The Gringos Are Already Angry

The murder of United States migration operative Jaime Zapata and the injury of his associate Victor Avila, prominent figures of the country’s embassy in Mexico, unleashed the indignation of the United States government in the face of undeniable evidence of the outrageous levels of corruption of the Mexican police forces. Even if the lightning-speed action of the Mexican army in detaining a group of professional killers — who enter and leave prison at their whim — was an attempt to palliate the neighboring government’s irritation, its response was truly powerful in generating massive retaliation in United States territory against the Mexican drug cartels that operate there, seizing 676 delinquents in the entire American union in order to “strike back” against those who attacked U.S. institutions.

The police and Mexican intelligence bureaucrats who believed they could get along with the U.S. government through a number of arrests of the drug traffickers that rule the country while allowing our country to splash into the quagmire of corruption, violence and uncontrollable crime. In recent months, we have undergone a series of messages, some cryptic and others extremely clear. U.S. authorities have shown that they are already tired of the dual language of these bureaucracies that like to switch lives, which is customary, believing that everyone wants to poke fun at them, while they manage, mask, or selectively detain those who they agree to protect.

This situation has been dangerously tense, as the U.S. secretary of state and other officials have already made their anger public. Meanwhile, the Mexican president emits harsh declarations against U.S. ambassadors, all within a situation in which violence and uncontrollable corruption continue.

The prosecutors and the judiciary have also scraped by in this crisis and blame each other for the impunity allowed to offenders by the police in their shows for the media, so that days afterward delinquents are returned to the street and detained once again, in an effort to confirm the cynicism, anarchy, disorder and absolute inefficiency of a security and justice system that seems more like a mafia of thugs than a state structure meant to serve the community.

This sinister display and the reaction of the U.S. government in its own country also indicate something that has always been latent but is now evident in a clear way:

1. To avoid internal violence, the United States government prioritizes the fight against drug trafficking in countries that produce or transport drugs to its nation and always tolerates drug dealing and consumption in its own territory when it does not disrupt social harmony and tranquility in its communities.

2. When delinquents surpass the established limits, the government seizes their territory. In one fell swoop, it captured 676 traffickers. This demonstrates that it is aware of the traffickers, that it knows what they’re doing and that tacitly the government permits them so they don’t generate a social explosion among drug addicts. But in the moment that traffickers violate the implied covenant and go beyond the underworld of conspiracy between addicts and delinquents and produce widespread violence and pretend to confront the system, the government crushes them.

3. This form of security management is not only seen in the United States, but in countries with very controlled crime rates like Japan, whose organized criminals — the “Yakuza” — can exist in the underground and the underworld among delinquents, but once they threaten the community the government undermines and destroys them.

4. In Mexico, this strategy of steering and controlling criminal phenomena is impossible to apply, because here criminals are both the delinquents and the authorities, and cannot be distinguished with clarity; for that reason they cannot establish effective limits or barriers.

5. Extreme corruption is what has brought this brutal violence (which is not due primarily to drugs sent to the United States, as this has been happening without this much violence for more than 50 years). The cause of the daily struggle is in the uncontrollable explosion of corruption. The haggling between civil delinquents and police officials for criminal control of urban territories exists in all of the country’s cities.

In this environment, the Mexican president and the United States president will meet, and I hope that on their agenda of collaboration against drug trafficking, they find a sensible and balanced formula. In the interests of both nations, Mexico will stop suffering from this outburst of violence of which the majority of the victims are Mexicans and the defendants of law have become executioners.