MEXICO Drugs, Guerrillas and Politicos in Mexico
Weinberg, Bill
Reports of massacres in the Mexican country- side have become alarmingly common in recent years, but a recent incident was among the bloodiest-and murkiest. On the night of May 31, 26 peasants...
...Violence connected to the drug trade has become intertwined with struggles over political control and natural resources-and counterinsurgency efforts against the new guerrillas in the Mexican south and other militant rural movements...
...The most recent such narcocaciqu statement, from Autonomous Municipality 17th of November the reality (in the "official" municipality of addressed by Altamirano), typically stated: "Our Autonomous Municipality long-stalled has always denounced and opposed the consumption, sale and cultivation of marijuana and all other things that go against life and health...
...Washington Post, November 11, 2001...
...Isidro Valdenegro was similarly cynical about drug control efforts-especially the spraying of paraquat, an herbicide, by federal police helicopters...
...7 An Environmental Secretariat representative told reporters logging permits had not been granted on disputed lands, and had "no bearing" on to the PRI...
...After the busts, the saw production of opium and marijuana rather than media ran sensationalized stories about a conspiracy coffee and beef...
...3 7 At Coloradas de la Virgen, Isidro Valdenegro told me that the community wants official government recognition of the traditional Tarahumara system of self-government-and the ancient patterns of land use it protects...
...Sierra Club press release, November 8; The New York Times, November 9, 2001...
...The same local machines-the cacigazgos-also enforce timber exploitation on communal village lands, often in deals of dubious legality...
...1 5 these economic incentives were insufficent to assure The power transition in Mexico City has not ended campesino loyality, the caciques dealt out measured the connivance between the mafias and caciques and doses of terror and repression, arming their followers local authorities...
...In May Even the DEA 1998, for instance, an army drugs an( detachment intercepted truckloads of marijuana on Guer- elsewhererero's coastal highway...
...And income is more of an issue as lands are degraded by erosion from deforestation-or stolen altogether for big drug plantations under the direct cacique control...
...We have eliminated alcoholism and prostitution from our areas...
...1 7 Significantly, Fox merely commuted their sentence, and stopped short of calling them innocent...
...It was in part due to Isidro's efforts that local human rights groups in Chihuahua City brought the terror at Coloradas de la Virgen to the public eye, prompting the Fontes gang to back off in recent years...
...3 3 ut the real heartland of drug production in Mexico is a thousand miles north of Chiapas in the yawning canyonlands of the Sierra Tarahumara...
...3 0 Las Abejas, the pacifist indigenous group targetted in the massacre, of the protested last November when a s is part of court freed six members of the "Red Mask" paramilitary group leant to be imprisoned in the massacre, cithe Zapatistas' ing lack of evidence...
...Authorities suspect a narco link to the still unnamed organization...
...The EPR itself has been accused of being a pawn of the drug cartels...
...http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/intel/20014/20014.html 26...
...El Diario de Chihuahua, May 5, 1998...
...The News (Mexico City), November 30, 2001...
...But in the Sierra Tarahumara, the situation is even worse...
...1 9 The complicity of authorities with the local narcogangs had become increasingly blatant under the PRI regime...
...The driver and his boy were the only survivors...
...If it is overturned, the peace process may have a new lease on life, with the government forced back to the original accords...
...At the height of the terror, in the mid-1990s, the village was almost completely abandoned as inhabitants fled to the bush...
...Her first husband was killed five years earlier, leaving her with four children...
...When huge tracts of land they had managed to amass...
...And, as often happens in Mexico, the press reported that authorities were investigating a possible drug gang link to the carnage...
...After the Agua Frfa massacre, state and federal politicians were soon pointing fingers at each other to avoid responsibility...
...Isidro's father, Julio Valdenegro Pefia, a comisario of the ejido, was assassinated by the Fontes gang in 1986...
...We have a law-corn and peace, yes...
...Authorities boast that the most powerful mafia-the Tijuana Cartel or Arellano Felix Organization (AFO)-is falling apart after a series of high-level busts and killings...
...3 2 The drug cartels do seem to be expanding their activities in Chiapas-both for cultivation and establishing smuggling routes for cocaine coming up the isthmus from Central America...
...Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)-always quick to emphasize the link between guerrillas and drug cultivation in Colombia and Peru-has dismissed the notion that Mexico's armed campesino groups are fronts for the drug mafias...
...The News (Mexico City), January 19, 2001...
...Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (New York: Monthly Review, 1973), p. 140...
...He said Coloradas de la Virgen must have recognition of communal rights over 151,200 acres...
...Alcohol had always been banned in Zapatista territory...
...Author's interviews, May 1998...
...1 4 campesino ecologists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro With the advent of the narco-economy in the 1970s Cabrera, who were arrested by the army in 1999 after and 1980s-which boomed after NAFTA took effect they tried to block illegal logging on their lands in in 1994-those planter oligarchs increasingly over- Guerrero's Sierra de Petatldn...
...Heraldo de Chihuahua, August 9, 2001...
...It was a provocation...
...Residents later reported that a two-year-old girl clung to life for two days after breathing the poison, then died...
...1 3 narco-economy in rural Mexico has provided the As the party grew more corrupt over the following authorities with an expedient rationale for the militadecades, a new oligarchy emerged, and the caciques rization of restive regions, and for the persecution of grew richer-although many still remained in pover- campesino leaders who stand up to corrupt local ty relative to their overlords-while conniving in bosses...
...ocal caciques started trading liquor or corn or cash with local people for opium and marijuana, until drug cultivation became possibly more ubiquitous than staple corn and beans...
...The same can be said of countless human rights violations that fail to result in spectacular massacres or high-profile trials...
...lords and their allies in the Catholic Church established intermediaries to exact were forced to cultivate marginal areas such as steep tribute of goods and labor from subjugated vil- hillsides-exacerbating erosion and ecological lages...
...The Zapatistas have issued no word on how they will respond if it is upheld...
...EFE, July 13, 2002...
...But Mexican Drug Czar Mariano Herrin Salvatti denied that the incident took place...
...official told a journalist recently...
...In testimony to the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, Chorogui residents said that on July 12, 2001, two groups of PJF agents showed up at their settlement-one on foot, the other overhead in a helicopter...
...The News (Mexico City), November 25, 2002...
...2 2 In Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state and home of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), the government has repeatedly sent army troops into disloyal campesino lands on ostensible counternarcotics missions, which technically do not break the official truce with the indigenous Mayan rebels...
...Proceeds from the sale of opium have been used to fund insurgent activities in Colombia, Afghanistan, and Myanmar (formerly Burma...
...In September 2000, federal and Chiapas state police announced they destroyed 34 marijuana plants, arrested one indigenous Tzotzil and confiscated two rifles in Chenalho municipality, near the site of the Acteal massacre...
...10.Cr6nica de Hoy, June 7; La Jornada, June 10, 2002...
...6. DPA, June 4, 2002...
...Oaxaca state police said men from nearby Santo Domingo Teojomulco carried out the massacre as "revenge" for a ruling by the federal Agrarian Tribunals that went against them...
...LaJornada, May 21, 1996...
...The conflict dated back to 1935, when the boundaries of the village communal lands were demarcated...
...26, 1998...
...3 4 Isidro Valdenegro, a Coloradas de la Virgen resident who opposed the Fontes gang, told me how they controlled both timber exploitation and drug cultivation in the valley through their control of ejidal lands...
...2 3 And shortly after Fox's inauguration in December 2000, the Mexican newsmagazine Milenio published a leaked report on Chiapas counterinsurgency strategy drawn up by army brass in preparation for the incoming administration...
...They started killing the comisarios who opposed them...
...The rebels' support bases have issued statement after statement over the years complaining of state police and army incursions into their communities to uproot pot grown by PRIistas...
...Lucinda Torres Molina, Isidro's wife, wore a cap with a marijuana leaf image, reading "EL VERDE ES LA VIDA"-"the green is life," one of many such hats and t-shirts seen in rural Chihuahua, demonstrating how the narco-economy has pervaded popular culture...
...As the campesinos drug cultivation charges the military brought against were squeezed from the good lands through illegal the pair were fabricated, and that they were tortured deals between caciques and rural oligarchs, they into signing bogus confessions...
...The ubiquitous Mexico...
...drugs and soldiers, no...
...Autonomous Municipality 17th of November communique, April 7, 2002...
...I am on the list, but if I were an armed guerrilla why would I be afraid to sleep in my house...
...Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, M'xico Profundo (Austin: University of Texas Press,1996), p. 78...
...It's a campaign we have throughout our communities...
...The implicated truckline, Autotrans- Zapatistas an portes Figueroa, belonged to involved in ti none other than the former governor Rub6n Figueroa, who was forced to step down after being implicated in the 1995 massacre of 17 campesinos by state police at Aguas Blancas...
...The local enforcers and middlemen for the cartels are called caciques, the old Aztec word for "chief...
...It was not until November 8, 2001-three weeks after their attorney Digna Ochoa was found dead in her Mexico City office-that President Fox released them on "humanitarian grounds...
...and Acteal and El Bosque in Chiapas, one state to the southeast...
...Drugs, Guerrillas and Politicos in Mexico 1. The New York Times, June 2; AP, June 3, 2002...
...The arrival of ejidos, a legacy of the Mexican Revolution aimed at institutionally protecting campesino lands, actually served to break up communal lands held by the indigenous Tarahumara, and deliver the land to powerful outsiders...
...Since then, law enforcement officials on both sides of the border have heralded the fall of Mexico's drug cartels from their formerly untouchable position...
...All of a sudden, AFO looks like a pretty bad investment, just like Enron...
...Therefore, getting the best possible price for under President Ltzaro CArdenas, the caciques their decimated harvests became more of an imperabecame closely linked to the PRI political machine, tive than ever...
...2 Authorities soon reported that 16 villagers had been arrested and 24 high-caliber weaponsincluding nine AK-47s and three AR-15s-had been seized at Santo Domingo Teojomulco...
...The reform has been challenged in the courts by numerous indigenous municipal authorities throughout Mexico, who charge that it fails to comply with international standards on indigenous rights...
...After pumping certain residents for information, the detachment left...
...In July 2002, authorities announced that at least ten people with suspected ties to the drug trade had been killed in Chiapas in a two-week period, and blamed a turf war between the Judrez and Sinaloa cartels for control of smuggling routes through Chiapas...
...Throughout Mexico, ejidos are often controlled by caciques 24NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASDRUG ECONOMIES OF THE AMERICAS Tarahumara elder Fidel Torres Valdenegro stands by the grave of his son who was killed by narcocaciques in Coloradas de la Virgen, Chihuahua...
...M. Delal Baer, an analyst with the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), the elite Washington D.C...
...Following army incursions into the Zapatista community of Oventic in the Chiapas Highlands in April 1996, a rebel soldier there, Miliciano Noe, told me the anti-drug operation was a charade...
...At a place called Agua Frfa, a truckload of indigenous laborers on their way home from a local sawmill was halted by men with rifles, who ordered the driver and his son-who were from a different village than the passengers-out before opening fire...
...However, it does not appear that the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) or the EPR are involved in narcotics trafficking to sustain their activities...
...NOTIMEX, Sept...
...The United States, campesinos were forced by economics caciques switched their allegiance to the PRI state's as well as mafia enforcers to grow drug crops on agrarian reform bureaucracy, assuring their peasant their own lands for sale to caciques-even as some wards' loyalty to the ruling party in exchange for caciques began plantation-style production on the access to land, credit and other necessities...
...In this isolated region, the caciques-not even campesinos themselves, but local ranchers and landlords-drew the ejidal lines which were subsequently recognized by the government...
...They only fumigate the plantations not run by their friends," he charged...
...She told The New York Times in 1995 that "army helicopters sometimes spray only water and...for every field that is supposedly destroyed, several others are untouched...
...quick to link "The vital question is: Who is guerrillas yanking the string...
...Indians signed contracts they didn't understand because they didn't know Spanish," he said...
...The Guardian (UK), May 26, 2000...
...The recent DEA report, "The Mexican Heroin Trade," actually exculpated Mexico's guerrilla groups: "With the exception of Mexico, insurgent groups are involved heavily in the cultivation of opium in growing regions worldwide...
...Residents accused the Federal Judicial Police (PJF) of recklessly spraying herbicide and terrorizing the pueblo...
...We want legal recognition of our lands, with clear territorial limits...
...4. La Jonada (Mexico City), El Norte (Monterrey), June 2, 2002...
...Federal Prosecutor Teresa Jardi confirmed to the press what Isidro told me at Coloradas de la Virgen about the spraying being highly selective...
...The law now stands before the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule imminently...
...9 Soon those arrested in the Agua Fria massacre were on hunger strike in a Oaxaca prison, insisting they were "scapegoats" for a local paramilitary group maintained by local landowners and caciques-and protected by state authorities...
...That was followed by a series of arbitrary detentions, interrogations under torture and a mysterious murder of an alleged military informer...
...The New York Times, June 2, 1995...
...The rival cartels have divided this heartland between them, with the greatest production of opium and marijuana on the Chihuahua side, under control of the Ju.rez Cartel...
...In reality they were looking for a confrontation with us...
...But what really frightened the villagers was news that the security forces were circulating a list of 23 local suspected members of the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) guerrillas, including 18 from Barranca...
...Bustillos also complained that most of the government's helicopters and other military and police resources were in the south, where rebellious peasants are arming, while the bulk of the drug cultivation is in the Golden Triangle states of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa-where only the caciques and cartel enforcers are armed...
...268-9...
...8. EFE, June 8, 2002...
...But many militant campesino leaders have been accused by authorities of collaborating with the group...
...Coloradas de la Virgen residents told me that 200 grams of opium, the yearly yield from a small patch, earns the producer 1,600 pesos-about $175...
...www.enlacecivil.org.mx 27...
...2 6 The anti-mota militarization has only intensified the EZLN's own puritanical instincts...
...We organizers of the EZLN, we don't allow any drugs or alcohol in our territory...
...Other children and elders remained sick and severely traumatized...
...3 Later the tale became more complicated, as other officials linked 18NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Bill Weinberg is author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso 2000) and editor of the weekly on-line newsletter World War 3 Report http://www.ww3report.com/ 18 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASDRUG ECONOMIES OF THE AMERICAS the land dispute to another over control of local timber...
...The Mexico City daily La Jornada quoted Oaxaca's Secretary of Public Protection as saying "There is an obstinate attitude about clearly defining the land boundary [between the two villages], according to our investigative sources in order to protect an area dedicated to drug trafficking...
...Ritual abuse of posh-the local hooch cane liquor-has helped keep the Indians down for centuries...
...The ejido was a complete fraud, but it was very well done...
...2 7 Now, with many caciques driving shiny new four-wheel-drive pickups, it was clear they had moved into more lucrative contraband enterprises as well...
...Oaxaca governor Jos6 Murat said the longtime enmity between the two villages had deepened when the federal government's environmental agency granted Santiago Xochiltepec permits to harvest timber on lands In Guerrero, Chiapas and elsewhere, indigenous farmers are a captive labor force for a secret but dizzyingly profitable industry that has local and national ties spine of the Mexican isthmus, stretching from Chiapas to Chihuahua, produces voluminous quantities of marijuana and opium for heroin that is exported to Gringolandia under the auspices of regional drug cartels...
...to fund an "ecoguerilla" group with marijuana profIn a vicious circle, cacique rule and the narco- its...
...resident Rodrigo Flores asked a visiting reporter...
...A new and mysterious group of masked gunmen have launched a series of ambushes on both security forces and local residents in Chiapas, leaving several dead over the last two years...
...In February 2000, when federal army troops destroyed what they claimed was a clandestine opium field in the Guerrero hamlet of Barranca de Guadalupe, the villagers insisted they had actually been cultivating aloe plants...
...Reuters, April 19, 1999...
...When they started exploiting the forest, that's when the violence started," he told me when I visited the pueblo in 1998...
...2 0 Such instances of obvious complicity usually don't make international headlines...
...EFE, May 3, 2002...
...the massacre...
...Investors don't want to put money into a company if they don't think they'll get their money back," one U.S...
...political elite...
...In southern Mexico, the anti-drug campaign disguises counterinsurgency, Bustillos said, while in the Golden Triangle the big drug plantations are protected by the government...
...While the ground crew ransacked homes and held families at gunpoint, the chopper unleashed a rain of toxic herbicide on the fleeing and panicked villagers...
...7. The News (Mexico City), June 5, 2002...
...In contrast to the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, who have actively sought a dialogue with civil society, the EPR remains intensely secretive, and charges of elitism and dogmatism d-I IC '14 against its leadership have led to several splinter factions in recent years...
...The rule of the caciques dates back to the colonial A boy in Chihuahua wears a cap with images of a marijuana leaf, a needle, a razor blade and era, when Spanish feudal lines of cocaine...
...But Mexican drug production is now tightly woven into existing local-and national-economic and power relations...
...They killed my husband, my two cousins in the barranca, practically my whole family," she said in response to our questions...
...The Economist, Sept...
...In the remote Tarahumara community of Coloradas de la Virgen, for instance, the local Fontes ranching family had their cousins and friends from as far away as Los Mochis, on the coast in Sinaloa, written into the ejido, while many local Tarahumara, whose families had used the land since time immemorial, were excluded...
...The Fox administration has denied that it is "following one specific plan...
...They filed a complaint with the help of a local human rights group...
...The dead were all from an indigenous Zapotec community, Santiago Xochiltepec, and authorities said they had been killed in a dispute over land rights with a neighboring community...
...6 In response to the accusation, Environment Secretary Victor Lichtinger was called to testify before Mexico's Congress about the possible role of his agency in the massacre...
...This remote and rugged range where the states of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa meet, defines Mexico's Golden Triangle, the primary source of raw material for the export cartels based in the border cities...
...nationally and in Chiapas with the 2000 elections, the situation has gotten murkier...
...Last summer, one child was reported dead, hundreds of residents ill, and several homes leveled following a brutal "anti-marijuana" operation by Mexican federal police in the remote Tarahumara community of Chorogui...
...Among other things, the plan urged Fox to use the media to paint Zapatista Subcommandante Marcos as "not a rebel defender of indigenous rights, but a law-breaker...who has enriched himself immensely by illicit activities detected and documented by the government's intelligence organs...
...1 8 Said Montiel upon his release: "He knows we are innocent, but he doesn't declare us innocent because the army doesn't want him to...
...Especially on holy days, many Indians get terrifyingly drunk on posh, and the caciques maintained a monopoly on production...
...He demanded the reopening of investigations into other major massacres in rural Mexico in recent years-Aguas Blancas and El Charco in Guerrero, one state to the northwest of Oaxaca...
...La Jornada del Sur May 9, 1999...
...The Sierra Tarahumara also represents Mexico's worst and most blatant corruption of the ejido system-communally owned and managed lands redistributed to villages in the agrarian reform...
...In many states, especially in the in the first embryonic development of the paramili- impoverished south, PRI governors, such as Oaxataries which now proliferate throughout most of rural ca's Josd Murat, still maintain power...
...1 ut on the groundthe rocky, eroded and frequently contested lands that actually produce the lucrative if illicit commodities of the narco-economy-little seems to have changed: The local caciques still run things, and still rely on violence, often backed up by the Mexican military, to maintain their power...
...The Zapatistas cut off all communication with Fox's administration following passage of the weaker reform, accusing the government of "sabotaging" the peace process...
...2 1 The EPR first emerged in Guerrero in 1996, exploiting a groundswell of popular anger against violence and impunity of caciques, the army and state police...
...Meanwhile, official optimism on cleaning up both Mexico's drug mafias and human rights situation may soon go up in smoke along with the Sierra Madre mota daily consumed by end-users in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago...
...U.S...
...The Journal raised all the usual sushas said the pects: "drug-traffickers, rogue police gangs or even disaffect- i EPR are not ed factions within Mexico's e drug trade...
...La Jornada, May 21, 1996...
...5. Financial Times, March 17, 1998...
...Bustillos spent years documenting various "trucos legales," legal tricks used by caciques to illegally "buy" ejidal or communal lands...
...both are profitable commodities in the free trade boom-legal or not...
...Wall Street Journal, September 3, 1996...
...They get their cut in exchange for keeping villagers in line and beholden to the drug economy through debt and conditional access to land...
...The ejido doesn't do that for us...
...The mafias controlling drugs and timber usually overlap...
...3 1 Since the PRI lost power both peace plan...
...2 5 Vol XXXVI, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 23DRUG ECONOMIES OF THE AMERICAS Marijuana and, to a lesser extent, opium poppy is, in fact, grown in zones where support or sympathy for the Zapatistas is strong...
...In the most recent case, four indigenous people were killed in an ambush near the community of San Lizaro this May...
...This has certainly provided the army with an excuse for intervention...
...16, 2000...
...In response, the Zapatistas banned mota from their territories too...
...They killed my father thirty years ago when they were carving the forest into ejidos...
...24 But even the U.S...
...La Jornada, January 11, 2001...
...Despite an outcry from Amnesty International and other human rights groups, Montiel and Cabrera were found guilty...
...3 5 Sometimes the paraquat seems to be aimed at people rather than drugs...
...With prices for traditional staple crops with the one-party state assuming the role formerly such as corn depressed by NAFTA imports from the played by the church and landed oligarchy...
...25...
...loyal to the PRI, who protect a system of patronage...
...It's the PRIistas that grow, with payments to the local authorities...
...9. Proceso, June 5, 2002...
...It has engaged the authorities on numerous occasions since then in Guerrero and Oaxaca, leaving several dead...
...Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp...
...The Sierra Madre mountain cially the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI...
...But the Zapatistas and their bases of support-the socalled "autonomous municipalities"-consistently maintain that mota (marijuana) is actually grown by their worst local enemies: caciques loyal to the PRI...
...4 A drug link to the incident may never be proven...
...2 9 Not surprisingly, this zone of cacique-paramilitary terror is also a zone of drug cultivation...
...2. EFE, June 6; La Jornada (Mexico City), June 10, 2002...
...5 With the exception of cocaine, all of these drugs are produced in Mexico, and Mexico's campesinos, especially in indigenous communities, increasingly live under a system of what might be called internal narcocolonialism--a captive labor force working under the oversight of local caciques for a clandestine but dizzyingly profitable industry whose overlords intermesh with the bureaucracies of the state and political parties, especlaimed by Santo Domingo Teojomulco...
...illegal delivery of titled village lands to big ranchers The most notorious such case was that of the and planters favored by the ruling bureaucracy...
...3. DPA, June 4, 2002...
...Tarahumara marijuana fetches 200 pesos a kilo, with a patch yielding 15 kilos, or 20 on a good year...
...1 0 Officially, Mexico has now undergone a democratic transition, with the rule of the long-entrenched PRI overturned by the victory of Vicente Fox of the right-opposition National Action Party (PAN) in the 2000 presidential elections...
...2 8 The paramilitary groups that are dramatically escalating the violence in the Mexican countryside are overseen by caciques and clandestinely armed by the federal military to try to terrorize rebellious Indians back into submission...
...This isn't much, but it's more than they can earn growing tradiVol XX)(VI, No 2 SEPTEMBERIOCrOBR 2002 25 z 8 a Vol XXXVI, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 25DRUG ECONOMIES OF THE AMERICAS tional crops like beans, corn or squash...
...Nowhere has the violence of e e t paramilitary groups been greater than in Chiapas, where the Christmas-time 1997 massacre of 45 unarmed Tzotzil Maya at Acteal hamlet made international headlines...
...On federal army link to the paramilitaries and Acteal massacre, see Carlos Marin, "Plan del Ejercito en Chia - pas," Proceso, January 4, 1998...
...Thus chabochis-as the Tarahumara call whites or mestizos-have come to control more and more traditionally indigenous land...
...A watered-down version of this reform, which excluded binding indigenous control over land and natural resources, went into effect last August, but was rejected by the Zapatistas and their followers as falling short of the accord they had negotiated with lawmakers...
...think-tank run by Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and James Schlesinger, told The Wall Street Journal shortly after the group first emerged in 1996 that she didn't believe such a sophisticated fighting force could emerge solely from the grassroots...
...Though they don't show up in the official trade figures, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana are major NAFTA exports for Mexico, with an annual crossborder drug trade estimated at $20 billion in round figures, far outstripping profits from such legal agricultural commodities as winter strawberries, and even oil...
...1 6 But human rights groups said the weapons and economy entrench each other...
...See Christine Eber, Women & Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995...
...8 But Luis Miguel Barbosa, Oaxaca federal deputy of the left-opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), said that whether drugs or timber were at issue, authorities needed to explore the violent rule of the caciques over all aspects of village life in impoverished regions of Mexico...
...n Chihuahua City, Edwin Bustillos, a rights worker and winner of the 1996 Goldman Prize, awarded each year to the world's bravest environmental activists, explained to me the mixture of fraud and terror by which the narcocaciques keep the Tarahumara under control...
...On the night of May 31, 26 peasants were shot to death in an ambush on a remote dirt road high in Oaxaca's rugged Sierra Madre del Sur...
...3 6 The rule of the narcocaciques is part of the reality meant to be addressed by the Zapatista rebels' long-stalled peace plan, calling for constitutional recognition of autonomous self-government in Mexico's indigenous communities...
...11.Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 2002...
...1 2 Following the agrarian reform of the 1930s decline...
...Then the caciques fence off a huge area-bigger than what they "bought"-with barbed wire...
...authorities believe [the Mexican drug cartels] now control one-third of the $50 billion market for illegal drugs in the U.S...
...Milenio, January 3, 2001...
...Whereas in Chiapas the desirable lands are in the valleys, and the indigenous farmers are pushed up onto slopes too steep and rocky for good farming, here the good lands are on the plateaus and mesa tops, and the Indians are pushed down into the vertiginously steep barrancas...
...When I pointed out that the army had reported 12 marijuana plantations burned and I asked who was growing the stuff, Noe responded: "The same PRIistas...
Vol. 36 • September 2002 • No. 2
