The indictment accuses the officials of connections to the Sinaloa Cartel. US Attorney Jay Clayton said: “The Sinaloa Cartel is a ruthless criminal organization that has flooded this community with dangerous drugs for decades… [I]t would not operate as freely or successfully without corrupt politicians and law enforcement officials on their payroll.”

The indictment links the officials to one faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, “Los Chapitos,” run by the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is serving a life prison term in the US. The specific charges include narcotics importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess them, kidnapping to result in death, and conspiracy to kidnap. The indictment demands the forfeiture to the US of all assets gained through the alleged crimes.

In a seeming reference to the fact that Rocha Moya and others of those indicted are from Mexico’s ruling MORENA party, President Claudia Sheinbaum said:

We will not cover up for anyone who has committed a crime. However, if there is no clear evidence, it is evident that the objective of these charges by the Department of Justice is political… We will not allow any foreign government to…decide the future of the Mexican people.

The Foreign Relations Secretariat responded to the indictment in a statement on X, reading: “The Secretariat of Foreign Relations received requests for provisional arrest for extradition purposes, which will be forwarded to the Attorney General’s Office. No evidence is attached to the documents.”

Rocha Moya “categorically and absolutely” denied the allegations against him in a post on X, adding: “It is part of a perverse strategy to violate [Mexico’s] constitutional order, specifically the national sovereignty.”

From JURIST, April 30. Used with permission. Internal links added.

Map: Google

Did Delcy capitulate?
Meanwhile in Washington, White House officials were briefing members of Congress, who were not notified beforehand of the Jan. 3 military operation in which Maduro was captured.

And in Venezuela, Maduro’s groomed successor, newly inaugurated acting president Delcy Rodríguez, showed signs of capitulating to the pressure from Washington. After the Pentagon raid in which Maduro was taken (which also claimed the lives of at least 60 people, including civilians and several members of a Cuban security detail), Rodriguez defiantly stated in a televised address: “There is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros.”

But the next day, she struck a conciliatory tone, writing on social media: “We invite the US government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence.”

Bellicose mid-flight press conference
Rodríguez is under explicit threat from Trump, who told reporters on a Dec. 4 flight from Florida to DC that if she doesn’t cooperate “she will face a situation probably worse than Maduro.” When asked about his boast that he will “run” Venezuela, Trump responded: “We’re dealing with the people. We’re dealing with the people that just got sworn in. And don’t ask me who’s in charge, because I will give you an answer and it’ll be very controversial.” When the reporter took this bait and asked him what that meant, he replied: “It means we’re in charge.”

Trump was similarly lacking subtlety in his claim to Venezuela’s oil: “The oil companies are ready to go. They’re going to go in. They’re going to rebuild the infrastructure. You know, we built it to start off with many years ago. They took it away. You can’t do that.”

Apparently refering to Venezuelan efforts to extend state control over the country’s oil resources following US investment in the sector over a century ago, he added: “It was the greatest theft in the history of America. Nobody has ever stolen our property like they have. They took our oil away from us. They took the infrastructure away and all that infrastructure is rotted and decayed, and the oil companies are going to go in and rebuild it.”

And indeed, shares of Chevron, the last US oil company that was authorized to operate in Venezuela, soared as much as 10% in pre-market trading after Trump’s comment. Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips shares also rose around 4%.

Queried about his supposed isolationism and antipathy to “nation-building,” Trump explicitly invoked the notion of Latin America as a US influence sphere, which was articulated in his recent National Security Strategy. He said of Venezuela: “This isn’t a country that’s on the other side of the world. This isn’t a country like we have to travel 24 hours in an airplane. This is Venezuela. It’s in our area, the Donroe Doctrine.”

Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Greenland
He went on to directly threaten Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro: “He has cocaine mills, cocaine factories. He’s not going to be doing it very long.” So there will be another military operation?, the reporter asked. Trump: “It sounds good to me.”

Mexico was next. Invoking the flow of migrants across the US southern border, Trump reiterated his recent threat of military intervention: “Mexico has to get their act together, because they’re pouring through Mexico, and we’re going to have to do something.”

And even Greenland: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I can tell you. You know what Denmark did recently to boost up security in Greenland? They added one more dogsled. It’s true.”

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen prompty responded: “This is enough. No more pressure. No more innuendo. No more fantasies about annexation.”

And Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said in a statement: “It is necessary to reaffirm that in Mexico the people are in charge and that we are a free, independent and sovereign country. Cooperation, yes. Subordination and intervention, no.”

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio meanwhile warned that Cuba could be next, responding to a reporter’s question at a DC press conference: “Yeah, look, if I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” (PBS NewsHour, FreedomNews.tv, CNN, The Hill, Politico, NDTV, NBC News)

Photo: US Navy via Latin America Reports

Manzo’s assassin, who was killed by police on the scene, has been identified as a 17-year-old methamphetamine addict. Authorities are said to believe he was paid by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, whose suspected local plaza chief in Uruapan—identified as René N, or “El Rhino”—was arrested by city police in August.

This was the second prominent assassination in Michoacán in as many weeks. On Oct. 20, the body of Bernardo Bravo, president of the Apatzingan Valley Citrus Producers Association, was found in his vehicle on a rural road. He had been campaigning in recent months against the extortion demands of the cartels on local lime growers, and their cooptation of agriculture in the state to launder illicit activities.

Specter of US intervention
In a Twitter post after Manzo’s assassination, US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau (who served as ambassador to Mexico during Donald Trump’s first term) wrote: “The US stands ready to deepen security cooperation with Mexico to wipe out organized crime on both sides of the border.”

But this comes as the specter of unilateral US military intervention has been raised. NBC News reported Nov. 3 that the Trump White House has started planning a “potential mission” involving US troops and intelligence officers to target the cartels on Mexican soil. Citing anonymous sources in the administration, NBC said that training has already begun for the mission, which could include drone strikes as well as ground operations inside Mexico. President Sheinbaum firmly rejected any possibility of US military intervention, stating that Mexicans are “united against any interference.”

In February, the State Department designated six Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations”—the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the New Familia Michoacana, the Gulf Cartel, the Northeast Cartel, and the United Cartels. Simultaenously, the State Department conferred FTO designation on Central America’s MS-13 and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. (MND, MND, CBC, CNN, PRI, Milenio, CBS, NBC)

Photo: Juan José Estrada Serafín/Cuartoscuro.com via Mexico News Daily

The struggle pitted Los Chapitos, the sons of imprisoned kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, against Los Mayos, followers of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. It was sparked by the arrest of El Mayo by US agents immediately after a plane carrying him touched down in El Paso, Texas, on July 25, 2024. El Mayo claimed he had been abducted by Los Chapitos and forced onto the Texas-bound plane.

The initial explosion of violence in the second week of that September, some 30 were killed, causing residents to observe a self-imposed curfew. But the bloodletting has continued since then, with bodies often left on streets or other public places as a warning. The death toll in Sinaloa over the past year is said to exceed 1,800, with local activists counting another 2,800 disappeared. (Animal Politico, Mexico News Daily, MND, NYT, NYT, CBS, News Nation, Reuters, BBC News)

El Mayo pleaded guilty to trafficking and conspiracy charges in a US federal court in Brooklyn this Aug. 25 to avoid the death penalty. Attorney General Pam Bondi flew to New York for the plea, and boasted that Zambada “will die in a US federal prison.” Fellow septuagenarian kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero was apparently also included in the deal, and will likewise avoid execution. Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of El Chapo, arrested on the same flight as El Mayo last year, has plead not guilty in federal court in Chicago. (AP, NewsHour, Latin Times)

The outbreak of violence in Sinaloa last year also saw bloody escalations elsewhere around Mexico. The remains of Mayor Alejandro Arcos of Chilpancingo, capital of Guerrero state, were found in a pickup truck on Oct. 6, 2024, with his severed head on the roof. Four mayoral candidates were killed in the state of Guanajuato that June. The assassinations caused several mayors around the country to request protection from Mexican federal authorities. (AP)

See our last report on Mexico’s human rights crisis.

Photo: Trasciende Noticias via Facebook

In response to the increased US military presence in the Caribbean, President Maduro announced plans to mobilize 4.5 million members of the territorial militia across the country. “Rifles and missiles for the rural forces! To defend Venezuela’s territory, sovereignty and peace,” he proclaimed. (Latin America Reports)

The US Justice Department indicted Maduro in 2020 as the supposed kingpin of the “Cartel of the Suns,” and has since asserted his ties to the Tren de Aragua gang network, as well as Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. This year, the US State Department classified both the Cartel of the Suns and Tren de Aragua as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

In June, Hugo Carvajal, former head of Venezuelan military intelligence, was convicted on drug trafficking charges after being arrested in Madrid and put on trial in the US. Carvajal had been a feared spymaster who went by the name “El Pollo” (The Chicken), but fled Venezuela in 2019 after calling on the army to back an opposition candidate and overthrow Maduro. (BBC News, NACLA Report)

In March, the US tightened sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector.

Photo: US Navy via Latin America Reports

Mexican military troops apprehended Ovidio Guzmán López in an operation that left 29 dead—including 10 soliders—in the wee hours of Jan. 5. The son of the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, imprisoned in the US since 2017, Ovidio, 32, was said to oversee sucessor organizations to his father’s Sinaloa Cartel, known locally as the Pacific Cartel—variously identified as Los Menores faction or Los Chapitos.

Following the arrest, violence exploded in Culiacán as Ovidio’s followers erected blockades and engaged in armed skirmishes with the security forces. Three local airports were closed, with highways blocked by burning cars and trucks. An attempt to arrest Ovidio in October 2019 led to similar violence, resulting in his release.

Guzmán was flown to Mexico City, where he is reportedly being held at the elite Campo Militar 1. (Aztec Reports, El Pais, Spain, BBC News)

Deadly prelude in Ciudad Juárez
New Years Day also saw violence in Ciudad Juárez as soldiers and police were deployed in response to a deadly jailbreak at the city’s Cereso No. 3 prison. Chihuahua state authorities said that 10 guards and security officers were killed, along with four prisoners, and that 24 inmates escaped. The violence apparently began in a conflict between rival gangs at the facility—a repeated pattern throughout Latin America. (El Paso Times)

Ciudad Juárez has long been the scene of a struggle between the Sinaloa Cartel and the local Juárez Cartel. Last August saw the arrest of Carlos Arturo Quintana AKA “El Ochenta,” accused leader of “La Línea” gang, said to be an enforcement arm of the Juárez Cartel, implicated in much violence in the border zone. He was arrested by a mixed force of federal police and army troops in the town of Namiquipa in western Chihuahua, and promptly extradited to the United States. (Univision, Sol de Mexico, El Paso Times, El Pais, Madrid)

…and in Tijuana
Earlier in August, the US Consulate General in Tijuana issued a “shelter in place” order for government employees as rival gangs torched cars in a score-settling spree in several Baja California cities. At least 19 vehicles were set on fire in Tijuana, Mexicali, Ensenada, Tecate and Rosarito. Authorities blamed the Jalisco New Generation cartel, another rival of the Sinaloa syndicate. (KFMB, San Diego, BBC News)

Washington seeks its own score-settling
Legendary drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, long on the FBI’s most-wanted list, was captured in July by Mexican forces in the Sinaloa mountian pueblo of San Simón. A Mexican navy Blackhawk helicopter carrying 15 crashed near the coastal city of Los Mochis during the operation, killing all but one of those on board. The arrest came three days after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador met with his US counterpart Joe Biden at the White House.

Although wanted in the torture-killing of a DEA agent in 1985, Caro Quintero walked free in 2013 after 28 years in prison when a court overturned his 40-year term for the murder. Mexico’s Supreme Court later upheld and re-instated the sentence. But by then, the erstwhile leader of the Guadalajara Cartel had disappeared. He is currently fighting his extradition to the US in the Mexican courts. (PRI, AP, CNS, CNS)

Map: PCL

More than 4,000 clandestine mass graves have been unearthed around the country. The unmarked graves are popularly known as narco-fosas. Citizens and kin of the missing in many states have formed their own informal search committees, scouring the deserts and brush for remains of their loved ones. (DW, DW, BBC News, Télam)

Women continue to be disproportionately targeted. The Executive Secretary for the National Security System (SESNSP) reports 3,462 women slain in Mexico between January and November last year, a rate of more than 10 per day. Of these cases, 922 were classified as “femicides”—women targeted for their gender. While the overall number of killings of women dropped 0.32% last year compared to the previous, there was a 3.25% rise in the number of femicides. (LAT)

See our last report on the body count in Mexico’s drug war, and the human rights crisis.

Photo via openDemocracy

Castro also pledged during her campaign that she will “open diplomatic and commercial relations with continental China,” which was widely taken as meaning a switch of diplomatic recognition. Honduras is currently one of only 14 countries that recognize Taipei rather than Beijing. (The Hill, NYT, El Economista, Mexico, El Heraldo, Honduras, Taipei Times)

“It’s an attempt to balance the hegemony of the United States,” economist Ismael Zepeda of the Honduran thinktank FOSDEH told The Guardian. “Honduras wants to enter into the dynamic of saying if you do not support me internally, I have another ally who will give me the resources I need if I want to build megaprojects.”

One of these megaprojects is the Patuca III hydro-electric dam in marginalized Olancho department, La Miskitia region—being built by the Chinese firm SinoHydro, and bitterly opposed by the local Tawahka, Pech, Miskitu and Garifuna indigenous peoples. (Cultural Survival, Cultural Survival, International Rivers, BankTrack) SinoHydro was also involved in construction of the Agua Zarca dam—that which was being opposed by the martyred indigenous environmentalist Berta Caceres.

According to World Bank data, Honduras owes 4% of its $10 billion external debt to China compared to 0.01% to the US. The country’s principal creditors are international bondholders, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), and the World Bank.

But Honduras has traditionally been strategically important to the US; it has long hosted Joint Task Force Bravo, the Pentagon’s principal component for hemisperic policing. “The US will not let Honduras go because it is crucial for homeland security,” Antonio Yang, a Taiwanese Latin America expert and honorary professor at the National Defense University in Tegucigalpa. told the Financial Times.

And indeed, the incoming Castro administration has already started to equivocate. Gerardo Torres, the LIBRE Party’s secretary of international relations and a member of Castro’s transition team, this week said: “The new government will maintain relations with Taiwan. President-elect Xiomara Castro has been clear, these ties will be maintained. Nobody in the party wants to enter government distancing ourselves from the United States.” (Al Jazeera)

One senses quiet pressure from the US embassy behind this back-pedalling. In the past five years, three countries in Central America and the Caribbean have switched their recognition from Taipei to Beijing: El Salvador, Panama and the Dominican Republic. In all three cases, the US responded by symbolically recalling its ambassadors. But the hypocrisy of the US position is obvious: Washington itself has recognized Beijing instead of Taipei since 1979.

On Dec. 10, Nicaragua became the latest country to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, which is what prompted the seeming back-pedalling from the LIBRE Party. (BBC News, Al Jazeera)

It is the archaic fiction of “One China” that reduces Central America and Taiwan alike to diplomatic pawns in the New Cold War between Washington and Beijing. It is tragic to see the Central American republics, in their struggle to break free of Washington’s orbit, acquiesce in Beijing’s design to incorporate Taiwan into its own orbit—or, more ambitiously, its national territory. Yet another illustration of how a global divide-and-rule racket is the essence of the state system.

Map: Perry-Castañeda Library

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

The clock is ticking in Mexico, where the country’s Supreme Court has mandated that Congress pass a cannabis legalization measure.

A 90-day deadline initially imposed by the high court in October 2018 has been extended by the magistrates twice already. The current deadline is set to expire April 30—but lawmakers now pledge they will pass the new law by the end of February.

Julio Menchaca, president of the Senate Justice Commission and a leader of the center-left Morena party, told news site Enfoque Noticias Feb. 11. “We have the deadline set by the Court, but we hope to have it out of the Senate this month.”

Menchaca said lawmakers had heard much testimony from medical experts as well as cannabis users, would-be entrepreneurs and other stakeholders, and are ready to act.

In comments that same day to Politico.mx, Menchaca said that legal cannabis “will be an element of peace in the country. Prohibition has generated so much violence over the past 100 years, as well as the creation of organized crime.” A regulated cannabis sector, he said, would be an opportunity for “peace, tranquility and the participation of the campesinos in a legal framework.”

Equity for the campesinos?
Mexico’s campesinos, or peasants, have long been reduced to virtual serfdom by the cartels, forced to grow illicit cannabis and opium poppy on pain of deadly retribution. Bringing them into the regulated sector will be critical to undermining the cartels.

The proposed bill would create a Mexican Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis to oversee all aspects of the industry—from cultivation to retail sale, medical and “recreational.”

According to a breakdown of the bill in Mexico City’s Milenio newspaper, penalties will be removed for possession of up to 28 grams (about an ounce), with unlicensed possession of up to 200 grams essentially decriminalized, punishable only by a fine. A regulatory regimen is to be established for production and marketing.

Encouragingly, the president of the National Farming Council (CNA, by its Spanish initials), Bosco de la Vega, has announced his support for the law. “We are ready for this industry,” he told reporters.

But getting agribusiness on board is not what will bring peace to bleeding Mexico. A secure place in the new economy for the campesinos, who have long borne the brunt of the narco-violence, will be the real challenge. And the outlaw economy is so deeply ingrained, especially in poor or remote areas, that day-lighting the campesiono communities with legal cannabis will certainly pose a challenge.

A grim analogy may be provided by the outrageous case of two campesinos slain in apparent targeted assassinations in the state of Michoacán in January, both of whom had been working at the world-famous Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. They had been hoping to attract eco-tourists to the reserve, so the mountainous area can have an economy based on standing forests rather than illegal timber-felling. But this was apparently perceived as a threat by the local timber mafias.

Narco gangs in Michoacán broadly overlap with local mafias that illegally exploit timber on protected lands, and have also co-opted the state’s avocado industry to launder illicit proceeds and maintain a legal cover for land-grabs, leading to warnings of “blood avocados.”

Michoacán, just as famous for its marijuana as its avocados, was also the scene of the latest entry in the wave of killings of journalists in Mexico.

Fidel Ávila Gómez, new anchor for a local affiliate of La Ke Buena radio network, went missing Nov. 29. His body was found Jan. 7 near the border of Michoacán and Guerrero states. Family members told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists that his efforts to uncover local narco-corruption may have put him in the crosshairs of La Familia Michoacana, the state’s notorious reigning cartel.

These cases illustrate the entrenched terror network poised to resist the daylighting of a significant sector of illicit economy.

US policy not helping
And evidence is perennially emerging of how this systemic narco-corruption goes to the very highest levels of the Mexican state. Mexico’s former secretary of public security Genaro García Luna was arrested by US authorities in Dallas on Dec. 10, charged with accepting multi-million-dollar bribes to allow the infamous Sinaloa Cartel to operate. He is to face trial in Brooklyn, where Sinaloa kingpin Chapo Guzmán was last year convicted.

García Luna was the head of Mexican law enforcement from 2006 to 2012—precisely the period when the war on the cartels was being militarized, and the narco-violence was spinning out of control.

Things may be cleaner at the top since Morena took over in 2018. But there is still an entrenched power structure in Mexico that has much invested in illicit cannabis, and resisting the emergence of a regulated industry.

Then there was Donald Trump’s distinctly unhelpful suggestion to designate Mexico’s drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.” Trump made the announcement during an interview with Bill O’Reilly in November.

“One of the things that you’ve said to me…is that if another country murdered 100,000 Americans with guns we would go to war with that country,” O’Reilly said, practically spoon-feeding him the response. “Yet, the Mexican drug cartels kill more than 100,000 Americans every year by the importation of dangerous narcotics. Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them with drones and things like that?”

“I don’t want to say what I am going to do, but they will be designated,” Trump replied. “I’ve already offered Mexico…to let us go in and clean it out and he so far has rejected the offer but at some point something has to be done. Look, we are losing 100,000 people a year to what is happening and what is coming through on Mexico.” (“He” seemingly refers to President Andres Manuel López Obrador, who has unequivocally repudiated any such US overtures.)

Later, Trump tweeted: “All necessary work has been completed to declare Mexican Cartels terrorist organizations. Statutorily we are ready to do so.”

It only gave a boost to Trump’s propaganda when a town just across the Texas border saw a spectacularly horrific shoot-out Nov. 28. Ten presumed cartel gunmen and four police were killed in the gun-battle in Villa Union, just outside the border city of Piedras Negras.

And in the border city of Matamoros, an actual refugee camp has sprung up, as thousands of asylum seekers wait for their claims to be heard in the US. This is a bitter fruit of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which those fleeing the violence in Central America and Mexico must wait on the Mexican side of the border while their US asylum claims are pending.

Legal cannabis could be a significant step toward de-escalating Mexico’s long narco-crisis. But if it is not crafted with care and courage, it may not live up to its potential. And, as ever, US policy is not helping.

Cross-post to Cannabis Now  and Global Ganja Report