Sinaloa Pays in Blood for Drug War

NAVOLATO, MEXICO —  Jorge Aguirre Meza was a determinedly public man. His fate highlights the price Mexico, in general, and Sinaloa, in particular, is paying to fight the drug war and win Congress’ approval that it is holding up its end of the bargain.

Aguirre Meza ran for mayor and lost, but he won a council seat in Navolato, a farming community in the state of Sinaloa. He was president of the Sinaloa Lawyers Federation. He had been a federal prosecutor and Navolato’s chief of police in 1997. He started the Navolatan Citizens Council for Human Rights and was a founding member of the Sinaloan Commission for the Defense of Human Rights.

In recent years, he had sworn out a murder warrant against the leader of a band of killers-for-hire and, as chief of police, had arrested a major drug trafficker. Still, he didn’t feel he had to leave town. Narcos were always reluctant to assassinate someone who enjoyed social support and kept a high civic profile.

But things have changed.

On the night of Jan. 27, Aguirre Meza was parking his Ram Charger at the end of his cul-de-sac. Two men wearing masks and carrying AK-47s suddenly appeared beside his truck. Frantically, he tried to maneuver out of the dead-end. But his attackers gunned him down.

The slaying of Aguirre Meza was the latest outrage in a state grown numb to murderous acts during a virtual Colombian-style social decomposition. For the last five years, Sinaloa has been besieged by warfare and executions among competing drug gangs, an outbreak of violence that increasingly targets prominent citizens like Aguirre Meza, who once were considered untouchable.

Sinaloa is home to the Mazatlan tourist resort. It is also the birthplace of Mexican drug smuggling. Around the turn of the century, Chinese immigrants arrived in the Mexican state with the opium poppy. Marijuana grows well in the Sinaloan mountains. Smuggling drugs to the United States has been part of the local economy for decades and increasingly important since the 1960s. Virtually every major Mexican drug lord is from Sinaloa.

When narco violence got out of hand in the 1970s, the state government launched Operation Condor, which used the military to chase drug runners out of the hills in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. As a result, the state’s most important traffickers left for Tijuana, Juarez, Guadalajara and elsewhere. As the great cartels of today formed to control the narcotics trade, Sinaloa settled into a tacit arrangement with its narcos: Keep your wars among yourselves and you can do your business.

In recent years, however, the cartel system has been upset. The chiefs of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Hector “El Guero” Palma are in prison. Amado Carrillo Fuentes, “The Lord of the Skies,” died after plastic surgery in 1997. The breed of trafficker replacing these drug lords seems more callous, less willing to accept any kind of control and criminally ambitious beyond drug running. Today, more than 200 well-armed gangs are based in Sinaloa, according to police officials. They seem accountable to no one and ply a variety of other criminal enterprises such as highway robbery, murder-for-hire and kidnapping. Full-blown shootouts in the hills of Sinaloa are, if not routine, frequent.

Thus, the tacit agreement that governed relations between law-abiding Sinaloans and narco gangs is no longer in force. Sinaloans thought they could co-exist with the drug trade. Now they find they cannot, and anyone is a potential victim of violence. For example, a plastic surgeon who operated on the mother of a gangster, who believed the operation caused her subsequent death, survived one attempt on his life, but not a second. But he is one of a mounting tally. Over the last few years, 47 lawyers, 40 state police officers and 12 university professors have been murdered by gangsters connected to drug trafficking. Prominent farmers, ranchers, merchants, professionals and social activists have been kidnapped or killed. Aguirre Meza is the third of five founders of the Sinaloan Commission for the Defense of Human Rights to be assassinated in the last decade.

Only a handful of the killings have been solved. Murders, meanwhile, have tripled, rising from 215 in 1987, to an average of 650 a year over the last few years. Many of them were execution-style hits, with the victim bound, shot in the back of the head and buried in a shallow grave.

The Sinaloans’ relative helplessness in dealing with the state’s drug gangs is rooted in Mexico’s old style of governance. For most of this century, the country has lived with a bloated, centralized national government in Mexico City. Its job, as the government saw it, was to do everything for the people. Because the central government was reluctant to share power with any institution that might one day challenge it, few state or local institutions with the muscle and vigor to act as a bulwark against the drug trade developed.

Mexico’s business elite, for example, has virtually no experience in civic causes. Indeed, the government actively discouraged such participation for years and, until recently, the most a businessman could aspire to, if he was socially minded, was to be president of the local Red Cross for a year. The idea that any businessman would, say, help raise money to buy computers for police cars was simply unimaginable. That was the government’s job.

City governments and police have been especially enfeebled by decades of centralism. Most municipal governments in Mexico are arthritic, with neither the money nor the civil-service expertise to pave streets, let alone fight the menace that the bandit gangs in Sinaloa represent. Until last year, municipal governments in Mexico received only 4% of the country’s tax revenues, with states getting 16%. The federal government got the rest. This method of distributing revenue has pauperized local police departments. The Navolato police department, for example, has 13 working patrol cars and 111 pistols for 210 officers, who each are rationed eight bullets a day. The police chief’s last job was teaching engineering at a local high school. State and federal police have more resources and are better trained, but they are also geometrically more corrupt.

It should thus be no surprise that Sinaloa’s drug gangs operate without much fear of getting caught by the authorities. About the only institution capable of taking on the traffickers is the army, to which President Ernesto Zedillo is increasingly turning to combat crime. Since Aguirre Meza’s murder, businessmen and politicians have called for the military to intervene again in Sinaloa.

Yet, this is not the 1970s. Narco influence has insinuated itself deeply into Sinaloa and far beyond its hills. Moreover, a true “narcoculture” has sprung up in Sinaloa and in most of northwest Mexico. With local police and government either inept, powerless or corrupt, the narcotraficante has emerged as a social hero. This is especially true for the working class, for whom drug smuggling offers a rare chance at economic advancement. Accordingly, some vicious, semiliterate narcos have become legends, regarded as swashbuckling risk takers who defy authorities to get rich selling the gringo the vice he covets. Their fashions are imitated. Their exploits incorporated into ballads. In Sinaloa, even middle-class college students know the stories of how certain narcos lived and died better than they know the works of major Mexican writers.

For now, Sinaloans would likely settle for the army reminding the narco gangs just whom they can murder with impunity and whom they can’t, in effect restoring a bit of the old order to their society’s relationship with the narco. Actual eradication of the drug trade isn’t on the agenda.

The longer-term solution is slackened demand for drugs in the United States and the development of modern Mexico institutions, which is already underway. Until then, Sinaloa will likely have to endure a good measure more of its current nightmare, unless the real power, the drug cartels, can bring the bandit gangs under control.