Just in time for Día de los Muertos comes a macabre tale from south of the border that reminds us what happens when someone makes a deal with the devil. It’s official: Mexico is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the drug cartels.
This should not come as a total surprise to the Biden administration, which needs to understand that its relationship with Mexico has to change. The new realization as to just how embedded the cartels are with Mexico’s institutions represents a formidable challenge for President Biden. He needs to understand that Americans can no longer trust Mexican officials to rein in the cartels, if we ever could.
Americans have come to expect that, no matter which political party in Mexico controls the presidency, there is likely to be a cozy relationship with drug traffickers. The current president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, literally describes his approach to the narcos as “hugs not bullets.” That’s a clear giveaway.
But now we know that the drug cartels don’t just exist in Mexico. The drug cartels are Mexico. They’re woven into the fabric of the place.
The original golden rule is that he who has the gold makes the rules, and so it is that our southern neighbor—and our No. 1 trading partner—is being run by some very bad, very rich people.
We have the receipts. They take the form of recently unearthed text messages between a local deputy police chief and a cartel boss. The two scoundrels hatched a mass murder that, in some countries, would be considered the crime of the century—but, in Mexico, might not make the top 10.
The texts provide a sobering glimpse into just how far the cartels’ tentacles reach into all facets of Mexican society—including commerce, law enforcement, the military and every level of politics.
The crime—and, just as bad, a far-reaching coverup—is at the heart of a nightmare that began seven years ago. It was on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, in the Mexican city of Iguala—about 120 miles southwest of Mexico City—that 43 young men between the ages of 18 and 25 disappeared. As the puzzle came together, a gruesome picture emerged: The young men, who were studying at a nearby teachers college, were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. Their remains were burned, and dropped into mass graves. Many Mexicans feared the bodies might never be found at all.
The massacre was orchestrated at the behest of a ruthless and lethal drug cartel known as Guerreros Unidos.
The young men seem to have committed the otherwise minor infraction of commandeering two buses to get to a protest in the nation’s capital. What the students didn’t know was that the buses were loaded with heroin bound for the United States to feed the American appetite for illegal drugs. Also unbeknownst to the young men, both the buses and the contraband belonged to the Guerreros Unidos, the local leader of which apparently decided to make an example of them—with a little help from his friends in local government and law enforcement.
The texts reveal direct communication between local police deputy Francisco Salgado Valladares and local crime boss Gildardo Lopez Astudillo. It’s the drug trafficker who calls the shots, instructing the cop what to do to the young men—how they should be killed and how their bodies should be disposed of. The dialogue is matter-of-fact, what you might hear from someone assigning chores to a housekeeper or landscaper.
I’ve been following this story on and off since it broke in 2014, and I’ve written a half-dozen columns about it in the years since. It’s a heart-wrenching tale I came to not only as a veterano journalist who is based in the American Southwest but also as the grandson of a Mexican immigrant who came to the United States as a boy more than 100 years ago during the Mexican Revolution.
As a Mexican American, my relationship with the homeland of my grandfather, Roman, has always been complicated. I’m not the only one. Most of the approximately 30 million Mexican Americans in the United States would not be here at all if not for the failure of Mexico to provide sufficient economic opportunity for our ancestors. And now the country wants us to spend our tourism dollars there?
And now that complicated relationship has—because of the horror story of the “Iguala 43”—become even more complex.
The scandal reached all the way to Mexico City, to the federales and the Mexican military. But it’s worth keeping in mind that it started in Iguala, a mid-sized city of about 150,000 in the Mexican state of Guerrero.
"A picture of a missing student of Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College is seen on a banner during a performance in Mexico City October 8, 2014. REUTERS/Tomas Bravo (MEXICO)"
REUTERSEarly on, Mexican prosecutors said they believed that then-mayor Jose Luis Abarca—and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa—might know the students’ whereabouts. But soon the couple’s whereabouts were also unknown, as they went on the run. Ditto for then-police chief Felipe Flores Velasquez. The plot thickened.
In October of 2014, Jesus Murillo Karam, who was then Mexico’s attorney general, responded to pressure from the United States by issuing arrest warrants for three people. Eventually, more than four dozen people were arrested in connection to the case, including police officers, local officials and members of a drug gang.
But arrests don’t always translate into convictions, and even convictions don’t always bring out the truth. Over the next several years, the devastated families of the 43 young men joined with other reform advocates to protest in the streets, vowing to never forget the lost boys of Mexico—and to never stop fighting for the truth to come out.
Now it’s out. This was never a local story after all, but a national one. The Mexican military and the federal police may not have helped commit the crime, but they did everything they could to cover it up and keep the truth from the Mexican people.
Today, Astudillo—who was detained at one point, but released—remains a free man. These families won’t get justice, because the elected officials who supposedly run Mexico—and the drug cartels who actually run it—turned the page on this case long ago.
The real problem for Mexico isn’t just that drug cartels have a powerful hold over cops and politicians and the military. We know that. It’s that the cartels have an equally powerful hold on the hearts and minds of the Mexican people. Those folks pray to the drug saint La Santa Muerte and sing corridos idolizing drug traffickers. The modern drug lord drives a BMW while taking his kids to soccer games on the field he paid for and built. It sits next to a school and hospital and community center, all paid for by the narco. South of the border, the trafficker is familia.
There’s no way for the United States at this point to look away from what we have tried for years not to acknowledge—just how entwined drug traffickers are with everyday Mexican society. So much so that it’s hard to imagine how anyone or anything can break these entities apart. You rip out the heart, and the patient could die.
The US-Mexico relationship is more important than ever. But, so far, it does not seem to be a top priority for the Biden administration. This disturbing revelation about the Iguala 43 should move it to the top of the pile at the State Department. We need our southern neighbor in a dozen different ways, but it needs us too. We should leverage our relationship, and make sure Lopez Obrador—and future Mexican presidents—understand that they have to choose which relationship they want to preserve: the one with the cartels, or the one with the United States. If we have to send U.S. law enforcement advisers or military assistance, so be it. This isn’t some faraway place we’re talking about. Our neighbor’s house is on fire, and it won’t be long until the embers find their way to our house. In fact, in many ways, they already have. Mexico’s fate and our own are hopelessly linked.
You will occasionally hear Mexican expatriates who live on this side of the border, and even some of my fellow Mexican Americans, asking for prayers for Mexico. Thoughts and prayers will do about as much good south of the border as they’ve done up here when offered after a mass shooting or some other man-made tragedy.
Finally, Mexico has another choice to make. What does it value more? The life that the friendly neighborhood drug trafficker helps provide, or its children and young people? You strike a bargain with the devil, and sooner or later, he comes for your soul. And now, as far as Mexico is concerned, he has.
