'You can’t trust anybody. We're on our own'

Posted by DD Republished from the Guardian

Cartel violence in Tamaulipas state has claimed 254 lives in the first three months of this year, but has largely gone unreported in the press

By Jo Tuckman in Mexico City

 When Carlos Ulivarri heard that a body had been dumped by the side of a road just outside his hometown of Rio Bravo, a few miles south of McAllen, Texas, he knew he had to act fast.

But he did not even consider contacting the authorities.

Hours earlier, Ulivarri’s son, Luís Carlos, 23, had been shot in a bar, and then dragged into the night after an altercation with a group of men presumed to be members of a local drug cartel.

At first, Ulivarri held out hope his son might be alive. But at 10am the next morning, a friend called to say that a corpse had been spotted on a road outside town which marks the frontline between two warring cartel factions. 

 Ulivarri, the president of the Rio Bravo chamber of commerce, knew that the body might disappear for good if he did not move quickly, but he did not want to risk a confrontation with either gang, who are both known to monitor the road.

So instead of calling the police and waiting for an escort, he drove alone to the site, bundled his son’s body into his car, and brought him home for the last time.

“We are on our own,” Ulivarri said in a phone interview from his office in Rio Bravo, just six miles from the Donna international bridge into Texas.

“Everybody is frightened here, there is lots of danger and you can’t trust anybody. Lots of people are sending their children away to the United States but that is not the solution.”

Rio Bravo sits on the northern edge of Tamaulipas, a state which is currently gripped by a patchwork of conflicts between rival factions of the Gulf cartel. 

It is a war which according to official figures has claimed 254 lives in the first three months of this year, but has largely gone unreported in the Mexican and international press.

Earlier this month, the US state department warned against all but essential travel to Tamaulipas. 

“Violent conflicts between rival criminal elements and/or the Mexican military can occur in all parts of the region and at all times of the day,” it said.

And if the public circumstances of Luís Carlos Ulivarra’s murder illustrate the brazen quality of cartel violence, his father’s reaction reflects the pervasive distrust many locals feel towards the official response. 

Locals describe a regime of constant terror, and widespread exasperation with a government security strategy which concentrates on the pursuit of cartel kingpins but has failed to establish a semblance of law and order in the state.

“The bullet-for-bullet strategy is failing. It gets rid of one cartel and another comes and everything remains the same,” Ulivarri said. “I am not a soldier and I don’t know what the strategy should be, but it is important to send the message that we are not the enemy.”

Years of government abandon allowed the Gulf cartel – and their notoriously bloodthirsty enforces, the Zetas – to consolidate their hold on Tamaulipas in the early, mid and late 2000s with a mixture of intimidation, exploitation and the infiltration of local authorities.

This changed when the Zetas turned on their former masters in 2010, unleashing a period of intense conflict and prompting the government to flood Tamaulipas with soldiers and marines. The strategy brought a temporary respite to the most dramatic violence, but did little to dismantle the subtler holds the cartels retained over communities and local politics.

The government’s “kingpin” strategy resulted in the death or capture of a string of bosses, leaving both the Zetas and the Gulf cartel much weaker – but splinter groups continued to terrorize the civilian populations.

And when rivalries between these second-generation cartels erupted into fresh violence last year, the government once again responded with new deployments of federal forces, and more detentions of local leaders. 

A girl looks at blood stains and a graffiti left by gunmen at a crime scene in Monterrey. Photograph: Tomas Bravo/Reuters

National security commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido admitted last month that Tamaulipas remains one of Mexico’s most conflict-riven states, but argued that the strategy was working. “The small groups left do not have anything like the capacity of the old organizations had before their leaders were captured or neutralized,” he told Radio Formula.

 But many in Tamaulipas question the official claims that the federal offensive has reined in the violence.

A spokesman for the office of President Enrique Peña Nieto said that the government is also working to improve security by strengthening local police forces and the judicial system.

“We still face important challenges and each episode of violence is an offence to society that we cannot allow to happen,” the spokesman said in a written answer. He said that in 2014 there were 38% fewer homicides in Tamaulipas than in 2012. “The government will not give up on this effort.”

But the official figures for the first quarter of 2015 show a 20% increase in homicides from the same period in 2014, and many locals say that murders are consistently under-reported.

Nancy Hernández, who heads a group of citizens seeking to help victims of violence, said the situation has been exacerbated by the cartels’ deep penetration of local authorities.

“In Tamaulipas the authorities became so closely allied with the narcos they lost control,” Hernández told La Jornada newspaper. “If you let the bandits into your house, there comes a time when they take over.”

Hernández said that despite the high-profile arrests, a daily litany of kidnappings, disappearances and extortion continues.

Little of this is reported in the local press which – as in other drug war zones – is subject to constant pressure and intimidation.

For years local reporters tended to ignore the violence completely, but today’s patchwork of territorial control has brought with it more complicated rules transmitted to reporters and editors via cartel press attachés.

“I have given up trying to understand why you are allowed to publish some things and some not,” said Enrique Juárez, who until February was the director of the newspaper El Mañana in the city of Matamoros. “But the controls are always there.”

 Torres fled Matamoros, just over the border from Brownsville, Texas, after being abducted and beaten on the day his paper published a minimalist account of three days of open gun-battles in the city.

He now feels relatively safe in a different city controlled by a different criminal faction, but he knows that could change if the balance of power shifts.

Juárez takes little comfort in the government’s protection program  for journalists under threat. Officials who had travelled to Matamoros to interview him about his case, abandoned the mission when they heard they would have to drive along a cartel-controlled road to interview him.

“What kind of protection do I have if the Mexican authorities themselves can’t come to where I am?” Juárez said, with a laugh.

The limitations on the media lead many to rely on Facebook, blogs and Twitter for real-time citizen reports of blockades, shootouts and cartel checkpoints.

The most active contributors always use anonymous addresses. Even so, several have ended up dead, with cartel warnings left by their corpses.

A man with the Twitter handle @MrCruzStar is one of the founders of the much-used #ReynosaFollow hashtag. He has never told his family of his online activities, in order both to protect them and reduce the risk they might unwittingly reveal his identity to a cartel informer. But he said he could not imagine giving up.

“When something happens I know there are people depending on me to let them know,” he said.

@MrCruzStar sees his responsibilities as including vigorously retweeting information he judges to be genuine, as well as downplaying posts he suspects are cartel propaganda, or efforts to manipulate public opinion from military intelligence.

“This war is taking place on social media as well,” he said.