Ciudad Juarez.- The fight against drug trafficking between the 1970s and 1990s, especially in regions such as the “Golden Triangle,” was one of the contexts in which elements of the Mexican State perpetrated serious human rights violations and, instead of confronting the traffickers, created protection networks for them.
This is one of the conclusions of the report prepared by the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification – which is part of the commission established by the federal government since 2021 – and presented on Friday in Mexico City.
“This fight against drug trafficking was discretionary, since the State’s intention was never to eradicate it, but rather to control and manage it. Since the 1950s, and especially since the anti-narcotics operations of the 1970s, police, soldiers, agents and politicians of all kinds were involved in drug trafficking, establishing clientelist relationships and protection networks with traffickers and criminal groups,” the text says.
“Under these alliances, the State launched a selective fight, favouring the big traffickers and targeting, instead, independent producers, traffickers who refused to pay the fees demanded of them and farmers, who found in the cultivation of marijuana and poppies a desperate form of subsistence – in the face of the systematic and historical abandonment of the countryside by the State,” he adds.
‘It was the State’
The document is titled “It Was the State (1965-1990),” consists of six volumes, and indicates that the Government’s work against drug trafficking – which it attributes to pressure from the United States – was one of the 11 contexts from which the identification of 11,743 victims in the country arose.
Other environments where attacks against the population were documented were those of political-partisan dissidents, peasant, indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities, populations that opposed development policies and urban-popular movements.
Operation Condor
In the section on what was recorded “against inhabitants of areas where drug trafficking was fought,” the investigation mentions the participation of the current Attorney General of the Republic, Alejandro Gertz Manero, in plans such as Operation Condor, which he attributes to having had 1,500 military personnel in coordination with the then-called Attorney General’s Office (PGR).
“On September 30, 1976, the Secretary of National Defense, Félix Galván López, accompanied by Alejandro Gertz Manero, one of the key men of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and coordinator of the actions of Operation Trizo, announced the realization of Operation Condor, which would direct the State’s batteries to combat narcotics in Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango. This was the most ambitious anti-drug operation of the Mexican State during the 20th century, and perhaps the most important due to the influence it had on anti-drug policy, but it was also the most serious due to the dramatic social cost it entailed,” says the text.
“According to the chain of command at that time, those responsible on behalf of the PGR in the context of the DN-PR-I Plan (1975), applied primarily in the states of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa, were the attorney general Pedro Ojeda Paullada (1971 to 1976) and his senior officer and coordinator of the anti-drug campaign Alejandro Gertz Manero (1975 to 1976),” he adds.
Other names mentioned in the report are those who commanded the Fifth Military Zone of Chihuahua, such as Major General with a Diploma in the Presidential General Staff “Félix Galván López (from July 1, 1974 to December 1, 1976) and Major General Juan Arévalo Gardoqui, (from December 1, 1976 to January 16, 1981).”
As specific cases, the document cites the arbitrary detentions and torture perpetrated among the Ódami community, south of the Sierra Tarahumara, in the mid- and late 1970s, as well as those recorded in the municipality of Guadalupe y Calvo.
“The inhabitants of the communities in the municipality of Guadalupe y Calvo, in the south of the state of Chihuahua, were victims of serious human rights violations. In particular, arbitrary detentions, torture, temporary forced disappearances and attempted extrajudicial executions by the Army and the PJF” (Federal Judicial Police), it says.
“Some people in the community were forcibly displaced when they were forced to leave their place of residence to escape the violence and its effects… another population that was forcibly displaced was the indigenous Ódami, neighbors of the community. The Ódami fled from soldiers and federal agents, leaving their houses abandoned,” he adds.
Pressured by the United States
The document also explains that the Mexican State’s drug policy became tougher starting in 1969, when, “pressured by the White House,” governments from Gustavo Díaz Ordaz to Carlos Salinas de Gortari deployed military elements, judicial police and agents of the Federal Security Directorate in various parts of the country, “especially in the north, in the area known as the ‘Golden Triangle’,” where Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango meet.
“During these operations, intense violence was used not only against the peasants but also against their communities, with villagers being forced to do labour and tasks, and being interrogated and tortured in order to obtain information,” he says.
The investigation also traces a link between the violence perpetrated under the cover of these operations in the aforementioned decades of the 20th century and that recorded after the deployment of the military in 2006.
“The insane violence that we have experienced in recent decades was not initiated by drug traffickers, but by the State itself, which, in the 1970s and 1980s, gave its agents carte blanche to use methods that were absolutely contrary to the law and alien to the rule of law, such as the systematic use of arbitrary detentions, torture, forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions,” he says.
“This strategy was, to a large extent, dictated, financed and implemented by and from the White House, which in its eagerness to stop the flow of drugs to the country that is the world’s main consumer, turned Mexico into its battlefield, a battle lost in advance. The United States has been jointly responsible for the commission of serious human rights violations, not only because it equipped and instructed the military and police who would fight on this new front of the dirty war, but because its own agents, attached to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), came to know about, witness and even participate in these violations, which have remained unpunished to this day,” he adds.
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