Clinton opens a new front in the Mexican drugs war

Few Mexicans will celebrate the bicentennial of their country's independence from Spain on September 15 with unalloyed pleasure. For a couple of hours, perhaps, with the help of some tequila, the festivities might allow them to forget that they are in the middle of an incredibly brutal drugs war.

In four years Mexicans have witnessed an astonishing 28,000 murders related to the war, a rate of killing which exceeds that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The most shocking incident came just a couple of weeks ago when 72 migrants from other central American countries were murdered by members of Los Zetas, roaming drug enforcers who have defected from the Mexican army.
 
The truth is that in the face of such bloody turmoil Mexicans are much less excited about the shedding of Spain's colonial shackles two centuries ago than they are disturbed by the havoc wreaked by the proximity of their rich and powerful neighbour to the north. As Porforio Diaz, president of Mexico from 1876 to 1911, said: "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States."
 
It is the United States which consumes the vast quantities of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine that the Mexican drugs cartels supply. It is the United States which returns to Mexico tens of billions of dollars in laundered drug money with which politicians and the security forces are routinely corrupted.

And it is in the United States where the drugs cartels buy the thousands of deadly weapons, including powerful assault rifles, with which they continue their orgy of blood-letting back in Mexico.
 
Earlier this week, Hilary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, compared the situation in Mexico to that of Colombia two decades ago, warning that the heavily armed Mexican cartels were on the verge of "morphing into... an insurgency".
 
That has provoked angry denials from Mexican politicians who point out that unlike their Colombian counterparts, the Mexican cartels have "no political agenda".

Alejandro Poire, the Mexican government's spokesman on security matters, couldn't help sniping back at Clinton: "Perhaps the most important similarity is the extent to which organised crime and narcotics-trafficking organisations in both countries are fed by the enormous and gigantic US demand for drugs."
 
Mexican politicians were also upset with the timing of Clinton's remarks, barely a week before the bicentennial, and so soon after what they are touting as a major victory in the drugs war: the capture of Edgar Valdez Villareal, 37, leader of a breakaway faction of the powerful Beltran-Leyva drugs cartel.
 
Nicknamed 'la Barbie' because of his blonde hair and good looks, Valdez (above, after his arrest) is a US citizen and the only American to have risen so high in a Mexican cartel.

Since his capture, Valdez has been singing like a canary, telling interrogators how he moved drugs in and out of Mexico and how he paid $200,000 for a movie script to be written about his life. He also told them about a war council meeting held by the rival cartel leaders a couple of years ago when they unsuccessfully tried to iron out their differences.
 
Security forces were almost certainly tipped off about Valdez's whereabouts by one of his main rivals and enemies: Hector Beltran Leyva or Joaquin 'Shorty' Guzman Leora, head of the Sinaloa cartel.

Beltran Leyva believes it was Valdez who told the authorities where to find his brother, cartel boss Arturo Beltran Leyva, who was killed in a massive shoot-out last December in Cuernavaca, an hour south of Mexico City.

La Barbie's capture came just a couple of weeks after four decapitated bodies were hung from an overpass of a motorway in Cuernavaca. The bodies' heads, genitals and index fingers were dumped elsewhere in the city, along with a sign which read: "This is what happens to all those who support the traitor Edgar Valdez Villareal".
 
But Valdez's capture has only increased talk in Mexico about the legendary power and influence of 'El Chapo' - Shorty - Guzman, whom Forbes magazine named as the 41st most powerful person in the world. While other cartel leaders have been caught and their drug operations disrupted, Guzman, a multi-billionaire, seems to be able to operate with virtual impunity, even though he has a $5 million bounty on his head from the US Drug Enforcement Agency.
 
Guzman's Robin Hood-like exploits, including surviving assassination attempts, have been extolled in many 'narcocorridas' – drug ballads. Born into poverty in a small village in the Sierra Madre mountains, Guzman shipped cocaine into the US in cans of chili pepper and in tunnels he built under the border, bringing millions of dollars back in suitcases on flights into Mexico City airport, where he bribed officials.
 
Although Guzman was caught and jailed in the early 1990s, he continued running his operation from inside prison, where he was also able to indulge in a plentiful supply of lovers, prostitutes and Viagra. He escaped in 2001, apparently in a laundry cart. On more than one occasion since then, Guzman's bodyguards have cordoned off expensive restaurants and confiscated cell-phones from the other diners while their boss eats. After he's finished he pays for everyone's meals.
 
While Hilary Clinton may be premature in declaring Mexico's drug wars an "insurgency", the cartels have increasingly been targeting politicians.

Five town mayors have been assassinated this year, as was the leading candidate for the governor of the state of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas. No-one knows if they were killed because they refused to cooperate with the cartels or because one cartel suspected them of cooperating with another.

And in what was widely seen as a direct warning to Felipe Calderon, the Mexican president, Diego Fernández de Cevallos, one of his closest friends and political confidantes and a former presidential candidate, was kidnapped in May.

The only drug cartel that has directly attacked the Mexican government is 'La Familia Michoacana'. The day after one of their leaders was captured last year, the cartel captured, stripped and killed 12 federal police officers, dumping their bodies by a motorway with a message which read: "Come for another of our leaders. We are waiting for you."

Run by Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, nicknamed 'El Más Loco' - The Craziest One - La Familia is the strangest of the Mexican drug cartels and the fastest growing. It is a grass-roots cult movement that preaches family and evangelical religious values and insists that its adherents do not use the drugs they sell.

La Familia first came to national attention in 2006 when cartel members rolled five decapitated heads into a nightclub with a message which read: "Know that this is divine justice."

Four bloody years later, Mexicans now pray for a rather different kind of divine justice as the Bicentennial looms. ·