Mexico City – Guatemalan former army commandos and members of Central American street gangs are the foot soldiers in the current war among Mexico’s drug cartels, two reporters said here Tuesday.
Jorge Fernandez Menendez and Victor Ronquillo said that some gang members have hired themselves out to drug lords to “protect” smuggling routes from South America into the United States.
The veteran Mexican journalists are the authors of the book “De los Maras a los Zetas. Los secretos del narcotrafico de Colombia a Chicago” (From the Gangs to Los Zetas: The secrets of drug trafficking from Colombia to Chicago), published this year by Grijalbo.
They say that in Colombia, the main theater in Washington’s war on drugs, U.S. agents and military officers are personally directing anti-narcotics operations from the Andean nation’s interior jungles to its Caribbean and Pacific coasts.
“I wouldn’t like to see in Mexico what happened in Colombia, where United States officers command operations in the war zones and pilot their own (combat) aircraft and helicopters,” said Fernandez, adding that his visit to the Andean nation had been at the invitation of authorities in Washington.
Fernandez and Ronquillo attribute most of Mexico’s current spasm of drug-related mayhem, which has already claimed more than 1,000 lives this year, to a clash between Central American gangs working for the Sinaloa drug mob and Guatemalan “kaibile” ex-commandos recruited by the Gulf cartel.
The Sinaloa organization, headed by fugitive Joaquin “El chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, and the Gulf outfit, run from behind bars by Osiel Cardenas Guillen, have been piling up bodies in the northern border cities of Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo and in the Pacific resort of Acapulco.
But the casualties are not limited to drug dealers and gunmen, as the dead include civilians and police, both patrolmen and command-level officers.
Mexican authorities say the Sinaloa cartel has beefed up its ranks with gang members – some of them said to be veterans of past civil wars in Central America – to match the firepower of the Gulf organization, whose armed wing, “Los Zetas,” consists mainly of former members of the Mexican and Guatemalan special forces.
“Both gang members and ex-kaibiles act as assassins for one group or the other,” Fernandez said, “in a context of greater internationalization of narco-trafficking and when Mexico’s anti-drug forces appear scattered and badly trained.”
Ronquillo said the decapitations of police officers that stunned people in Acapulco and Tijuana earlier this year are “very similar to those used by gang members or ex-kaibiles in the underworld of Central America.”
The authors agreed that the spike in drug-related bloodshed has prompted journalists in the hardest-hit regions to “censor themselves out of fear,” something Ronquillo and Fernandez say “represents a triumph for the criminals.”
Both men also blamed “international double standards,” corruption on the part of some Mexican officials and “tolerance” of drug consumption in the United States for the worsening violence here in their homeland. EFE
