Terror and Corruption in Mexico – Part One

On November 10^th, Mexican gunmen stormed an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Chihuahua City and opened fire on everyone inside. In Mexico, rehabilitation clinics are now recruiting centers for the narcotraficanos (drug cartels) and, as a result, the locations of increasing violence as cartels struggle to stay alive in the face of increasing government pressure. Backed into a corner, the cartels have been international innovators in brazen displays of cruelty, which have crossed even the U.S.-Mexico border. Cartel activities in the southern United States, for example, have included kidnappings, executions, and recruitment of American teenagers for cross-border operations. Americans traveling to Mexico are especially at risk. On New Year’s Eve, Agustin Roberto Salcedo, a UCLA Ph.D. student and El Monte school board member, was executed while vacationing with his wife in the Mexican state of Durango. It is Mexicans, however, who have the most to fear. In the state of Sinaloa, one man’s tortured body was discovered hanging by his neck from a highway overpass, his hands tied behind his back. Other grisly actions have included: “public displays of battered human heads, some thrown into plazas or placed on car rooftops, some thrown outside schools; mutilated torsos hanging from meat hooks; threats and taunts to rival cartels written on walls with the blood of butchered adversaries; and video-postings of torture and beheadings on YouTube.”¹ These activities, once unheard of outside the realm of shock horror film, have become depressingly common in Mexico.

Part One: Corruption as party policy

“You govern or you do business….the public charge should not be the spoils for anyone.” President Miguel de la Madrid, 1983

Mexico’s current problem with the cartels cannot be understood without a discussion of its history of corruption. Scholars trace Mexico’s endemic corruption to its authoritarian past, when Mexico was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.² The PRI came into existence in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. Though the Revolution in many ways ended in 1920, violence continued through the 1920s with the onset of the Cristero War, when then-president General Plutarco Elias Calles came up with the idea to create the first incarnation of the PRI to halt what appeared to be Mexico’s continued slide into civil war.

Calles was no liberal democrat: as president of Mexico from 1924-28, some scholars believe his oppression of Mexican Catholics was responsible for instigating the Cristero War. Calles’s PRI was instead a pragmatic compromise between various strata of Mexican society, whereby each agreed to collectively, but exclusively, govern the country. This system was institutionalized in a corporatist structure whereby the urban workers, peasants, and caudillos were each given representation and interfaced directly with the president of the PRI but not with each other.

After initially consolidating power, the PRI moved quickly to nationalize the economy in the 1930s, including the highly profitable oil sector, providing the PRI with a wealth of rents to distribute amongst itself and its political allies. This was followed by the ill-fated Import Substitution Industrialization scheme in the 1940s which “substituted” foreign imports for inferior, state-led products to try and “modernize” the economy. Authoritarian power and economic inefficiency became further entrenched.³

As time wore on and the PRI continued to calcify, its policies became increasingly less relevant to certain segments of Mexican society. Its corruption, moreover, was becoming ever more egregious. The PRI attempted to adjust, but limits to its political openness remained, and in 1968 students protesting the Olympics taking place in Mexico were brutally put down by the state police. As if to illustrate this very point, the PRI then elected the man responsible for the massacre, Luis Echeverria, to the presidency. His economic policies were a disaster, however, and opposition mounted. Jose Lopez Portillo, Echeverria’s successor in 1976 continued Echeverria’s economic ineptitude, and mounting international debt led to the state’s default in 1982.

The PRI’s dominance in the economy and policy in the 20^th century presented it with ample opportunity for corruption, which it took advantage of from the very beginning. Of course, the PRI did not invent it: Alvaro Obregon, President from 1920-24, had publicly advocated the use of corruption before the PRI was even conceived.⁴ The PRI, however, institutionalized it.

Evidence of government corruption under the PRI has been well-documented for years. As Frank Tannenbaum wrote, concerning corruption among the Mexican police in the late 1940s: “the mordida [the "bite" of police corruption]…has grown in a widening circle from official to unofficial persons and is now perhaps the greatest single impediment both morally and politically to good government and economic progress.”⁵ Miguel Aleman Valdes, the sixth president of Mexico to come from the PRI and who governed from 1946-52, was said to have “left a world-renowned legacy of corruption and ill-gotten gain.”⁶ In 1976, two PRI state governors were accused of taking 36 million and 400 million pesos respectively for private use.⁷ Jose Lopez Portillo, president of Mexico from 1976-82 and the 11^th president of Mexico to come from the PRI, was estimated to have taken anywhere from $1 billion to $3 billion from state coffers.⁸ “General estimates of the sums pilfered in the major cases exposed in the early 1980s approach $20 billion,” which was, as Stephen Morris remarks, “enough…to have paid the interest on the huge Mexican debt for 1983, 1984, and the first five months of 1985.”⁹

Clearly, the PRI saw themselves as above the rule of law, bending it for their private gain as they saw fit. Since laws are only as strong as the power behind them, with the ruling powers of the country operating so extra-judicially, how much force could the law possibly have? As virtually every political philosopher of note since the time of Aristotle has written, the law is meant to be the great equalizer between the powerful and the powerless. It is not the powerful who need the protection of the law, it is everyone else that needs the law as protection from them. Without such an equalizer, economic activity becomes arbitrary and unpredictable, and something as simple as a business contract can quickly become unenforceable.

This state corruption has enabled and generally encouraged the growth of Mexico’s drug cartels, which otherwise might have been prevented from growing as they did. President Felipe Calderon’s Drug War has revealed for the first time the extent to which top Mexican authorities have been bought off by the cartels. What some have lost sight of, however, is that PRI cooperation with the cartels was never much of a secret.

Andre Joaquin Castillo is an M.A. candidate at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies concentrating in International Economics and Middle East Studies with a specialization in Emerging Markets, focusing on Mexico. He has publications forthcoming in the SAIS Review, an academic journal, and writes on Middle East issues for the blog poetsandpolicymakers.com. He is currently writing a book detailing his family’s journey from Mexico and Panama to the United States of America.

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

Picture above from Flickr user Christian Frausto Bernal licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License.