Trump signed executive orders Feb. 1 to impose 25% import tariffs on Mexico and Canada, and a 10% tariff on China. The tariffs, which include a carve-out of a lower 10% levy on Canadian energy exports, were imposed under a “national emergency” exemption to the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), citing a crisis of illegal migration and drugs. The tariffs on China remain in place, and are being challenged by Beijing before the World Trade Organization (WTO). (LatinVex, Atlantic Council, Jurist)

Photo: SEDENA via Peninsula360

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

The director of Pemex, Octavio Romero Oropeza, added that the Spanish firm had “all the advantages” in the Burgos contracts.

López Obrador also made reference to the Camisea project, which delivers gas to the Mexican port of Manzanillo from fields operated by a consortium including Repsol in the Peruvian Amazon. According to the Mexican president, the 2007 Camisea contract had not even been signed when “Repsol was already buying the gas in Peru, assuring that it had already been sold in Mexico.” (Europa Press)

On Feb. 7, Spain’s high court, the Audiencia Nacional, accepted appeals to re-open formal investigations into Repsol chair Antonio Brufau and Isidro Faine, former chair of Valencia’s Caixabank. The investigation, which had been suspended by a lower court, was exploring charges that Repsol and Caixabank hired Grupo Cenyt, a security firm belonging to Spain’s former national police chief Jose Manuel Villarejo, to spy on the then chair of Madrid construction company Sacyr, Luis del Rivero, in 2011 and 2012. The alleged aim was to block a joint takeover bid for Repsol launched by Sacyr and Pemex. (Jurist, Reuters, EuroNews)

The chronically mismanaged Burgos fields were opened to private development followiing a 2013 reform of the energy sector in Mexico. The initial Repsol contract was for exploitation in the onshore portion of the basin, straddling the states of Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. In 2018, Repsol won leases in the offshore section as well. (S&P Global)

The onshore section had been particularly subject to the phenomenon of “narco-oil,” with criminal organizations pirating petrol and gas for sale on the illicit market. This remains a serious problem today. At least one person was killed and over a dozen injured when a Pemex pipeline in the central state of Puebla exploded last October, after it was breached by suspected fuel pirates. (Digital Journal)

Repsol is also currently under fire in Peru following a devastating oil spill at a refinery it operates outside Lima.

Photo via Digital Journal

Since taking office late last year, Mexico’s new President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (popularly known as AMLO) has appeared to move in contradictory directions where the country’s bloody drug war and cannabis are concerned.

Last month, he declared the “drug war” to be over, pledging to reverse the policies of his predecessors, who sent the army after the cartels (and, in effect, the peasant communities that grow cannabis and opium for them). He’s also been exploring cannabis legalization—which was mandated by a Supreme Court decision last year. Yet he has simultaneously been pushing a plan to create a new “National Guard,” drawing personnel from both the Federal Police and army, to continue the use of military troops in drug enforcement.

This plan entails changes to Mexico’s constitution, and appears to be AMLO’s way of getting around the Supreme Court’s strike-down of a measure last year that would have created a legal framework for deployment of the military in drug enforcement. The Internal Security Law was declared unconstitutional by the high court in November, on the countdown to López Obrador’s inauguration. At the time, AMLO vowed to seek constitutional changes allowing such a legal framework. It is now looking like he might get it.

AMLO goes around Supreme Court
The National Guard proposal was submitted to Congress in January. Given that AMLO’s left-populist Morena party and its allies hold a majority in both chambers, and the opposition is controlled by the very parties that sent the army after the narcos in the first place, it is unsurprising that it passed overwhelmingly. On Feb. 28, the lower-house Chamber of Deputies voted up the final version of the constitutional reforms, which had already been approved by the Senate. The vote was a heavily lopsided 463 to 1.

The new force is to be under civilian command, answering to AMLO’s newly created Public Security & Citizen Protection Secretariat. This new secretariat was approved by Congress in the transition period last year, so he could hit the ground running with it upon taking office Dec. 1. It merges the now-disbanded Public Security Secretariat with those branches of the Governance Secretariat concerned with overseeing the Federal Police. But troops for the new National Guard are to be drawn both from the Federal Police and the National Defense Secretariat, which controls the armed forces.

Morena’s congressional chair, Beatriz Milland Pérez, assured that the new force will be “efficient in its action and with a new face that wins the confidence of citizens.”

With Congressional approval, the measure now goes to the legislatures of Mexico’s 31 states for ratification. Five states have already voted the measure up: Nuevo Leon, Tabasco, Guerrero, Chiapas and Campeche. At least 17 state legislatures must give approval for the constitutional change to be enacted.

Lonely dissent in Congress
The sole dissenting vote in the Chamber of Deputies was—tellingly—cast by a young womanwho was a student activist and musician before being elected to Congress as an independent, with no party affiliation. Lucía Riojas Martínez was a founder of the “Yo Soy 132” student movement at Mexico City’s Ibero-American University that was initiated with angry protests at a 2012 visit to the campus by then-presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. The movement demanded accountability in rights abuses committed by the security forces (especially the recent repression at San Salvador Atenco).

“Unanimity in the vote would have been unjust,” Rojas said in explaining her lonely dissent. She acknowledged that the Senate had added measures assuring civilian control of the new National Guard, but said “there are still elements that appear to us a risk.”

Army still chasing cannabis
Indeed, despite the legal ambiguity with the constitutional changes pending (and despite AMLO’s announced end to the drug war), the army has never been withdrawn from narcotics enforcement—and that of course includes cannabis.

On Feb. 9, a mixed force of army, navy and Federal Police troops detained 10 presumed “narcomenudistas” (small traffickers), including men and women, in the coastal town of Arriaga in southern Chiapas state, “decommissioning” several weapons and a kilo of cannabis.

On March 7, a far more impressive metric ton of cannabis was “decommissioned” by a unit of army troops at La Bufadora, in Baja California. No arrests were announced, but the army said the cannabis was being prepared to be taken up the coast in a launch over the international line to the US.

On March 8, army troops with the Mixed Operations Base (BOM) No. 4 burned a field inter-cropped with cannabis and opium at the campesino community of Corral de Piedra in León municipality, Guanajuato state.

Narco-violence grinds on —with official complicity
And violence related to the relentless struggle for control of the narco trade continues to take its grisly toll. In the latest outrage, four were killed March 2 when unknown gunmen opened fire on a party at a restaurant in Ciudad Victoria, capital of Tamaulipas state—heartland of the blood-drenched Zetas narco network.

In late December in the same city, the severed head of an unknown man was left in a cooleroutside the offices of newspaper Expreso—another grim warning to the press not to look with too close an eye at who is behind the reign of deadly violence.

And nearly every day brings more evidence of complicity and outright overlap between the security forces and ultra-murderous narco networks.

The Mexican government just issued a formal apology for police involvement in the deaths of five youths who were detained by Veracruz state police at a gas station while on their way home from a birthday party in the town of Tierra Blanca in January 2016. The teenage girl and four young men were turned over to the Jalisco New Generation cartel—who promptly put them to death, apparently in the mistaken assumption that they were working for a rival gang. Their bodies were found in a mass grave days after they were detained. Eight police officers are among the 20 that have now been arrested in the case. In his statement to the victims’ families this week, Alejandro Encinas, the deputy Governance secretary for human rights, acknowledged the state’s “profound responsibility” in the crime.

Some 5,000 have disappeared in Veracruz over the past decade, as Los Zetas and their rivals like New Generation vie for control of the state.

Legalization anticipated —but who will benefit?
Amid all this, AMLO’s government continues to study its cannabis legalization proposal—whetting the appetites of investors both within Mexico and beyond its borders. Agricultural entrepreneur Guillermo Nieto, founder of the Mexico Cannabis Industrial Association (ANICANN), told Milenio newspaper Feb. 26 that he expects the herb to be a 30 billion dollar legal business sector in the country by 2020—and even anticipated cannabis provisions in the new US-Mexico Trade Agreement.

“The first thing we have to understand is that by our geographic situation, our country is ideal for planting cannabis,” he said. “So I think we should take advantage both of the benefits of our climate and the benefits brought by the Free Trade Agreement, and begin using the same concept of export agriculture of this plant.” He said he sought to inform lawmakers of how an expansive legalization could “benefit all Mexicans.”

But if legalization moves ahead along with institutionalization of use of army troops against the illicit cannabis sector, it could mean big bucks for agribusiness but more militarization-as-usual for Mexico’s long-suffering peasantry and common folk.

Cross-post to Cannabis Now and Global Ganja Report

There were signs enough that trouble was brewing at Cadereyta. A similar protest at the facility on March 27 resulted in four killed and some 20 wounded. That was prompted by the authorities’ move to have inmates submit to x-ray searches to crack down on contraband entering the facility. Back in October 2011, a clash at the prison left seven dead and 12 wounded.

The town of Cadereyta was also the scene of one of the worst massacres in Mexico’s ultra-violent cartel wars back in 2012. In May of the year, 49 people were decapitated, mutilated and left in plastic bags on the side of the highway through town. It remains unclear today whether the massacre was carried out by the Zetas or the Gulf Cartel, the rival outfits fighting for control of Nuevo León.

After this latest prison massacre, the local Consejo Cívico (Civil Council), a citizens’ group demanding government accountability, protested the use of force as premature, and charged that authorities did not make sufficient effort to open dialogue with the rebel inmates. The statement noted that in the two years since Gov. Jaime “El Bronco” Rodríguez Calderón took office in Nuevo León, the state’s prisons have seen 73 inmates killed in five violent incidents—compared to a total of 67 over the six years of the previous administration.

Ironically, Rodríguez Calderón was elected as a gadfly and outsider (he ran as an indpendent, a rare thing in Mexico), who said he would put an end to the chronic narco-violence in Nuevo León.

Cross-post to High Times and Global Ganja Report

Despite some 40,000 soliders and federal police troops sent into the streets to keep the peace, violence continued right up to the vote—and has continued since. At least 1,000 people in the small town of Pueblo Nuevo, Guanajuato, staged an uprising June 8 as results showed a win for the PRI mayoral candidate, Lariza Solorzano Villanueva. Townsfolk torched police vehicles and ransacked government offices to vent their rage at a third term for a member of the Solorzano Villanueva family. (TeleSur, 20 Minutos, June 9)

Activists were divded on whether to support the left opposition parties in the elections, or boycott them altogether as a farce. The National Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CNTE), a radical faction of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), pledged to disrupt the elections. In Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Chiapas and other states CNTE teachers blocked highways, seized toll booths, and occupied offices of National Electoral Institute. In some places, they seized facilities of the Mexican state oil company Pemex. In Oaxaca, taxi drivers armed with clubs and rocks mobilized to evict CNTE teachers from a Pemex plant they had occupied, and clashes ensued. (TeleSur, June 5; Milenio, June 4)

In another sign of ugly divisions at the grassroots, a violent battle broke out in Mexico City's Tlahuac district June 5 after hundreds of squatters took over a vacant lot at a place called La Poblanita and set up an encampment. Other neighborhood residents moved in to evict them, sparking the donnybrook. While actual ownership of the property is unclear, the squatters were said to be organized by the Francisco Villa Popular Front (FPFV), in turn said to be linked to one of the major left-opposition formations, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Those who mobilized to evict them were reportedly followers of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME). (TeleSur, June 5)

The SME and PRD have generally been allied to oppose the PRI-led "reform" that would open Mexico's power sector to private investment. The clash at Tlahuac speaks to a social fragmentation even affecting the popular opposition to the narco-coopted political establishment.

Cross-post to High Times and Global Ganja Report

But, as always, there is a sense of deja vu here. Z-42 took over the Zetas after his brother Miguel Angel Treviño AKA "Z-40" was captured by Mexican marines in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas in July 2013. Z-40, in turn, had replaced Heriberto Lazcano AKA "El Lazca" after he was killed in a shoot-out with military forces in Coahuila in October 2012. Despite repeated blows against their leadership, Los Zetas continue their reign of terror in Mexico—especially the northeast, but their network extends throughout the country and even into Central America.

Los Zetas emerged as a paramilitary enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel in 1999, integrating several veterans of the Mexican and Guatemalan armed forces into its command structure. They definitively broke from the Gulf Cartel in 2010, precipitating a three-way war between the Zetas, their former masters and their mutual rival, the Sinaloa Cartel. In this grim contest for narco-supremacy, the Zetas singled themselves out for spectacular brutality. They even pioneered the tactic now notoriously used by ISIS of releasing grisly videos of the execution of their captives. (See the NarcoTube website if you have a strong stomach.) They are also believed responsible for a series of massacres of abducted migrants who presumably refused to submit to slave labor as drug "mules," sexual servants, and the like.

They say third time's a charm, but it remains to be seen if this third take-down of Los Zetas' top commander will do anything to disrupt the organization or its bloody operations. (AFP, Latin Times, Diario Uno, Argentina, March 4)

Cross-post to High Times and Global Ganja Report

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“What sets these crimes apart is that, for as long as the fate of the victim remains unknown, they are ongoing,” the report states. “Each day that passes is another that authorities have failed to find victims, and another day that families continue to suffer the anguish of not knowing what happened to a loved one.” HRW focused on 249 cases of men and women who disappeared since 2006. In 149 cases, state security forces participated “directly in the crime, or indirectly through support or acquiescence,” it found.

In one case, 12 house paint vendors disappeared near a military checkpoint as they traveled to a job in the border city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, in March 2009. In another, eight young men went missing on a hunting trip in Zacatecas in December 2010. In both cases, HRW found, authorities subjected families desperately seeking their loved ones to dismissive and sometimes humiliating treatment.

“How can 12 people go missing, get rounded up, whatever happened, and no one notices?” Reyna Estrada, the wife of one of the Piedras Negras missing, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “At least when your loved one dies, you know where they are, what happened, you can eventually get used to it. We do not know what monster we are fighting.”

In some cases, people disappeared by the security forces were turned over to narco gangs. On May 28, 2011, the report states, 19 men on a construction crew in the Nuevo León town of Pesqueria were detained by municipal police who are believed to have delivered them to a local crime boss. HRW said the cases it examined were a small sample, but that “there is no question that there are thousands more.”

Mexico’s new Prosecutor General, Jesús Murillo Karam, said late last year that thousands of people disappeared during Calderón’s term. This week, a senior official of the interior ministry (Gobernación) put the figure at 27,000. There was no immediate response to the report from the new government of Enrique Peña Nieto. In meetings with members of an HRW delegation, government representatives did say they were working to prevent disappearances and step up searches. Nik Steinberg, HRW’s top researcher for the Americas: “As positive as that is, none of this can work until the government starts to do what the previous government never did and determines who is responsible and brings them to justice.” (LAT, Feb. 20)

US Sen. John McCain met with Peña Nieto Feb. 22, saying he was “convinced” that the new leader is “committed to taking action against the drug cartels.” Meanwhile, in the border town pf Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state authorities are searching for the municipal police chief, Roberto Alejandro Balmori Garza, who disappeared over the weekend. Local media report that Balmori Garza’s two brothers were found shot dead in the neighboring state of Nuevo León Feb. 17. One of the brothers was a federal prosecutor.

With violence begining to wane in some border cities, Nuevo Laredo remains among the most deadly places in Mexico (with Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel vying for control). In 2005, the city’s police chief was gunned down on his first day on the job. In 2010, gunmen killed a retired army general who had been put in charge of the city’s police force. (LAT, Feb. 22; CNN, Feb. 19)

In an especially disturbing trend, the city has recently seen a wave of abductions of youths and adolescents. With officials and the local news media silent, social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter report that at least four youths, aged 13 to 20, have disappeared over the past week. (SDP Noticias, Feb. 22) One Facebook page that has reported such abuses, Valor por Tamaulipas, with more than 164,000 “likes,” has not surprisingly received threats. Last week, fliers were distributed in the state capital Ciudad Victoria offering 600,000 pesos, or $46,500, “for whoever has exact information about the owner of the page ‘Valor por Tamaulipas.'” (AFP, Feb. 22)

Peña Nieto is working to project an image of a rebooted anti-narco effort. He has changed the name of the campaign to “Operations for Strengthening the Security of Mexicans”—whereas Calderón oversaw “High Impact Operations” carried out in the context of the “Mexican State Comprehensive Strategy Against Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime.” Some 45,000 military troops remain deployed against the cartels throughout the country, but defense officials now pledge a new commitment to human rights. Data from the National Defense Secretariat indicates that the military has actually stepped up its enforcement role, however. In little more than two months of the new administration, 1,318 people have been detained by military forces. This represents nearly a third of the arrests reported by the armed forces throughout all of 2007, the first year of the Calderón government. On Feb. 7, Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos met behind closed doors with congressional deputies to brief them on the anti-narco strategy. (Milenio, Feb. 9 via Mexico Voices)