NewsLatin AmericaThe pulse of the Mexicles: atomized crime terrorizes Ciudad Juarez

The pulse of the Mexicles: atomized crime terrorizes Ciudad Juarez

On one side of the Ciudad Juarez jail, academic Salvador Salazar points his finger at any point inside. “They are separated in there: the Aztecs, the Mexicles, the Bent… When I worked there, the only ones we couldn’t go to see were the Mexicles. It was too dangerous,” he says. The birds sing next to the prison, over the puddles left by the early rain, with the mountains in the background. It seems quiet in there. Anyone looking at the building now might think of words like control, calm, or order. He would be wrong, of course.

A week and a half ago, a fight inside the prison left two inmates murdered and provoked, hours later, the attack of criminals against pedestrians, workers, stores and gas stations, which ended with nine more deaths. The extraordinary thing about Juarez was the direct and indiscriminate attack against anyone who was on the street at that time: the announcer and the producers of a local radio station, workers of a pizzeria, dispatchers of a self-service store To this day, there is no only one arrested for the murders.

Salazar begins a tour in the prison that passes through different points of the attack. Most, he says, were in the northeastern fringe of the city, where middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods and developments abound. The academic, who a few years ago worked for months with the different groups that populate the prison, knows the criminal dynamics of the city, in clear interdependence with the prison. “The logic of self-government is very strong in there,” he explains. “A social worker even told us that the inmates managed the medical lists. So the doctor attended first to whom they said, ”he adds.

Both on the street and in prison, the authorities have pointed to the Mexicles, a prison gang that emerged in the southern United States, which took root on this side of the border years ago. Mexicles, Aztecas and other gangs fight for the sale of drugs inside and outside the prison. What is not clear is the motive for the attack. The unknown is repeated these days in another handful of regions of Mexico, given the similarity in the responses that criminal groups have given to any type of threat or onslaught of authority, real or imagined.

The Ciudad Juarez prison where on August 12 two people were killed in a fight.Quetzalli Nicte Ha

In Juarez, a city of a million and a half inhabitants dedicated to the auto parts and electronic components industry, the famous maquilas, any explanation is lost in a tangle of names of criminal groups, splits, alliances and betrayals. It is the new face of crime, atomized and interconnected, with a brutal firepower. What happened in prison had repercussions outside, just as the attempt to capture criminals a week and a half ago in Jalisco caused blockades in Guanajuato, or the arrest of a capo in Mexico City days later raised crime in Colima.

The fragmentation of the groups makes it difficult to test explanations, given the tendency, moreover, to explain the violence as fights between criminal cells. It’s not that they don’t happen, it’s that the argument of the struggle for the plaza usually ignores the role of municipal and state police. In Juarez, corporations have historically been linked to drug trafficking groups, both to the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels, as have the gangs and criminal networks linked to the former. The clearest case is that of La Linea, a criminal group whose first members were police officers from the entity, who have kidnapped and murdered people for the cartel for 20 years.

The ten days that have passed since the attacks in the city have gone a long way. Different stories about what happened have been published in the press. Some point out the anger of the Mexicles with the authority for preferring another group, called La Empresa. Others point to the fear of the boss of one of the factions of the Mexicles to a possible transfer. But in Juarez the suspicion is different, an idea that the president himself, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has raised in passing this week from the National Palace. In one of his morning press conferences, the president pointed to the custodians. He said that they had not let the Army through.

The Los Alena neighborhood, where there have been at least two fires set in funeral homes in the last month.
The Los Alena neighborhood, where there have been at least two fires set in funeral homes in the last month.Quetzalli Nicte Ha

The Mexicans

There is no way to understand Juarez from a pedestrian logic. No one walks on the street for pleasure. Nobody walks. Academician Salazar says that it is common for quinceaneras to celebrate their parties in shopping centers, walking corridors full of stores, surrounded by their chambelanes. It is a matter of the weather, the extreme heat, but also of security. More so now, after the immoral escalation of crime.

The base of the state police in the city operates on the Juan Gabriel road axis, the limit between the northeast and the center. It is a huge property, behind a baseball field, trapped in a braid of bridges, crossings and other vehicular paraphernalia. The guards seem surprised that someone is walking. Inside, Commander Ricardo Realivazquez, operational director of the corporation in Ciudad Juarez, gives some information about the place. “We had to climb the fence,” he says, pointing to the fence of the property. “There was a time when they passed by and from the car they shot at us inside here.”

Armored vehicles of the state police, at the Ciudad Juarez base.
Armored vehicles of the state police, at the Ciudad Juarez base.Quetzalli Nicte Ha

Realivazquez is a Juarez veteran. He arrived in the city in 2014 as commander of the state. From 2016 to 2020 he was commander of the municipal police and then returned to the state police. The policeman shares his reading of what happened on Black Thursday, as the attacks of a week and a half ago are called in the city. “The Mexicles did not want us to enter their module. It was the only place we didn’t go in and the only way to stop us from doing it was to keep ourselves busy on the street,” he explains.

According to the commander, the state police were the first to arrive at the jail on the day of the fight. “I think it was around 1:00 p.m., because the first video comes from the helicopter at 1:40 p.m. and we were already there,” he says. The fight had started around noon. According to the police account, a group of Mexicles went to the module of another group, “apparently close to the Sinaloa cartel.” The reason for the assault is not clear, but in the fight, two inmates died from gunshots. The authority has not explained how it is possible that the prisoners had firearms. It has also not made clear whether the attackers targeted the victims directly or died in the brawl.

Upon entering the prison, the state police arrived at the “area of ​​the attacked,” as Realivazquez says. “He had lit a fire in the entrance booth and they were throwing stones at us. On the other side, we had to push a group of Mexicles back to their module,” he adds. “We never enter where they, only the custodians. The Mexicles did not want to”. In the end, the state police arrived at the module of the attacked. Once there, with the help of the municipal police, the emergency services intervened. The families of the inmates, visiting that day, were able to leave the prison. At the end of last week, the director of the Juarez prison resigned, without the scandal having escalated beyond him at the moment.

The history

Commander Realivazquez gives an explanation of the panorama of criminal groups in the city. “Before, the Aztecs were stronger,” he says. The policeman refers to one of the longest-running gangs in Juarez, born in the southern United States, these specifically in the Coffield prison, in Dallas, in the mid-1980s, as journalist Sandra Rodriguez explains in her brilliant book about violence in the city, the crime factory.

In a similar way to the Mara Salvatrucha with El Salvador, the Aztecs left the United States and arrived in the mother country, in this case Mexico. South of the Rio Grande, it did not take long for the Aztecas to operate for the Juarez cartel, an organization formed in the 1990s around the figure of Amado Carrillo, better known as The Lord of the heavens. This is how it was at least since the beginning of the century. Los Aztecas were an armed group at the service of the Carrillo Fuentes, for whom they also distributed drugs.

At the time, the Mexicles were a minor gang. “The Mexicles had the largest number of heroin addicts and their members lived in the dirtiest and poorest prison conditions,” writes Rodriguez. At that time, one of the strangest gangs that Mexico has seen, Los Artistas Asesinos, was also born, but already in Mexican territory, a name adopted by groups of young people who grew up in the southeast of the city in the 1990s, a desert from which factories sprouted. and entire neighborhoods overnight, in the heat of the free trade agreement signed years ago with the United States and Canada.

The commander of the state police in Juarez, Ricardo Realivazquez, shows a map of the region.
The commander of the state police in Juarez, Ricardo Realivazquez, shows a map of the region. Quetzalli Nicte Ha

The three gangs and other smaller ones coexisted in Juarez and its prison, always at the mercy of the aggressiveness of the Aztecs, who wanted a monopoly on drug sales. But everything changed in the last third of the first decade of the 21st century. Rodriguez and other authors have narrated ad nauseam the thrust of the Sinaloa cartel in those years, which waged a battle to the death with the Juarez cartel, through gangs, for control of the border crossings. In 2008, in addition, the Government of Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) launched the Chihuahua Joint Operation. Thousands of soldiers arrived in the border city. Never in the history of the city were there as many murders as at that time.

The history of the Mexicles changes then. Sinaloa saw in them an opportunity to harm their opponents and the power of the Mexicles increased. The war between cartels never ended, although it is true that the degree of violence of those years is not seen now. It goes in waves and sometimes catches on in the press, for example at the end of 2019, when a group of members of La Linea murdered a group of women and children from the Mormon clan of the Lebaron, on the border between Sonora and Chihuahua.

According to Commander Realivazquez, “the Mexicles have never been as strong as they are now, although it is true that they have already fragmented, just like the Aztecs.” His explanation is somewhat contradictory. Perhaps, also, because of the paradoxical nature of the groups and the dynamics that are established between them. “Everyone fights against everyone, always for the fight on the ground, inside and outside prison,” he settles.

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Source: EL PAIS

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