Calderon created “mayhem” and psychosis everywhere in Mexico and destroyed Mexico’s image all over the world by sending the armed forces to fight crime on the streets and among the innocent population. Viridiana Rios, a scholar from Harvard University seems to think differently.
To make my point I will remind you about the search and persecution of those believed to be responsible for the Boston Marathon explosions. People were asked not to go out unnecessarily, and a state of fear overcame the whole population. There had been a violent encounter between supposed criminals and the authorities. The Bostonians were right to be afraid to go out.
Is it useful to ask who started the war on drugs in Mexico? Viridiana Rios, author of Who Started the Mexican Drug War? | Kennedy School Review offers figures obtained by sophisticated methods on the patterns and the distribution of violence around the country. For example, she and another scholar used Google to “…identify the municipalities in which criminal groups operate.” She also found that cartels had become more competitive by 2003. (Rios 18-22)
Their techniques and their findings should be quite valuable to many agencies that fight this kind of crime. However, one of her conclusions was that “Calderon was also right in claiming that he did not start Mexico’s mayhem” is faulty. Well, doesn’t that depend on what she means by “start” and “mayhem”? Other researchers such as Daniel Mejia, have concluded that some 25% of the violence can be attributed to its diffusion from South America, but he doesn’t vindicate Calderon from the remaining 75%. (Croda )
We, the people from Monterrey, lived our lives as best we could, thinking that we could be mistaken for criminals, that we could get caught in the cross fire at any time, day or night, weekdays, weekends or holidays and that we could get picked up by criminals or authorities alike without a court order. This situation did not last a few days as it did in Boston; it lasted 6 macabre years all over Mexico. There were instances of crossfire between cartels on the streets as well as mafia style executions, but those instances were rare before 2006. Soon after Calderon took office, the Johnny’s of the Mexican Cartels took their guns into the streets.
Civil war had started. The Mexican newspaper El Universal published an article in January 2010 affirming that Calderon’s plan, a “Colombian Style war on drugs” was planned by his close collaborators and high ranking DEA officials two months before he took office. According to the authors, “The use of militiamen triggered violence from the first days. By the end of November 2006, Michoacan had been converted into butchery. The year closed with more than 500 executions. In 2005, the drug traffic related homicides in that entity were 211, according to the local authorities”. On the same day, the newspaper published a front page article titled “y dias despues, nos fuimos a la guerra” ... (…and days later, we went to war). The article included the picture shown below.
If this doesn’t look like war, I don’t know what does. Innocent bystanders shot in the so called war against drugs were called “collateral damage” and human rights were constantly violated by the armed forces. Fortunately, I was never a witness or a victim of any such crime. However, I limited my outings during the day and later, stopped going out altogether. The streets of Monterrey, my hometown, became deserted by dusk.
I was fortunate to be able to leave the country. Generally speaking, I was affected by everything that went on. After all, more than 60,000 dead and more than 25,000 missing was the balance of the Colombian war like strategy on drugs. Specifically, I was quite disturbed by a couple of incidents in my hometown. One incident involved my Alma Mater, The Monterrey Institute of Technology (TEC). Two innocent graduate students were mistaken as criminals by military men, which chased the assumed criminals at midnight inside the university’s campus, and later captured. The students were tortured and killed, and weapons were planted on them to justify the aggression. A similar incident happened again a year later in early morning to a young doctor on his way to work. Searches with no warrants became common. No one was safe anymore, neither indoors or outdoors.
Most of the data published by Viridiana Rios is what we already knew. News papers published articles about how border towns had become ghost towns because of rival cartels’ street armed confrontations. Peaceful towns such as San Pedro, a Monterrey suburb, were preferred living places for drug lords and their families. Dailies also published about “truces” made by cartels during holidays, Christmas for instance, when the violent incidents subsided or came to a halt. Any Mexican could have given her the information if she had only asked. We lived through it! And yes, all of Viridiana Rios scientific research findings were used to clean Calderon’s image lacking any internal validity, whatsoever. That is, she could not demonstrate that the variables she studied are related to her conclusion: exonerate Calderon.
