Mexicans lose all hope in their impotent authorities

In Mexico, people take arms in their hands. Residents of south-eastern states of the country, tired of incessant wars of drug cartels, create armed militia to defend themselves and their streets. Mexican authorities fear the fighters of Mexican self-defense - the authorities actually surrendered to criminal gangs.

The war against drug traffickers, launched by former Mexican President Calderon in 2006, has claimed the lives of 60-70 thousand people. Cartels wage war with each other as well. In the beginning of 2010, cartel Los Zetas and its formerly parent structure, Cártel del Golfo, started the struggle in the north of Mexico for the control of the states of Tamaulipa and Nuevo. Before 2006, the government was not willing to notice the groups, and cartels were doing their business, simultaneously corrupting security forces and government officials. The coming to power of Felipe Calderon, who won the election by a narrow margin, triggered a war of the Mexican state against cartels. The war ended with the defeat of the state.

Cartel Los Zetas became a symbol of the impotence of the state. The backbone of the cartel was made of the government's special forces GAFE (Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales) and Infantry Parachute Brigade (BFP) of the Mexican army. The soldiers, who sided with drug dealers, had been trained at CIA bases, and later studied at the so-called School of the Americas (Escuela de las Américas) of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Co-operation.

The main consumers of drugs supplied by Mexican cartels are U.S. citizens. The activities of Calderon, who, like many other Mexican presidents, was a puppet of Washington, played into the hands of cartels. Prices on cocaine in the United States have increased 1.5 times in several years. The average purity of the 'product' has dropped from 67.8 to 56.7 percent. The price of amphetamine jumped by 73 percent. 

The successor to President Calderon, Enrique Peña Nieto, acknowledged the supremacy of the Mafia and its curators in the United States of Mexico. In April, the Prosecutor General of Mexico said that the distribution of information on drug cartels and their leaders would be restricted before 2025.

Now Mexican prosecutors take care of bandits. "Announcing relevant information poses an obvious danger to the development of appropriate strategies (fighting crime) and threatens to disclose information about the whereabouts of the people, who are directly related to organized crime, which endangers their lives," Mexican publication Reforma quoted a response from Mexican law enforcement agencies about this strange decision.

Meanwhile, dozens of people are killed in the country every day, and drug cartels regularly organize exhibitions of severed heads of the fighters of feuding cartels and simply those whom mafia bosses did not like.

Mass kidnappings of cartels technicians have also become a commonplace phenomenon in Mexico. During the last four years, about 36 engineers and radio engineering and communications technicians have disappeared. Those specialists worked in major Mexican companies.

Cartels have obtained their own radio networks. The most progressive one, Los Zetas has mobile radios and antennas, installed in hard-to-reach areas, powered by solar panels. One of the detected networks of this kind included 167 radio antennas. Cartels even build their own relay towers on the territories that they control.

As a result, common people, who do not participate in the system of production and delivery of drugs, took up arms and began to arrange their own lives outside the cartels. Noteworthy, government forces, militias and bandits obtain their arms presumably in the United States. Fortunately, anyone having a driver's license and no criminal record can buy weapons there. Weapons are often bought for straw men, who carry guns abroad and hand them over to local dealers at different prices.

Even mortars and machine guns can be transported across the border, but this is what cartels do. Mexican border guards, when forced to choose between silver (bribe) or lead ("plata o plomo"), opt for the first one.

The number of militia members grows every day. In Guerrero, a few thousand people have already taken up arms voluntarily. Mini armies of drug cartels are able to destroy those brigades, but drug lords position themselves as Robin Hoods, and the war with Mexican people will naturally weaken their support among the population. For the time being, drug lords turn a blind eye on the actions of militia, which affect only lower layers of street vendors of dope.

Thus, the Mexican territorial self-defense looks up to the status of a third force in the ongoing civil war in the country. 

Anatoly Miranovsky

Pravda.Ru

Read the original in Russian