Frontera NorteSur

    In its second-to-last year in office, the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon is on a public relations offensive to counter a ceaseless barrage of criticism over the conduct and progress of the so-called drug war. In response, Calderon administration officials-echoed by Washington-are increasingly claiming victories in various operations against organized crime.

    Interviewed on Mexican television, Mexico City’s new point man for public relations, Alejandro Poire, put a positive spin on the balance of power between the Mexican state and several large criminal organizations.

    Of 37 wanted crime family capos, 17 have been captured and four killed, said Poire, who serves as technical secretary for Mexico’s National Security Council. “If something marked 2010, it was the systematic capture of these criminals,” Poire said.

    In terms of specific organizational damage, Poire said that the Tamaulipas-based Gulf Cartel had lost “a good part of its organization,” while the rival Zetas have suffered the systematic elimination of branch leaders in the northern border state of Nuevo Leon.

    Since December 2009, Mexican security forces have killed the top leaders of the Beltran-Leyva, Gulf, La Familia and Nacho Coronel organizations. They also have detained presumed drug lords Edgar “La Barbie” Valdes Villareal, Sergio Villareal Barragan, Vicente Carrillo Leyva, Alfredo Beltran Leyva, Vicente Zambada Niebla, Teodoro Garcia Simental, and other important members of underworld organizations.

    Poire was asked to explain a graph that showed a sharp rise in violence in states where the Mexican army and federal police forces have intervened since 2006. While not fully answering the question, Poire said it was important to underscore successes during the last four years, especially in Baja California, which is now “not even among the 7th highest states in homicides.”

    The Harvard graduate maintained that Baja’s success was due to close collaboration between local and federal authorities, as well as the participation of civil society in rooting out criminal elements. He said half the murders linked to organized crime occur in three states-Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Tamaulipas-with one in five homicide victims nationally from just one city, Ciudad Juarez. In another positive trend, violence showed a slight dip during the last two or three trimesters, Poire asserted.

    In 2010, more than 15,000 people were reported killed in incidents attributed to organized crime. In absolute terms, the Mexican death toll was more than double the estimated 6,800 people killed in Afghanistan last year, though the war-torn Asian nation still had a higher proportional rate of killing because of its much smaller population than Mexico. In his television interview, Poire claimed that Mexico’s homicide rate is lower than those of Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and “all of Central America.”

    But many analysts and citizen activists have a drastically different take on the record criminal violence that bloodied Mexico last year.

    Writing in Proceso magazine, Jorge Carrasco Araizaga contended that the federal offensive since 2006 has merely succeeded in “atomizing” big crime syndicates and transforming them into widespread and autonomous groupings, while spreading around the corruption.

    “The (criminal pacts) with civil and military authorities also have been decentralized,” Carrasco wrote. “They are now more of a conjunctural nature than ever before….a military chief has his own agreements, a local police chief-federal, state or municipal-goes for his own agreement, and a local political chief seeks his own.”

    Carlos Humberto Toledo, an expert in national security affairs, said organized crime was far from vanquished. “Organized crime does not appear to be weakened,” Toledo said. “On the contrary, it appears active, operative, strong and fighting for its plazas.”

    According to a Mexican national news agency, 507 people were reported killed in gangland-style killings across Mexico during the first 14 days of the new year.

    The murder rate was 18 percent higher than the comparable period of 2010, the Reforma News Agency reported.

    Three Mexican mayors, one each in the states of Coahuila, Morelos and Oaxaca, were assassinated in the first half of January 2011. Last year, 14 Mexican mayors were slain. January’s victims also included two little girls, 12-year-old Evelyn Hernandez Garcia and her eight-year-old sister Betsa, struck down by gunfire in a Guadalajara suburb.

    In recent days, other violent incidents included deadly clashes between soldiers and gunmen in Veracruz and Nuevo Leon, a grenade attack followed by the escape of 12 prisoners at a Chihuahua penitentiary, a so-called “narco blockade” of an important road near Guadalajara, and the murders of nine presumed street dealers in the sprawling, working-class Mexico City suburb of Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl. Numerous killings also were registered in Guerrero, Nayarit and other entities.

    In a Mexico City press conference, meanwhile, the leader of a non-governmental organization accused state governments of underreporting the true number of killings in order to not destablize elections and drive away tourism.

    Jose Antonio Ortega, head of the Citizens Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, pointed a finger at the state governments of Chihuahua, Mexico, Durango, Coahuila, Nayarit, Oaxaca, and Tamaulipas. Ortega said Mexico accounts for four of the ten most violent cities in the world, including Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City, Mazatlan and Culiacan.

    With 229 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, Ciudad Juarez tops the world list, followed by Kandahar, Afghanistan, with 169; San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with 125; and Caracas, Venezuela, with 118, according to Ortega.

    It should be noted that because of doubts concerning Ciudad Juarez’s true population (many people have fled the city during the last two or three years), which officially stands at approximately 1.3 million, the real homicide rate of the Mexican border city could be higher than the number used by Ortega.

    For the Calderon administration’s Alejandro Poire, the government crusade is far more than just a simple drug war. Beginning in the 1990s, he argued, export-oriented drug cartels began evolving into diverse operations with interests in extortion, product piracy and illicit drug sales in domestic places like nightclubs. The old style trafficking organizations are “a thing of the past,” Poire said.

    The government spokesman added that the Calderon administration is immersed in an “exercise of enormous transparency and information,” and that reports of its progress are available on the presidential web site at presidencia.gob.mx.

    The view from Mexico City was publicly endorsed by US drug czar Gil Kerlikowske in comments to the Colombian press several days before a scheduled visit to the South American nation by the US official. Concurring with his Mexican counterparts, Kerlikowske agreed that important advances had been made in the fight against organized crime within the past six months.

    “This is not given attention in the media and is eclipsed by the tragedies that keep happening,” Kerlikowske was quoted.

    The increasingly close collaboration between Washington and Mexico City “will give results and the successes will keep coming,” he was quoted as predicting.

    Citing a report from the Rand Corporation, Kerlikowske once again ruled out the Obama administration backing drug legalization as a possible solution to drug related violence, contending that countries which took such steps including Portugal and Holland experienced problems.

    “We already have enough problems with tobacco and alcohol,” he argued.

    In its assessment of 2010, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research rated Mexico as one of the six most violent nations on the planet, in the same camp as Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Sudan. In the Heidelberg Insitute’s conflict barometer, Mexico graduated from a country in crisis in 2006 to a country at war in 2010. The European think tank indentified police corruption, drug consumption and US-based arms trafficking as high on the list of reasons for the spiraling violence.

Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico.