Populist Drug Cartels

Over the past several days, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and Veracruz have borne witness to protests of the presence of the army. Today, the governor of Nuevo León, Natividad González, accused the Gulf Cartel of paying the protesters. It's unfortunate that he offered no evidence (other than a vague reference to the arrests of people with a relationship to organized crime), because it's a lot easier to blow off the accusation as an embarrassed executive's blustering as a result. However, a couple of factors lead me to suspect that there may be some truth to González's comments: first, the states in question are the traditional stomping ground of the Gulf Cartel, and other states with an army presence have had no protests; second, there has not been, as far as I know, a rash of army abuses in any of those states in recent weeks (although, I haven't read Proceso in a couple of weeks, so I could be missing something), so it's an odd time for the protests to flare up; third, paying protesters for their objection has a long tradition in Mexican politics.