The Narco-State of Chiapas Part V in a series
The Narco News Bulletin
The
Rebels, not the Government, Slowed the Drug Trade
And then the government
re-established it
Part
V
PANAMERICAN HIGHWAY; CIUDAD
CUAUHTÉMOC TO SAN CRISTÓBAL, CHIAPAS: About 25 miles past Tapachula, near the next city
of Huixtla, a right turn brings the traveller up into the woods,
through the coffee plantations.
This is one of two possible northbound
routes from Tapachula.
The coastal route, straddles the Pacific
Ocean beyond Huixtla. Most of the drugs now head up the coast.
This series will review that route later. But the military and
police presence is nonetheless concentrated inland; a "low
intensity war zone" as the Pentagon manuals describe the
theater of this kind of conflict.
The road winds past Frontera Comalapa
and soon the Panamerican Highway begins in Cuidad Cuauhtémoc;
the third of the entry points from Guatemala into this region.
The traveller approaches one of the many military checkpoints
in this zone. Not a "highway" in the sense that most
gringos understand one, the Panamerican -- Route 190 -- is a
narrow, at times poorly paved, road that winds around mountains,
past Comitán toward San Cristóbal de Las Casas.
Two soldiers in olive-drab uniforms and
helmets board the bus. "We're applying the federal law of
arms and explosives," announced the first. He looks to be
about 20 years old. While searching the overhead bags for weapons,
the soldiers sometimes find drugs and make an arrest. The second
soldier stands guard at the front of the bus, apparently oblivious
that his loaded semi-automatic rifle is waving at the feet of
some passengers. The first soldier traverses the aisles, inspecting
the overhead rack, looking below the seats, feeling pieces of
luggage, sometimes opening them while demanding to see the passenger's
identification.
The mountain path was, years ago, a preferred
route for drug smuggling.
That all changed, overnight, on January
1, 1994, when the indigenous Zapatista Army of National Liberation
seized four Chiapas cities -- San Cristóbal, Ocosingo,
Las Margaritas and Altamirano -- calling for a revolution against
what they called "the neoliberal economic system."
The antithesis of the "narco-guerrilla"
movements in other parts of the world, the Zapatistas have explicit revolutionary laws
against drug use or trafficking. They have, in fact, driven the
drug cartels off their jungle and mountain lands -- where governments
had previously failed to do so. Alcohol, too, is banned in their
villages.
Any government serious
about fighting drugs would study the success of the Zapatista
drug policies -- instead of persecuting their indigenous supporters
-- in the hope of learning to achieve the same sober results.
But in the first years of the conflict, the Mexican and Chiapas
state governments tried desperately to link the Zapatistas with
drug trafficking in order to discredit them. That effort failed
so miserably that by 1998, the Mexican federal drug czar, Mariano
Herrán Salvatti, had to admit that there were no "narco-guerrillas"
in Mexico: insurgent armies like the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso,
the Afghani and Lebanese rebel armies, or the Tamil Tigers of
Sri Lanka, who enjoy the financial backing of narco-traffickers.
"This circumstance," Salvatti declared during a press
conference on April 9, 1998, "does not exist in Mexico."
And from the Zapatista's
point of view it's a good thing they are not drunk or stoned:
they are surrounded by 70,000 Mexican army troops (a quarter
of the nation's Armed Forces). From 85 jungle and mountain bases,
the Army has encircled the insurgent villages of Chiapas' indigenous
populations.
La Realidad,
Chiapas
Photo
D.R. 1999 Al Giordano
Frequently, these same
soldiers raid and ransack the villages, stealing livestock, tools,
food, what few possessions that the peasants who identify with
the Zapatista movement have. These regular incidents are painstakingly
documented by the local Catholic diocese and other human rights
organizations.
More often, the soldiers,
together with the state police, protect paramilitary groups,
formed by the large landowners and ranchers, while these armed
organizations -- most of them members of the ruling PRI party
-- do the pillaging.
At least two dozen roadblocks
have been set up by military and immigration officials in these
mountain roads. The officials at these checkpoints are looking
for foreigners -- journalists, human rights observers -- to deport
from Mexico for the crime of being where their presence is inconvenient
to the carrying out of dark tasks that are better accomplished
without international attention.
This series has explored
how the Migra, in particular, is involved in drug smuggling
and corruption. Thus, the federally orchestrated campaign against
foreign presence in Chiapas has an added advantage to the authorities
that is scarcely mentioned in the media: It draws a curtain around
the rampant drug corruption in Mexico's southern border state.
The bastion of the narco-traffickers
nearest to Zapatista terrain festers in Benemérito de
Las Americas, deep in the Lacandon Jungle, along the Usamacinta
River. This deserted outpost was settled in the 1970s by Northern
Mexicans from the state of Sinaloa (from where PRI Presidential Candidate Francisco Labastida emerged), at a time when Sinaloa
was the seat of the first emergent drug cartels of Mexico.
There are lakes in this
region where traffickers drop, from small airplanes, by dark
of night, packages of cocaine, to be collected in smaller boats
and re-packaged to be sent North.
Investigative journalist
and columnist Jaime Avilés of La Jornada, the Mexico City
daily, says that the Mexican government's actions in this region
-- especially its construction of a new highway -- have virtually
handed control of the region to the narco-traffickers. And that
this is an intentional strategy aimed at eliminating the Zapatistas.
Aviles wrote on April
18, 1998, about "the city of Benemérito de Las Americas,
certainly terrible, refuge of bullies and sanctuary of narco-traffickers,
which the common people are in the habit of calling 'Matamérito
de Las Americas'...."
(Benemérito
means "worthy." Mata, means "kill."
Thus, a rough translation would be "Kill-worthy of the Americas.")
Avilés wrote about
the new government-constructed highway to Benemérito:
"In this zone
of extreme poverty, barely frequented by tourists, the federal
Secretary of Communications and Transportation has constructed,
inexplicably, a 40-kilometer highway from Palenque to Chancala
that is a pride of national engineering because it is a huge
work. It has a splendid and well-planed pavement, and its phosphorescent
signals convert at night into a magnificent landing strip...
for airplanes.
"The political
and social forces that surround the Zapatistas in the Canyons
region are settling for the domination of narco-trafficking...
to make the Indian people submit and to extend the domain of
the drug traffickers."
This is all very far --
everything in the jungle and its mountain canyons is hours from
anywhere -- from the Panamerican highway, which winds up past
Comitán (the city from which sprang Chiapas Governor Roberto
Albores Guillen). There, another Migra checkpoint. Have your
passport and visa ready. Less than an hour later, between Amatenango
de La Valle and before Teopisca, the Federal Judicial Police
often have a roadblock. An hour later, entering San Cristobal,
one passes the massive military base at Rancho Nuevo, and a state
police checkpoint. On the other side of the city, heading North,
is another inspection point by military soldiers.
None of this keeps cocaine
out of San Cristóbal, a world-famous tourist Mecca. There
are four late night dance clubs and a red-light district where
the white powder flows freely. One might even procure it from
an undercover agent or government informant -- typically appearing
very much like a hippie with an indigenous fashion fetish --
who is allowed to deal marijuana and other drugs in exchange
for collecting information on human rights observers from foreigners.
Some tourists end up entrapped
and are arrested for drug possession. They don't generally end
up in the State Penitentiary at Cerro Hueco. They simply must
pay a bribe of between $500 and $5,000 dollars to regain their
freedom.
One night in early May
1998, at a time when 140 Italian human rights observers were
in Chiapas much to the bother of authorities, police and immigration
authorities conducted a combined operation in four nightclubs
in San Cristóbal. They were looking for foreigners --
especially anyone who looked Italian -- in order to search and
arrest them for drugs.
They found neither peace
observers nor Italians. The international observers all receive
training and advice to avoid these bars precisely because of
the rampant presence of informants and police. They did find
one North American anthropologist with two grams of cocaine.
He was with a North America freelance reporter who herself was
in a state, according to people who saw her that night, of extreme
enebriation. Perhaps because her "reporting" is always
pro-government, she was not searched or arrested, although she
was with the man who was. The man was not associated with the
Zapatista cause. La Jornada, in fact, reported that he
"is known to have very close relations with the intelligence
agencies of his country's embassy." He was out of jail within
24 hours.
The reality, though, for
most Chiapas residents, especially the impoverished rural Indians,
is that there is no money to pay the police, nor to hire a lawyer.
The average family income in Chiapas is $20 US dollars a month;
less than a dollar a day.
Polho,
Chiapas
Photo
D.R. 1998 Al Giordano
While police and soldiers
at every level are helping major drug shipments pass in exchange
for cash, these same authorities use the anti-drug laws as a
weapon against the most drug-free people in the hemisphere: the
downtrodden descendents of the ancient Mayan civilization.
To Be
Published Tomorrow:
Chabal
Tak'in:
"There is No Money"
Preview
from Part VI:
"Here,
we don't permit the growing of marijuana, nor its consumption.
If a young man grows marijuana, he goes before a municipal judge
to be disciplined and oriented so that he won't ever do it again.
If the youth does it again, there is no response whatsoever:
he already cannot be pardoned a second time. He would then be
expelled from the community."
--
Luciano, spokesman for the autonomous town of Polho
Authentic Journalism
on the Drug War