.
Now, to what degree, because we hear talk like this from, I think Fox said this once or twice, and we hear it occasionally from Mexican politicians, that we really just need to legalize the drugs and then we can just handle the drug trade, you know, in an open market and court system type situation, rather than dealing with a black market type war.
So, I wonder whether, or to what degree you think American political pressure on Mexico accounts for their, obviously, backwards policy.
Well, you know, the U.S. certainly has a heavy responsibility in all this, not only for an insatiable demand for cocaine, for meth, for Mexican marijuana and so forth, but also the smuggling of, you know, tens of thousands of assault weapons into Mexico, you know, sort of not policing that well.
So, both money and guns flow freely into Mexico.
You know, the Mexican presidents haven't had the guts to actually push for any sort of legalization effort while they're in office.
They only do it once they leave office.
But there's a new dynamic in Latin America, and you see some presidents of other countries actually taking a more proactive position on this, particularly the presidents of Guatemala, Colombia, Uruguay, and Costa Rica.
And the Mexicans are watching with, you know, paying very close attention to this move, because, you know, they're seeing what's happening in the state of Washington, state of Colorado with marijuana legalization, and they're not happy about the fact that they're tasked with going out and rounding up marijuana growers and even killing, you know, getting into firefights with them when, you know, it's legal in some U.S. states.
So, it's really a moment of flux in what's going to happen with the legalization draws.
The Mexican government, per se, hasn't really taken a strong position on it.
They'll just say they'll continue to enforce law.
All right.
Listen, thanks so much for your time, Tim.
We've got to go, but I really appreciate it.
You're welcome, Scott.
Everybody, that's Tim Johnson.
He's a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers stationed down there in Mexico City.
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