Mexico violence hits new levels in scale, brutality in 2010
gains, but the road remains a long one. Will Mexicans, the next administration, show the same resiliency and determination? Those are questions that you cannot help but ask.”
Calderón administration officials acknowledge the exceptional violence in the past year but insist that it began stabilizing in the second half of 2010 — a claim that some independent experts dispute.
“Violence is usually cyclical,” said Carlos Flores, a former analyst for Mexico’s intelligence agency and a visiting scholar at the University of Connecticut. “The numbers vary and are not necessarily conclusive.”
The Morning News writes that for decades, cartels have operated in Mexico, often enmeshed with the government itself. Democracy was supposed to change that, strengthening institutions like the courts and reducing the number of crimes that go unpunished.
The reality has been starkly different: Ten years after the so-called democratic opening, with the election of the first opposition party to the presidency in 2000, the rate of unsolved crimes hovers around 98 percent, virtually unchanged from a decade ago.
“The democratization succeeded in breaking up power relations that controlled the violence,” said Georgina Sanchez, an independent security analyst. “Governors, police, military, all institutional powers — when their power base was broken, an enormous void opened that the democracy wasn’t prepared to confront.”
With democracy, “the top came off the pressure cooker,” she said, and the violence that had long been simmering boiled over.
Business between rival cartels was once negotiated quietly, but now these groups, including those operating along Mexico’s border with Texas, battle openly for territory and have become notorious for torture and horrendous killings. One group in particular, the Zetas, has raised the stakes for violence.
“Previously you had an informal code of ethics,” said Maureen Meyer, a Mexico analyst with the Washington Office on Latin America. “Women were not targeted; children were not targeted. You took out your rivals, but you didn’t hang their bodies from bridges. It was a quieter type of violence than what you’re seeing now.”
Genoveva Sánchez, a vendor who sells roasted chickens on a street corner in Ciudad Juárez’s 16th of September neighborhood, said she pays a weekly extortion fee of 700 pesos — about $60 — to the Juárez cartel in order to operate.
“In the end, organized crime has proven to be very organized and more visionary than the government itself,” she said. “We wanted democracy and voted for that, and look what we got: criminals who scare everyone off, from cops to politicians to citizens. How can we ever change that? Do we even stand a chance?”
