Category Archives: Drugs

March 15, 2012 · 6:19 am

MEXICO: San Pedro’s big mayor

Franc Contreras reports for Al Jazeera on Mauricio Fernandez, mayor of Mexico’s wealthiest town, San Pedro Garza Garcia, near Monterrey, and a larger-than-life guy from one of the country’s elite families.

Fernandez highlights a huge problem facing Mexico that the drug war has made clearer than ever: the weakness of local government and institutions, and thus the inability of local authorities to play any role in the fight against crime.

Fernandez, some say, is using connections to drug cartels to keep crime low.

But the main issue is that local police and criminal justice system in Mexico is simply unarmed, unfunded, often incompetent and hardly a weapon in the fight against narcotics traffickers and criminal gangs.

A different approach to covering the drug war. … Good job, Franc!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Drugs, Mexico

February 22, 2012 · 5:40 pm

GANGS: Where’d all the gangs go? pt. II

 

I spent some time today on Drew Street in the Glassell Park neighborhood in northeast LA.

This three three-block stretch was once one of the most dangerous spots in the city. It was essentially a closed society, and had as much to do with a Mexican village as with LA itself. It was inhabited by dozens of families from the town of Tlalchapa, Guerrero in the Tierra Caliente, a particularly violent part of southern Mexico.

Drew was the landing strip for immigrants from Tlalchapa, but even back in the town, Drew came to be known as the “Barrio Bajo” (the Low Neighborhood), as all those with aspirations came and left, leaving behind those with other intentions.

A few in particular grew up to run the drug trade on the street and their children grew into gang members. By the middle of the last decade, Drew Street was like a garrison state in some ways, where the folks on the street ran things, dense apartments provided places to hide and watch for police, and no one could move in who didn’t have some connection to the gang families in the area. (I know one person who had his rent money refunded by the gang to get him to move.) One family in particular was the shot-caller: the Leon-Reals, and especially the matriarch, Maria “La Chata” Leon.

I wrote about the family and the street after one of the family members, Danny Leon, was killed in a shootout with cops in 2008.

In the following years, the gang on Drew Street was the focus of a RICO indictment and a gang injunction. Many went to prison, including La Chata. One of the Leon Reals, Francisco, turned state’s evidence. The city seized several properties and, in an attempt at a kind of exorcism, destroyed La Chata’s house, which had a large satellite dish and was thus known as the Satellite House. It’s now a community garden.

Things are very different now on Drew. The gang still has some presence – it writes on trees and sidewalks, but by and large things are quiet, even sweet, on Drew.

Adan, an ice cream vendor, says he hasn’t had any trouble in the three years he’s been driving the street. The community garden seems full. There are no kids in hoodies lurking by the cars. The major apartment buildings are without graffiti.

I spoke with Ignacio Ramirez, who bought in 1968 and watched as the street descended into hell. He woke up to a body one morning, and a bullet hole in his door another.

He now owns four properties on Drew, even buying one of the houses the city seized due to drug activity.

“It’s getting there,” he said.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Drugs, Gangs, Los Angeles, Mexico, Migrants

Tagged as ,

February 2, 2012 · 5:30 pm

DRUGS: SB County Supe accused opponent of Mexican Mafia ties

A story today in the Daily Bulletin in the Inland Empire is interesting for what it dredges up about an episode in the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

Members of the tribe, each of which earns a ton of money from their casino, feel in with San Bernardino gang members and through them with the Mexican Mafia members in that area. Now it’s become a campaign issue, according to the story.

The Mexican Mafia prison gang remains the most fascinating criminal enterprise in California. It’s able to force street gang members to exact taxes from local drug dealers. When MM members began this system in the early 1990s, it amounted, and still does, to the first region-wide organized crime in the history of Southern California, which had been spared the Italian mafia and others.

Local gang members were ordered to do the bidding of the MM — also known as “Eme”, which is Spanish for the letter M — whose influence in the prison system is vast. Gang members hopped to it, for the most part. The revenue is shared among taxers, shotcallers and the mafioso from each areas of SoCal.

Today, years after its formation, the Eme taxation system is often as ingenius as the member in that area, which is to say sometimes enormously so, sometimes not at all.

In Huntington Park, the Eme member, doing life in Pelican Bay State Prison, ordered gang members to tax popsicle vendors and street drag-queen prostitutes, as well as drug dealers. One transgender told me recently they had to pay taxes to even live in the area, as the considered their presence a besmirching of the barrio’s rep.

Out in SB County, according to fed documents, the local Eme figured out that some members of the San Manuel Band were juicy sources of cash. In 2008, Sal “Toro” Hernandez, the Eme member from San Bernardino, was implicated in the whole thing. A DEA document, according to newspaper reports, said the Eme was extorting money from tribe members, who each reportedly earn $100,000 a month in revenue from their casino.

“Toro” Hernandez pleaded guilty as did his brother, Alfred. (Here’s a reprint of a Press Enterprise article on the case.)

Will be interesting to see how the campaign, and this issue within it, plays out.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Drugs, Gangs, Southern California

Tagged as , , ,

· 7:20 am

DRUGS: Mennonites and Time’s `Flower Girls’

Mennonite one-room school house near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua

Time Magazine has published a set of photos of an Old Colony Mennonite community in Durango, Mexico, titling it The Flower Girls. Check them out. Tell me what you think. I find the photos are sweet, delicate, beautiful, and only hint at the disaster that has befallen most of these Mennonite communities, which have tried mightily to separate themselves from the world.

The Mennonite communities in Chihuahua are replete with severe problems of inbreeding, domestic violence, benighted education, alcoholism, and, in the last 20 years, drug trafficking, particularly in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua, four hours south of Ciudad Juarez.

Mennonites came to Mexico from Canada in the 1920s, invited by the government that wanted to colonize the north to avoid further US depredations. Those who came to escape the world were masterful farmers and cheesemakers. But in time they suffered from the same problems as other Mexican farmers: drought, lack of credit, etc. Many in the Chihuahua colonies turned to drug smuggling — some full time and some to pay an urgent debt. I ran into these folks in 2003 and included a chapter on the harrowing result — the scariest moment of my reporting life — in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.

I like the Time photos immensely, but from them you’d not guess much of the reality of Old Colony Mennonite life in Mexico.

For many of these world-rejecting Mennonites, it always seemed to me that their very attempt to isolate themselves made them  vulnerable to the worst the modern world has to offer. Many I spoke with described their people as lambs, unprepared for what they would encounter outside their community. Some likened it to Indians’ lack of exposure to small pox before the Europeans came.

I’ve included a photo above of a one-room schoolhouse, taught by a man with barely a bad sixth-grade education, which is how Mennonite kids are still schooled in the colonies near Cuauhtemoc, Chihuahua. Would  love your comments on the Time photos.

2 Comments

Filed under Drugs, Mexico

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 21, 2012 · 2:15 pm

Jaripo, Michoacan

Speaking with people from Jaripo, Michoacan comes news that the small town now has a cell of the La Familia camped out and controlling access.

They apparently drive around armed and with walkie-talkies, questioning any who enter the town.

This is sad.

Jaripo is a small, sweet town in northern Michoacan, largely deserted. Most natives have moved to the United States — Chicago, Dallas, Stockton, Santa Ana and other places. It’s inhabited mostly by empty houses, built by migrants through the 1980s-90s, when they returned every year for Christmas.

I wrote about the town in Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream — a place of clean air and quiet, except at fiesta time, when it filled with folks from the US and their trucks and mariachi bands brought in from Guadalajara.

Few return any more. Its only new residents, I’m told, are folks deported: for DUI or felony reentry into the US; a few for more serious stuff. Some of the latter have formed an alliance with this La Familia cell, I’m told.

But Jaripo lies on a paved road between Apatzingan in Michoacan’s Tierra Caliente (Hot Land), which is home to a robust drug trafficking culture that spawned La Familia, and Guadalajara. So this isolated place has become a strategic point in Mexico’s inter-cartel drug wars.

(Btw, a lot has been written about La Familia Michoacana — a pseudo-Catholic narco clan, who present themselves as defenders of Mexico against drug traffickers and smuggle large quantities of meth into the US. They have allied with the Sinaloa Cartel lately in a battle with the Zetas. They appeared to be on the decline since the arrest and death of several of its leaders in the last year or so. )

 

3 Comments

Filed under Drugs, Mexico, Migrants