DRUGS-MEXICO: “New-School” Cartel Leader Arrested

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Nov 21 2005 (IPS) - The stereotypical image of drug lords in Mexico is one of individuals who blatantly flaunt their wealth, defy the authorities and engage in bloody public wars to gain power and markets.

But there is also a newer breed of kingpin, university-educated professionals who live the discreet lives of seemingly upright businessmen in middle-class neighbourhoods – yet wield just as much if not even more real power.

Ricardo García Urquiza was one of those refined, low-profile drug barons, until he was arrested by Mexican federal agents, as reported Monday by Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca.

Known as “The Doctor”, García seemed like just another resident of his upper middle-class Mexico City neighbourhood. He apparently moved about without the protection of bodyguards, and took pains to remain anonymous.

But according to the Mexican authorities, he is one of the top leaders of the so-called Juárez cartel, a loose affiliation of drug gangs in this city near the U.S. border, who move roughly five tons of cocaine a month.

García headed up a 600-million-dollar-a-year business, with part of the revenues filtering back through diverse channels to his “partners” in Colombia, the source of most of the cocaine sold in the United States, the world’s largest market for illegal drugs.

According to investigations, most of the cocaine involved was transported in large boats that set out from Colombia towards the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, and from there to Mexico and the United States. However, alternative routes through the Caribbean were sometimes used as well.

Part of the money earned from sales and a portion of the drugs themselves either stopped over or remained in Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

With García, “we see a new drug trafficker profile. An educated, professional person, who does not stand out, moves freely around our country and our cities, lives in upper middle-class and upper-class neighbourhoods, does not travel in flashy cars (.) and has the training of a businessman,” said Cabeza de Vaca.

Growing evidence and studies by experts over recent years reveal that in the majority of Latin American countries, there has been a shift from the traditional violent, showy image of drug lords to a more understated, executive veneer.

Nevertheless, it is the ostentatious and violent ones, most of them from rural and peasant areas, who still capture the headlines.

Although they may represent a dying breed, they continue to draw the media’s and public’s attention through their constant association with murders and other crimes, their blatant defiance of the authorities, and their predilection for flaunting themselves by buying luxury houses and cars and even attending parties where they are photographed, Raquel Paredes of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) told IPS.

But García and his network, which included accountants and a range of other operators, were in a different class. According to Cabeza de Vaca, it was García’s outward appearance of a professional and businessman that helped him gain full control over the Juárez cartel and become “one of the most important if not the most important drug wholesaler in our country.”

The Juárez cartel was headed up until 1997 by Amado Carrillo, known as the “Lord of the Skies” for transporting drugs by plane, who died that year during plastic surgery meant to change his appearance.

Although Carrillo’s death briefly undermined the network’s power, it soon regained its place among the most important drug cartels in Latin America through the efforts of other members of the Carrillo family and García.

According to Paredes, a researcher and expert in security affairs, the Juárez cartel is probably the single most important drug cartel in Mexico today, and precisely because of García’s strategy of acting with greater caution and a business-like approach.

García marked a total break from the larger-than-life characters who controlled the drug trade in Mexico and elsewhere in the region until the 1990s.

These former kingpins are now all either in prison or dead. The “Lord of the Skies” has passed away, Benjamín Arellano was arrested in 2002 and is still in jail, Juan García Abrego was extradited to the United States and sentenced there in 1996, and Osiel Cárdenas has been incarcerated in Mexico since 2003.

Héctor Palma was captured in 1995 and remains in jail, while Rafael Caro Quintero has been serving a prison sentence of close to 100 years since 1992.

The same holds true for other countries in the region, following the demise of legendary figures like Bolivia’s Roberto Suárez Gómez, who offered to pay off his country’s foreign debt in the 1980s, and Colombian drug king Pablo Escobar, killed in 1993.

One of the few survivors from the “old school” of drug trafficking is Mexico’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, a notorious cartel leader in the 1990s. He was arrested in 1993 and spent seven years in prison until escaping from a high-security penitentiary in 2001 and returning to the helm of his business. He remains at large as Mexico’s most-wanted man.

The bulk of the cocaine consumed in the United States enters the country from Mexico, which is also home to the Sinaloa, Tijuana and Gulf cartels.

It is these three that are the most violent and brazen, prompting the Vicente Fox administration to wage an all-out war on drug traffickers.

This year alone, some 300 people, including numerous police chiefs, have been murdered in Mexico in drug trade-related violence. The authorities attribute this bloody upsurge to power struggles between rival cartels for control of transport routes and markets.

Since 2001, over 98,000 individuals have been arrested and tried on drug trafficking charges in Mexico, with some of the top figures in the cartels among those captured and put away.

But in spite of this, the illegal drug business remains robust, as even the authorities acknowledge. In Paredes’ opinion, the war on drugs has been a failure, and the battles will be never-ending unless the demand decreases or the use of some narcotics is legalised.

But the Fox administration, like almost all governments in Latin America and the Caribbean, refuses to even consider this strategy as a means of combating drug trafficking and related violence.