Families of Mexico's disappeared call for 'pact' with cartels; AMLO agrees
Talk of a social pact with the cartels shows the shortcomings of the Mexican state in controlling its territory and the president's continued public deference to criminal organizations.
Editor’s note: State elections occur Sunday, June 4, in the State of Mexico and Coahuila – the last races prior to the 2024 presidential election. A newsletter will be published on the contests in the week ahead.
Delia Quiroa, a lawyer and activist in Tamaulipas state, penned an open letter to the country’s drug cartels, pleading with them to end the scourge of disappearances – in a country where more than 110,000 people have disappeared in the haze of the drug war of the past two decades and families form search committees to scour the landscape for clues on their missing loved ones.
In a two-page missive, Quiroa proposed a “Social Pact to Prevent and Eradicate the Disappearance of Persons in Mexico and Foment Peace.” Quiroa, whose brother Roberto was disappeared in the border city of Reynosa in 2014, wrote:
“The only thing that we want is to know what happened with our disappeared family members and, in the case that they may have died, be able to provide them a dignified burial to honour their lives in this world.”
The letter provoked scandal in Mexico as it again revealed the deep victimization of families in regions rife with drug cartel violence, while reminding Mexicans of the indolence of their public officials. But the president’s reaction to the letter provoked scandal, too, while further fuelling suspicions he would prefer pursuing a pax narca (narco peace) with the country’s criminal organizations rather than confronting them.
A reporter subsequently asked president Andrés Manuel López Obrador about the letter and Quiroa’s call for a pact at his May 30 press conference. The president responded enthusiastically, telling the country.
“I’m in favour. I hope that peace is achieved. That’s what we all wish for: that there’s no violence, that there are no homicides, that there are no aggressions because that affects everyone. … Violence is irrational and we’re going to continue seeking peace, getting peace. … Yes, if there’s an initiative of this kind, of course we support it.”
The journalist asking the question sought clarification, asking AMLO, “With organized crime groups, president?” To which AMLO doubled down on his original response: “That they not act with violence, of course. If that is the proposal, an exhortation that they not act in a violent way.”
The journalist again pushed AMLO – who had detoured into a talk of cash stipends for young people in a labour secretariat program, which he claimed was deterring vulnerable youth from lives of crime – “So you endorse or you are joining this call?” The president responded, “Me, yes.” To which the journalist queried, “Organized crime for a social pact for peace?” AMLO said in response:
“Everything that means putting aside or not using violence, I approve, I approve. And that doesn’t have to be only by the demands of the authorities, rather by decision of the members of these criminal groups. They must assume responsibility and behave like good citizens. In other words, not get lost or think that they no longer have another option, another path. There’s always an exit. There are always exits for those that don’t want to use violence.”
AMLO: Narcos respect us at their checkpoints
The president’s response to a plea for a proposed pact with narcos harkened back to a bygone era when politicians made pacts with drug cartels, who kept violence out of populated areas in exchange for free rein.
Analysts consider any idea of reconstructing pax narca unrealistic as the country’s criminal landscape has fractured. A 2022 study from the International Crisis Group found the number of drug cartels operating in Mexico more than doubling during the 2010s from 76 cartels to 205 cartels – with the fragmentation of cartels driving violence in the country.
AMLO has never publicly had a cross word for narcos – unlike the country’s middle class – and has showed a steady deference to the Sinaloa Cartel, which mobilized ahead of the 2021 elections in Sinaloa state in favour of his MORENA party. (The president and governor of Sinaloa state deny striking any deals with drug cartels.)
He even boasted May 29 that narcos respect promoters of his social programs, who have been stopped by narcos at illegal checkpoints, but allowed through because criminal groups “now identify them and respect them.”
Narcos control swaths of territory – contrary to AMLO’s claims
The boast that narcos allow the impoverished residents of areas they control to collect government benefits reflects an old reality in Mexico: criminal organizations sometimes prefer to be seen as benefactors rather than tyrants among local populations. (The editor of this newsletter knows of a journalist who gained access to El Chapo’s birthplace by accompanying civil servants delivering money through a now-exitinct conditional transfer program.)
But AMLO inadvertently acknowledged that not all of Mexico is under state control – confirming what U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Congress in March. It was a claim AMLO vehemently denied at the time.
“With this did the president try to tell us that criminals back his movement, too?” wrote human rights activist Jacobo Dayan in the news publication Animal Politico. He continued:
“It’s clear that the Mexican state abdicated its primary obligation to control territory and guarantee life and justice.
“He openly assumes that the state does not control national territory. Not only that, what he recognizes is that those in control are non-state, criminal armed groups. What happens in reality is that the government is the one that recognizes and respects them.”
AMLO’s stated willingness to deal with drug cartels also seemingly confirmed acquiescence. Writing in the publication Eje Central, columnist Raymundo RivaPalacio observed:
“What these words mean is his government’s surrendering of its constitutional duties and handing the power to stop violence to criminals. Said another way, it is the complete subordination of the president as commander in chief of the armed forces to the whims and wishes of drug cartels. That they, not him, be responsible for their acts is another of his impulsive claims, which only reflects his deep ignorance or criminal tolerance.
López Obrador has handed over the country – by omission or commission – to the cartels, ceding territory and accumulating deaths and disappearances like no other president in peacetime ever had.”
Families of the missing plead with the cartels
Prior to AMLO responding to a call for a pact, the Union of Collectives of Searching Mothers of Tamaulipas published a letter May 24, calling on three drug cartels to release Yesenia Durazo Cota, leader of a similar collective in northwestern Sonora state. The letter read:
“We come to you because in our searches have inadvertently realized that you are the ones who have true control and power over various territories in Mexico. Please put aside your difference for the moment and help deliver our colleague alive.
“Show society that you can feel love and compassion for others and do your own thing without damaging the community. This is a good time to make peace with society. And we see ourselves in need of turning to you because we know that the authorities will not help in this case.”
In her letter, which she read in a YouTube video, Quiroa also appealed to the power of the cartels, writing, “You were seen as heroes by the people because you were among the few who confronted abuses of authority.”
Quiroa also sought to find common ground with the drug cartels, casting them as victims, too, of the same corrupt officials.
“Our authorities have persisted in acting in an omissive and negligent manner toward the Mexican people. … Most of our political class, already in power, focus on fabricating operations and diverting resources, such as in combating insecurity, assigning billions of pesos without results.
“You can help stop this, stop the violence and prevent our rulers from continuing to steal under this pretext and blaming you. …
“We have something in common: we are abused by our government. You when your are detained and us as victims, searching for our family members, having no one to defend us.”
Quiroa founded the 10 de Marzo collective – after her brother Roberto was disappeared on that date in 2014 by a criminal group in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas.
According to a profile in the newspaper Reforma, her family operated a seafood restaurant in Reynosa, but were forced to make extortion payments of 10,000 pesos monthly to the Gulf Cartel, starting in 2012. The cartel raised the extortion to 20,000 pesos monthly (more than $1,500 at the then-exchange rate.)
Roberto was kidnapped twice for non-payment, then taken a third time in 2014 along with his mother María Icela Valdez Chairez. The captors eventually freed Valdez to raise funds for making extortion payments. She later obtained evidence that Roberto was seen in the custody of a narco detained in 2015, but no one has been charged.
Activist: ‘The pact is working’
Victims pleading with narcos is not unprecedented in Mexico. Quiroa previously requested permission from the Gulf Cartel to search an especially notorious area near Matamoros, opposite Brownsville, Texas, known as La Bartolina, which media described as an “extermination zone.” Some 500 kilograms of charred human bones were removed over a five year period, according to the National Search Commission, a federal agency founded in 2018 to find missing persons and accompany the more than 1,000 collectives of victims’ families in their searches.
Quiroa’s letter came after the disappearance of three children ages 10, 14 and 16 in Reynosa. The trio were found May 2. Quiroa told news channel Milenio TV they had been abducted by a group that “tricks migrants”
She told Milenio TV:
“The cartel did not give (police) permission to operate in the area. When we made the call [via the letter] they started to search for them. … The pact is working, it’s touching hearts. The boy spoke with 911 and the anti-kidnapping unit retrieved them without a scratch. … Their mother is happy.”
HORROR IN JALISCO STATE
Eight workers from a Guadalajara call center disappeared under mysterious circumstances in late May – in a case possibly linked to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). In searching for a victims, state officials discovered 45 bags of human remains tossed in a ravine. Some of the remains matched characteristics of the victims, according to the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office.
Western Jalisco state has been especially notorious for missing persons, while the state morgue has run out of space. CNN reported:
More than 1,500 bodies have been found in Jalisco state since 2018, official figures show. According to the office of the Jalisco’s special prosecutor for missing persons, 291 bodies were discovered in 2019, 544 bodies were found in 2020, 280 bodies in 2021, and 301 the following year. So far in 2023, 147 bodies have been found.
The motives for the disappearances are uncertain. But Reforma cited sources close to the investigation, who described a possible motive being the criminal group suspecting information leaked from the call centre, which was used for scamming foreign seniors.
Time share scam
The call centre was among the 19 companies and seven individuals sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which said in an April 27 statement:
“CJNG’s deep involvement in timeshare fraud in the Puerto Vallarta area and elsewhere, which often targets elder U.S. citizens and can defraud victims of their life savings, is an important revenue stream supporting the group’s overall criminal enterprise.”
The time-share scam showed how the CJNG has penetrated the tourism sector in Puerto Vallarta, a five-hour drive from Guadalajara – with its hit on former Jalisco governor Aristóteles Sandoval in December 2020 marking another of the cartel’s demonstrations of power. The former governor was shot in the back while using a posh restaurant’s bathroom.
InSight Crime wrote of the CJNG’s foray into Puerto Vallarta and tourism
“The CJNG’s involvement in the timeshare scheme is only the tip of the iceberg concerning their involvement in businesses across the tourism sector in Puerto Vallarta, which has been a goldmine for the group for years.
“Hotels, bars, restaurants, and now timeshares are particularly attractive since they provide access to a range of other criminal activities, including money laundering, human trafficking, and drug trafficking, explained the source consulted by InSight Crime.”
A PERSON DISAPPEARS EVERY HOUR
The López Obrador sexenio (six-year term) is shaping up as the most violent in modern Mexican in history. The country passed a grim milestone in late May with the death toll reaching 156,136 homicides since he took office December 1, 2018 – surpassing the scandalous figure under his predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto.
The president, as he often does, blamed the figures on problems from the past, telling the country at his June 1 press conference: “This is a bad legacy in security. … The country was bankrupt. The country was immersed in decadence. It wasn’t a crisis, it was decadence.”
The figure for disappeared persons is equality grim during AMLO’s administration with Animal Politico reporting, “A person has disappeared every hour. … In these 1,635 days of government, 42,029 disappearances have been registered across the country, an average of 25 persons daily.”
ARE MEXICO’S CITIES THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS?
The provincial capital of Colima, capital of the eponymous state to the south of Guadalajara, ranked as the world’s most violence with a murder rate of 181.9 per 100,000 in 2022, according to an annual survey from the Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal. (The editor of this newsletter studied in Colima in 2002, when it was placid and the main threat was a simmering nearby volcano.) Nine of the top 10 cities on the survey were Mexican.
The list made the rounds of Mexican social media recently. But serious security analysts have long considered it suspect. The late Alejandro Hope – who tragically passed away April 28 at age 52 – highlighted serious methodological shortcomings in a 2021 column. He noted:
“The study is based on an arbitrary definition of a city: it only includes urban areas of more than 300,000 inhabitants. Why this threshold?”
The study analyzes metropolitan areas rather than specific municipalities. But in the case of some U.S. cities such as Detroit and New Orleans, “the sources cited only show data from the cities and not the surrounding counties.”
“As indicated in the methodology document, the information from the included cities must ‘be accessible through the Internet.’ In other words, if homicide data for a city cannot be easily found with a Google search, that city is excluded.”
There was no homogeneity in sources and often didn’t draw on primary sources – rather press reports form the cities surveyed.
Hope concluded:
“It is not a ranking of the most violent cities in the world: it is an arbitrary classification of some cities, made with data of heterogeneous quality and even with invented numbers.
“That does not mean that there are many violent cities in Mexico, but it does not help to make ridiculous comparisons with the methods of a bad high school student.”
CARO-QUINTERO DENIED INJUNCTION
A federal judged denied an injunction (known as an amparo in Mexico) requested by detained drug kingpin Rafael Caro-Quintero to avoid extradition to the United States. A founder of the once-powerful Guadalajara Cartel, Caro-Quintero, wanted in the United States for the 1985 murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, was detained by the Mexican navy in July 2022 – after having been released from prison nearly a decade earlier in error.
The U.S. request for Caro-Quintero comes amid strained security ties between the two countries. Extraditions from Mexico to the United States fell by 53% between between 2013 and 2023.
MEXICO’S INTERIOR MINISTER: ‘WE’RE NOT THE US’S MIGRATION POLICE
White House security advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall travelled to Mexico again for meeting with AMLO at the National Palace. Details on the meeting were scant, but the president’s office said it was “to continue the dialogue on migration.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports a 70 percent drop number of encounters at the southwestern border since Title 42 ended on May 11. The meeting also came as media and migrant activists report a backlog of migrants in border cities and other parts of Mexico with shelters beyond capacity.
Panama, meanwhile, reported the third busiest month ever in April for migrants passing through the Darién Gap, the thick jungle separating Central and South America, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights think tank.
NBC News reported the Biden administration is consider sending U.S. troops to the region “to help local authorities curb drug smuggling, human trafficking and migration.”
In Mexico, interior minister Adán Augusto López once again spoke of the country not wanting to play a migrant enforcement role. He said at a June 2 conference in Morelia:
“We are not the United States’s migration police nor do we aspire to be it. We aim for that the autonomy and independence of Mexico and the government continue to be respected, as it has up to now, to make decisions that help improve the quality of migration of all our foreign brothers, who have made the decision to be or transit through the territory.”
CORN DISPUTE GOES TO USMCA PANEL
From The Wall Street Journal:
“The U.S. on Friday stepped up its efforts to get Mexico to ease its restrictions on genetically modified corn, after more than a year of high-level discussions between the two countries failed to resolve the dispute.
“The U.S. requested dispute-settlement consultations with Mexico under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the most forceful action the U.S. administration has taken so far to resolve the fight over Mexico’s efforts to largely ban genetically modified corn.