0.3 The role of corruption

It is crucial to recognize that these illegal operations, including a share of the violence, have occurred with the knowledge, permission, blessing, and even encouragement of the Mexican political establishment, from local police and mayors to the highest levels of the ruling party, which for 70 years after its birth in 1929 was the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Like other institutions in Mexican society, the gangs operated in a patron-client or “elite-exploitative” relationship. Stanley A. Pimentel uses “elite-exploitative,” which he attributes to Peter Lupsha, in “The Nexus of Organized Crime and Politics in Mexico,” John Bailey and Roy Godson, Organized Crime and Democratic Governability: Mexico and the US-Mexican Borderlands (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) Chapter 2. In return for being allowed to carry on their business without significant interference (or with overt assistance) from law enforcement personnel, the gang leaders were expected to pay what amounted to a franchise fee or tax on their earnings. The officials in question might simply accept a reasonable offer or, particularly at higher levels, make their expectations explicit. Precise arrangements and levels of officials involved have varied and accounts of these actions by historians, social scientists, and law enforcement agents differ on details, but there is little dispute regarding the overall pattern of thorough-going, institutionalized corruption. Luís Astorga, a sociologist at the Institute of Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a premier authority on Mexican drug trafficking, summarized the situation well: “The state was the referee, and it imposed the rules of the game on the traffickers. The world of the politicians and the world of the traffickers contained and protected each other simultaneously.” Tracy Wilkinson, “In Sinaloa, the drug trade has infiltrated ‘every corner of life, ’ ” Los Angeles Times , December 28, 2008. Unless otherwise noted, all Los Angeles Times articles cited herein are part of an extensive and continuing reportorial series, “Mexico under siege—The drug war at our doorstep,” and can be accessed by date at http://projects.latimes.com/mexico-drug-war/#/its-a-war.

Widespread discontent with the corruption and anti-democratic ethos of the PRI led to the rise and growing strength of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and a leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and also to pressures for reform within PRI itself. Ernesto Zedillo, president of Mexico from 1994 until 2000, attempted some reforms. A few crime figures went to prison during Zedillo’s six years in office, but the cozy arrangement between the gangs and the government persisted.

PAN-member Vicente Fox, whose election in 2000 ended seven decades of PRI domination of the presidency, declared war on the cartels and sent federal police after them, resulting in the arrest of several high-profile drug trafficking figures but also in a sharp increase in violence as the gangs fought back, a harbinger of things to come.