Sicario's story

Ioan Grillo has a very good piece on a sicario in Medellin, Colombia. (Link in title of post). Grillo writes for Time and various other publications, his reporting is top notch, and he always manages to find good narco characters. He's by far the bravest English-language reporter in Latin America right now, perhaps the craziest too but I leave that to the shrinks to decide. For anyone interested in the human (and often, darker) side of the drug trade, I highly recommend his stuff. He's also got a book coming out next year, which I'm sure will be pretty fascinating.

In defense of Calderon

I feel like I'm turning increasingly PANista, in part in reaction to the ongoing criticism of Calderon's tactics in the drug war. I don't consider myself an advocate of his war or the tactics employed to fight it, but I do feel like the press is increasingly targeting him without good reason/sufficient evidence. There's a tendency, as a foreign reporter in Mexico, to get swept up in left-wing emotion, often because the government fails to give you straight answers/access, and I see this happening right now with allegations that his war on drugs is increasingly political. One quibble I have is the simple lack of coherent fact and argument.

In several pieces, I've read about how Calderon has "targeted" opposition members but not members of his own party. This simply isn't true or accurate. While the authorities have certainly targeted more members of the opposition, that does not mean that members of the PAN have not been targeted. A piece in the Christian Science Monitor argues:

"But [Calderon] has not targeted his own party’s elected officials. [Gregorio] Sanchez’s arrest has been compared to Calderon’s sweep of 10 mayors in PRD-held Michoacan during election season last year on alleged links to drug traffickers. Almost all of the mayors, who included two members of Calderon’s National Action Party (PAN), were later released from prison."

So there were two PAN mayors targeted in the sweep, contradicting the initial sentence arguing that Calderon "has not targeted his own party's elected officials."

It's true that the majority of targeted officials have not been PAN. And this is a dilemma the current administration faces, because historically, it's been the PRI which had the deepest ties to the narcos. In Michoacan, it's the PRD. The PAN doesn't have those historical ties to deep-rooted corruption. By default, it's going to be going after the opposition if it wants to fight a drug war.

In another piece a while back, in Newsweek, the author wrote: "Some of the other arrests seem even more craven because of their openly political flavor. The 10 mayors were jailed a month before the July 5 midterm elections last year—which Calderón's conservative National Action Party lost badly. All but González were members of political parties opposed to Calderón."

So there was one PAN mayor arrested? I thought it was two.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, wrote: "Several of the arrested mayors belonged to Calderón's own center-right National Action Party."

So there were several, ie, more than two but not many?

Where are these numbers/facts coming from? According to press reports at the time, 6 of the detained mayors were PRI, 2 were PRD and 2 were PAN.

If you're going to make an argument that a president is effectively abusing his power, please get your facts straight before you do so.

Smart piece on economic recovery

The Economist notes how security could affect Mexico's economic recovery. (Link in title of post.) Good piece, particularly as it focuses on the Nuevo Leon situation.

Context is everything

Slate.com puts the "black tar heroin" scare stories into context (link in title and below). Next thing you know, we'll learn that homicides have long been a common occurrence in Ciudad Juarez, they've always grown marijuana in Sinaloa and that Mexican cartels have been operating in the United States for quite some time. Oh, and they still haven't caught Chapo, by the way.

http://www.newsweek.com//frameset.aspx/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.slate.com%2Fclick.phdo%3Fi%3D9e3801b068b9b693bcac0e3fa83a3f3e

Paulette again

In El Universal, Carlos Loret de Mola asks a few questions regarding the Paulette case. I couldn't have said it better myself. (Link in title of the post.)

How is it possible that from the 22nd to the 28th of March, two reconstructions took place but no one searched Paulette's bed, the last place she'd been seen alive?

How is it possible that Amanda de la Rosa slept in the same bed for four days without noticing anything unusual?

How is it possible that a corpse wasn't detected by one of the roughly 200 people – police, detectives, journalists, relatives, friends, the chief prosecutor – who entered the 300-square meter (thanks for noting my error David) apartment during the week that Paulette was missing?

He's got more questions, of course, which you can read in his piece. Keep the pressure on, folks. This case shouldn't be allowed to go away like so many have before it. Mexico needs to move forward, and moving forward by just letting things slide isn't the right way.

Paulette

I'm going to take a break from organized crime and the like and blog about little Paulette today. Apparently, the authorities have concluded that the 4-year-old girl who went missing for 9 days this Spring and was then found in her bed, dead, died in that very bed, of her own accidental smothering. Apparently, she was actually in the bed the whole time. Apparently, she was there while the police searched her room, the house, detained the mom, searched some more, put up billboards and launched TV ads looking for her, while an aunt slept in the very bed where she was supposedly lying dead.... And so on.

This story is too fucking ridiculous to be true. It reeks of jesus, I don't know what. It reeks of some weird twisted conspiracy on a par with the Juarez femicide conspiracy theories. In my mind, there is no explanation for it. And I add this: If State of Mexico Gov. Enrique Pena Nieto doesn't solve this twisted shit before running for president in 2012, I hope it haunts him for the rest of his days. Note to anyone in the press reading this: Ebrard has been haunted by the fact that he froze when two cops were lynched in Tlahuac when he was police chief, and that will likely resurface if he runs for president. If Pena Nieto runs, the 4-year-old corpse of Paulette should be pictured alongside every cheery photo op he ever does.

Except...

I didn't have time to post my quibbles with this followup piece. Now I do:

I only have one, really. First guy quoted in the story is a police officer. That's better than a street vendor. Except... he's a 25-year-old former cop in a suburb of Mexico City. What in God's name does he know about Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel?

Rest of the story is good. It doesn't prove all that much but it's more thorough than other pieces I've read. And the headline expresses a decent amount of doubt: "Sinaloa Cartel Seems Favored In Mexico's Drug War."