Lower Taxes, New Taxes

If the coming revenue bill is to include some new taxes, may it be a tax on cigarettes: seven out of ten Mexicans say they would support a new tax on tobacco, according to a poll conducted by the Senate health subcommittee. Of course, the fact that the same proposal garnered only 39 percent support last year from Mitofsky suggests that the 70 percent might not be quite accurate.

Also, it appears as though one of the planks of the revenue agreement will be a lowering of the IVA to 15 percent.

The Reaction to La Barbie's Capture

Above we have a taste of Mexico's front pages today. Some of the news stories trickling out about the arrest of Édgar Valdez Villarreal include the claim that he tried to talk Arturo Beltrán Leyva into turning himself in shortly before he was killed in a shootout with the navy in December. As a result of his arrest, 11 more people connected to Valdez Villarreal were arrested in Colombia. Also, he couldn't wipe the smile off his face during his presentation to the cameras. Lastly, it's not much of a surprise, but the ranch house where Valdez Villarreal was arrested looks like a heck of a place to hole up.

Big Arrest

Edgar Valdez Villarreal, known as la Barbie, has been arrested in Mexico State by the Federal Police. This marks four major arrests/killings for the Mexican government since December, with Nacho Coronel's death, Teo García arrest, and Arturo Beltrán Leyva's death preceding Villarreal's arrest. (Oddly, despite the much publicized deployment of the army around the country, the army has been heavily involved in only one of these events.) It would also seem likely to spell the end of the Beltrán Leyva organization as a significant force in Mexico's drug trade.

Also, Malcolm Beith offers an illustration that the government's supposed protection of Chapo is greatly exaggerated.

Another Murdered Mayor

The latest victim, Marco Antonio Leal, served in Hidalgo, Tamaulipas, which, like the Monterrey suburb where Edelmiro Cavazos was murdered last week, is located in the northeastern part of the country that has degenerated a great deal this year. According to Excélsior, 13 mayors have been assassinated in the last year and change.

Estimates on Kidnapped Migrants

A handful of Mexican NGOs, using data from the CNDH, say that 20,000 immigrants passing through Mexico are kidnapped each year, which (even if the figure is exaggerated) is why we have protests like the one jarringly photographed above. The CNDH says that three quarters of all migrants who are kidnapped are victimized in Veracruz, Tabasco, and Tamaulipas. These are, not coincidentally, three states with a strong presence of the Zetas. This tendency to expand into extortion and other activities harmful to non-combatants is often associated with the Zetas, who I've read are the organized crime group with the shallowest roots as drug traffickers. They formed as a group of gunmen, so they didn't tease together a smuggling network or forge relationships with Colombian cocaine producers. They could get rich without doing so. When they broke away from their erstwhile sponsors, i.e. those people in Tamaulipas who were drug traffickers first and foremost rather than all-purpose gangsters, the Zetas still had the guns and the will to wreak havoc, but no drug connections and the consequent profit margins. As a result, to keep their wallets fat, they've gotten into much more alarming activities, and have made northern cities where they operate much more violent. This is something to remember and plan for if Mexico (or the US) moves toward legalization at some point.

Cleaning Up the Federales

Mexican authorities announced yesterday the expulsion of more than 3,000 Federal Police officers as part of a revision and cleansing process. The number of officers kicked out since May is 4,685, which represents some 10 percent of the total personnel. Federal Police corruption has been a weightier topic ever since dozens of Juárez-based federales rebelled against four of their commanders, the reason being that the commanders were thought to be corrupt (and drugs and illegal weapons were found in their possession). One might think that this was a positive step in the same direction, but the officers who led the charge against their dirty bosses were evidently among the purged, which makes you suspect retaliation for publicly rocking the boat.

More on Calderón's Reaction to Criticism

Lydia Cacho is not the first person I looked to for security commentary, but I thought she had some interesting things to say in a column last week:

The drug traffickers march took to the streets of Zacatecas. Wives, children, and brothers of criminals walked along the streets demanding their right to "a life in peace". Neighbors noticed armored trucks with false plates, and recognized leading retail dealers, and four fired ex judicial police. And as in a theater of the absurd, the march passed before the people and the authorities. The signs requested the removal of the army. The wife of a famous hit man had a sign that said, "No more dead children, fuera army".

[Break]

This problem has many ramifications, but here I will deal with one: the incapacity of President Calderón to ally himself with critical and professional civil organizations that for decades have worked in their communities against violence, corruption, and for human rights. These groups, which don't belong to the elites invited to the Dialogues for Security, have for years been making local diagnoses that allow them to understand the complex reality. Their activists are the ones that have created social prevention and education networks. And yes, they have also documented cases of grave violations by the army and authorities, and they are critical of the system; nevertheless, their work is centered on the dignity of people and they are a tool to defuse possible social explosions. Strengthening civil organizations right now could be the most important play for the federal government. They are the ones who know who is marching, governing, and writing for the country and those who defend dark interests. A strategic dialogue that respects differences and creates alliances where they coincide is a tool against narco-cynicism. Calderón needs to understand who are his real enemies.

A couple of points: first off, Calderón's willingness to take the criticisms of his policy to heart isn't an elite versus non-elite dispute. Or, at the very least, it doesn't need to be. Only so many people can have access to the president, which means some of the smaller, more localized groups are going to have a harder time getting heard. If their message is carried by someone else, I don't see that as much of a problem. Second, narco as a modifier could stand to be curtailed a bit. Narco-cynicism is a bridge too far.

Lastly, she's exactly right that Calderón's intransigence toward critics does more harm to the effectiveness of his policy than listening to them would. Both Calderón supporters and his critics are guilty of this sometimes, but the tendency is often to reject everything the other side has to say and dismiss them as entirely incorrect. It's a search for areas of disagreement than for areas of agreement, which is not the most productive approach. Apologies for any resemblance the previous sentences might have to many written by David Broder over the past few decades.

La Liga Kicks Off, Determines Champion

I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I suspect that the two-point gap that opened up between Barça and Real yesterday won't get any closer over the next nine months. More on the opening weekend here from Phil Ball.

Monterrey

It's interesting how much of the recent media uproar about Monterrey has been that this is the nation's second city, not some border backwater. For instance, here's an editorial from El Universal from a couple of weeks ago:

The second most important city in the country, the central nervous system of our national industry, is at the breaking point, on the border between civility and barbarism. If Monterrey falls, has Ciudad Juárez and Reynosa have, the country will be one step away from doing so as well.

[Break]

In less than two years, Monterrey went from occasional violence in poor neighborhoods to narco-blockades across the city, grenades thrown at local media outlets, and kidnapping of public officials at the doors of their houses.

One unwritten subtext is that if it can happen in Monterrey, it could happen in Mexico City as well, which is a worry that periodically crops up among the national media. I know Monterrey has had a lot of violent episodes this year, but I'd be interested to see some hard data about how much more violent it really is this year. (Diego Valle?) It could be that just a few spectacular episodes are making the city seem much more out of control than it really is. I also think the degree to which this is recent is a bit exaggerated; I remember having a long talk with someone in Monterrey in 2007 about the explosion of violence.

Update: Diego Valle says in comments that indeed the spike has been both sudden and extreme.

Whining

Calderón complained yesterday that the "broken record" of complaints about military abuses were tiring, and said that they were false. I agree that some of the comments about the army are over the top and unbalanced, but how can Calderón say that all the complaints are untrue? They have been documented by HRW, Amnesty International, and numerous media sources. Is Calderón arguing that the dozens of complaints, documented in great detail and with first-person accounts, are all lies?

And more broadly, if Calderón and the military brass are sick of the complaints, making a public show of punishing the offenders is the best way to deal with that, not denying the basis of the denunciations.

LA Times on the Migrant Massacre

Via Boz:

The bullet-riddled bodies of 72 Central and South Americans reportedly slain by drug traffickers in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas shine a light on the dark truth known to undocumented migrants: The illegal trek north through Mexico is treacherous, and those who undertake it put themselves at the mercy of vicious predators. Even before they reach the potentially fatal desert crossing into the United States, thousands of migrants each year face kidnapping, extortion, sexual assault and murder — crimes that often go unreported and unsolved.

An Ecuadorean survivor of the massacre has told officials that the victims were gunned down after refusing to pay or work for the Zetas, the dominant cartel in the region. This would be consistent with reports that drug cartels are diversifying into the lucrative human trafficking business, collecting fees of up to $7,000 a head from relatives in the United States while often forcing migrants to carry drugs with them across the border. But many questions remain unanswered, not the least of which is why the traffickers would kill such valuable prey.

The case is the latest evidence of the well-documented violence against migrants that Mexican officials have been unwilling or unable to confront. Amnesty International has described an "epidemic" of abuses against migrants. In 2009, Mexico's National Human Rights Commission issued a report concluding that 9,758 illegal immigrants had been kidnapped in a six-month period ending in February of that year, including at least 57 children. Among the states with the most cases: Tamaulipas.

Official Candidacy

Gustavo Madero's hat is officially in the ring as a potential successor to César Nava.

Something Good in Hoover Digest

One cool article that appeared in the same pages as the piece picked on in the previous post was about how nations have increased revenue by hiring foreign firms to take control of revenue collection, written by Gancho pal Noel Maurer and Kris Mitchener. The nations mentioned were significantly less developed than today's Mexico, and I don't imagine that a wholesale outsourcing would be feasible, but from what I've heard anecdotally about dealing with hacienda, there's little question that a radical overhaul of the agency's collection practices would do a lot to increase revenue without raising taxes.

More on Colombia as Mexico

The Hoover Digest makes it two US policy journals arguing in recent months that the solution to Mexico's problems is to treat it as we did Colombia. As ever, this a bit silly, or at least narrow. Unlike the Foreign Affairs piece, Hoover article suffers from a lack of specificity and a manipulation of info that makes the whole thing suspect. On the latter score:

Uribe maintains the confidence of a vast majority of Colombians. In 2002 he released the Democratic Security Policy and his administration, with the support of the Colombian military and police force, focused on strengthening democratic institutions. By 2004, they had re-established a government presence in every one of the country’s municipalities. By 2007, Bogotá, Medellín, and Cartagena had murder rates lower than those of Washington, D.C., or Rio de Janeiro. Between 2002 and 2007, Colombia saw a decrease of 37 percent in homicides, 78 percent in kidnappings, 63 percent in terrorist attacks, and 60 percent in attacks on the country’s infrastructure.

Of course, 2007 isn't the most recent year for which we have murder data for Medellín. In 2009, almost 3,000 people were killed in Medellín, which makes it significantly more violent than any city in the United States. I don't want to dismiss Uribe's achievements out of hand, but they did have a cost, which goes unmentioned here, and, more to the point, they weren't all necessarily enduring.

Author Don Chipman also writes:

Why, then, are we not more concerned by the situation south of the border in Mexico, where all of these threats to our national security exist? The answer is that most Americans view the U.S.-Mexican border through the prism of the illegal-immigration issue, neglecting serious issues of drug trafficking, free trade, and national security.

US attention to Mexico neglects drug trafficking as an issue? Wow, he must be reading different media than I. The Post, the WSJ, and the LA Times all have longstanding, titled series about security problems south of the border, with names like Mexico under Siege and Mexico at War. I'd estimate the ratio of security to immigration stories in the major American publications at maybe 5 to 1, if not higher. One frequent complaint from Mexicans is that the US already views its southern neighbor not as a country but as a security problem (though you do also hear the complaint that the US isn't doing enough to address the problem).

Other articles, such as the Foreign Affairs piece, make the same comparison more persuasively, but I've yet to read why Colombia is a better model for Mexico than, for instance, Italy (which did a more comprehensive job eliminating organized crime as a threat to state and reducing violence than did Colombia). Mexico and Colombia both have drug traffickers and both are Spanish-speaking, but Colombia has vast swaths of the country where the government isn't in control, it has a long-simmering civil war, and it has thousands of paramilitaries, among other hugely significant differences with Mexico. And Colombia, while treated as a miracle of success, remains on the whole far more unstable and dangerous than Mexico. No one knowledgeable would seriously argue that the US would be better off sharing a border with Colombia than with Mexico.

There are of course broad remedies which would benefit both Mexico and Colombia: stronger anti-corruption controls, judicial and penal reform, a more honest and professional police force, et cetera. The thing is, these are obvious improvements that would benefit any developing nation. Mexico shouldn't improve its police forces because it worked for Colombia; it should do so because effective police are better than ineffective police, wherever you might be. Turning such a banal observation into a comparison with Colombia makes writing an article easier, but it doesn't really give us any special insight into either nation.

Improving Anti-Money Laundering Efforts, Mexico Edition

Calderón presented a new law under which it will be illegal to buy cars, houses, and other goods with cash, presumably a common practice for members of organized crime. The same law also will increase regulation on frequent laundries, such as casas de cambio and gambling houses. The former will probably help some around the margins if it is enforced; it won't make gangster hide all their cash under their mattress, but will likely force them into using financial institutions, which should make the transactions and dirty money in general more traceable. Of course, whether that translates into significantly more effective controls depends a great deal on whether Mexico will go after banks holding drug money. And history isn't encouraging on this score.

Lookalikes, Miss Mexico Edition

That would be Televisa personality Marisol González (Miss Mexico 2003) on the left, who coincidentally is from Torreón and went to school where I taught (though years before my arrival), and Jimena Navarrete, the just-crowned Miss Universe. I guess the rejoinder would be that all beauty queens look the same, but I think this resemblance goes above and beyond. Maybe we need Burro Hall to weigh in.

Mayors Washing Hands

One of the more disturbing and noteworthy pieces of info from my past week of limited blogging was the kidnapping and murder of Edelmiro Cavazos, mayor of a Monterrey suburb, in apparent retaliation for the arrest of some Zetas in his town. While murders of mayors are thankfully rare in Mexico, intimidation of local governments by organized crime groups is far from an isolated phenomenon: according to officials involved with the recent security dialogues, 90 percent of local government efforts to confront organized crime are insufficient.

More on the Massacre

The execution of 72 immigrants in Tamaulipas is being attributed to the Zetas, and reportedly happened over the weekend. The immigrants were accused of being hit men, and then fired upon. The only reason the authorities knew that the event had happened because an Ecuadorian survived the assault, including the shot to the back of the head that each received (a bullet meant to kill him went in the neck and came out his jaw), and ran more than 20 kilometers seeking help before he found it.

El Universal's editorial page, among many others, had a strong reaction to the event in today's paper:

The tyranny of the Zetas in the North and the anarchy in the South [along immigration routes] was well known. The alarming things isn't just the massacre, but the incapacity of the state to anticipate it, not to mention formulate some answer.

For years, the northern border in has demonstrated itself untamable because of the violence and social decomposition, but the southern border, quieter until now, turns out to be as or even more decayed. We would do wrong in forgetting again.

Money-Laundering in the Post

The Washington Post's story on the failure of even redoubled efforts to stop the illicit cash flow from the US to Mexico is a bit depressing, but not too surprising (although I would have guessed that authorities nab more than 1 percent of the drug cash flow). If we can't stop the weapons or drugs from crossing the border, what makes us think we will have better luck with cash, which isn't in and of itself contraband. We might be able to do a better job tracking down big chunks of cash, which would force the narcos to pay more "ants" to bring smaller amounts across the border, not unlike the way weapons are moved. That would likely mean a smaller total sum of cash in the hands of the drug bosses, but it also likely means more total people earning cash from the drug trade, so it's not clear that such would be a positive outcome. In any event, it seems unlikely that we will be able to up our cash confiscation rate to even such a modest number as, say, 20 percent at any time in the near future. Which means that at some point we should conclude that stopping the cash flow, while it would be an enormous help were it possible, is not the best use of our resources.

Chuchos Key to the Budget

Leo Zuckermann runs the numbers on the Chamber of Deputies, which is the only house that has to pass the budget spending bill, and notices something that could be extremely important here in a few weeks: Jesús Ortega's band, should it choose to side with Calderón, could be the difference between a PRI-led opposition passage of the budget over the president's veto, which would be rather embarrassing for the man in Los Pinos. Of course, this presupposes that the PRI won't be willing to negotiate a final solution with Calderón, which may not wind up being the case.

The PRD's Future

Brenda Herrera writes about a group known as the G-5 that is redefining the party's mode of operation in a number of significant and potentially enduring ways. Interestingly, she says that AMLO and Ebrard have little influence over the negotiations, despite the presence of longtime AMLO ally Alejandro Encinas among the five. The other four members of the so called G-5 are René Bejarano, Amalia García, Héctor Bautista, and Jesús Ortega.

Nava's Replacement

Bajo Reserva tells us that it will be Gustavo Madero, presently the party leader in the Senate. Another possibility is former Interior Secretary Francisco Ramírez Acuña.

Lots of Bodies

More evidence of northeastern Mexico's problems: navy personnel have found more than 70 dead bodies in a warehouse on a ranch in Tamaulipas.

Update: Witnesses say that the bodies are of immigrants kidnapped by organized groups, an increasingly common (at least, based on newspaper reports) practice in an increasingly bloody industry.