The assassinations this year of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) designated by President Carlos Salinas to succeed him in office, and Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the secretary general of the PRI, have exposed an alarming reality: narco-power is becoming a state within a state in Mexico.
In his state of the nation address on Nov. 3, President Salinas himself was obliged to acknowledge for the first time publicly that drug trafficking "is intertwined with the violence we have suffered (in Mexico)" over the past year.Alongside the North American Free Trade zone painstakingly negotiated by officials from the United States, Canada and Mexico is another reality - the underground free trade zone for narcotics patched together by cruel bands of criminals whose network stretches from the Mexican border to Arizona and Texas, from California to New York, from Miami to Chicago.
This subterranean trade is dominated by the powerful multinational gulf cartel believed to be led by Juan Garcia Abrego and linked to the Ciudad Juarez cartel. They corrupt everything in their violent and cash-rich reach, including politics.
Unless their growing power is contained, it will spread to challenge the security of the rule of law in an increasingly integrated North America. In the past two decades, since the "gomeros," as the drug traffickers are known, began pushing cocaine northward for the Colombian Cali cartel, they have become "the other power" in Mexico.
In 1994, with NAFTA in place, and as the most vigorously contested presidential race in modern Mexican history was conducted, the party of narco-power launched an armed insurrection against the rule of law. Through the terror of assassination, they have intimidated the Mexican political class which is trying to make Mexico a partner in legitimate commerce and democracy with the United States. The drug cartels fully understand that the greatest threat to their subterranean commerce is the non-tariff barrier of the law.
First, Mexico was the location for the production of marijuana, opium and black heroin. Later, the country became the main transit point for cocaine from Colombia. With the enormously lucrative growth of the cocaine trade, the demand for which grew geometrically in U.S. cities over the past two decades, came the need for greater political protection of the business.
Too much was at stake for the petty payoffs that had ensured an official here or there would look the other way. That greater protection was provided by elements within the federal state and also by the "caciques," or political bosses, at the local and state level. In short, the political authoritarianism of the Mexican presidential system and the weakness of democratic institutions created and fed its own Frankenstein.
Initially, in the 1970s, the old guard of the PRI accommodated the narco-traffickers for the obvious reason: the flow of dollars that surged from contraband trade was too attractive to ignore. The enriching payoffs were large and entailed no direct consequence to public order. But, by the end of Jose Lopez Portillo's presidency in the 1980s, money from narco-trafficking needed to be invested because the assets had grown so large. In this way, drug funds penetrated the whole system: banks, tourism, construction, aviation and other transportation and agriculture.
No one knows the exact amount of the assets involved. But it is said that the Mexican cartels today take as much as 40 percent of the street price of Colombian cocaine as the fee for their mediating role in getting it into U.S. markets.
According to the authoritative newsletter Mexico Report, the profits from drugs moving through Mexico into the United States every year are more than twice the total revenues of Mexico's petroleum industry, and will roughly equal the cost of servicing Mexico's $160 billion foreign debt for 1994.
By the time Miguel de la Madrid took office, after Lopez Portillo, he found two crises confronting Mexico: economic collapse due to falling oil prices and the hidden crisis of narco-power with which he had to directly contend in order to govern. This was a crisis known only to the party heads and by the group closest to the president known as "The Happy Family."
In their way, Mexican officials up until today have made their pact with narco-power, either by directly protecting the traffickers or implicitly by not pressing the challenge against their political allies, which would disrupt the shaky balance of power in the ruling PRI. It is this balance that is unraveling today in the aftermath of the assassination of Ruiz Massieu, as the trail of blood apparently leads from the gulf cartel ever higher and higher into the ranks of the PRI.
Mexicans do not yet know if Ernesto Zedillo, the man who will become Mexico's next president on Dec. 1, will accommodate the pressures of the traffickers and negotiate with their political representatives, or if he will seek a long-range strategy with Canada and the United States to subdue the narco-power that increasingly challenges the rule of law. We will soon know, when Zedillo begins to make political decisions like the naming of a PRI governor of the state of Jalisco or when he names the cabinet officers for attorney general, the army and the navy.
For now, Zedillo has declared in Matamoros, birthplace of the gulf cartel, that drug traffickers "and those associated with them" will be fought with all the state's power. If Zedillo sticks to this course, there may be hope yet for escaping the criminal undertow of narco-power that could turn Mexico into another Colombia.
The eruption of long-dormant violence in Mexico's political life this year can be the writing on the wall of worse to come. Or it can provide the opportunity to raise to the highest priority Mexico's most pressing challenge in the NAFTA era: Establishing the rule of law across the land.