Ernesto heard, just a few meters away, the insults and blows on one side and the pitiful screams on the other, but there wasn’t much he could do. Some demanded the payment of a debt, and the other begged them to stop the torture. The attackers, members of the Pacific Cartel (CDP), one of many organized crime groups that plague Mexico; the victim, a street vendor who did not pay the “floor fee” on time; Ernesto, the silent witness, owner of the place where everything happened, in the exclusive hotel zone of Cancun, a city in the Mexican Caribbean that lives under the widespread extortion of organized crime.
Ernesto, a prominent businessman from Cancun, one of the most important tourist destinations in Latin America, agreed to tell his story under the condition that he change his name. He is a concessionaire of one of the places on the beach, offers tourist services on boats and was also a victim of extortion.
In 2020, when the covid-19 pandemic was just beginning, members of the CDP showed up at their premises to demand the right to land. It was to pay 20,000 pesos a month or face the consequences. They did the same, he says, with the rest of the people who had commercial activities in the area. “They had extorted all of us, they charged everyone, the street vendors, the private businesses, the small ones, the big ones; to the boats. To all businesses from all locations. I can generalize it. Nobody escaped”, affirms the businessman.
Cancun, in the southeast of the country and in the extreme north of the state of Quintana Roo, is the youngest city in Mexico. Founded in 1970, created from nothing. There, between the jungle and the Caribbean Sea, where there was a small coconut town, today a complex of 201 hotels is being built that this year will receive more than six million tourists, who will spend six billion dollars, according to the state Secretary of Tourism.
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Due to its geographical location, Quintana Roo is also a strategic route for the transfer of drugs from Central and South America to the United States. Due to this double condition –tourist destination and key point on the drug route–, illegal activities such as drug dealing, arms, migrant and drug trafficking, money laundering, vehicle theft and extortion are the most profitable for the criminal groups, according to the Regional Fusion and Intelligence Center of the Southeast (Cerfise), an intelligence agency that the Ministry of National Defense has in the region.
Security agencies admit that the Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), the Pacific, Sinaloa, Gulf, Los Pelones, Los Bonfiles, Zetas Vieja Escuela and Los Rojos cartels operate in Cancun, among others.
Cerfise himself, in internal reports, acknowledges that extortion has increased in the last five years, derived from disputes between these groups. Criminal organizations take advantage of the violence created by their own war to sell protection to merchants. A protection that beyond consoling, restless. Or, they take advantage of the turbulent panorama to threaten them with physical or material damage if they do not pay a certain periodic amount, known as the “flat fee”.
In the hotel zone, where Ernesto works, there are at least five of these cartels, dedicated, among others, to charging for a flat: the CJNG, the one from Sinaloa, the one from the Gulf, the one from the Pacific and the Pelones, explained Martín José Gordillo. Aguilar, from the State Attorney General’s Office (FGE), in charge of fighting extortion in Quintana Roo. The Gulf cartel, he specifies, dominates nightclubs, discos and bars, while the others fight for beaches and other commercial premises. The Pacific cartel controls 2 of the 11 beaches in Cancun.
Carlos Dinar Torres Jaquez, alias Chore – a member of the Pacífico cartel and leader of one of its criminal cells, the Caborca, which operates in the northern zone of Quintana Roo – was in charge of extortion on the public beach where Ernesto and from yet another, 14 kilometers away, according to a Cerfise document.
At the beginning, Ernesto says, a couple of subjects came to the beach to spend the afternoon and have a beer. Then they approached the business owners. They asked for anything, to be allowed to charge their cell phones or enter the restrooms, and in the meantime, they struck up a conversation. They realized that they were not going to bask in the sun, but to collect information. Once they identified business owners, with personal details and details about business activities, they introduced themselves again, but this time in a threatening manner. “ ‘We know who you are,’ they told me. They gave me details of my work, what I did, the position I had. They intimidated me. They were two people. First they told me that they wanted to charge me twenty thousand pesos (per month), but we reached an agreement for five thousand pesos”, says Ernesto. Once the beach was dominated, with the rest of the extorted restaurateurs, nautical and street vendors, and the sale of drugs already controlled, a group of about twenty members settled in, with different tasks: monitoring, distributing drugs, collecting floor rights , threaten and hit those who opposed or delayed payments.
Three months after his arrival, Ernesto continues, the group raised the fee and then again and one more until reaching nine thousand pesos per month (about four hundred and fifty dollars). “They got paid as the boss of the plaza changed, because they were getting caught, killed or something happened. The one who arrived always asked you for more, ”he says.
The speech that these members of the Pacific cartel gave Ernesto is that, in exchange for the fee, they would offer him protection from the danger of the irruption of other criminal groups. “They said that they were going to protect the beach, that it was for protection, that there were other groups that wanted to enter and that they were the ones that were taking care of the area,” recalls Ernesto.
But in these matters you never buy a guarantee. On June 11, an armed group stormed the beach with bullets, which ended up killing two people and wounding an American tourist. It was about an opposing group that was fighting for the square, and that managed to flee on jet skis, as if it were an action movie. Twelve days later, on July 23, the body of ‘Chore’, who controlled the beach, was found in a community near Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo. After that, the leadership of the Caborca cell was taken over by Luis Miguel Landeros Aguilar, alias El Diez.
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These changes always generate tension in the divided territories and the groups intensify the measures against their victims. If at first its members demanded free food or drinks, then they asked for more and more money and to keep weapons and drugs: marijuana and cocaine.
“Afterward they asked you to keep your weapons, drugs, phones. They told you ‘keep this for me’ in case there are police operations. And they put you between a rock and a hard place, how can you tell them no?”, says the businessman resigned.
A serious crime on the rise
Extortion in Cancun already affects all economic strata and different lines of business. This investigation by Connectas requested information on citizen complaints from the Quintana Roo Secretary of Public Security (SSP). From 2019 to October 2022, in the state, 13,012 anonymous complaints for extortion -in all its forms- were made to 089, the number that provides specialized attention in this crime to citizens. Of these, 5,406 (41.5%) were made from Cancun, the municipality that accumulates the most records. The threat of physical harm or death and the collection of property rights are among the most reported.
A total of 337 business owners, shops or service providers dared to break the silence and reported to the SSP that they had been victims of extortion, according to the data requested and analyzed by Connectas. Hotels, restaurants, auto repair shops, food outlets, medical offices, beauty salons, and grocery stores are among the most common targets, but extortions were also reported against owners of bars, taquerias, stationery stores, laundries, tour agencies, salons nail shops and places selling desserts and snacks —even mariachis.
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Complaints, files, detainees
Although thousands of complaints of extortion have been reported in Quintana Roo in recent years, only a few hundred investigation files have been opened and the detainees do not even reach fifty. The bottleneck is alarming: between 2019 and 2021 there were 9,932 emergency calls to 089 motivated by extortion in the state, only 883 cases resulted in formal complaints to the FGE, and the SSP, meanwhile, arrested 31 people.
In the specific case of Cancun, there are 3,126 calls, 303 files and 25 detainees. But on five occasions (20% of the cases), in the control hearings, the judge in charge described the arrests as illegal or not in accordance with fundamental rights, according to information obtained through transparency and requested from the SSP, the FGE and the Judiciary of Quintana Roo.
The few investigation files, says Lucio Hernández, are due to the lack of formal complaints. The Inegi reports that the black figure of extortion in Quintana Roo reaches 97.4%, that is, only 2.6% of cases are formally reported. “The main problem is that the victims of extortion do not appear before the Prosecutor’s Office, because the criminals threaten them, intimidate them. If they report, they are told that they are going to disappear, that they have located them, that their businesses are going to be shot at,” says Hernández, and assures that more than 80% of the detainees are released within a few months of being apprehended. “And they leave to commit crimes again. There is a recidivism of 35% ”.
For Martínez Trujillo, from México Evalúa, place responsibility for complaints and investigations on victims It takes the wrong perspective.
“It only makes sense to increase the complaint if you immediately have an alternative protector to the extortionist. For example, reporting works for businessmen because the State will react to protect them with greater force than the criminal, but this does not work with the majority. Think of a small venue. You cannot go to denounce it because your protector, the criminal, is going to retaliate and the State is not going to intercede. Then the complaint can be a death sentence, ”rebuts the specialist.
*) Research: Ricardo Hernández Ruiz.
(**) Connectas is a nonprofit journalistic initiative that promotes the production, exchange, training, and dissemination of information on key issues for the development of the Americas.
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