Angry Planet - When the 'War on Drugs' got literal, and how it could end

Episode Date: September 28, 2016

Drug cartel weaponry has gotten deadlier. In 2015, a Mexican army helicopter was shot down in the state of Jalisco. The local cartel used a rocket-propelled grenade to do it. And for years, drug gangs have worked on their navies, moving from cigarette boats to homemade submarines. They have air forces, as well, and fight pitched battles against the army in Mexico and other places. But things are changing.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. There's a feeling that, you know, the U.S. sends the guns and the money in Mexico, Colombia, pay with their lives. When a drug cartel has the means to blow a government helicopter out of the sky, when the U.S. Coast Guard has to face off against submarines instead of rubber rafts,

it's time to ask if your law enforcement issue isn't really a shooting war. This week on War College, we discuss how what was once hyperbole became reality, the war on drugs. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world. in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with Wars Boring. Gabriel Stargutter is a Reuters reporter in Mexico City. He grew up in the UK and has worked in Germany, Mexico, Colombia, and across Central America. He has regularly

reported on drug gangs, immigration, and violence. So Gabriel, Thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. All right, we're going to start off with like a crazy big picture question. Why is there a drug war? And when did it actually start? There's a drug war because there's demand for illegal substances like cocaine, meth, opium, heroin. And because they can't be legally distributed by companies that are taxed and regulated by the government,

it's a market that's been cornered by criminals. who have no other way of enforcing contract disputes other than through violence. And territories are marked out by force, and incursions are answered with violence. So that's why we have a drug war. When did it start? There are lots of different points along the way where you could say that it begins. But, I mean, some will go back even until, you know, prohibition in the United States.

was a form of drug war which the mafia cornered. So you have different drugs which have come to the fall like cocaine, which was run by the Colombians in the 80s. Cocaine is still a big drug, but these days the Mexicans have sort of cornered the market and have basically turned the Colombians into suppliers. Who are kind of the major players in the drug war? Like who are the big cartels, which countries are mostly involved?

Specifically about Mexico, probably the biggest cartel, and probably the one you're most likely to have heard about is the Sinaloa cartel, which was the one that was led by Joaquin Chappelgousman until his arrest earlier this year. That's kind of one of the old-school legacy cartels in the sense that it's a cartel which had very robust links with the Colombian supplies of cocaine

and then had very robust sort of customers' distribution networks in the United States and one which also had large territorial. control in mainly northern Mexico. But then more recently, you've got new sort of aspiring cartels. A few years ago, you had the famous Setas cartel who sort of hyperviolent newcomer on the scene who didn't really have the old school links with the Colombians, so the corrupt patronage networks with politicians.

And so they sort of relied less on drug smuggling. They got into other businesses like humans. smuggling of Central American migrants, extortion, and were kind of known for being incredibly violent, decapitation, dissolving people's bodies in acid tubs, that sort of thing. More recently, there's been a new cartel, which seems to be making ground, or at least threatening the Sinaloa cartel, which is the Halisco New Generation cartel. I've had a number of high-profile victories against the government and also against the Sinaloa cartel. So, you know, as you can see, there's basically always a desire from on the part of

newcomers to muscle in on territory if they see an opportunity there. And I suppose that's why you get these seemingly intractable periods of violence as one cartel's dominance is maybe challenged by another. What does a victory against the government look like? I mean, can't the government just bring in more troops and take back whatever it is? I mean, what? Yeah, I mean, A victory in the government, so in the case of the Helleschool New Generation Cartel, they shot down a government helicopter with, I think, six soldiers on board, and that was in May of last year, in May 2015, and that's pretty unprecedented, you know,

a bunch of mafiosos with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, shooting down a government helicopter. I mean, I think that's pretty new for Mexico's drug war. That's a pretty high-profile sort of scalp for them. But the problem with troops, I mean, it's an interesting question. Why don't they just flood it with troops? Unfortunately, with troops, as Mexico's, I suppose, 10-year drug war now has shown, troops are very corruptible, particularly if they're garrisoned near in cartel-held territory.

There are lots of instances of human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, of specifically soldiers, police forces, even elite police forces. So, you know, once you're in those bad lands, you know, that rise, tide kind of tends to mixed metaphors kind of to tar everyone so that has been the government's response at least in Mexico for the last few years

has been oh let's just flood it with troops that hasn't really yielded that many sort of results that are widely considered to be successful problem also is what they tended to do is they tended to try and behead these criminal organisations

so bring that cut down their leaders arrest them shoot whatever it might be, but then often what that causes is power vacuums as new people trying to aspire to reach to the top, usually shoot their way to their top. And so that has many people believe created more violence, not less. So you're describing, I mean, right now at least, it's a real shooting war. I mean, are they using military tactics on both sides? Is this like a guerrilla war like you might see in the Middle East? There are some people who argue that what Mexico's drug war

and drug wars in general actually across Latin America is that they should be viewed as criminal insurgencies. I mean, militaryisation is a real thing. The Cetdas were born out of the army. They were deserters who basically started as the enforcement wing of the

Gulf cartel. Then they later swallowed up the Gulf cartel, decided that they didn't like playing second fiddle any longer and decided that they would take their lunch. So the Hylisco New Generation Cartel also very much known for their sort of military tactics, their militarized

sort of appearance and how they promote themselves on, you know, YouTube videos and all sorts of different arenas and, you know, just shooting down an army helicopter is not exactly just what a typical drugs wholesaler does. So there is an element, yeah, that this is, this has that element.

I mean, I think a lot of analysts are also wary of going down that route and branding it something like a guerrilla movement, because there are no real political ends here. this is a fight for power, this is a fight for territory, and, you know, defending oneself against newcomers against aspiring usurpers or whatever it might be. So, but when you talked about videos, are you talking about, I mean, are there social media outreach efforts?

Or, I mean, what kind of videos are you talking about? Well, they're not trying to sort of, I don't think it's not like sort of ISIS videos where they're trying to actually actively bring people into the course. I mean, it's more, you know, they have gatherings and they have, I suppose you would call it propaganda, but it's not really propaganda in the sense that they're trying to terrorize or, you know, put their message across through the media. It's more their own sort of ragadocio or something, I suppose, you know. All right, talking about the kind of the political end or lack of political ends, I want to talk about what's going on in Columbia right now.

So the FARC and the Colombian government have signed a, are working on a peace deal. How do you see that affecting, first of all, what's FARC's role in the drug trade? And how do you see this peace deal affecting thing? I think that's a really interesting question about what's going to happen in Colombia, because, you know, the FARC, I mean, began as a sort of political movement. That's been chipped away over the last 40 years. And, you know, that was kind of part of the reason why I think people, particularly in Colombia, had lost any support for the FARC,

the political angle was completely lost, and they basically become drug smuggling operations. One thing that always seems to be an inevitability is that drugs keep making their way north to Europe, wherever it might be. The flow rarely stops because there's money to be made. So I don't think that the drugs flow will stop. I think it's a big question about how the Colombians are going to, you know, try and wean the FARC, you know, first off, this bizarre career lifestyle that they've had living

in the jungle for decades, and then also, you know, from a very, very important income stream that has worked for them for a long time. So I think that's going to be a thorny issue that they're going to have to confront in Colombia. But I don't doubt that the Coke will keep flowing. Does anything change between cartels and regimes? Right now on Netflix, they're doing a show called narcos. So that's about Pablo Escobar and, you know, the first great cartel as, you know, as the 80s would tell you. So do things change? Do things get better, worse? You know, are there good drug lords? To answer your first question, it's what, the mention of the sort of legacy cartel in Colombia, the melein cartel, is an interesting one because I think there's

something approximating that going on in Mexico at the moment. I think since Chappel has been in Jail, obviously famously escaped in 2015 from jail, burrowed out of his jail cell and was on the run for six months and then was finally arrested again in January. Ever since then, there have been some sort of high-profile attacks. There was a raid against his mother's house, which is kind of a very, you know, you don't attack the mother. Then recently his sons were kidnapped from a bar in a seaside resort.

And then just a few days ago, he was over the weekend, person who's widely believed to be running the Sinelloa cartel El Mayor Sambada, who's Chapo is number two, his nephew was assassinated. These are kind of viewed, obviously the drug war is a dangerous place for anyone, but those three sort of episodes viewed in conjunction, it tells you that there's some sort of attack against the Sinala Qatat, which was really the number one cartel in the country, particularly as other ones have sort of waned in recent years.

So one thing that security experts say, this is actually part of a process which kind of, Colombia has already experienced. In Colombia, you had the first-generation cartels like the Medellin cartel, which was Pablo as one. And then over time, the FARC then got involved in the drugs trade. But over time, actually, what you see happening or what you saw happening as, you know, the US and the Colombian security forces pounded, all these drug smuggling organizations,

was that they kind of splinter and disintegrate a little bit, which in some sense is probably some people might brand as a victory. in reality it's often not the case it actually makes things more violent, more bitty, more fractured and this is the argument that is sometimes made in some sort of, almost in a conspiratorial way is that the old school cartels maintain the peace, were only really interested in business,

only really became violent when a competitor encroached on their territory. I mean, I think that's also kind of a bit of a revisionist reading. These are not nice organisations. They're violent, and they're built on intimidation. But there probably is some sort of sense of truth to that in the sense that once they really disintegrate

and it's anything's up for grabs and there is no clear boss, then things can get really, really violent. And that's been seen in all sorts of episodes. Firstly, in Colombia, through the rise of the Bacrimo, as they were known, Bandas Criminales. And also, I think you're starting to see it in Mexico now. I mean, that's kind of what happened with the Ceddas.

I think you're seeing that a bit with the Hellisco-Noeuera generation cartel, which are the sort of aspiring bad boys of the moment. And I think that, you know, there are signs that as these old legacy cartels, which have these very deep networks of corruption, distribution channels both in South America and in the States, and also Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia, I do think that that can lead to an uptick in violence. Gabriel, I wanted to circle back around to something we were talking about a few questions back, about the cultural stuff.

You said that there's a bunch of TV shows about narcos. How do the people kind of see all this violence and these cartels? Are they heroes? Are they villains? Are they everything in between? I think that depends when you ask the question and also where. I mean, in some places they're seen as outlaws, sort of, you know, almost Robin Hood type figures.

But I mean, I think if you ask that question in Colombia these days, which has basically been dealing with the sort of nasty side of the drug, war for, at least since the early 70s, there's pretty much exhaustion and very little positive that can be said. The cases of Colombia and Mexico are not analogous because in Colombia you had a sort of politicized guerrilla movement, which you don't have in Mexico. But I think in Mexico as well, some people who've, you know, lived under the Sinaloa cartel might say, you know, these are great men who built, you know, because they would often fill in where the state would fail. So, you know, they would buy allegiance by, you know, putting a new roof on the church or these sort of kind of Robin Hood-esque jobs, but, you know, it's an alternative state which is built on violence and intimidation. So I don't know if really it's, you know, it's more a failing of the state of what they should be doing. I think, you know, in Mexico people, as this sort of widespread criminality becomes more of a factor. I mean, for example, in Mexico, rich people used to get kidnapped. These days, the guys, the guys, the guys, the guys,

who sells the bread at the end of the road is getting kidnapped, you know, and that I think is getting extorted, is getting their daughter kidnapped, you know, I mean, that I think is changing things and I think, you know, I think that there's a desire to maybe, well, this chimes with another thing, which is the sort of more widespread

feeling across Latin America, which we're increasingly seeing, which is kind of a sort of exhaustion with the US-led war on drugs, and that's being reflected in more and more Latin America. leaders openly questioning prohibition, starting to discuss the possibility of regulation. You know, starting to really question, is this paradigm that we've had for so long really delivering any positive results for us? I mean, there's a feeling that, you know, the U.S. sends the guns and the money, and Mexico, Colombia, pay with their lives.

So we've been kind of slowly decriminalizing, regulating, and legalizing marijuana in different states here in America. Is there any sense that that has had an effect on the drug trade down there at all? And if so, what kind of effect? Yeah, I mean, I think it definitely has. I mean, there are two things, right, politically and actually on the business side of things. I know that the drug cartels are starting to abandon weed as a product, because when it's being made in your main market and so when anyone can get hold of it, then it's sort of, it no longer becomes a product that is of any use to you,

particularly now that the quality in the United States has got so good. And the quality here is basically sort of bushweed, right? which is cheap, sort of a scruffy, seedy, sort of weed, which is a much lower value. The stuff in the United States is pure value added, right? Hydroponics and things like that. And you're even in some bizarre cases even seeing like US weed coming over to Mexico. I mean, I'm sure that's probably for a very small connoisseur class. But I think the cartels, I mean, you can see this in terms of what's being stopped at the border.

The cartels are definitely starting to export less weed. I still think weed is of value to them. I think what it does, and I've been told this by police and drugs officials here in Mexico, weed provides cash flow. So you don't make any money off weed, but it allows you to pay your troops. Okay. Why is the guy selling bread at the end of the road being kidnapped now? Well, I mean, if you think about it, when you have a monolithic cartel, which basically controls everything, the police, the politicians, everything in the town, they also have an enormously lucrative income stream which is selling cocaine or selling weed,

then they don't really need, like they can keep the peace. In fact, actually it's good for business to keep the piece. When there's a kind of a few more people scrapping over the same area, suddenly the money is not as guaranteed and you need money, right? I mean, a criminal organisation only survives by the fact that it can pay its foot soldiers more than they could earn in the legitimate labour market. So you need to guarantee income to lots of different people. you also need to pay bribes. You don't pay tax, right? So you pay bribes. And that's an expensive

pursuit. So you need money. And unfortunately, if the money is more scarce, you have to do less pleasant things, which involves kidnapping the guy sells bread, right? Or, you know, whatever it might be. It almost sounds like it's more of a fight over scraps than the huge paydays it used to be. Is there some truth in that? Yeah, I think there's evidence, definitely, for that. I mean, you see that with human smuggling. I've written a few stories about Central American migrants who are kidnapped just to extort their family members in the United States. You know, it's a tough, it's a tough industry that, right? You've got these drop houses with 200 Hondurans in right next to the U.S. border.

I mean, literally right next to the U.S. border. And, you know, they need to be fed that you can't have them starving. They can't kill each other. I mean, obviously, you're not exact. It's not the writs. But, you know, this is not an easy line of work. And you have to get them to call their family members who are also poor immigrants living in, you know, Houston or Los Angeles or New York and say, you've got to wire me $6,000 in the next two days

or else I might die in this house where I'm sleeping on the floor with 100 other Hondurans. I mean, these are tough lines of work and unpleasant work. And, you know, you're extorting people who have themselves have very little money. I mean, you're right. I think they are fighting over scraps. Older, more legacy cartels, they're facing threats these days which are unprecedented in their heyday of the 80s, right? I mean, the Americans are all over them. The Mexicans can't really not be all over them anymore

because the pressure is so great from the Americans, from their own populations, from the international community. You know, they can't just sit back and do nothing like they probably did in the 80s. Technology is all over these guys now. I mean, they can't make phone calls. So I just think, you know, these old-school cartels are under enormous amounts of pressure

and you add to the fact that they don't sell weed anymore. And, for example, the most dangerous new drug is fentanyl, right? which is a sort of synthetic opiate, that's a mail order business at the moment. You buy that, and someone bedexes it to you from China. And two kilos of fentanyl can equal tens of thousands of kilos of street drugs. So, I mean, you know, these are all things which are changing, and I think which are putting pressure on these old school cartels,

but then at the same time you have the Mexican state not guaranteeing great jobs. Wage growth is very stagnant, productivity is very low. So a lot of people are saying, well, you know, why don't I join these bad boys? And so, but there's not enough, you know, not enough good times to go around anymore. So they're having to get into these, you know, new revenue streams, which are, which are basically ratcheting up sort of criminality, I think, you know, day-to-day, kind of boring, destructive criminality. So does that change the model that, you know, if the U.S. made drugs legal, then the criminality would go away? I mean, it always sounded like a fairly good argument to me.

It sounds like from what you're saying also, it doesn't matter. If the United States made all drugs legal, it would change things. But there's a lot more going on. Right, the gangs that the war created would still remain. That seems to me more a failure of, you know, Mexico, right? I mean, they need to provide jobs. They need to provide better education. They need to provide...

I mean, why doesn't any country just have loads of gangs, right? I mean, well, because, you know, people believe that the legitimate labor market is a better place to be and you don't die like they don't rape your daughter so I think Mexico needs to get better at convincing people that they should have legitimate careers and raise salaries and more widespread education have a justice system

that isn't a complete sham these things would also help a lot but yeah I mean there is also the elephant in the room which is that you know when you have a client the size of the United States next door to you who demands drugs someone's going to step in and supply it. I think that's just a reality as well.

You asked about legal weed, how is that affecting the cartels? But I think there's also a very important question of how's that affecting politics in Latin America. For example, California in November is going to have a big ballot on whether they should legalize weed. California, you guys will correct me,

is one of the top five economies in the world just on its own. I mean, this is a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge market, and it's right on the Mexican border. It's very hard. Arizona is also due to have a ballot on this as well. It's very hard for the United States to say, hey, you've got a, we want you to have a prohibitionist drug policy when a border state with an economy in size of California is legalizing weed. I mean, you know, there's a certain, or at least from the Mexican and Latin American perception,

there's a certain hypocrisy there. And so I think that's accelerating discussions in what are essentially still very conservative countries, right? You need to understand that Latin America is quite conservative about this sort of stuff. You know, they're not big drug users themselves, but they are very afflicted by the drugs trade. So I think this is really accelerating conversations within Mexico, certainly within Mexico. Colombia has just legalized medicinal marijuana, and Mexico is thinking about doing the same. These are conversations which are kind of unprecedented in Latin America, where drugs are bad and full stop, end of story. These conversations are now gathering speed

And I think, you know, the sort of dogmatic war on drugs That we've sort of known through Nixon, Reagan And all those sort of days, I think is not over yet But, you know, it's being chipped away at such a pace That I think it's going to be insustainable for much longer I mean, as soon as the United States federally legalizes weed Which I imagine probably will happen What option do these countries have?

What option? I mean, otherwise you would have legal, U.S. weed flowing over the border into Mexico. I mean, you know, it wouldn't be sustainable anymore. So I think, you know, the weed question in the United States is an interesting one because it's really provoking kind of unprecedented internal conversations within these Latin American countries, which are going to fundamentally change the way the drugs war develops. Do you think that the apparatus of fighting drugs, so like the DEA and the other forces that are arrayed to fight the drug war? actually helps keep them around or keep them illegal?

Yeah, I think probably practically they are, but probably intellectually as well, or morally, right? You know, these people come with a strong conviction that drugs are evil. I think there's a growing consensus which bubbled up through the left, but which is kind of gaining traction, you know, with people like libertarians, right?

That's a kind of a reductionist view and that, you know, that maybe that belief system hasn't really done much positive for the world. You know, 100,000 dead, way more than 100,000 dead since 2007 in Mexico alone is pretty good evidence of the fact that that is not necessarily the sort of best intellectual starting point to have the discussion about drugs. And I think that that's why you're seeing things like legal weed in the States, discussions about legalizing the opium crop in Mexico,

or legal medical marijuana industry in Colombia. these are things which are bubbling up now and being taken pretty seriously. Even, you know, an analogue and a not perfect one, but, you know, gay marriage in the United States was this sort of out there thing about five years ago, right? Or not necessarily fringe, but like not part of the political mainstream. I mean, Barack Obama, by that stage, I believe, was still anti-gay marriage, right? I mean, obviously his views evolved. But, you know, these things, once they start moving, can move incredibly quickly.

I don't necessarily know if drug legalization is going to move at that speed. But what I'm saying is that something which could seem completely unthinkable a few years ago, in a very short space of time, can seem kind of completely bog standard. So who knows? Gabriel Stargarter, I want to say thank you so much for joining us this week. Learned it a lot. Yeah, thank you. Pleasure. Thanks.

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