In 1891, my great-great-uncle, Catarino Garza, attempted to overthrow the
Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz, by launching an armed revolution from my
family’s south Texas ranch. One year into his campaign, Garza agreed to an
interview with The New York Times to explain the reasons behind his
insurrection. “The impression prevails that I and my followers are simply an
organized band of border ruffians,” Garza told the reporter. “As nothing can be
further from the truth, I rely on you to do me justice.”
Journalists of that era who covered the new and largely unknown southern
territory drew heavily on U.S. military reports, which viewed Mexico through the
prism of expansionism. The United States, eager to protect trade with Mexico and
secure its new frontier, came to Díaz’s defense and deployed the Army, the Texas
Rangers, and other law enforcement outfits to join Mexican federales in hunting
Garza down. And on the front page of the Times, in keeping with the label
assigned to Garza by the U.S. and Mexican governments, Garza was branded a
“bandit.”
In Garza’s day, American press coverage of Mexico paid scant attention to the
fledgling nation’s internal political dynamics or the views of its population at
large. More than a century later, this remains too often true, as the story of
Mexico in the U.S. press is mostly a one-dimensional account of the horrible
“drug war.” I am no apologist for drug cartels, and I don’t place the
revolutionaries of old on equal footing with drug kingpins. Rather, I detect
enduring assumptions that govern our coverage of Mexico—what’s perceived as good
for the U.S. is portrayed as good for Mexico. To wit, if the U.S. interest is
clamping down on the supply of drugs reaching American streets and nightclubs,
then calling out the military is a wise policy decision for Mexico. Such a
simplistic calculus ignores the fact that narco-trafficking is a firmly
entrenched and complex organism that exists for a range of economic, social, and
political reasons.
The result is that with few exceptions the press has embraced the idea of
unleashing tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers on a civilian population as an
unquestionably good idea. And in the last three years, the Mexican government
has deployed 45,000 troops, made anywhere from 24,000 to 60,000 arrests
(depending on the source), and recorded roughly 12,000 dead in this “war.” The
U.S. has supplied Mexico with training and military hardware to the tune of
roughly $1.2 billion.
Credible voices of dissent—both in the U.S. and in Mexico—have been available
to journalists. In the U.S., for instance, some in Congress expressed concern
about a strategy modeled after the failed approach the U.S. has taken in
Colombia. And in Mexico, historians and political commentators raised concerns
about increasing the role of the military in civilian life and its effect on
Mexico’s young democracy.
But with rare exceptions, their views have been relegated to the obligatory
“balancing” paragraph or two. For the most part, the horror and gore of
drug-cartel violence has seized the press’s attention. By December 2006, turf
wars between cartels raged in some Mexican cities. At the time, Felipe Calderon
was a new and embattled president with a tiny—.58 percent—margin of victory and
protestors screaming “fraud” on the streets of Mexico City. Public-opinion polls
reported 69 percent of Mexicans felt “very safe,” and that unemployment and
poverty were their top concerns. Still, just days after assuming office,
Calderon declared drug violence his top priority and deployed the military in an
offensive against the narcos.
In the U.S., the Bush administration (and then the Obama administration)
hailed a “brave” Calderon who was engaged in a “courageous” battle. This
perspective was repeated in news articles and in editorials urging U.S.
intervention:
“Mexican President Shows He Can Lead; Election Crisis Fades”—The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, March 25, 2007
“Mexican president Felipe Calderon has been brave enough to try to wrestle
back control of his country”—San Francisco Chronicle, May 13, 2008
“U.S. Bolsters Security at Mexican Border”—The New York Times, March 25,
2009
“The United States has a vested interest in seeing Calderon succeed”—San
Antonio Express-News, August 15, 2009
Now, after three years of this “drug
war,” press reports have appeared in the U.S. citing the mounting criticism over
human-rights abuses as well as the disenchantment among Mexican political
insiders with the government’s tactics. But the dominant storyline—in print and
on television—has been to depict the more sensational aspects of the drug
violence, focusing on body counts and decapitations and ignoring a number of
relevant questions that would have framed the story much differently.
For instance, did Calderon launch an internal war to legitimize his
presidency? While Calderon was elected in 2006 with the support of the
international community, and the church, the elite, and the business class
within Mexico, he faced civil unrest in the southern state of Oaxaca and
mounting economic problems. A solid half of the Mexican population qualifies as
poor, and in the presidential race, a large number of those poor voters
supported Calderon’s opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
When Calderon appeared in battle gear with the military in a spectacular
January 2007 photo op, it indicated to Mexican political commentators that the
president was attempting to bolster his weak position and shift the discourse
from complex social issues to security. “The images and the way in which the
press treats this topic creates an alliance with the most conservative class
elite,” says Froylan Enciso, a Mexican historian and former journalist. “When
all the coverage is around criminals, then you have an enemy and the Mexican
government can have its war.”
What does victory in this “war” look like, and is it attainable? Is the
objective to dismantle the cartels, reduce their size, end the violence, or
disrupt drug shipments? Over the last three years, all four have been mentioned
by the Mexican and U.S. governments as the goal.
Whatever the goal, is a military offensive the best strategy? In the 1970s,
the U.S. funded a succession of drug interdiction programs in the coastal state
of Sinaloa, where marijuana cultivation was (and remains) robust. The result:
hundreds were arrested and tortured, and the traffickers morphed into today’s
cartels. But the strongest reason to question a military-based strategy is the
story of the U.S.’s effort to stamp out the cocaine industry in Colombia.
Between 2000 and 2008, the U.S. poured some $6 billion into that “drug war.”
Yet, according to a report last year by the U.S. Government Accountability
Office, coca production increased by 15 percent over the first six years of this
decade.
While American press reports have consistently suggested that Calderon’s
deployment of the military is evidence of his commitment to the drug fight,
Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister, noted in a piece in the May
2007 Newsweek International that the secretary of defense in the administration
of Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, had refused to send his troops on the
drug mission. “The Mexican military is not trained, equipped or enthusiastic
about such chores,” Castaneda wrote.
Finally, are Mexico’s public institutions, many of which are notoriously weak
and corrupt, prepared for a massive crackdown on drug traffickers? In 2008, for
instance, after nearly two years of the “drug war,” Mexico approved a judicial
reform package to address the country’s 30 percent conviction rate for alleged
narco-traffickers and nearly 5 percent conviction rate in cases of murder and
kidnapping.
Without an exploration of such questions, we are presented with a simplistic
battle between good guys—macho soldiers with loads of ammo—and bad guys—the
tattooed and sinister drug goons. Despite complaints by Mexican human-rights
groups about alleged human-rights violations by the military and reports of
altercations between civilians and soldiers from the outset of the offensive,
rarely does the U.S. press coverage show citizens in confrontation with the Army
or the experience of a civilian population under siege by cartel violence.
Instead, detailed coverage is lavished on the exotic habits of the drug
traffickers, their taste for ostrich-leather cowboy boots, and the romanticized
presentation of “narcocultura.” Consider this representative passage from the
February 21, 2009, edition of The Wall Street Journal: “Mexican drug gangs even
have an unofficial religion: they worship La Santa Muerte, a Mexican version of
the grim reaper.” The rising death toll, which doubled between 2007 and 2008, is
explained simply by repeating Calderon’s logic: “Officials in both Washington
and Mexico City also say the rising violence has a silver lining … the Mexican
government is finally cracking down on the drug cartels … .”
Contrast this with Alma Guillermoprieto’s article, “Days of the Dead,” in the
November 10, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, in which she too covers narcocultura
and the violence, but her perspective is much broader. The article includes
dissenting viewpoints and scrutiny of Calderon’s war, its origins, and its
tactics, and it places the rise of the cartels in the context of the end of the
one-party political system in Mexico.
Guillermoprieto’s piece delivers a sober report on an underground economy
that has thrived for generations out of economic need and with tacit political
approval. She approaches the story from a perspective within Mexico, rather than
from the outside looking in. As a result, the reader is informed, rather than
coerced by the implicit moral judgments found in articles that paint the cartels
as “gangs” or “goons.”
Daily coverage cannot match the depth and nuance of a New Yorker piece, but
there are examples of efforts by newspapers to break free of the narrow,
simplistic storyline on the drug story. Consider the video series produced by
Travis Fox for The Washington Post’s “Mexico at War” project. By making the
experiences and perspectives of Mexican citizens the central focus, Fox blurs
the easy distinctions between bad guys and good guys, explores the fear and
distrust of the government, and explains the myriad reasons why the drug
business thrives: a confluence of a lack of social services (education) and
good-paying jobs, poor social mobility, and indifference on the part of the
police. We meet one family trying to protect its little girl from the “war”
outside, and then learn that many parents in the violence-ravaged town where
this family lives work for the “narcos.”
Such deeper reporting of Mexico requires a critical perspective on U.S.
policy—a perspective that doesn’t fit the simplistic good guy/bad guy paradigm.
The drug issue is too often cast as a Mexican menace, with breathless stories of
the looming “spillover” of violence along the border reinforcing the notion of
the U.S. as a bystander to a Mexican problem. Sam Quinones, a Los Angeles Times
reporter assigned to the paper’s “Mexico Under Siege” series, which began in
June 2008 and is ongoing, says that without “continual coverage” of Mexico,
“what you end up getting is big boom and bash, and you don’t get a lot of
subtleties.” Despite the significance of Mexico as a trade partner and a
neighbor with whom the U.S. shares a two-thousand-mile border, Quinones finds
that among some readers there is “a lack of knowledge that we are part of the
war, the drug demand, the guns, the money.”
Part of the reason, I would suggest, is articles like a May 31, 2009, piece
in The New York Times, under the headline “In Heartland Death, Traces of
Heroin’s Spread,” which linked the overdose death of an Ohio drug user to the
rapacious tentacles of the drug cartels. This perspective reflects the U.S.
government’s own war-on-drugs mentality, with its emphasis on punitive policies
and on supply rather than demand.
When the Times interviewed my great-great-uncle, he introduced himself as a
fellow journalist, the publisher of several Spanish-language newspapers. But the
nterview was conducted in English because Garza understood that the media’s
presentation of issues had considerable influence in shaping U.S. attitudes and
policy toward its new neighbor. Today, language is less of a barrier to
understanding. The problem is a distorted and invisible wall of perception, a
wall the press must dismantle to truly see our neighbor—and ourselves.
