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| Community guard, Buenavista, Michoacan Photo: Octavio Gómez |
Proceso: José Gil Olmos
MEXICO CITY, MAY 29 – Six years ago, Mexico’s former president Felipe Calderón put on a large, ill-fitting green jacket and a military cap to kick off his declaration of war against the drug cartels, starting with his native state of Michoacán. The irony here, of course, is that when all is said and done, nowhere else is the failure of this military strategy more evident.
Today, the country’s president and PRI party darling Enrique Peña Nieto is repeating the same story. Although he didn’t dress up in military regalia like his predecessor, last week Peña Nieto deployed some six thousand soldiers to “rescue” the Tierra Caliente region in southern Mexico where militias composed of local residents have taken up arms to rebel against the tyranny imposed by organized crime & yet tolerated by the very same state and federal authorities.
Michoacán is now the poster child for Mexico’s growing inability to govern itself. According to published reports by the state itself, 70% of Michoacán territory is controlled by the local Knights Templar cartel, with the balance under the equally-illegal auspices of La Familia Michoacana. Moreover, all municipalities pay a rate of 10% to these drug traffickers not unlike that of the Italian mob’s “protection money”, according to remarks by Coalcomán mayor Rafael García Zamora.
With an interim governor, Jesús Reyna, who was previously questioned by his citizens over his lack of action as the state’s governing secretary, Michoacán suffers greater instability every time teachers or students organize their next protest. The economy’s decline is also more than obvious, as is the drop in tourism.
The quilt of Michoacán’s governability is only patched together with a few fragile stitches that the ongoing spiral of violence that pervades the entire state could dangerously rip apart, as witnessed a few days ago in the towns of Coalcomán, Buenavista, Tomatlán, & Tepalcatepec. Here, residents assembled themselves into heavily-armed militias after finally having their fill of frustration at the cartels’ influence, and they faced off against the gangs’ hitmen without regard for the risks they took with their own lives.
The absence of a state’s ordinary apparatus of security, governance, & functional administration is crystal clear in Michoacán. Jesús Reyna’s interim government is completely overwhelmed by the forces of organized crime which have infiltrated even the highest levels of government, creating a kind of parallel administration in which these same unscrupulous gangs effectuate the functions of government in some parts of the state.
Merchants, avocado & lime harvesters, cattle ranchers, sawmill operators, businessmen, carriers, tortilla producers, butchers, storekeepers, owners of communications enterprises, and even moms & dads… almost all Michoacans have had to make payments to the local cartels just to make it through their jobs & lives each day with varying degrees of peace.
And to top it all off, based on testimonies by various Tierra Caliente-region residents, when they couldn’t make one of these payments imposed by a local gang member, the gangs collected by simply coercing the debtor into offering up their daughters or wives for sexual romps instead. This was the last straw for the villagers who then took up arms and literally took into their own hands the security that the three levels of their government had failed to provide them up to that point.
The situation hasn’t changed much today. Despite the arrival of thousands of soldiers, flyovers, ground unit deployments everywhere, and roadblocks from Apatzingán to Coalcomán (which have been relegated to the civil defense groups assembled in these areas)… despite all this, not even one member of organized crime has been detained while they continue hiding in their established refuges in Apatzingán and other neighboring towns.
The military presence in Tierra Caliente will not last long. A sociopolitical fire of sorts is trying to be put out with half-baked remedies that in reality fail to resolve the governance problem in Michoacán. The state has deep roots in the business of corruption, in alliances between government leaders and organized crime syndicates, and in impunity, but above all, the state’s deepest root remains its utter failure to carry out its principal functions of security and the administration of justice. Spanish original