The Mexican drug cartels up to last year had avoidedscaring the
tourists: no battling in Cancun — at least not right in the resort
areas themselves — no shooting in Acapulco; and so on. That’s over
now. At the height of this year’s February tourist season, 15 taxi
drivers and a few passengers were killed in Acapulco. This followed
a mid-January slaughter of 31 in that resort area. The year before
in March a total of 17, including 6 police, were assassinated in
what has been referred to as Mexico’s Pearl of the Pacific. The
drug cartels are no longer honoring their deals with the resort
owners.
According to local journalists, the taxi drivers in years
past acted as the eyes and ears of the police. It was a convenient
arrangement. The cops were able to keep a discreet eye on the
always vulnerable but wealthy tourists, and at the same time the
taxi drivers received some protection for their “guide” activities
in recommending everything from high stakes poker games, incidental
drug availability and, of course, prostitutes. It was all quite
circumspect and traditional to resort communities in many parts of
the world. The drug gangs took them over and the result has been
taxis are now the couriers-of-choice — and fair
game.
The resort owners of Cancun employed the same local toughs
who later became the soldiers of the cartels to provide protection
for their guests from traveling scam artists, thieves, and that
part of the underworld that preyed on Cancun’s seasonal target of
students on school break. The arrangement took a great weight off
the job of the underpaid local police and provided useful local
employment. Now drug trafficking has increased employment, but also
local insecurity and premature death among the formerly ubiquitous
“beach boys.” Two were killed in January. Nonetheless Cancun
remains Mexico’s preferred beach resort, if one doesn’t mind
vacationing under the protection of Los Zetas.
The cartels have destabilized the entire “hand-in-glove”
system that had existed for years between law enforcement, the
holiday industry, and the security provided by traditional Mexican
organized crime. If the Corleone family actually had existed
outside of their Hollywood creation, they would have lamented the
fact that the drug cartels were “ruining the
neighborhood.”
The real test will come in the next month as American
college students begin their annual Spring break. The Cancun hotel
association is doing everything it can to create a secure
environment, but the cartels are just not playing ball. The
government of Felipe Calderon, as previous Mexican administrations
before him, counts on the tourism industry for a major portion of
their yearly service sector income and employment. The impact of
the ongoing drug wars now adversely affects broad areas of society,
even as the profits continue to buoy up investments.
When 30,169 people are killed as a result of drug wars in
the four years of a presidential administration (Mexican Govt.
statistics 2006-2010, including 12,456 Jan.-Nov. 2010), there must
be a recognition that a civil war exists. And yet Mexico is still
treated as a friendly neighbor with an unfortunate problem by the
White House. The Mexican government may be quite correct when it
points to the U.S. narcotics consumer as the reason for the scope
of the illicit trade, but it is also true that Calderon encourages
the Obama Administration to pretend there is no connection between
the cartels’ smuggling of humans and drug trafficking.
The latest example of purposely unexplored action has been
the movement in Pima County, Arizona to secede from Arizona in
order to establish a 51st state on the Mexican border. Apparently,
certain Pima County authorities want to ensure freer access for all
goods and human travel between the two countries. To suggest that
this initiative is unconnected to the conflict over illegal
immigrants challenges the public’s intellect.
Another puzzle was created recently when the combined
forces of ICE, FBI and DEA acted in swift response to the killing
in Mexico of ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata and wounding of his
companion S.A. Victor Avila. The result of this joint task force
operation in a matter of a few days was the arrest of more than 100
people, the seizing of $4.5 million in cash and sizeable quantities
of meth, cocaine, heroin and marijuana in several hundred locations
around the U.S. Los Zetas members are the prime
candidates for the shooting and it is presumed that those arrested
in the raids principally had connections to this group.
Carl Pike, assistant special agent of the DEA Special
Operations Division, said the raids were designed “to disrupt drug
trafficking operations in the U.S.” It is obvious that the entire
operation was definitely “personal not business” — all of which is
quite understandable. The question arises, though, of how more
effective similar activities could be if the secretary of homeland
security, Janet Napolitano, unleashed her considerable anti-drug
trafficking forces on a regular basis rather than restricting such
actions to such a “personal” reaction to one agent’s tragic
death.
The Homeland Security department has allowed false stories
to be perpetuated such as the reverse traffic in guns from the U.S.
to Mexico. Why is that? It has turned out that detailed analysis by
the independent STRATFOR group
indicated that the figure of 90% of smuggled guns into Mexico
was in itself off by 90%.
It’s about time the Obama Administration accepted its
responsibility to correctly identify the scope of the issue and
protect the American public from the dangers that Mexico’s economic
and human turmoil brings. While this may be seen as a political
problem, it is even a greater issue of governmental ethics. Get
some backbone, Washington! The time for symbolic action is over.
That is the real way to honor Jaime Zapata.
