The Making of a Narco State

In mexico, the raid on Conejo's party and the subsequent revelations of Garay's corruption played out in the press with a mix of outrage and resignation. Sensational stories of police corruption are a near-daily occurrence here. Indeed, as drug violence has spiraled out of control in Mexico, the line between law enforcement and organized crime has virtually disappeared. Many of Mexico's police officers, who are paid less than $5,000 a year on average, supplement their meager incomes by taking money from drug traffickers. In a recent investigation of 400 federales, 90 percent were linked to the cartels. Police who refuse to cooperate are frequently executed, often in broad daylight. More than 500 police were killed last year, some of them beheaded by members of the growing cult of Santa Muerte, or Holy Death — a group, celebrated in shrines across the country, that includes drug traffickers and police officers alike. In January, to cite one of many grim examples, the severed head of a police comandante was dumped in front of the police station in Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The widespread corruption has all but handed control of large swaths of Mexico to the drug lords. In the past year, at least 6,290 people were killed in drug–related crimes, double the number in 2007. Nearly half of the victims remain unidentified because the families are too afraid to come forward to claim the bodies, lest they be targeted by drug violence. Although more than 45,000 soldiers have been deployed to lawless regions throughout the country, the military response only appears to have escalated the violence. In January, a man in Tijuana confessed to being "El Pozolero" — the Stew Maker — who disposed of the bodies of 300 murder victims for a drug cartel by dumping them in pits and dousing them with acid to dissolve the remains. In February, an hours-long shootout between the army and a gang of kidnappers in Chihuahua, near the border with New Mexico, ended with 21 dead. No police officers took part: The town's entire police force had already resigned last year after drug traffickers murdered the police chief and two other cops.

"Mexico is on the edge of the abyss," retired U.S. general and former drug czar Barry McCaffrey wrote in a strategic assessment at the end of last year. Michael Hayden, the outgoing head of the CIA, said in January that the threat of a narco state in Mexico is one of the gravest dangers to American security, on a par with a nuclear–armed Iran. A recent report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command likens instability in Mexico to the risk of a failed state in Pakistan, warning that a "rapid and sudden collapse" could occur in the coming years. "Any descent by Mexico into chaos," the report concludes, "would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone." In 2007, the Bush administration unveiled the Mérida Initiative, pledging $1.4 billion in aid — most of it military–related — to help Mexico fight drug traffickers, and the CIA and the DEA both operate actively in Mexico, gathering intelligence on the cartels. Now, under pressure from Washington, the Mexican government is pursuing a new initiative called "Operación Limpieza" — Operation Cleanup — to investigate dirty cops and root out corruption.

But the lawlessness and brutality throughout Mexico — as well as the official misconduct that makes it possible — are not limited to the local police, or even to top-ranking federal officers like Gerardo Garay. As the raid against Conejo revealed, the influence of the drug cartels reaches all the way to the highest levels of Mexico's political elite. The real front in the War on Drugs is not in cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, or in the Sierra Madres, where drug kingpins hide out, but in the corridors of power in Mexico City. The government itself has become a tool of the narcotraffickers, who have successfully infiltrated every level of the country's law–enforcement and intelligence agencies. Indeed, it now appears that Mexico's top drug czar, as well as its head of Interpol, have been secretly working for the drug cartels, funneling classified information to the nation's most notorious drug lords.

"Garay is totally corrupt," says José Reveles, founder of the leading newsweekly Proceso and author of a forthcoming book on the Mexican drug war called Dark Stories of Drugs, Impunity and Corruption. "But Garay was right underneath the top man for security for the whole government, who has not been arrested. The arrests only go to the neck, not to the head. It is not possible that the corruption ends at the neck. The whole body is corrupt. These cleanup operations are nothing but propaganda."

The roots of Garay's raid reach back to December 2007, when Mexican police seized 500 kilograms of cocaine at the airport in Mexico City. When I traveled to the Mexican state of Sinaloa last year to report on the escalating drug violence ["The War Next Door," RS 1065], I wrote about the bust at the airport and how it had started a deadly feud between two of Mexico's most powerful drug kingpins, "El Chapo" (Shorty) and "El Mochomo" (Red Ant). The two had been allies in an all–out war with rival cartels for control of the incredibly lucrative territory along the U.S. border, where drugs are routinely smuggled into America via a network of tunnels and trucks with false floors and, new to the market, mini–submarines used to skirt coastal patrols. Furious at the loss of half a ton of cocaine, Mochomo ordered the execution of the airport workers responsible for the shipment's safekeeping. The retribution attracted police attention, and that proved bad for business. Within weeks, Mochomo was arrested. Given the level of corruption in Mexican law enforcement, Mochomo assumed that his capture could only be the result of betrayal by someone close to him: none other than Chapo, a legendarily sly and ruthless trafficker. Before long, Chapo's son was killed in a drive–by shooting. So began the internecine war within the Sinaloan cartels.