On the cartels – Rachel Nolan in Harper’s:

‘In 2008, a plane crashed in the heart of Mexico City, near the National Museum of Anthropology. Juan Camilo Mouriño, the interior minister, and José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, a former prosecutor known for fighting drug cartels, were both killed. The government said it was an accident. But many people believed—simply because it seemed like it might be true—that the cartels shot the aircraft down. Or that it was a government plot to rein in investigators looking into drug trafficking operations that might lead back to high places. Los Tigres del Norte, one of Mexico’s most popular bands, sang about the crash in an extended political allegory called “La Granja”: A hawk has fallen The chicks are asking Did it fall by itself? Or did the winds bring it down? When I moved to Mexico City a year later, the crash was still the subject of elaborate conspiracy theories. A popular topic of conversation was whether the president of the country really wanted to wipe out the gangs or if he was perhaps in cahoots with one of them and using money from taxpayers and the United States to selectively target its rivals. The week before the crash, Mexican news outlets reported that the government had arrested high-level officials accused of serving as paid informants for cartels, as well as a mole in the United States Embassy who had been leaking information about Drug Enforcement Agency operations. That same year, the United States and Mexico established the Merida Initiative, a partnership through which the United States has administered some $3.3 billion in government aid to a Mexican regime known to have been infiltrated by the cartels.
In 2010, Los Tigres del Norte performed at the bicentennial celebration of Mexican independence on a massive stage erected on Paseo de la Reforma—the same avenue where the plane had crashed two years earlier. I arrived after midnight, and the five band members, dressed in suits and black cowboy hats, were well into their set, taking suggestions written on slips of paper and passed up to the stage. The crowd was dancing to “Contraband and Betrayal,” the song that made the group famous in the Seventies. It tells the story of a fictional drug runner, Camelia la Texana, who smuggles marijuana to California with her lover, Emilio Varela. When Varela tells her he plans to leave her, she shoots him and makes off with the money. The song helped make narcocorridos—songs glorifying traffickers—wildly popular. The classic version of “Contraband and Betrayal” ends with a shoot-out. But performing four years into a bloody escalation of the Mexican drug war, the band tapered off with accordion figures instead.’

(…)

‘Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, by Oswaldo Zavala, a Mexican journalist turned professor, asks us to consider what at first may seem an absurd proposition: What if there are no cartels? What if it’s all a lie, a cover-up? Behind the screen, Zavala proposes, is not a narco killer with gelled hair and a taste for expensive tequila—but the police, the army, and various arms of the state.
In 2007, Felipe Calderón was a new president with a weak mandate and a weak chin. In a political stunt, he would go on to climb into baggy combat fatigues and declare the war on drugs his number one priority. Two years later, Calderón ordered the armed forces into the fight and unleashed death on a scale not seen since the Mexican Revolution. By the government’s own count, 105,000 people have been killed or forcibly disappeared since 2006. Groups of mothers roam the countryside, searching for the bodies of their children.
The standard explanation given by members of the Mexican government, the U.S. government, and news articles based on what journalists like to call official sources, is that this is “drug war violence”—a phrase that sounds like it should mean something but doesn’t. Who is killing whom? Here is the usual capsule history: Once upon a time, there was peace in the drug trade. Certain kingpins were in charge, and everyone knew whose territory was whose. This story is familiar from official sources in Colombia too. The Eighties and early Nineties were the top-dog years for the Medellín Cartel, led by Pablo Escobar. Then, after the U.S. and Colombian governments ratcheted up pressure, they squeezed the trade over to Mexico, and eventually to the Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The cartels were named, often by the DEA, after the areas they supposedly controlled. The story goes that when the kingpins were captured, there was a battle for turf and supply routes. In other words, traffickers killing traffickers. Nothing to see here.
Zavala’s book, translated from the Spanish by William Savinar, offers a different explanation. Zavala is one of a growing number of observers who see the cartels and kingpins as a distraction from the real story: who is using the drug war to consolidate power and make money.’

(…)

‘Zavala maintains that there is little accurate reporting on the drug wars, a stance that has understandably been unwelcome in Mexico—not least among journalists. Nevertheless, the underlying premise seems sensible enough: we should listen to the friends and families of victims when they tell us who has been killing them. And what they say is that it isn’t narcos killing narcos. It is the government—the police and the military—killing young men and disappearing young women. Military officials routinely kill women after acts of sexual violence. They torture young men to obtain confessions, and forcibly disappear them. Indigenous people who resist mining on their lands or protest theft of their water are killed, supposedly by narcos, but often at the behest of corrupt local politicians. This is what Cristina Rivera Garza, in her book Grieving, calls “the misnamed war on drugs,” which is actually “the war against the Mexican people.”’

(….)

‘ The peaceful transition of power in 2000 marked a democratic turn, but it also unsettled who would benefit from shaking down traffickers. The biggest change began under Calderón, who was president from 2006 to 2012. He called the military out to the streets, deploying soldiers to support, then supplant, the police. They have yet to return to their barracks. Zavala cites the sociologist Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo’s “simple analysis based on official figures” showing that the country’s violence sharply escalated after the militarization ordered by Calderón.
That violence has extended to the press: it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is not always narcos who are behind the murders of Mexican journalists. John Gibler is a North American reporter who has lived in Mexico for many years and is involved in a collective of journalists investigating the murder of the Chihuahuan journalist Miroslava Breach. “There’s this myth that reporting on the cartels gets you killed,” he recently told The New Yorker.
And yes, it can, if you publish specific information about who is doing what and where. But, if you look at the majority of the more than one hundred journalists killed in the last decade in Mexico, most of them were working on stories about the collaboration between the political state apparatus and organized crime.
Breach was targeted because she published names of traffickers—and those of corrupt politicians.
In a book recently published in Spanish, La guerra en las palabras, Zavala opens with the 2019 trial of El Chapo. Despite its billing by international media as the “trial of the century,” Zavala writes that the real power was elsewhere—with the politicians whom El Chapo bribed, and the politicians who work for narcos or are narcos themselves. The narrative of the war on drugs is a cover that allows the Mexican government to kill, torture, and disappear its citizens with impunity.’

Read the article here.

That the war on drugs has been a failure is widely known. That is has been used as excuse discriminate against certain groups should have been known.

That in the case of Mexciso the state or let’s be prudent, certain state agencies and individuals who operate as state actors benefit from the war and use the war to wage against opponents for whatever reason should not come as a surprise.

The question not answered is why the US is playing. Perhaps the question is too much of an invitation to conspiracy theories.

Let’s say that the war on drugs is an even better excuse for the militarization of the state than terrorism.