Drugs, Guerrillas and Politicos in Mexico

September 25, 2007

Reports of massacres in the Mexican countryside 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 were shot to death in an ambush on a remote dirt road high in Oaxaca’s rugged Sierra Madre del Sur. At a place called Agua Fría, 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. The driver and his boy were the only survivors.[1]

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. 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.[2] Authorities soon reported that 16 villagers had been arrested and 24 high-caliber weapons—including nine AK-47s and three AR-15s—had been seized at Santo Domingo Teojomulco.[3] Later the tale became more complicated, as other officials linked the land dispute to another over control of local timber. And, as often happens in Mexico, the press reported that authorities were investigating a possible drug gang link to the carnage. 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.”[4]

A drug link to the incident may never be proven. But Mexican drug production is now tightly woven into existing local—and national—economic and power relations. 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 Sierra Madre mountain 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. The local enforcers and middlemen for the cartels are called caciques, the old Aztec word for “chief.” 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 same local machines—the cacigazgos—also enforce timber exploitation on communal village lands, often in deals of dubious legality. The mafias controlling drugs and timber usually overlap; both are profitable commodities in the free trade boom—legal or not.

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.[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, especially the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

After the Agua Fría massacre, state and federal politicians were soon pointing fingers at each other to avoid responsibility. Oaxaca governor José 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 claimed by Santo Domingo Teojomulco.[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.[7] An Environmental Secretariat representative told reporters logging permits had not been granted on disputed lands, and had “no bearing” on the massacre.[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. 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; and Acteal and El Bosque in Chiapas, one state to the southeast.[9] Soon those arrested in the Agua Fría 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.[10]

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. 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. 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. “Investors don’t want to put money into a company if they don’t think they’ll get their money back,” one U.S. official told a journalist recently. “All of a sudden, AFO looks like a pretty bad investment, just like Enron.”[11]

But on the ground—the 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 rule of the caciques dates back to the colonial era, when Spanish feudal lords and their allies in the Catholic Church established intermediaries to exact tribute of goods and labor from subjugated villages.[12] Following the agrarian reform of the 1930s under President Lázaro Cárdenas, the caciques became closely linked to the PRI political machine, with the one-party state assuming the role formerly played by the church and landed oligarchy. The caciques switched their allegiance to the PRI state’s agrarian reform bureaucracy, assuring their peasant wards’ loyalty to the ruling party in exchange for access to land, credit and other necessities. When these economic incentives were insufficent to assure campesino loyality, the caciques dealt out measured doses of terror and repression, arming their followers in the first embryonic development of the paramilitaries which now proliferate throughout most of rural Mexico.[13]

As the party grew more corrupt over the following decades, a new oligarchy emerged, and the caciques grew richer—although many still remained in poverty relative to their overlords—while conniving in illegal delivery of titled village lands to big ranchers and planters favored by the ruling bureaucracy.[14] With the advent of the narco-economy in the 1970s and 1980s—which boomed after NAFTA took effect in 1994—those planter oligarchs increasingly oversaw production of opium and marijuana rather than coffee and beef.

In a vicious circle, cacique rule and the narco-economy entrench each other. As the campesinos were squeezed from the good lands through illegal deals between caciques and rural oligarchs, they were forced to cultivate marginal areas such as steep hillsides—exacerbating erosion and ecological decline. Therefore, getting the best possible price for their decimated harvests became more of an imperative than ever. With prices for traditional staple crops such as corn depressed by NAFTA imports from the United States, campesinos were forced by economics as well as mafia enforcers to grow drug crops on their own lands for sale to caciques—even as some caciques began plantation-style production on the huge tracts of land they had managed to amass.[15]

The power transition in Mexico City has not ended the connivance between the mafias and caciques and local authorities. In many states, especially in the impoverished south, PRI governors, such as Oaxaca’s José Murat, still maintain power. The ubiquitous narco-economy in rural Mexico has provided the authorities with an expedient rationale for the militarization of restive regions, and for the persecution of campesino leaders who stand up to corrupt local bosses.

The most notorious such case was that of the campesino ecologists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, who were arrested by the army in 1999 after they tried to block illegal logging on their lands in Guerrero’s Sierra de Petatlán. After the busts, the media ran sensationalized stories about a conspiracy to fund an “ecoguerilla” group with marijuana profits.[16] But human rights groups said the weapons and drug cultivation charges the military brought against the pair were fabricated, and that they were tortured into signing bogus confessions. Despite an outcry from Amnesty International and other human rights groups, Montiel and Cabrera were found guilty. 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.”[17] Significantly, Fox merely commuted their sentence, and stopped short of calling them innocent.[18] 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.”[19]

The complicity of authorities with the local narcogangs had become increasingly blatant under the PRI regime. In May 1998, for instance, an army detachment intercepted truckloads of marijuana on Guerrero’s coastal highway. The implicated truckline, Autotransportes Figueroa, belonged to none other than the former governor Rubén Figueroa, who was forced to step down after being implicated in the 1995 massacre of 17 campesinos by state police at Aguas Blancas.[20]

Such instances of obvious complicity usually don’t make international headlines. The same can be said of countless human rights violations that fail to result in spectacular massacres or high-profile trials. 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. They filed a complaint with the help of a local human rights group. That was followed by a series of arbitrary detentions, interrogations under torture and a mysterious murder of an alleged military informer. 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. “I am on the list, but if I were an armed guerrilla why would I be afraid to sleep in my house?” resident Rodrigo Flores asked a visiting reporter.[21]

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. It has engaged the authorities on numerous occasions since then in Guerrero and Oaxaca, leaving several dead. 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 against its leadership have led to several splinter factions in recent years. But many militant campesino leaders have been accused by authorities of collaborating with the group.

The EPR itself has been accused of being a pawn of the drug cartels. M. Delal Baer, an analyst with the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), the elite Washington D.C. 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. “The vital question is: Who is yanking the string?” The Journal raised all the usual suspects: “drug-traffickers, rogue police gangs or even disaffected factions within Mexico’s political elite.”[22]

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.[23] 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. 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.”[24]

But even the U.S. 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 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. Proceeds from the sale of opium have been used to fund insurgent activities in Colombia, Afghanistan, and Myanmar (formerly Burma). However, it does not appear that the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) or the EPR are involved in narcotics trafficking to sustain their activities.”[25]

Marijuana and, to a lesser extent, opium poppy is, in fact, grown in zones where support or sympathy for the Zapatistas is strong. This has certainly provided the army with an excuse for intervention. But the Zapatistas and their bases of support—the so-called “autonomous municipalities”—consistently maintain that mota (marijuana) is actually grown by their worst local enemies: caciques loyal to the PRI. 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. The most recent such statement, from Autonomous Municipality 17th of November (in the “official” municipality of Altamirano), typically stated: “Our Autonomous Municipality has always denounced and opposed the consumption, sale and cultivation of marijuana and all other things that go against life and health.”[26]

The anti-mota militarization has only intensified the EZLN’s own puritanical instincts. Alcohol had always been banned in Zapatista territory. Ritual abuse of posh—the local hooch cane liquor—has helped keep the Indians down for centuries. Especially on holy days, many Indians get terrifyingly drunk on posh, and the caciques maintained a monopoly on production.[27] Now, with many caciques driving shiny new four-wheel-drive pickups, it was clear they had moved into more lucrative contraband enterprises as well. In response, the Zapatistas banned mota from their territories too.

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. “In reality they were looking for a confrontation with us. It was a provocation.” 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. We organizers of the EZLN, we don’t allow any drugs or alcohol in our territory. We have a law—corn and peace, yes; drugs and soldiers, no. It’s a campaign we have throughout our communities. We have eliminated alcoholism and prostitution from our areas. It’s the PRIistas that grow, with payments to the local authorities.”[28]

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. Nowhere has the violence of paramilitary groups been greater than in Chiapas, where the Christmas-time 1997 massacre of 45 unarmed Tzotzil Maya at Acteal hamlet made international headlines.[29] Not surprisingly, this zone of cacique-paramilitary terror is also a zone of drug cultivation. 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.[30] Las Abejas, the pacifist indigenous group targetted in the massacre, protested last November when a court freed six members of the “Red Mask” paramilitary group imprisoned in the massacre, citing lack of evidence.[31]

Since the PRI lost power both nationally and in Chiapas with the 2000 elections, the situation has gotten murkier. 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 the most recent case, four indigenous people were killed in an ambush near the community of San Lázaro this May. Authorities suspect a narco link to the still unnamed organization.[32]

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. 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 Juárez and Sinaloa cartels for control of smuggling routes through Chiapas.[33]

But the real heartland of drug production in Mexico is a thousand miles north of Chiapas in the yawning canyonlands of the Sierra Tarahumara. 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. 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 Juárez Cartel.

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. Throughout Mexico, ejidos are often controlled by caciques loyal to the PRI, who protect a system of patronage. But in the Sierra Tarahumara, the situation is even worse. 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. 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. 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.[34]

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. “When they started exploiting the forest, that’s when the violence started,” he told me when I visited the pueblo in 1998. “They started killing the comisarios who opposed them.”Isidro’s father, Julio Valdenegro Peña, a comisario of the ejido, was assassinated by the Fontes gang in 1986. 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.

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. Her first husband was killed five years earlier, leaving her with four children. “They killed my husband, my two cousins in the barranca, practically my whole family,” she said in response to our questions. “They killed my father thirty years ago when they were carving the forest into ejidos.” At the height of the terror, in the mid-1990s, the village was almost completely abandoned as inhabitants fled to the bush.

Local 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. 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. Tarahumara marijuana fetches 200 pesos a kilo, with a patch yielding 15 kilos, or 20 on a good year. This isn’t much, but it’s more than they can earn growing traditional crops like beans, corn or squash. 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. 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.

In 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. Bustillos spent years documenting various “trucos legales,” legal tricks used by caciques to illegally “buy” ejidal or communal lands. “Indians signed contracts they didn’t understand because they didn’t know Spanish,” he said. Then the caciques fence off a huge area—bigger than what they “bought”—with barbed wire. Thus chabochis—as the Tarahumara call whites or mestizos—have come to control more and more traditionally indigenous land.

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. 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.

Isidro Valdenegro was similarly cynical about drug control efforts—especially the spraying of paraquat, an herbicide, by federal police helicopters. “They only fumigate the plantations not run by their friends,” he charged. Federal Prosecutor Teresa Jardi confirmed to the press what Isidro told me at Coloradas de la Virgen about the spraying being highly selective. 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.”[35]

Sometimes the paraquat seems to be aimed at people rather than drugs. 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. Residents accused the Federal Judicial Police (PJF) of recklessly spraying herbicide and terrorizing the pueblo. 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. 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. After pumping certain residents for information, the detachment left. Residents later reported that a two-year-old girl clung to life for two days after breathing the poison, then died. Other children and elders remained sick and severely traumatized. But Mexican Drug Czar Mariano Herrán Salvatti denied that the incident took place.[36]

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. 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. The Zapatistas cut off all communication with Fox’s administration following passage of the weaker reform, accusing the government of “sabotaging” the peace process. 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. The law now stands before the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule imminently. If it is overturned, the peace process may have a new lease on life, with the government forced back to the original accords. The Zapatistas have issued no word on how they will respond if it is upheld.[37]

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. He said Coloradas de la Virgen must have recognition of communal rights over 151,200 acres. “We want legal recognition of our lands, with clear territorial limits. The ejido doesn’t do that for us. The ejido was a complete fraud, but it was very well done.”

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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/

NOTES
1. The New York Times, June 2; AP, June 3, 2002.
2. EFE, June 6; La Jornada (Mexico City), June 10, 2002. The conflict dated back to 1935, when the boundaries of the village communal lands were demarcated.
3. DPA, June 4, 2002.
4. La Jornada (Mexico City), El Norte (Monterrey), June 2, 2002.
5. Financial Times, March 17, 1998; “U.S. authorities believe [the Mexican drug cartels] now control one-third of the $50 billion market for illegal drugs in the U.S.”
6. DPA, June 4, 2002.
7. The News (Mexico City), June 5, 2002.
8. EFE, June 8, 2002.
9. Proceso, June 5, 2002.
10. Crónica de Hoy, June 7; La Jornada, June 10, 2002.
11. Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 2002.
12. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo (Austin: University of Texas Press,1996), p. 78.
13. Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1982), pp. 268-9.
14. Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (New York: Monthly Review, 1973), p. 140.
15. The Economist, Sept. 26, 1998.
16. La Jornada del Sur May 9, 1999.
17. The News (Mexico City), November 30, 2001.
18. Sierra Club press release, November 8; The New York Times, November 9, 2001.
19. Washington Post, November 11, 2001.
20. El Diario de Chihuahua, May 5, 1998.
21. The Guardian (UK), May 26, 2000.
22. Wall Street Journal, September 3, 1996.
23. e.g. La Jornada, May 21, 1996; Reuters, April 19, 1999; La Jornada, January 11, 2001.
24. Milenio, January 3, 2001. The Fox administration has denied that it is “following one specific plan.”
25. http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/intel/20014/20014.html
26. Autonomous Municipality 17th of November commu-
nique, April 7, 2002; www.enlacecivil.org.mx
27. See Christine Eber, Women & Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
28. La Jornada, May 21, 1996.
29. On federal army link to the paramilitaries and Acteal
massacre, see Carlos Marin, “Plan del Ejercito en Chia -
pas,” Proceso, January 4, 1998.
30. NOTIMEX, Sept. 16, 2000.
31. The News (Mexico City), November 25, 2002.
32. EFE, May 3, 2002.
33. EFE, July 13, 2002.
34. Author’s interviews, May 1998.
35. The New York Times, June 2, 1995.
36. Heraldo de Chihuahua, August 9, 2001.
37. The News (Mexico City), January 19, 2001.

Tags: Mexico, drugs, guerrillas, politics, drug trade, corruption, NAFTA, narcotrafficking


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