It was, even by the usual high standards of New York Times investigations, an article that took my breath away.
On Saturday, my colleagues Natalie Kitroeff and Ronen Bergman published a story that used a vast cache of text messages, investigation records and other secret documents to shed light on one of Mexico’s most notorious cold cases: In 2014, 43 college students disappeared after the police stopped their buses, forced them into patrol cars and handed them over to a drug cartel. They were never heard from again.
The attack gripped the nation, not just because of the scale of the disappearances, but because of the questions it raised about who was involved. After all, as Natalie and Ronen wrote, “how could a relatively unknown gang pull off one of the worst atrocities in Mexico’s recent history, with the help of the police and the military watching the mass abduction unfold in real time?”
The answer, as they painstakingly documented, was that the cartel, known as Guerreros Unidos, was colluding with nearly every local arm of the Mexican government, including the military. The gang effectively had the resources of the state at its disposal.
That level of collusion may be unique to the state of Guerrero, experts say, where the long history of drug trafficking and a heavily militarized state presence would have created fertile ground for such relationships. But in Mexico, the lines between trafficking organizations and the state have long been blurry, scholars say. And that has had profound consequences not just for organized crime, but for the development of the Mexican state itself.
‘Criminal state-building’
“There really is no binary between the ‘bad’ cartels and the ‘good’ state,” said Alexander Aviña, an Arizona State historian who studies the drug trade in Mexico. “I think those of us who work on the history of drugs in 20th-century Mexico will say that drug trafficking actually emerges within the confines of the Mexican state, particularly the long running PRI party that was in power from 1949 to 2000.”
In the popular imagination, collaboration between cartels and state officials tends to take the form of corruption: criminals pay bribes to officials, who then tolerate drug trafficking in exchange for private wealth. But that story doesn’t quite fit Mexico, said Benjamin T. Smith, a professor at Warwick University in the U.K., and the author of a book on the history of the Mexican drug trade.
Rather, he said, there is a long history of Mexican officials taking money from drug traffickers to fund the government, not just personal bribes. He described it as a kind of “criminal state-building.” But that state-building later proved to be dangerously fragile.
Documents from the 1940s show that police in the state of Sinaloa, for instance, were extorting money from opium growers, Smith said. But they then handed the money over to state tax collectors to be deposited into the public coffers.
Later, after U.S. demand…
2023-09-06 14:16:40
Article from www.nytimes.com
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