President Claudia Sheinbaum said after the revelation of apparent CIA involvement that she is considering sanctions against the government of Chihuahua, asserting that any security collaboration with the US must be approved by Mexico’s federal government. She is meanwhile demanding a meeting to discuss the matter with the governor of Chihuahua, María Eugenia Campos Galván of the right-wing opposition National Action Party (PAN).

Mexico’s Senate Commission on Constitutional Issues is attempting to broker a dialogue between Chihuahua and federal authorities on the question. But lawmakers from Sheinbaum’s leftist MORENA party accused Campos and the PAN of “betraying the homeland and the Mexican people” by concealing the CIA presence in Chihuahua. (CBS News, Animal Político, El Arensal, NACLA Update, Diario Red, La Verdad, La Verdad, Juárez)

The Washington Post reports that under CIA director John Ratcliffe, “the agency has taken a larger, more aggressive role in counternarcotics, one of Trump’s top priorities upon assuming office. The agency has shared more intelligence with Mexican antidrug units and increased training for local counternarcotics units… It has flown unarmed drones over Mexico to help track cartel leaders and locate illicit drug labs.”

CIA intelligence was apparently critical in the operation by Mexican federal forces in which Jalisco New Generation Cartel kingpin Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes AKA “El Mencho” was killed earlier this year.

Photo: AEI via CBS News

According to the report, a local collective called the Jalisco Search Warriors on March 5 uncovered uncovered the site on an isolated ranch, where they found “bone fragments…hundreds of shoes, clothing items, charred human remains, and three underground ovens…”  The discovery was made while attempting to locate missing individuals or their remains, with local citizens organizing the effort in the absence of a sufficient response by the authorities.

The discovery raised concerns among family members about apparent mass killings tied to criminal cartels, drawing international attention to the ongoing crisis of disappearances in Mexico and the government’s failure to meaningfully respond.

Speaking of the discovery at Izaguirre Ranch in the municipality of Teuchitlan, HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus stated: “President Claudia Sheinbaum should see this as a signal to undertake an urgent, nationwide effort to professionalize the investigation of crimes by state prosecutors’ offices.” Amnesty International has echoed this call, urging authorities to act expeditiously and open a comprehensive forensic investigation. Along with HRW, Amnesty emphasized that the Mexican government’s slowness to investigate or prosecute forced disappearances creates an atmosphere of “total impunity,” endangering family members of the disappeared.

The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) reported a staggering 111,521 persons missing in Mexico as of September 2023. The organization noted that under-reporting may indicate that actual numbers of missing persons are much higher. Jalisco, Tamaulipas and Estado de Mexico have the highest numbers of missing persons across Mexico, while 75% of missing persons throughout the country are men, and 25% are women.

HRW also condemned Mexican authorities in a 2023 report on the government’s failure to investigate homicides due to systemic problems such as high workloads, limited resources and lack of coordination in official search efforts.

From JURIST, March 20. Used with permission.

See our last reports on Mexico’s human rights crisis, and the body count.

Photo: Mtenaespinoza via Wikimedia Commons

This is not the first such disruption of exports. In February 2022, the USDA similarly suspended inspections after a plant safety inspector in Michoacán received a threatening message. The halt was lifted after about a week, and later that year Jalisco became the second Mexican state authorized to export avocados to the US. Aditionally, shipments of Michoacán avocados are already in transit, so the new suspension should not have a significant market impact if it is resolved shortly. Michoacán Gov. Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla told reporters that Mexican authorities are in discussions with their US counterparts to quickly address the situation. The Mexican Association of Avocado Producers & Exporters (APEAM) is also petitioning the US embassy to have the suspension lifted.

The protest in Paracho had actually been called to support local agents of the state police force (formally renamed the Civil Guard in 2022) who have apparently been denied promised bonuses. The protesters were also supporting their demand for the removal of police commanders said to be compromised by the cartels. It is unclear why the APHIS agents were targeted. (AP, Enlace Noticias, MiMorelia, PRI, InfoBae)

Underfunding and cooptation of the police force has become a contentious issue in the state. On March 18, the regional Civil Guard commander for Pátzcuaro, Kristel García Hurtado, was killed with two of her escorts when their car was ambushed on the Uruapan-Pátzcuaro higway. The car was burned and the bodies left beheaded. (TeleSur, SinEmbargo)

The violence in the state is basically a struggle for control by the rival Familia Michoacana and Jalisco New Generation Cartel. As the New Generation, based in the adjoining state to the north, encroaches on La Familia’s turf, both organizations are also seeking to expand into other neighboring states. Last Dec. 8 saw a horrific massacre at Texcaltitlán in México state, when apparent Familia Michoacana enforcers demanded that local farmers pay a protection fee for each square meter of their bean and pea fields. A meeting had been called to discuss the dispute at the town’s football field. When the farmonmers refused to pay, citing a bad harvest, the enforcers killed 14 with their machetes and firearms. (El País)

The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) this week placed sanctions on eight Mexican figures said to be affiliated with La Nueva Familia Michoacana cartel for trafficking fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine to the United States. (El País)

Map: Google

Sheinbaum indeed has her own populist creds, having taken a leading role in the campaign against privatization of Mexico’s oil resources when the conservative National Action Party (PAN) was in power 15 years ago. And she pledges to continue with López Obrador’s basic policies.

Sheinbaum’s win represents two firsts in Mexico’s two-century history as an independent country. She will be the first woman president, and (although she has chosen not to emphasize this) the first president of Jewish heritage.

Despite the ongoing plague of femicides, recent years have seen significant advances for women in Mexico, at least in the sphere of formal politics. A 2019 constitutional reform mandates gender parity in government-appointed positions and requires that political parties present equal numbers of male and female candidates for all offices. The reform was approved by a unanimous vote of Mexico’s Congress. Some 50% of lawmakers in Mexico’s lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, are women, and women lead close to a third (10) of Mexico’s 32 states. In 2021, Mexico’s Supreme Court voted to decriminalize abortion.

Sheinbaum’s chief rival in the election was also a woman. This was Xóchitl Gálvez, candidate of an unlikely coalition of the PAN, center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the country’s former entrenched machine, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Gálvez, of indigenous Otomí background, served as indigenous affairs adviser to President Vicente Fox of the PAN, but stepped down in protest of budget cuts to the office under the subsequent PAN president Felipe Calderón. Another candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the center-left Citizens’ Movement (Movimiento Ciudadano), placed a distant third. (NewsHour, Al Jazeera, PRI, FastCompany, CarbonBrief, ClimateChangeNews, NYT, AP, AFP, LatinoUSA)

Wave of assassinations
The ongoing human rights crisis in Mexico that will obviously pose a grave challenge for Sheinbaum was dramatically exemplified by the record number of political assassinations that marred the elections. On May 31, just days before the polls opened, Jorge Huerta Cabrera, a municipal council candidate with the Mexican Green Ecological Party (PVEM, a MORENA coalition partner) in Izúcar de Matamoros, Puebla state, was gunned down in an attack near his home, in which his wife was wounded.

This marked the 37th assassination of a candidate or campaign worker over the course of this year’s political season. On May 29, Alfredo Cabrera Barrientos, PRI-PAN-PRD candidate for mayor in the municipality of Coyuca de Benítez, Guerrero state, was shot in the head as he took the stage at his final campaign event. The assailant was shot dead by the National Guard, which had been deployed to protect the candidate, who had survived previous attempts on his life.

Mexican consulting firm Integralia provided an updated political violence report in early May revealing that most candidates who were assassinated were running at the municipal level. Although candidates from all parties were targeted, the greatest number of victims were from MORENA. The most impacted states were Guerrero, Michoacán and Chiapas.

Chiapas continues to be plagued by paramilitary violence. On May 16, Lucero López Maza, a young woman running for mayor in the village of La Concordia with the local Popular Chiapaneco Party (PPCH), was killed along with five people accompanying her in a street attack by a group of armed assailants, who all got away.

And on March 14, the Tzotzil indigenous mayoral candidate with the PRI in the Chiapas village of San Juan Cancuc was killed in an attack near his home, in which his wife and son were wounded. (Jurist, BBC News, MexicoNewsDaily, Aristegui, Aristegui, Aristegui, Aristegui)

Finally, on the same day that Sheinbaum’s victory was announced, June 3, the PAN mayor of Cotija, Michoacán, Yolanda Sánchez Figueroa, was killed in a hail of bullets, struck 19 times, just outside the municipal palace. She had survived a three-day abduction last September, and was waging a campaign against attempts by local narco gangs to co-opt the police in her municipality, especially naming the notorious Jalisco New Generation Cartel. (AlDíaDallas, VozMedia, InfoBae)

These political assassinations come along with ongoing violence related to drug cartel turf wars throughout Mexico. Five people were killed and another wounded on May 23 in an armed attack in Acapulco, the once fashionable tourist resort city in Guerrero state. The deaths came when gunmen shot up a handicrafts market on a main tourism strip. This came just three days after 10 bodies were found in the streets of famous Pacific coastal city. (CBS)

Constitutional reform pending
Human rights activists and civil society voices have also been critical of President López Obrador, or AMLO as he is popuarly known by his initials. In February, AMLO sent a package of 20 legislative proposals to Mexico’s Congress, including 18 proposed constitutional reforms. These include some seemingly progressive measures, such as increasing the autonomous powers of indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities. But the package also contains some worrisome measures.

One would define the National Guard, a new enforcement body created by AMLO, as a branch of the armed forces, attaching it to the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). This is AMLO’s second attempt to bring the National Guard under SEDENA, after Mexico’s Supreme Court struck down a similar legislative reform in 2023. Currently, Article 129 of the Constitution restricts SEDENA’s power to engage in internal law enforcement. AMLO’s proposed reform would now weaken this restriction. And AMLO created the National Guard in 2019 in the first place after the Supreme Court ruled against a proposed measure to formally bring SEDENA into drug enforcement.

The National Guard, currently under AMLO’s newly created Public Security & Citizen Protection Secretariat, has been heavily deployed to intercept undocumented migrants headed north, leading to accusations that it was serving as proxy force for Trump (and Biden). It was also seen by critics as ironic that AMLO, who took office in 2018 declaring the “war on drugs” to be over, appeared to be moving back toward the militarized drug enforcement policies of his predecessors. It was the PAN’s Felipe Calderón (AMLO’s bitter rival, who he accused of stealing the 2006 elections from him) who first unleashed the army on the cartels—a move which was constitutionally dubious and only escalated the endemic violence. AMLO’s sexenio, or six-year term, has seen a further militarization of previously civilian government functions.

The current proposed reform package follows AMLO’s “Plan B” reform of the electoral system—so called because it, in turn, followed congressional rejection of an earlier, more wide-ranging reform package in 2022. Plan B was rushed through Congress but struck down by Mexico’s Supreme Court before it could take effect in May 2023, due to irregularities in its passage.

But the new package calls for all judicial authorities, including Supreme Court justices, to be elected by popular vote. This is portrayed as a measure against corruption and unethical practices. However, as the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) independent rights group states: “There is no reason to believe that electing judges would achieve these ends. On the contrary, the reform would weaken the judiciary as a democratic counterweight and encourage penal populism.” (Reuters, WOLA)

This could begin to reverse the progress represented by the 2006 constitutional reform in which Mexico switched from its old “written inquisitorial” legal system to the new “oral adversarial” system.

WOLA expresses hope that Sheinbaum will reconsider provisions of the pending constitutional reform that would weaken the judiciary and accelerate the militarizaton of society.

Sheinbaum is to take office Oct. 1.

Map: PCL

Last month, the disappearance of Debanhi Escobar, an 18-year-old law student, sparked fresh outrage amid a spate of disappearances of women in Monterrey, capital of northern Nuevo León state. Her body was found two weeks later submerged in a cistern on the grounds of a motel near where she was last seen alive, according to authorities. Hundreds of women blocked a highway in downtown Monterrey in the days following, demanding an end to gender violence. Twenty-six women and girls have disappeared in Nuevo León this year, and five more have been found dead after being reported missing.

The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances last month urged Mexico to address “the alarming trend of rising enforced disappearances,” saying the problem is facilitated by “almost absolute impunity.” (Al Jazeera, El Financiero, El Pais)

Attacks on journalists continue
Just as Mexican media workers prepared to protest the killing of a journalist last week, word came May 9 that two more were shot to death in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz. The killings of Yessenia Mollinedo Falconi and Sheila Johana García Olivera, both of the online news site El Veraz in Cosoleacaque, brought to 11 the number of journalist slayings in the country this year. Veracruz state authorities say they are investigating.

Their killings followed the ninth slaying of journalist this year, in the northern state of Sinaloa. Prosecutors there said May 5 that the body of Luis Enrique Ramírez Ramos was found on a dirt road near a junkyard in the state capital, Culiacán. Ramírez Ramos, of local news site Fuentes Fidedignas, had been abducted near his home hours earlier. (AP)

See our last report on the human rights crisis in Mexico.

Photo via Twitter

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, once a left-wing firebrand, won criticism at home over his July 8 meeting with Trump at the White House, called to inaugurate the renegotiated “NAFTA 2.0,” which just took effect.

Top CEOs from both countries were in attendance at the White House dinner, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Mexican magnate Carlos Slim.

López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, heaped effusive praise on Trump, even saying the US president has “treated us [Mexicans] with kindness and respect.” This seemed a peculiar thing to say of the man who has built a political career out of demonizing Mexicans.

“The forecasts failed,” AMLO told reporters after the meet. “We didn’t fight. We are friends, and we’re going to keep being friends.”

Unfortunately for AMLO, the days leading up to the meeting saw eruptions of spectacular bloodshed across Mexico—grisly evidence that there is no end in sight for the narco-violence that has engulfed the country for the past 15 years. And the day after the meet, US border agents shot a man to death at the Mexicali-Calexico crossing in California.

Most disappointing for many Mexican activists who once placed high hopes in AMLO, the cannabis legalization ordered by the country’s supreme court back in October 2018 has been delayed yet again. Many are looking hopefully to the new law as a first step toward ameliorating the violence and bringing at least one element of the underground economy into a legal, regulated market. But delays to its passage are starting to seem interminable.

Kicking the cannabis can down the road —this time thanks to COVID
In its 2018 ruling, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) gave Mexico’s Congress 90 days to amend the Health Code to allow for legal personal use, possession and cultivation of cannabis. AMLO gave his full support, but lawmakers deadlocked over to what degree to allow a legal market, and whether it should be in the hands of the state or private sector. So the 90 days ran out, and since then the SCJN has given Congress repeated deadline extensions to pass the law.

This February, the deadline was extended to April 30, and lawmakers were ambitiously pledging to beat it. The bill, dubbed the Law for the Regulation of Cannabis, called for permitting individual possession of up to 28 grams, and cultivation of up to 20 plants per household, depending on how many family members reside under the roof. It also called for creation of a Mexican Institute of Cannabis under the Governance Secretariat to oversee a legal market. In March, the bill did pass the key Senate committees on Justice and Health, and lawmakers appeared to finally be racing to the finish line.

And then COVID-19 happened. Just as progress seemed imminent, Congress shut down in response to the pandemic. Days before the new deadline ran out, Congress shook down the high court for yet another. And this one is far more flexible. Lawmakers now have until the end of the next scheduled legislative session—a window from mid-September to mid-December. That means it will almost certainly be at least two years after the SCJN imposed its 90-day deadline before the law is passed.

Compounding the frustration, a planned expansion of Mexico’s medical marijuana program is also stalled. Lawmakers revised the Health Code to allow for medical use in June 2017. The law ordered the Health Secretariat to issue regulations establishing norms for cannabis use by qualifying patients. But this deadline came and went without action. Mexican patients have since been confined to use of CBD-only products imported from the United States—certainly an historical irony, as illicit cannabis has long gone north from Mexico to the US.

With the legalization bill on hold, the Health Secretariat has just announced that is preparing, at long last, to release the medical marijuana regs. If they actually follow through in a timely manner, this could provide at least a limited legal market for herbaceous marijuana (high-THC cannabis flower) while full legalization is delayed.

Nightmarish violence unabated
If more evidence were needed that Mexico’s endemic narco-violence is meanwhile unabated, some was conveniently provided by headlines from the days around the AMLO-Trump lovefest. July 3 saw a bloody shoot-out just across the border from Texas, involving government troops and presumed gunmen from the Cartel of the Northeast, a splinter faction of Los Zetas. Mexican army soldiers said they came under fire from the gunmen in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Tex. They returned fire, killing 12 gunmen.

Two days before that, there was another horrific massacre as gunmen killed 24 people after storming a drug rehabilitation facility in the city of Irapuato, in central Guanajuato state. It’s unclear which faction was behind that attack, but for some reason rehab centers have become a favorite target of the warring narco-gangs.

On June 26, Mexico City’s chief of police, Omar García Harfuch, was shot and injured and two of his bodyguards killed in a dramatic assassination attempt blamed on the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. On June 16, a federal judge and his wife were assassinated in the western state of Colima.

Homicides in Mexico hit a new record last year, and are trending higher still in 2020.

And back in March, AMLO won controversy by making a visit to the mother of imprisoned Sinaloa Cartel drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in his hometown of Badiraguato, Sinaloa. Chapo’s conviction by a New York federal court last year drew skepticism from cynics that his imprisonment would do anything to abate the violence in Mexico. The cynics are now sadly vindicated.

Meet the New Boss?
More Mexican commentators are growing suspicious of the left-populist AMLO’s schmooziness with right-populist and Mexico-bashing Trump. Some even went so far as to call the White House meeting an act of “national treason.”

AMLO ostentatiously declared the drug war to be “over” after taking office in late 2018. In May 2019, he made a big deal of dropping out of the US-led anti-drug Plan Merida—but this was only after most of the military aid had already been delivered. Now his critics say AMLO’s new National Guard force, ostensibly created to combat the narco-violence, is being used as proxy force for Trump, intercepting migrants before they reach the US border.

It was actually the conservative Mexican commentator Enrique Krauze who had a harsh op-ed in the New York Times ahead of the summit, entitled “Mexico’s President is All In for Trump.”

Wrote Krauze: “There is only one power that Mr. López Obrador…recognizes and fears, and that is the only power greater than himself—the United States… That’s why when Mr. Trump threatened to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement or to impose tariffs on Mexican products, he agreed to turn Mexico into Mr. Trump’s wall. The new National Guard, which was supposed to prevent and combat this country’s unspeakable drug violence, has instead been deployed on our southern border turn away Central American migrants and, on the northern border, to keep them penned up in subhuman conditions.”

And, not surpisingly, the National Guard is also involved in cannabis enforcement. On July 9, the force announced the decommissioning of 66 tons of illicit cannabis in a series of operations across the country, with one of the biggest hauls in the state of Sonora.

A crowning irony is that AMLO and Trump seem to be facing identical domestic crises at the moment. Drawing an explicit connection to the Black Lives Matter uprising in the US, hundreds of protesters took to the streets and clashed with riot police in Guadalajara on June 4, one month after the killing of a construction worker at the hands of local law enforcement. The rally climaxed with the storming of the Jalisco state government palace, where protesters smashed down the front door and left graffiti on the exterior walls.

Outrage was further enflamed on July 11, when police officers in Acatlán de Pérez Figueroa, Oaxaca, shot and killed a 16-year-old boy after supposedly mistaking him for a criminal. The youth, named Alexander Martínez, actually proved to be a US citizen who was in Oaxaca to visit family, and was a clean-cut aspiring soccer player. “My son had a dream! They have cut that short!” Martínez’s grieving mother shouts in a video that has gone viral on social media.

Cannabis legaliztion will likely be only a small step back from the brink of social cataclysm in Mexico. But with even that first step stalled, all the trajectory is deeper into crisis.

Cross-post to Cannabis Now  and Global Ganja Report

Photo: Secretaría de Seguridad y Protección Ciudadana

Jalisco authorities were also under pressure from the state’s official human rights office. The State Commission on Human Rights (ECHR) declared that “the excessive use of force and mistreatment of people by police authorities is unacceptable. In this event, where the detained person’s lifeless body was handed over to relatives, it is necessary to act with all the rigor of the law and dictate all preventive measures, and guarantee access to justice for victims, knowledge of the truth, and comprehensive reparation of the damage.” (Puerto Vallarta Daily News, Yucatan Times, Mexico News Daily)

Photo: Notimex via Yucatan Times

Mexico is poised to become the third country in the world to legalize cannabis, after Uruguay and Canada—and, with a population of nearly 130 million, it will represent the biggest market of the three by far. It also has an ideal climate for cultivation—and a centuries-long tradition of it. Inevitably, international investors are wating eagerly for legalization to finally take effect.

It’s a grim, irony, however, that even amid preparations for legalization, the criminal narco-economy continues to spawn nightmarish violence—with recent bloody episodes starting to look like an actual war, the security forces out-gunned by the cartels. Crafting a legalization model that can effectively tackle this reality will be a challenge.

Congress gets a six-month extension
Last October, the same month that legalization took effect in Canada, Mexico’s Supreme Court issued a binding decision that cannabis prohibition is unconstitutional on individual liberties grounds, and ordered the country’s Congress to amend the law. The ruling imposed a 90-day deadline for Congress to act. But it passed without action. This August the Supreme Court reset the clock, impsing a new 90-day deadline—which was, symbolically, to run out on Oct. 31, one-year anniversary of the high court’s historic decision. Mexican lawmakers in September at last introduced a legalization bill.

But they deadlocked on the details, and just days ahead of the Oct. 31 deadline, the Senate appealed to the Supreme Court to reset the clock again. Julio Menchaca, head of the Senate Health Commission, appealed for “a small extension…to get the law right,” according to Heraldo de Mexico.

It turned out to not be so small. This time the Supreme Court granted a six-month extension; lawmakers will now have until April 30 to legalize, Mexico News Daily reports.

The Mexican Cannabis Institute, a new government agency to oversee the legal market, is now expected to be operational by Jan, 1, 2021. And there is much contention as to what that market will look like.

Ricardo Monreal, leader of the ruling center-left Morena party in the Senate, said upon the extension that the legislative process will proceed with caution “because we want to do things well.” Mario Delgado, Morena leader in the lower-house Chamber of Deputies, is calling for creation of a state-owned company to control sales in a closely regulated market.

But there are more free-market voices, including within the ruling party. Morena’s Sen. Julio Menchaca predicted in October (before the deadline was extended and passage of the law this year became unlikely) that legal cannabis would generate up to 18 billion pesos ($938 million) in tax revenue in 2020.

Will corporate cannabis usurp the campesinos?
With such big money foreseen, foreign capital is of course circling in. Imports from Canada are even broached, which is certainly a very strange irony, given that Mexico has long been a world leader in illicit-market exports, mostly to North American markets.

Vancouver’s Aurora Cannabis, one of Canada’s biggest licensed producers, is especially named as seeking an entry to the Mexican market, according to the investing website TipRanks. Aurora has already gained a foothold in Mexico through its 2018 acquisition of Farmacias Magistrales SA—the only Mexican company that is licensed to import cannabis with more than 1% THC. (Mexico passed a medical marijuana law in 2017, but it is still mostly limited to CBD products.).

However, TipRanks warns that “Mexico is definitely leaning toward giving its own citizens priority in relationship to licensing, to the degree that larger cannabis firms will probably be rejected, or at least put on hold until Mexican producers and distributors are entrenched in the business. That could easily take several years, and maybe longer.”

A draft version of the bill released by the Senate Health Commission on Oct. 18 seems to be a compromise between more populist and more free-market approaches. It imposes a 20% limit on foreign investment in cannabis enterprises. It also seeks to limit vertical integration by barring multiple types of licenses being issued to the same individual, or to family members.

One wonders how effective such measures will be, given the longtime Mexican business practice of prestanombres (name-loaners). And there is opposition from those eager for looser industry atmosphere. Financial news site Aristegui sites Erick Ponce of Mexico’s Instituto del Cannabis (ICAN) opposing such measures as a bottleneck on growth.

Another proposed populist measure stipulates that for the first five years after legalization, at least 20% of cultivation licenses will be reserved for campesinos (small independent farmers) or ejidos (agrarian cooperatives) in municipalities where authorities have eradicated illegal marijuana fields.

Mexico City’s Cultura Colectiva website reported in July that a reporter from the business site Merca 2.0 asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at a press conference if the government’s new campesino aid and sustainable forestry program Sembrando Vida would be opened to cannabis producers. The president replied that he would discuss the matter with the program’s directors.

Cartel wars still escalating
As Congress mulls such populist measures, aimed at weaning rural communities long captive to the cartels off of the illicit economy, narco-violence has been hideously escalating across Mexico.

The country’s most powerful drug lord, the notorious Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, was found guilty of trafficking and money laundering by a federal jury in New York in February, and sentenced to life in prison in July. Hedging their bets, prosecutors managed to add 30 years to the life term for use of firearms in commission of a crime, BBC News noted.

But on Oct. 17, when Mexican security forces tried to arrest his son, Ovidio Guzmán López, now a top leader of Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel, it sparked a raging gun battle with extremely heavily armed fighters. A mixed detachment of army troops and the new National Guard force tracked the younger Guzmán down in Culiacán, capital of Sinaloa state. But as soon as he was taken into custody, the troops were surrounded by Cartel gunmen riding in trucks mounted with big machine-guns, and even what appeared to be improvised armored vehicles known in Mexico as “narco-tanks.” Gear-head website The Drive sports photos of this formidable mechanized equipment.

In a bitter humiliation for the government, Ovidio was turned over to his comrades. “The decision was taken to retreat…without Guzmán to try to avoid more violence in the area and preserve the lives of our personnel and recover calm in the city,” Mexico’s security secretary, Alfonso Durazo, said, according to The Guardian.

Two days before that, 14 state police officers were killed in El Aguaje, Michoacán, when their convoy was surrounded by pick-up trucks filled with heavily armed men, BBC News reported. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel was blamed for the attack.

On Sept. 26, an ambush of an army patrol on an opium-poppy eradication mission left three soldiers dead in the village of Balzamar, in Felipe Bravo municipality of southern Guerrero state. Mexico News Daily reports that the “community police,” an anti-narco vigilante force that has emerged in Guerrero, is preparing to “go to war” against the Cartel del Sur, which is believed to have been behind the attack.

And in mid-September, yet another of the “narco-fosas”—mass graves where the cartel enforcers dump the bodies of their victims—was uncovered in a well outside Guadalajara. Authorities investigated when residents complained about the smell. At least 44 bodies were found, cut up into pieces and hidden in 119 black bags, according to BBC News.

It made more stateside headlines when three women and six children belonging to a family of US citizens from a rogue Mormon sect with communities in northern Mexico were slain when their vehicles were ambushed on a road near the border of Sonora and Chihuahua states. Security Secretary Durazo said they might have been mistaken by cartel enforcers for members of a rival gang. A local affiliate of the Sinaloa Cartel known as Los Salazar is fighting for control of the area with La Línea, a gang linked to the Juárez Cartel, according to Mexico News Daily. Multiple suspects in the attack have been arrested, AFP reports, although little other infromation was made available.

And the militarization of cannabis enforcement continues. On Nov. 14, a mixed force of army troops and Guerrero state police confiscated an unspecified large quantity of marijuana along with weapons in a traffic stop in Coyuquilla village, Petatlán municipality, Sol de Acapulcoreports. An army patrol seized a ton of cannabis in Ensenada, Baja California, as it was being put on a small boat for export across the border, Noticias Ya reported Oct. 23. In July, an army detachment “decommissioned” (burned) a ton of cannabis in Ixtlán del Río, Nayarit state, according to Acustik Noticias.

Cannabis legalization has been posed as a solution to the narco crisis in Mexico. But utopian expectations that it will make the cartels simply evaporate may be setting up the entire effort for recrimination from prohibition-nostalgists when that fails to happen. And if legalization is not effectively crafted to benefit the campesino communities now captive to the cartels, such a failure is all the more likely.

Cross-post to Global Ganja Report and Cannabis Now

Photo via The Drive

The jury was anonymous even to the judge for fear of reprisals in a trial that became something of a media spectacle. Among those showing up to observe the proceedings was Alejandro Edda, the actor who plays El Chapo in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico. The kingpin flashed the actor what the New York Times called an "ecstatic smile."

Chapo was already a media star even before he was immortalized by Netflix. "I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world," he boasted to Hollywood star Sean Penn in an embarrassingly gushy interview for Rolling Stone back in 2015, when he was still on the lam in Mexico. "I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats."

The shine may now come off his Robin Hood image with witness testimony about his vicious predilection for raping underage girls. The case against him featured 200 hours of testimony from 56 witnesses. Fourteen of those—his admitted former henchmen and traffickers—cooperated with the prosecution in hopes of reducing their own prison terms.

Chapo faces a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole—actually, multiple life sentences, though after one the rest become a mere formality. Having serially escaped from prison in Mexico, he is now probably headed for the federal government's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado—also known as ADX for "administrative maximum," and more colloquially the "Alcatraz of the Rockies."

Will anything change?
Narco-violence has not abated in Mexico since Chapo's most recent capture in 2016, and his Sinaloa Cartel remains intact—now run by his heir apparent, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada. Witnesses at the trial said that Mayo is now protected by co-opted officials at the highest levels of Mexican state power, just as Chapo had been. Chapo's lawyers, in turn, claimed that Mayo had bribed Mexican officials to detain and frame their client so that he could inherit the cartel.

"El Mayo Zambada and Sinaloa have continued and thrived and flourished," Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami expert on Mexico's cartels, told CNN. "The fact that you knock off a kingpin like El Chapo—which he clearly was—does not mean that you end the organization or in any way severely debilitate it."

He added: "With or without El Chapo, these lines of bribery, these lines of corruption, extend into every political party at every level of the Mexican government."

And upstart rivals like the Jalisco New Generation cartel are rising to challenge the Sinaloa Cartel on its turf of Mexico's Pacific coast. Its leader, Rubén "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, is another aspirant to fill Chapo's bloody shoes.

"There's going to be more bloodshed," Bagley predicted. "Every time there are these transitions…there is a period of adjustment. It's often quite bloody, but they sort things out because they have every incentive to do so."

How cannabis prohibition created El Chapo
This cycle has been playing itself out for a long time in Mexico. Chapo got his start in the 1980s overseeing ranches that grew cannabis for the Guadalajara Cartel, then Mexico's reigning crime machine. This was just as Mexico's old marijuana syndicates of the '70s were morphing into the sinister cocaine cartels. This transition was at least partially a result of the aggressive crackdown on cannabis—itself the bitter fruit of pressure from Washington.

This began in 1969, when President Richard Nixon virtually shut down the border, slowing traffic to a crawl with aggressive searches of every vehicle to root out smuggled cannabis, in what was called Operation Intercept. By the end of the '70s, Mexico capitulated to the pressure, launching Operation Condor, the first big militarized crackdown—on cannabis. Mexican federal police helicopters sprayed paraquat on the marijuana plantations. This helped incentivize the cartels' switch to ferrying cocaine coming up from Colombia—although cannabis would remain an important sideline.

The Guadalajara Cartel fractured when its leaders were finally arrested and convicted in 1985. This was occasioned by the cartel going too far—abducting and torturing to death a DEA agent in retaliation for the bust of a giant marijuana plantation in Chihuahua state. In the new regional syndicates to emerge from the fractured Guadalajara machine, Chapo seized control of the Sinaloa branch. After a long and bloody struggle with the rival Tijuana Cartel, it emerged some 20 years later as uncontested suzerain of Mexico's west. It then went to war with the competition in the east, the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas.

In 2006, the Mexican government sent in the army to fight the warring cartels, and violence escalated exponentially. It was at this point that Mexico's "drug war" arguably became a real internal war.

Chapo was arrested in 1993—for, among various drug crimes, the killing that year of the Archbishop of Guadalajara, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo. But he escaped from prison in 2001—apparently using bribes to slip out in a laundry cart. He spent the next decade and change as the country's most-wanted fugitive, as his Sinaloa machine rose to hegemony. In February 2014, he was detained in Mazatlán, Sinaloa's coastal resort city, and sent to Mexico's top-security federal prison, at Altiplano, México state. But in July 2015, he escaped a second time—through an elaborate tunnel that had been built from his shower block at Altiplano to a nearby apartment. This obvious inside job was a painful embarrassment for Mexico's then-President Enrique Peña Nieto

Chapo taunted the world on social media as the second manhunt was carried out. In January 2016, he was apprehended at an upscale condo in Los Mochis, Sinaloa. A Mexican government that appeared eager to be rid of him had El Chapo extradited to the United States on Barack Obama's last day in office in January 2017.

Among the claims made against Chapo by his former henchmen in the Brooklyn trial is that he won the protection of President Peña Nieto with a $100 million bribe. This appears to vindicate the widespread conspiracy theory in Mexico that the government was in league with the Sinaloa Cartel, with enforcement efforts largely aimed at its competition.

There are some encouraging signs that Mexico's new President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will roll back the "drug war" militarization and lift the prohibitionist pressure on cannabis, at least. But there is a lot of damage to undo if Chapo getting sent up the river is to translate into any degree of peace on the ground on long-suffering Mexico.

Cross-post to Cannabis Now  and Global Ganaja Report

Photo: US Coast Guard via Cannabis Now