Mexico’s Presidential Election and the Cartel War
Mexico’s Presidential Election and the Cartel War
BY SCOTT STEWART
Mexico will hold its presidential election July 1 against the
backdrop of a protracted war against criminal cartels in the country.
Former President Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) launched
that struggle; his successor, Felipe Calderon, also of the PAN, greatly
expanded it. While many Mexicans apparently support action against the
cartels, the Calderon government has come under much criticism for its
pursuit of the cartels, contributing to Calderon’s low popularity at the
moment. The PAN is widely expected to lose in July to the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI), which controlled the Mexican presidency for
most of the 20th century until Fox’s victory in 2000. According to
polls, the PAN has lost credibility among many Mexican voters, many of
whom also once again view the PRI as a viable alternative.
In our effort to track Mexico’s criminal cartels and to help our
readers understand the dynamics that shape the violence in Mexico,
Stratfor talks to a variety of people, including Mexican and U.S.
government officials, journalists, business owners, taxi drivers and
street vendors. At present, many of these contacts are saying that the
Calderon administration could attempt to pull off some sort of
last-minute political coup (in U.S. political parlance, an “October
surprise”) to boost the PAN’s popularity so it can retain the
presidency.
The potential election ploy most often discussed is the capture of
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, who
is widely believed to be the richest, most powerful drug trafficker
anywhere. The reasoning goes that if the government could catch Guzman,
Calderon’s (and hence the PAN’s) popularity would soar.
Still, very real questions exist about whether such an operation
really would give the PAN the boost it needs to retain the presidency,
however. North of the border, the re-election of U.S. President Barack
Obama has not been guaranteed by the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden.
Political considerations aside, the factors that have helped Guzman
avoid capture thus far are the very same factors that inhibit the
Mexican government’s ability to capture him. While we don’t put a lot of
stock in these rumors of an election surprise, we do see them as a good
reason to examine the factors that have protected Guzman.
Plata o Plomo
As we noted in our annual cartel report, Mexico’s cartels have begun
to form into two major groupings around the two most powerful cartels,
the Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas. These two cartels approach business
quite differently. The common Mexican cartel expression “plata o plomo”
(literally translated as “silver or lead,” the Spanish phrase signifying
that a cartel will force one’s cooperation with either a bribe or a
bullet) illustrates the different modes of operation of the two
hegemonic cartels.
Los Zetas, an organization founded by former Mexican special
operations soldiers, tends to apply a military solution to any problem
first — plomo. They certainly bribe people, but one of their core
organizational values is that it is cheaper and easier to threaten than
to bribe. Rather than retain people on their payroll for years, Los
Zetas also tend toward a short time horizon with bribery.
By contrast, people like Guzman and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia,
founders of the Sinaloa cartel, have been producing and trafficking
narcotics for decades. Guzman and Zambada got their start in the
trafficking business working for Miguel “El Padrino” Angel Felix
Gallardo, the leader of the powerful Guadalajara cartel in the early
1980s. Because they have been in the illicit logistics business for
decades, the Sinaloa leaders are more business-oriented than
military-oriented. This means that the Sinaloa cartel tends to employ
plata first, preferring to buy off the people required to achieve its
objectives. It also frequently provides U.S. and Mexican authorities
with intelligence pertaining to its cartel enemies rather than taking
direct military action against them, thus using the authorities as a
weapon against rival cartels. While Sinaloa does have some powerful
enforcement groups, and it certainly can (and does) resort to ruthless
violence, violence is merely one of the many tools at its disposal
rather than its preferred approach to a given problem.
Thus, Sinaloa and Los Zetas each use the same set of tools, they just tend to use them in a different order.
Guzman’s Web
Within his home territory of rural Sinaloa state, Guzman is respected
and even revered. An almost-mythical figure, he has used his fortune to
buy good will and loyalty in his home turf and elsewhere. In addition
to his public largesse, Guzman has bribed people for decades. Unlike Los
Zetas, the Sinaloa cartel leadership tends to take a long view on
corruption. It will often recruit a low-level official and then continue
to pay that person as he rises through the ranks. This long-term
approach is not unlike that taken by some of the more patient
intelligence services, along the lines of the Soviet recruitment of the
“Cambridge Five” while they were still students. Quite simply, Guzman
and the Sinaloa cartel have had police and military officers,
politicians, journalists and judges on their payroll for years and even
decades.
This intelligence agency-like approach has permitted the Sinaloa
leadership to construct a wide web of assets with which to gather
intelligence and serve as its agents of influence. At the street level,
all Mexican cartels employ lookouts called “halcones,” Spanish for
“falcons,” who provide their cartel masters with early warning of law
enforcement or rival cartel activity in the halcones’ area of
responsibility. Higher-ranking officials on a cartel’s payroll
essentially serve as high-level halcones who provide early warnings when
government operations against the cartel are being planned. Such
advanced warning allows the cartels to protect their shipments and
leadership.
Once an official or politician is on a cartel payroll (a situation
similar to a network of sources run by an intelligence agency), he is
subject to blackmail should he stop cooperating. And the relationship
between a politician and the cartels can go beyond just cash. It can
also involve the murder of a rival or provide other forms of non-cash
assistance in the attainment of political power.
Whatever the relationship entails, once a cartel gets its hooks into a
person, it tends not to let go — and the person thus entangled has
little choice but to continue cooperating, since he can be subject to
arrest and political or financial ruin if he is caught. He also can be
assassinated should he decide to quit cooperating. No Mexican politician
wants to become the next Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who the U.S. government alleges
made hundreds of millions of dollars in dirty money, much of it from
cartel figures. Raul Salinas’ arrest in 1995 for murder, the subsequent
money laundering charges brought against him, and questions about what
his brother Carlos knew about his activities were important factors in
the 2000 presidential election in which the PRI lost.
This fear of being linked to a figure like Guzman serves as a strong
deterrent to his arrest. Guzman has been operating as a high-level
narcotics trafficker in Mexico for decades now, and a big part of his
operations has involved bribery. For example, in November 2008, Mexico’s
drug czar, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, was arrested and charged with
accepting $450,000 a month from Zambada and the Beltran Leyva brothers,
who were aligned with Sinaloa at the time.
If Guzman were to talk to authorities after his arrest, he could
implicate a number of very powerful political and business figures.
Indeed, it is likely this fear led to the delicate treatment he received
after his 1993 arrest in Guatemala and his subsequent conviction in
Mexico for narcotics trafficking and bribery. Guzman was able to
continue to run his criminal empire from behind bars, and it was only
when it appeared that Guzman might face extradition to the United States
that he chose to escape from his comfortable prison cell in January
2001. Since his escape, he undoubtedly has continued to add strands to
the web of protection surrounding him.
We must also note that without Guzman, the dynamics that drive the
Mexican cartels would continue, and other leaders or even organizations
would rise to take his place. Killing or arresting an individual will
not be the end of Mexico’s criminal cartels.
If Guzman is concerned that he could be killed rather than captured,
like his former associate Arturo Beltran Leyva, it is possible that he
could have prepared some type of insurance document incriminating
powerful people on Sinaloa’s payroll. As a deterrent to Guzman’s
killing, Sinaloa could threaten to release such a document should Guzman
be killed.
That said, a long line of powerful Mexican cartel leaders have been
arrested. Guzman’s mentor, Felix Gallardo, was arrested in 1989 in large
part due to U.S. pressure on the Mexican government in the wake of the
torture and murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent
Enrique Camarena. Gulf cartel founder Juan Garcia Abrego, also a
protege of Felix Gallardo, was arrested in 1996. Garcia Abrego allegedly
was linked to Raul Salinas and other high-ranking officials in the
government of then-President Ernesto Zedillo. Garcia Abrego’s successor
as leader of the Gulf cartel, Osiel Cardenas Guillen, was arrested in
2003 and, like Garcia Abrego, was deported to the United States and
convicted in a U.S. court; he is currently incarcerated in the
“Supermax” penitentiary in Florence, Colo. Indeed, Guzman and Zambada
are the last of Felix Gallardo’s proteges still at large.
Along with Zambada, Guzman has been a high-profile fugitive for three
decades now. He has not survived that long by being careless or stupid.
It would be very difficult to track down such an individual in a short
window of time established by political calculations unless those
responsible already know his exact location and have chosen not to
arrest him thus far. The Calderon administration and the PAN have
struggled with public perceptions for some time now, making it likely
that if high-level PAN officials knew where Guzman was and wanted to
arrest him for the public relations bump such an operation could
provide, they already would have done so.
Still, Guzman is one of the most wanted individuals in the world, and
large teams of Mexican and U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agents
are trying to locate him. Therefore, it is possible that Guzman could
be arrested before the election in July. Any operation to capture him
would be tightly compartmentalized for fear it could leak out to
high-ranking halcones in the Mexican (or U.S.) government. Indeed,
special Mexican units working closely with U.S. counterparts and
segregated from any outside contact so that they cannot betray their
mission — or the intelligence that led to it — normally carry out such
sensitive operations. This means such an operation would likely be
beyond the control of Mexican politicians to mandate, although they
could conceivably provide actionable intelligence to the forces involved
in such an operation.
Interestingly, with all the chatter of an election surprise floating
around Mexico, any arrest at this point would be met with a great deal
of skepticism. The arrest of such a powerful figure would almost
certainly become very politicized with all parties attempting to use it
to their advantage — and dodge any connections they might have to
Sinaloa. Such an environment would serve to bring more attention to the
issue of corruption and collusion between the cartels and the
government. And that could end up hurting rather than benefiting the PAN
in the upcoming presidential election.
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