Wise Old Mexico (Charles Dews)

Charles Dews -- World News Trust

Aug. 24, 2009 (ERGONGARICUARO, Michoacán, Mexico) --  Well, whaddaya know, gringos? Mexico, poor backward Mexico, my chosen home and hearth of my heart, has legalized, for all practical purposes, the possession of small amounts of pot, coke, heroin, meth, LSD, and other drugs while encouraging government-financed treatment for drug dependency free of charge.

President Calderón, our homegrown but Harvard educated answer to GWB, signed the bill into law, finally, after months of dithering, probably waiting to see how his opposite numbers in the US would react. The nation´s congress passed the bill months ago, and the law has actually been in effect since then. Unlike before, when the cops and their cohorts the lawyers used the finding of drugs, no matter what amount, as an opportunity to extort large sums of money from unwary visitors and cowed locals, now anyone caught with drug amounts under the personal-use limit will be encouraged to seek treatment, and for those caught a third time treatment is mandatory—although no penalties for noncompliance are specified.

Mind you, the amounts are incredibly dinky—the amount of pot you can be carrying when caught is equivalent más o menos to four joints—hardly an evening´s entertainment, from what I am told. Not that drugs are especially popular here. They have been given a bad rap by the US so-called War on Drugs, the always thoughtful Catholic Church, and the other rightwing nut cases who are now in charge of the nation´s morals. Still, this is where pot used to originate—remember: “Hey, man, I got some really cool Mishmacan weed!” Or, “Oh, wow, this stuff is Acapulco Gold.” Maybe you have to be a certain age. And a certain tribe of folks hereabouts still like to toke it once in a while. Especially the city folk known as “heepies” and the indigenous people, of which there are aplenty in my state. Some even think good pot can drum up a positive religious experience. I wouldn´t know, personally, but I trust their judgment.

Only problem is, here in Michoacán, we have a particularly nasty bunch of drug handlers, let us say, who are battling for turf with another bunch of equally nasty handlers. Our local boys call themselves La Familia, or the Family, and to give them their due, they seem to have a pretty high standard of honor among thieves, at least among siblings. If any familiar or family member rapes a woman, say, or abuses a kid, or steals product, or gets out of line in any way, he may likely be found missing his cabeza. Not a few folks here have found themselves missing that very important section of their anatomy. Nine of the severed parts were summarily rolled onto the dance floor in a popular bar not too long ago in one of our larger towns as a warning not to mess with La Familia. Startled a crowd of country boys and girls doing the two-step and sipping tequilita in the middle of the afternoon. A handwritten note was attached to one of the cabezas that said, “We don´t mess with innocent people, but if you piss us off….”

The US is constantly dangling the carrot of a bunch of dollars in front of the Mexican government in exchange for doing their level best at rooting out the drug handlers operating nationally and internationally. This is very attractive to the Mexican jefes of state, especially when state-of-the-art helicopters and high-powered armaments are included in the deal. Their mouths fairly water.

The Mexican government is afraid it is going to need these gringo fripperies in the future when the Next Mexican Revolution happens, and that, my amigos, is about due. Every hundred years Mexicans get fed up enough with the corruption to throw the bums out on their you-know-whats. The last one was in the early 1900s. And Mexicans are currently suffering from severely diminished incomes due to the “crisis” of capitalism in the US and worldwide. Just over half of Mexicans are officially considered poor—that is 54.8 million people. And that, as you can imagine, is a problem. One of the reasons handling drugs is such a lucrative business here, aside from the fact the world´s biggest market is just across the fence, is that there are no decent jobs with which people can improve their lives and the lives of their families.

Anyway, to continue this tale, in order to show they are serious and impress the gringos, the federal government in Mexico City captured one of the La Familia bigwigs, the putative second in line in the chain of command. This pissed off the family men in SUVS, so they mounted a coordinated attack against some of the more allegedly corrupt local cops. Even in the peacefully tourist-ridden town of Pátzcuaro, familiares shot up really bad the local gendarmerie next to a filling station and even threw a grenade or four. Nobody there was hurt, but a car in the filling station was pretty badly singed. Thankfully, the filling station did not blow up. But the bullet holes in the walls of the cop station and their broken windows stand today in mute testimony to the power of the local cartel. A number of people in various locations in our state, both good guys and bad guys—I´ll leave it to you to decide which is which—were offed in the melee.

To up the ante, the feds sent a horde of troops and black-clad federal cops out here to our fair state, where they did what troops and cops do best: they abused people´s human rights with characteristic impunity. People in cars were stopped, pushed to the ground, searched roughly, beaten, and apparently some were raped by the “good” guys, although their spin doctors in Mexico City vehemently deny this. They also abducted a dozen and a half mayors of towns and other state officials in an early morning raid, supposedly due to their connections with La Familia, and took them to the pokey, where most of them are still languishing in at least some luxury. The drug guys fought back, naturally enough, alleging that the very ones who were targeting La Familia were in the pay of their opposite number, the Gulf Cartel otherwise known as Los Zetas, another unsavory bunch of boys in shades. Additionally, they did not like the way the feds were hassling their real families while looking for them. It´s one thing to catch one of us and put us in jail, they allowed, but it´s another to bother our kids and our mujeres. We are fair game, after all, they are not. So, you leave our families alone, and we will leave you alone. They wanted to make a deal.

That did not sit well with the president, who did not want to appear to be friendly with the cartel just when the bête noire to the north was about to award some serious big bucks to his minions for the next phase of the drug war. So our little president, local wags call him Presidente Enano or President Dwarf (no offense to dwarves, of course), then ordered more troops and cops and even the Mexican navy, a fierce bunch of sailor boys in tighty whities, to sit behind machine gun nests at the borders with all the surrounding states and in warships off the coast of our state checking people going and coming.

The feds, by the way, mounted this unprecedented attack on our state without informing the sitting governor of the state or anyone else in his government, seeings how the half brother of the gov had disappeared after it was rumored he was in the pay or at least in contact with La Familia. He had just won a seat in congress from our main coastal sin city through which lots of drugs get funneled, but did not show up to be inaugurated, something virtually all politicians should seriously consider. And he has not been seen since, although the other day the government disallowed his election.

The governor did not like not being included in the plan of attack one little bit. He protested vehemently to the feds, who after much debate decided to let him know the next time they were going to mount an attack on his state´s citizens.  Mexico is a federal republic, and the feds are only in the states at the behest of the state´s residents, according to the national constitution. The governor was quite within his rights, but the feds resented the imposition from a know-nothing rube. Some folks here suggest that the state, a bastion of leftwing politics and thought, if not action, was being punished by the president, a native of Michoacán, but also a member of the rightwing National Action Party or PAN, for having gone so thoroughly for the leftish Party of Democratic Revolution  or PRD.

Battles, apparently, are ongoing in any number of towns and villages in Michoacán. I make the two-hour trip to the state´s capital, Morelia, once a week on business, and this past week I counted no fewer than 20 trucks full of soldiers in a convoy heading out of the capital city and a large contingent of black-masked federal cops manning a checkpoint leading in the direction of the city. They did not stop me; I am about as unlikely a subject for handling drugs as anyone can imagine, so I was safe, but a number of young men in pickups and real families in SUVs, still wildly popular here (we are typically a few years behind the trendy US) were not so lucky. Everyone says the big narcos travel in SUVs with blackened windows and are always preceded by an innocent looking couple of fellows in Chevy or Ford “peek-up” or some such vehicle so as not to attract the cops´ attention, but who then relay a cell phone message back to the real “bad” boys in black shades to take another route around the checkpoint. I mean, these guys are smart and well-financed, to say nothing of well-dressed, as well as armed to the teeth.

I can´t imagine how the new law, which, by the way, only decriminalizes, not legalizes small amounts of drugs for personal use, will make any difference here. It may encourage US college kids to extend their vacations south of the border for a while. People here are just not very interested in drugs, aside from alcohol, and don´t seem to be too concerned one way or the other about how much pot they can carry in their shirt pockets or woven ditty bags without worrying about the cops. In fact, they have to worry about the cops for other reasons much more than for drugs. Like making an illegal turn or driving over the speed limit. Cops here are universally despised due, no doubt, to decades of abuse and extortionate mordidas or little bites (and sometimes really big bites), i.e., bribes. Some people despise them much more than they hate the drug handlers.

A while ago I engaged in a lively conversation in Spanish with my working class buddies at the big urban market where I shop to find out what they think of what is going on. One wag in a muscle shirt and dirty khakis said, “I hope the feds keep sending more soldiers and cops; they will just be more for La Familia to shoot!” The other people in the boisterous group just laughed and slapped his back in agreement.

Despite all this sordid tale of an ill-conceived war gone terribly wrong thanks to the behemoth to the north and its greedy clients on this side of the Rio Bravo, life here continues to be satisfyingly tranquila for the vast majority of us who have no truck with either side of warriors. Our big concerns presently are things like drought caused by climate change and its concomitant failure of the corn and bean crop. We can do without a lot of stuff you gringos consider important as long as we have our families, our homes (be they ever so humble), and our simple, delicious bean tacos. And, of course, we want our friends and loved ones to safely escape the nutty north when it crashes and burns to enjoy another fiesta with those of us waiting for their return with open arms.