The influential British weekly The Economist asks in its latest issue who is responsible for the disappearance of 43 students of the Teachers College Ayotzinpa—whether it is the State or organized crime. The question would be valid if there was a clear boundary between the two, but there is not.
In large areas of Mexico, several states and municipalities, and major federal institutions organized crime coexists with or has subjugated the State. In the first long stage of the PRI in power, organized crime was overshadowed by the State. Politician and criminal worked together, dividends were distributed, but the power was held by the political class. The transition began with Salinas de Gortari. At the beginning of the new century in several states and municipalities, as well as several federal agencies, drug traffickers began setting conditions. Their economic power grew enormously and, politically as well. The drug trade went global and funding sources increased exponentially.
Traffickers appropriated the main international markets for cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, methamphetamines and with that platform, began to behave like transnational CEO’s. Like any big company they seek more political influence to facilitate the expansion of their businesses. Mexican globalization has strengthened illicit businesses more than any other sector. From Mexican capital, that which has most grown in globalization alongside Carlos Slim and Roberto Martinez is illegal capital.
The government of Enrique Peña Nieto imprisons powerful capos, the latest Vicente Carrillo, brother of “Lord of Heaven,” but does not stop the growing power of organized crime. And it cannot because organized crime has penetrated the State and the whole electoral party system. Organized crime has forced everyone to accept their personnel, with all they have negotiated, all they have funded and are indebted to them.
This blurring of the Mexican State has been facilitated because neoliberalism has sacked it of much of its political, social and financial strength, which has been exploited by powers that pressure, corner or displace. They (the drug cartels) co-govern with the federal government the television monopolies. And in several states and municipalities, share power among organized crime syndicates.
When the border between the State and organized crime is erased, violence increases, and arbitrariness and barbarity are enthroned. In these conditions the State is better able to repress because it can cast the blame for crime due to the shared violence, as happens in Iguala. “It was not I; it was he,” say the politicians.
In Mexico, there is no longer a monopoly of force in the State, but a shared power. And it is not legitimate but criminal.
So much so, that the OAS, the NATO, the U.S. government, multinational corporations and international media, concerned about the Mexican bravado and the possibility that Peña Nieto reforms remain flapping in the wind such do not provide the atmosphere conducive for large capital flows to the country, that they demand that the Mexican barbarism stop.
But miracles are rare in these lands.
Santamaría Gómez is a proffesor at Sinaloa Campus Mazatlán since 1982. Hes has also been a political analyst columnist for the Noroeste Newspaper since 1999.
