Patrick Corcoran (of Ganchoblog) has been garnering a lot of positive reaction for his article in Mexidata on Felipe Calderón’s failure as a strategist in the “war on drugs.” Patrick’s basic arguement is that Calderón doesn’t have a strategy.
It’s an excellent article and worth reading, even — as Patrick himself notes — that he should have written more about human rights abuses. I don’t agree with everything in the article, of course. Count me among those who ” focus on unprovable theses (Calderón’s strategy was motivated by a desire to legitimate himself after winning a closely contested election)” and — as Patrick commented on with regard to an Excelsior survey — one who shares the the belief of half of all Mexicans that the Calderón Administration is avoiding a confrontation with Chapo Guzmán.
While the survey was not broken down by state, I’d venture an umprovable thesis that here in Sinaloa, the belief that Chapo is untouchable (or purposely avoided) would probably poll closer to 80 or 90 percent of those asked.
I know I believe that, and I suspect that a lot of my neighbors either believe it, or hope it’s true. Chapo, like it or not, is something of a folk hero to many (even in my middle-class Mazatlán neighborhood, one hears corridos celebrating Chapo’s exploits) and — while his organization may be more brutal than, say, Starbucks or WalMart when it comes to driving competitors out of the market — people tend to side with locally owned and operated employers and investors over outsiders. Here in Mazatlán, not too many people regret the Arellano Felix brothers losing their sizable investments, although some realtors and developers would like to see some of those prime locations come onto the market rather than sit and deteriorate. Besides, this is a tourist resort… with a long history of smuggling and piracy. Where do you think a lot of investment funds are coming from?
And, not to put too fine a point on it, the tomato business isn’t all that hot, and narcotics, unlike gold and silver extraction, at least is run by local interests (and is less environmentally damaging).
It’s not that people are pro-narco even, but that they are realists. And it certainly appears to us as if the Administration is by-passing Chapo. The body count in the State as a whole is appalling, but everyone can see that it’s not Chapo’s guys who are taking a bullet, or Chapo’s organization that’s being targeted, but rather rivals and wannabe replacements like the Beltran Leyva clan… or, one suspects, those being murdered for other reasons, but chalked up to “drug war victims”. And, for many, the government agents are the bigger human rights abusers than the gangsters, whose human rights abuses (when it doesn’t involve dismembered corpses, anyway) are less likely the subject of media coverage.
I was hesitant about writing this post. This does not mean I, or my neighbors FAVOR the narcos, or are necessarily sympathetic to them. It does mean that I haven’t seen the government doing a good job of justifying it’s actions, or, in Chapo’s case, seeming lack of action (other than denying that there is a lack of action) and that it would be short-sighted to assume everyone supports the government’s actions, or that those who disbelieve the government’s claims are entirely illogical in their assumptions.
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