Decades of Impunity | Article by Mario Luis Fuentes

Mario Luis Fuentes

The arrest of Ismael Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López opens a new chapter in the history of organized crime in the country. The details of how they were caught and whether it was on the country’s territory are more than just anecdotal questions, given the implications this event will have for the functioning of one of the criminal organizations considered among the most powerful in the world.

The details that we will reveal to the public will be minimal. An operation carried out with such secrecy, even in the ignorance of the Mexican government, shows, above all, the level of obvious mistrust that the North American agencies responsible for the arrest have towards the Mexican authorities; hence the brief statement from the North American embassy in Mexico, which highlights other cooperation processes but makes it clear that in this case it is the exclusive initiative of its government.

The news that has come in so far strongly suggests that this was an arrest and not a coordinated surrender of criminals. This could mean that there is a new logic of the North American agencies in the fight against organized crime and in light of this threat of Donald Trump that the government of this country can openly intervene in our territory if it reaches the post of the President of the United States. The States accept a new aspect, because it seems that this will not happen until then, but in fact there is a permanent presence and action of authorized or secret North American agents in Mexico.

Another major problem that comes to the fore again is the enormous impunity that prevails in our country, as all unofficial reports and official files contain records of at least five decades of continuous activity by Zambada as a leader of organized crime, never having been arrested and never having been subjected to any known serious attacks.

How do you manage to be the head of one of the most bloody criminal organizations on the planet for fifty years and not be arrested by the authorities of the country where you have your main base of operations? How can you be able to move around your national territory and presumably through several countries, with an international arrest record, and not be bothered for decades?

The answer, of course, lies in the concept of impunity, that is, the condition of remaining unpunished for the impunity that the law deserves. According to unofficial estimates, organized crime in Mexico generates profits of more than $36 billion a year, a figure equivalent to about 684 billion pesos, a figure several times greater than the cost of the Mayan train.

With these figures, which are estimated as net profit, it is possible to imagine the corruption potential of organized crime groups, since there are other organizations that compete in size and operational capacity with the so-called Sinaloa Cartel, and among which are the so-called Jalisco Nueva Generacion Cartel, the Michoacan Family, the Juarez Cartel, the “Del Golfo” and others, the number of which is estimated at least 20 additional organizations with powerful local and regional structures that enter into pacts and agreements with the most powerful cartels.

The National Survey of Urban Public Safety (ENSU) shows that at the local level, the proportion of people who have had contact with public security agencies and have become victims of corrupt practices is 47.5%; But also, monitoring over time allows us to estimate that the average has been virtually the same over the last six years, which shows that, at least in the recent past and up to now, corruption has not decreased and corruption has not become illegal. Transactional practices under the protection of power.

To what extent and in what way these arrests will affect the operational and financial structures and mechanisms of the so-called Sinaloa Cartel is a question that will only become clearer with time; but there are still many side issues that need to be seriously addressed in our country.

Firstly, there is a serious forensic crisis in the country due to the thousands of bodies that remain in forensic services across the country. Added to this are the most serious aspects of enforced disappearances: on the one hand, the huge number of people buried in mass graves because their identification is impossible; and the thousands of people who are estimated to be in clandestine graves across the country.

Secondly, there is currently no national drug prevention policy, an area in which we have no real diagnosis of the scale of the problem we face; but given the available data on the care of people intoxicated by alcohol and other drugs, it shows that the incidence has increased significantly in recent years.

The third major factor is the level of drug use in the United States, especially fentanyl, which is responsible for the deaths of at least 80,000 people each year on this side of the border; which reinforces the policy of manufacturing and distributing weapons, thousands of which end up in Mexico and allow criminal groups to become increasingly better equipped and resourced.

In Mexico as well as the United States, widespread impunity continues to reign, and protection is provided to criminals not only for their criminal activities, especially in the financial sector, which allows for the laundering of resources and the “legalization” of ill-gotten gains, and this allows for the reproduction of patterns of criminal brutality.

Researcher at PUED-UNAM