by Ed Vulliamy
The Observer/LONDON – During January 2011, Anabel
Hernandez’s extended family held a party at a favorite cafe in the north
of Mexico City. The gathering was to celebrate the birthday of Anabel’s
niece. As one of the country’s leading journalists who rarely allows
herself time off, she was especially happy because “the entire family
was there. There are so many of us that it’s extremely difficult to get
everybody together in one place. It hardly ever happens.”
Anabel Hernandez had to leave early, as so often, “to finish an
article,” and it was after she left that gunmen burst in. “Pointing
rifles at my family, walking round the room — and taking wallets from
people. But this was no robbery; no one tried to use any of the credit
cards — it was pure intimidation, aimed at my family, and at me.” It was
more than a year before the authorities began looking for the
assailants. And during that time the threats had continued: one
afternoon last June, Hernandez opened her front door to find decapitated
animals in a box on the doorstep.
Hernandez’s offense was to write a book about the drug cartels that
have wrought carnage across Mexico, taking some 80,000 lives, leaving a
further 20,000 unaccounted for — and forging a new form of 21st-century
warfare. But there have been other books about this bloodletting; what
made “Los Senores del Narco” different was its relentless narrative
linking the syndicate that has driven much of the violence — the Sinaloa
cartel, the biggest criminal organization in the world — to the
leadership of the Mexican state.
Her further sin against the establishment and cartels was that the
book became, and remains, a best-seller: more than 100,000 copies sold
in Mexico. The success is impossible to overstate, a staggering figure
for a non-fiction book in a country with indices of income and literacy
incomparable to the American-European book-buying market. The wildfire
interest delivers a clear message, says Hernandez: “So many Mexicans do
not believe the official version of this war. They do not believe the
government are good guys, fighting the cartels. They know the government
is lying, they don’t carry their heads in the clouds.”
Hernandez’s book will be published in English this month with the
title “Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers,” so that
we in the English-speaking world that consumes so much of what the
cartels deal, and which banks their proceeds, might learn the lie of
“cops and robbers,” of “upright society versus the mafia” — the received
wisdom that still contaminates coverage of drug wars and the “war on
drugs.”
Two writers in particular have pioneered the struggle to counter this
untruth: One is Hernandez, and the other is Roberto Saviano — author of
“Gomorrah,” about the Camorra of Naples — who writes in a foreword to
Hernandez’s English edition: “Narcoland shows how contemporary
capitalism is in no position to renounce the mafia. Because it is not
the mafia that has transformed itself into a modern capitalist
enterprise, it is capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia.
The rules of drug trafficking that Anabel Hernandez describes are also
the rules of capitalism.”
Threats and deadly violence
By the year 2000, Anabel Hernandez had made a name for herself in Mexican journalism, on the daily paper Reforma. But in December of that year, she found herself personally caught up in the murky crossover between state and criminals when her father was kidnapped: a crime the family believes to have been unconnected to his daughter’s work.
The police in Mexico City said they would investigate only if they
were paid; the family refused, figuring — as sometimes happens — that
the police would take the money without taking any action. When Mr.
Hernandez was murdered, Anabel Hernandez’s resolve to nurture her craft —
fearless of, and without illusions about, the establishment — was
deepened by the outrage.
Within a year, Hernandez had broken a scandal about the extravagance
with which the winning presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, had
decorated his personal accommodation using public funds — while
campaigning on a ticket of economic austerity. Two years later, she was
honored by UNICEF for her work on slave labor and the exploitation of
Mexican girls entrapped in agricultural work camps in Southern
California. Before long, Mexico’s drug war erupted, and Hernandez turned
her attention to this most perilous of subjects, and the most powerful
man involved: Joaquin “El Chapo’” Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel.
In the depth of its depiction of the world’s richest and most
influential criminal, Hernandez’s book leaves every other account far
behind.
 |
| El Chapo Guzmán |
When Zulema Hernandez (no relation) entered Puente Grande prison,
convicted of murder, she cannot have thought herself in for a happy
time. But she could never have imagined the consequences of attracting
the attention of the jail’s most famous inmate, Guzman, and becoming one
of his lovers. The attentions of El Chapo (“Shorty”) led Zulema to have
two abortions, to being prostituted around the warders like “a piece of
meat” and — once released — to her corpse being found in the boot of a
car with the letter Z, epigram of Guzman’s main rivals, Los Zetas,
carved into her buttocks, breasts and back.
If this appalling tale, past midway through Hernandez’s narrative,
captures the squalidness of Mexico’s drug war, another passage
illustrates the way Guzman ran the jail in which he was supposedly
incarcerated, inviting his extended family in for a five-day Christmas
party. Hernandez also recounts the mysterious murders of the one senior
public official who tried to expose the corruption at the jail at
government level and the only warder who testified to it. And, most
important, the fact that Guzman did not “escape” from Puente Grande, as
the lore has it, in a laundry truck — he walked free in police uniform,
with a police escort, long after the chief of the prison service and
deputy minister for public security arrived in response to the “news” of
his escape.
 |
| Genaro Garcia Luna |
For this is a book about, to use one of Anabel Hernandez’s best
words, the “mafiocracy,” rather than the mafia — about the mafia state.
It is about how the old Guadalajara cartel of the 1980s was protected by
the Mexican government just as its heir, Guzman’s Sinaloa syndicate, is
now. It is about the rise of Genaro Garcia Luna, whom Hernandez accuses
of being El Chapo’s protector at the apex of government. “At first, I
thought it would be difficult,” she says. “I didn’t think people would
be ready to believe that the government is lying. That this is all one
big lie.”
A character appears throughout the book, called simply “The
Informant” — one among many Hernandez found during her five-year odyssey
through the criminal world, and those supposedly fighting it. “And he
told me when I started this in 2005: ‘Don’t do this. You’re a woman and
it’s too dangerous.’ But I had to — because of what had happened in my
life, and because only when people understand what is going on can they
change it.”
The threats began when Hernandez’s book was published in Mexico in
2010 — and their story is interwoven into the book she has since
written, “Mexico in Flames.” By this time she had become a mother of two
children. “I received initial warnings that Garcia Luna — who was
minister for public security — wanted to sanction me,” she says. “Even
that he wanted to have me killed. I didn’t want to believe it, but I was
told this on good authority — ‘they want to kill you’. I’d come to know
Garcia Luna’s various cars well over the years, and one day when I was
fetching my little child from school, there it was, one of them, an
official one.”
Whatever the motive of this menace, “I reported it immediately to the
government’s human rights commission. They opened a file, and I was
allocated 24-hour protection.” But then, earlier this summer, a sinister
move: The authorities announced their intention to remove the escort,
forcing her to cancel a number of trips to afflicted areas of the
country to promote the new book.
“I fought the decision,” says Hernandez, “and they gave me back the
escort — but beheaded animals continued to appear on my doorstep even
after this, as recently as last June.”
Pogrom against the press
When Hernandez visits Britain this month, she will be drawing attention not only to the agony of her country, but to the intimidation she has suffered and the murder of scores of her colleagues. This pogrom against the press is no “sideshow” or media obsession with itself — it is strategically integral to Mexico’s drug war, and the taking of territory by the cartels.
 |
| Mike O’Connor, CPJ |
One of Hernandez’s friends is the veteran reporter Mike O’Connor, who
spent much of his childhood in Mexico, has covered conflict since
America’s “dirty wars” in Central America during the 1980s and now works
full-time on behalf of Mexico’s menaced reporters, based in Mexico City
for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“The silencing of the press and killing of journalists is integral to
the reality, the big story, of what is happening here,” explains
O’Connor. “The cartels are taking territory. The government and
authorities are ceding territory to the cartels and, for the cartels to
take territory, three things have to happen. One is to control the
institutions with guns — basically, the police. The second is to control
political power. And, for the first two to be effective, you have to
control the press.”
Furthermore, he says, underlining the theme of his friend’s book,
“The inability of the government to really solve any of the crimes
against journalists during the four years I’ve been here is a metaphor
for its inability to solve crimes against common citizens. They simply
cannot do it. And you wonder: if they can’t solve these crimes, why not?
Is it because they don’t want to?”
 |
| Reporter murdered |
What does Hernandez feel about her less prominent colleagues on local
papers, often compromised and threatened by cartels? It is a problem,
she says, that “our reporters are not united in the face of these
threats and murders,” and she intends to “form a federation of
solidarity, to build a group, a community, to make us stronger against
the cartels and authorities.”
“Many of these murders of my colleagues have been hidden away,
surrounded by silence — they received a threat, and told no one; no one
knew what was happening,” she says. “We have to make these threats
public. We have to challenge the authorities to protect our press by
making every threat public — so they have no excuse.”
 |
| Caro Quintero released |
The timing of this English edition of the book is fortuitous, feeding
into the current news like a hand into a glove. The release last month
of the cartel boss Caro Quintero by a Mexican federal court made
headlines across the world; Quintero had been convicted of a part in the
torture to death of a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Enrique
“Kiki” Camarena in 1985. It’s a murder which, in Hernandez’s account,
throws light on both Mexican government and CIA complicity in drug
trafficking, a narrative that exposes a deep root of the present drug
war.
The court released Quintero on a legal technicality, but Hernandez
says now: “Mexico’s government did nothing to prevent his release. On
the contrary, they contributed cover for the release. The one thing
nobody wants is Quintero talking about the roles of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party [returned to power, and in government during
Camarena's murder] and the CIA in the origins of Chapo Guzman’s cartel.”
Another major item of news was the capture in July of the Zetas
leader Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, and the killing last year of the
man he replaced, Heriberto Lazcano. These successes for the Mexican
military speak to Hernandez’s theme: it has long been speculated that
any Mexican government’s best chance for peace is to return to the
so-called “pax mafiosa,” a conviviality with — a blind eye towards — the
biggest cartel, Guzman’s, whereby the drugs keep flowing in exchange
for a cessation of violence, while the official “war on drugs” is fought
against his opponents. Of these, the Zetas are by far the most
formidable.
“Sadly, I think this is what is happening,” says Hernandez. “Mexico
is exhausted. People will pay anything to live in peace. And this is the
strategy; a sponsorship of the Sinaloa cartel, which makes the
so-called ‘war on drugs’ one big lie.”
“Senores del Narco” is not flattered by its English translation,
which is sometimes colloquial to the point of inelegance (agent Camarena
is described as “a goner,” and the mysterious killing of a compromised
government official, Edgar Millan, is “a shocker”). That is a shame
given the importance of the book and the availability of excellent
translators from Spanish. The English edition is, furthermore,
regrettably tardy (though hats off to Verso for publishing it),
illustrating the Anglophone world’s baffling detachment from the death
toll of the drug-taking to which it feels entitled.
Hernandez is “very pleased my book is being published in English, so
it can be read in London and New York where drugs are being sold and
taken on every corner, and people can know where every gram of cocaine
comes from — corruption and death. I want it published in Britain and
America, where the profits are laundered. In your country [the U.K.],
where HSBC took Chapo Guzman’s money to ‘look after it,’ and then said
they didn’t know where it came from. I have studied the laundering
networks in depth, and I cannot believe them.”
Hernandez insists — and this is what places her among the political
heretics with regard to the “war on drugs”— that “the violence and the
cartels are not the disease. They’re a symptom of the disease, which is
corruption. The cartels cannot operate without the support of officials,
bureaucrats, politicians and police officers — and bankers to launder
their money. These people let the narcos do what they do and they are
the issue, this is the cancer. I met these people, the narcos. They have
no scruples, they’re cruel — but in the end, they’re just businessmen,
all they can see is money. Life, they cannot see.”
