Abstract
The chapter presents a backdrop to the assassination of local law enforcement in Mexico’s drug-war. The analysis begins with an explanation of how spill-over arms helped change the tactical balance of power between organized crime elements and the municipal police, opening a space for the successful use of law-enforcement assassination. This facilitated the rise of the repetitive use of targeted assassinations against municipal officers which is motivated by multiple criminal goals (not just retaliation).
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- 1.
To give one example, the PAN Mayor of San Pedro, Nuevo León declared the murder of his municipal police chief Héctor Ayala Moreno “part of the risks of public functions” (La Jornada 2006).
- 2.
The use of the term “law-enforcement assassination” is confined more narrowly to municipal police chiefs and top-level commanders in order to achieve rigor across a series of similar cases. Chapter 2 briefly discusses other rule of law personnel assassinated in a specific municipality in the context of the death of a local police chief or top-commander. This does not, however, exclude the potential use of the term “law-enforcement assassination” to refer to a larger conceptual universe of law-enforcement members of the executive branch including federal police, state police, the military, specialized members of the attorney general’s office and the prison system. Excelsior (2011a) lists, for example, in its registry of 174 government officials killed (2006–2011) the following other law-enforcement officers assassinated: the director of the Anti-Kidnapping Unit of the Federal District PDJDF, a director of the Criminal Investigations Unit of the PDJDF and an Inspector of the Federal Police.
- 3.
The primary job of the municipal preventative police is to conduct patrols, maintain public order, prevent crime and administrative violations, and be the first responders to crime. The transit police, responsible for sanctioning traffic violations and responding to accidents, are technically considered part of the preventive police. However, in some cases they are organized as a separate police force. At the municipal level, formal control of the police falls under the jurisdiction of the mayor, except when the president is in the area at which point he is the new commander of that force (Mexican Constitution Article 115; Esparza 2012: 18–19). “Police chiefs” are referred to in Mexican Spanish as, variably, “Comandante”, “Jefe Policiaco”, “Director de la Policía” and “Director de Seguridad Pública”. Also included in this brief are top municipal Mexican police commanders including: “Comandante de Operativos de la Policia Municipal”, “Comandante de Unidad”, “Sub-director of Seguridad Pública”, “Jefes de Distrito” and “Jefes de Delegaciones”.
- 4.
By 2007, media reports began to criticize the flow of firearms from the United State to Mexico (Department of Justice [DOJ] Inspector General 2012: 48). One news story reported US law enforcement as saying they had never seen anything like the flood of guns surging into Mexico. This article (Roig-Franzia 2007) quoted a Phoenix Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives [ATF] agent as blaming the circumstances on the ease of buying of high-powered weapons since the U.S. assault weapons was not renewed in 2004. This same quoted agent, along with four other ATF agents would later be reassigned within ATF and the Justice Department after a Congressional inquiry into “Operation Fast and Furious”. Operation Fast and Furious was meant as a short-term federal operation which purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to ultimately track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arrest them. The DOJ Inspector General’s Review of Operation Fast and Furious and Related Matters reports that by the end of 2009, the ATF, by using informants and not prosecuting straw buyers, had “identified 19 suspected straw purchasers who had bought approximately 690 firearms over the previous 4 months—primarily AK-47 style rifles—for over $350,000, much of it cash. Four of the buyers—Patino, Steward, Moore, and Chambers—were responsible for over 70 % of the purchases” (DOJ Inspector General 2012: 132–133). The ATF also learned that many of these illegally purchased weapons made their way into Mexico. It is beyond the scope of this brief to analyze each and all incidents of the estimated 195 recovered weapons in Mexico and the type of weapon(s) recovered reported in the 512 page DOJ (2012) report relating to Operation Fast and Furious. The DOJ (2012) report does not always mention the specific type of US weapon recovered in Mexico. Nevertheless, two examples of such recoveries were selected for illustrative purposes here where the specific type of weapon was reported in Mexico. One recovery occurred in Mexicali, Mexico (December 2009) where 50 % of the 48 recovered firearms (46 of which were AK-47s) were purchased by Operation Fast and Furious subjects (DOJ Inspector General 2012: 119). In another incident in (Caborca 2007), Mexican authorities recovered during a raid in the city an AK-47 pistol and an AK-47 rifle purchased by an Operation Fast and Furious straw-buyer on March 30 and June 26, 2007 (DOJ Inspector General 2012: 57).
- 5.
The original fire fight did not start out as a conflict between the government and organized crime elements. Instead, the Zetas and pursuing Black Command gunmen who worked not for Zetas but the rival Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Cartel were pursuing the Zetas, but did not catch them. Instead, they ran into patrolling AFI officers and engaged them in a 40 min firefight with automatic small arms fire and launcher-fired grenades (Turbeville 2010). By 2009, such tactics had spread to hits on the municipal police where a similar attack occurred made up of a specialized commando of 38 sicarios who made good on prior death threats to the police chief. The commando stormed the municipal building in rural town of Bahuichivo (Urique, Chihuahua), kidnapping and then assassinating police chief Leopoldo Pérez Quiñónez, a senior municipal official and a citizen in April 2009 (XEPL 2009; Turbeville 2010: 136).
- 6.
This mirrors a general trend in the ever younger recruitment of Mexican citizens into organized crime groups. The previous average was 20–35 years old but the post-2008 period began to see the recruitment of youth as young as 12–15 years old (SSP 2010: 12).
- 7.
Ríos (2010) presents evidence of different “levels” of hit-men when she asks Alfredo Quijano, the editor of El Norte, a local newspaper from Juárez, Mexico how much does a hit man cost? According to Quijano: ‘It depends on the type of hit man. The good ones are expensive, but you can always find someone who would do the work for $150–$210’. Ríos (2010) says that for $210, “an inexpert gang member can get a low profile target killed; for $21,000, an expert can kill the chief of police in Mexico City, or at least that is what the hit man who killed Mr. Robles Liceaga, the chief of police in Mexico City until 2002, said he was paid”.
- 8.
Mexican hit men are fairly disposable, lasting only about 3 years before being executed either by rivals or their own organization (El Universal 1/5/09).
- 9.
Most of the literature, however, reaches an agreement on the point that hired guns in Mexico kill mainly for the money. Payment for the Mexican cartel hit man is typically in the form of a salary and benefits for assassination [benefits can include drugs, access to women, electronics, restaurant food in jail] (Lusk et al. 2013: 11). Mexican hit-men will also sometimes be able to supplement their incomes with kidnappings to increase their personal earnings (Grayson and Logan 2012: 55). Some Mexican hit men, however, also hope, beyond the money to achieve professional mobility and perhaps “climb the criminal ladder and eventually become cartel leaders themselves (Kan 2012: 50)”. Some do successfully climb this ladder, taking the next step above the hit-men which is the plaza boss or even the next step to an intermediary leadership position (lieutenant) who is head of a cell. Grayson and Logan (2012: 29) says that lieutenants carry out commands issued by their superiors. They oversee the work of the second tier of the organization or local cell sergeants who are responsible for about six or more cells (whose 5–7 members often do not know each other). The sergeants also control their own hit-men and are loath to share their names with other sergeants who may try to recruit them (Grayson and Logan 2012).
- 10.
Several recently prosecuted “murder for hire” schemes include former Army private Michael Apodaca, 22, who was recruited and paid $5,000 by the Juárez Cartel to shoot and kill José Daniel González-Galeana, a cartel member who had been outed as an informant for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in El Paso. Kevin Corley, 29, a former active-duty Army first lieutenant from Fort Carson in Colorado, pleaded guilty in federal court in Laredo, Texas, to conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire for the Los Zetas cartel after being arrested in a sting operation. He had pledged, together with former Army Sgt. Samuel Walker who was also prosecuted, to put together a four man kill team to raid a Texas ranch, steal 20 kg of cocaine and kill four people (Business Insider 2012).
- 11.
In other words, organized crime elements try to recruit hit men with previous specialized training when they can but cannot rely exclusively only on hit men with extensive previous tactical training to run the majority of their sicario cells (Stratfor 2013; El Universal 2009). As such, Mexican organized crime elements often must “make do” with their on-the-job training of hit-men. The recruitment of non-professionals and even their subsequent sophisticated military-like, tactical training can have mixed results in terms of precision, collateral damage and publicity for the organized crime group. Nevertheless, the outcome is almost always lethal for one or more victims. One example is Laredo US teen Rosalio Reta with no previous tactical training who was recruited at age 13 then trained by the Zetas in Mexico where he claims to have received military-like tactical training in counter-surveillance, intelligence gathering, explosives and handling different types of weapons (CBS News 2012). Reta turned out to be a very “professional” assassin in one US-based hit, according to Laredo police, executing a precise pattern of shots through the car window with a steady hand killing a Mexican crime lord living in Laredo, Texas. Yet, Reta subsequently botched another hit, this time in Mexico where he killed innocents and missed the target. Realizing he would die for the mistake, Reta agreed to prosecution and to cooperate as a witness for the Laredo police in exchange for their extracting him from Mexico. He was sentenced to 70 years in a US prison for two contracted Zeta hits but is suspected of having killed several others in his career as a Zeta assassin (CBS News 2012).
- 12.
That same day, Roberto Velasco, one of the directors of the federal organized crime unit, was also shot and killed in Mexico City (US Senate 2011b).
- 13.
By “system”, the author is referring to the organized, lethal strategies of assassins as they relate to, and are influenced by, the larger, complex, dynamic set of inter-related institutions (international and domestic criminal justice systems, legal systems, political system) that surround these actors.
- 14.
Guerrero-Gutiérrez’s (2011: 45) mapping of the municipal spread of organized-crime related deaths (2007–2011) shows that the homicide has never been solely concentrated in the immediate border states (Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas). Nor has it spread from the southern states to the northern states of Mexico or even from the second tier Northern states (Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí) to the immediate border states. Instead, such drug-related homicides follow drug-routes that cross state boundaries. This often follows after the fragmentation of cartels in a city (Guerrero-Gutiérrez 2011: 46–50). Guerrero-Gutiérrez’s (2011: 45) mapping therefore suggests a relationship between cartel fragmentation in urban areas and dispersion to municipalities near and along drug-smuggling routes and highways. After 2011, there has been a process of its further dispersion both within a municipality and to new municipalities. As afore noted, Osorio (2011: 25) seeks to explain drug-related homicides of all types of government agents when confrontations between law-enforcement and DTOs occur. He argues that government agents are more likely targets in specific drug-reception areas, spots of international wholesale distribution, local retail markets and marijuana producing zones after confrontations between law-enforcement and DTOs.
- 15.
Increased migrant (illegal and drug-trafficker) deaths have been reported in multiple desert areas between town crossings, especially on federal lands in the states of Arizona and New Mexico. Using Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner death statistics, Humane Borders (2013) presents detailed maps of rural Arizona federal lands where multiple migrant deaths have occurred. Humaneborders.org. Sasabe poster; Douglas poster; Nogales poster; Lukeville poster; http://www.humaneborders.org/warning-posters. Arizona and New Mexico are the US states where police response/patrol numbers experienced a very large increase after 2008 in relationship to total federal officer personnel (Reaves 2012: 11).
- 16.
For example, the Tubutama/Saric municipality police chief Julian Adrian Paz Robles was a resident of the rural Mexican port of entry town Sásabe (La Policiaca 2011). Intra-cartel turf-wars [Sinaloa versus Beltrán Leyva] over that same critical twenty-seven miles of drug-smuggling border crossing which includes Sásabe/Arizona Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge were “ground zero” (Moore 2011) in the violence that later engulfed and killed the chief. The previously quiet small town of Caborca, Sonora lies along rural highway 2 to the rural Mexico-US port of entry Sonoyta (Sonora)/Lukeville (Arizona). Caborca, Sonora was transformed from a relatively quiet place in terms of the drug trade (New York Times 1988) to a significant staging point for smugglers going north (Arizona Republic 2008) before the assassination of its deputy police chief Francisco Javier Gutiérrez Moreno (Excelsior 2011b).
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Schatz, S. (2014). Backdrop to the Assassination of Local Law Enforcement. In: Impact of Organized Crime on Murder of Law Enforcement Personnel at the U.S.-Mexican Border. SpringerBriefs in Sociology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9249-3_1
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