Sergio 'El Toto' Mora of the Los Zetas Cartel, held in connection with
the killing of a U.S. customs agent, in Mexico City, Feb. 28. Recently
disclosed U.S. diplomatic cables about Mexico's leadership and the
drug war have rocked the country.
La Jornada, Mexico
WikiLeaks Reveals 'Devastating X-Ray' of Power in Mexico
"The
U.S. diplomatic cables present an image of power in Mexico that is as bleak as
it is deplorable. … They show that warnings about the loss of national sovereignty
made by the most apocalyptic critics were not exaggerated. And they remind us that
the struggle for national liberation is not the outdated nostalgia of
nationalists, but a necessity that is the order of the day."
The guns, drugs and money keep on flowing: Julian Zapata Espinoza, also known as 'Piolin' of the Los Zetas cartel, arrested in connection with the killing of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata, Feb. 23.
On February 16, La Jornada
published a news item outlining the doubts of U.S. Consul in Monterrey Bruce
Williamson on the effectiveness of the Mexican Army in their fight against narco-trafficking.
"The military presence," he asserts in a confidential cable on July
29, 2009 - "is not a panacea for Nuevo Leon." The dispatch also
states that in the battle against organized crime, there is a serious lack of
coordination between the Army, the Attorney General's Office and the Public
Security Secretariat; and that these agencies are infiltrated by those whom
they are supposed to be fighting.
The cables were a major blow to
the Felipe Calderón Administration, Nuevo Leon State Governor Rodrigo Medina and former
Governor Natividad
González Páras. They reflect the failure of their anti-drug strategy, the
territorial control that Los
Zetas Cartel has over this rich state, and government corruption.
The strategy of damage control
was immediate. Various state-approved analysts dismissed the scope of the
revelations. “We already knew,” said some. Governor Medina said the cables “have
no validity.” And González Páras remarked that the communications of the former
consul “don't refer to his opinions, let alone (the government’s) official
position, but to positions of certain contacts associated with him; these positions
asserted the existence of links between drug trafficking and officials of my
administration and my brothers.”
A few days later, in an
interview with El Universal, Felipe Calderón acknowledged
the magnitude of the blow. “The ambassadors," or those who created the
cables, "pour lots of sour cream on their tacos" [they exaggerate]. They
always want to raise their own agendas with their own bosses, and they've done
a lot of damage with the stories they tell, because the truth is, they distort.
There are so many cases of this that it isn't worth talking about.”
On an issue that, according
to Roberto Rock, greatly exasperated his interviewee, the president added: “I
don't have to tell U.S. ambassadors how many times I meet with the Security
Cabinet or what I say. The truth is that it's none of their business.”
The cable was one of almost
3,000 dispatches written by U.S. diplomats and delivered to La Jornada
by Sunshine Press
Productions, headed by Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. These address
the politics, economics and public safety of our country. Some of the
information they contain is very sensitive.
These materials are a kind of
X-ray of influence in Mexico, the degree of subjugation of Mexican authorities
to the designs of Washington, the failure of President Felipe Calderón’s fight
against narco-trafficking, the impunity of the nation's system of law
enforcement and the enormous social inequalities that prevail in our nation.
This X-ray reveals a clear diagnosis
of the nation’s public health, which is alarming and outrageous. Never in
history has such a vast and enormous amount of information about the nature of
power in Mexico been disseminated to the public. In any other country, the
matter would be a scandal. It is here as well, but it's a scandal that the great
electronic mass media have given the cold shoulder, confining it to people who
read the printed press and use social networks.
Since February 16, more
information from the U.S. diplomatic cables has been intermittently published that
offers an image of power in Mexico that is as bleak as it is deplorable. One
cable documents how then-presidential candidate Felipe Caldeóon held to a double
standard on the border wall, when he discloses to the U.S. Embassy his decision
to make public statements opposing the [U.S.] border wall, “because I cannot afford
to lose votes to AMLO [Andrés
Manuel López Obrador],” adding that it wasn't his intention to stoke the
debate.
Immediately after the 2006 presidential
election, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza described the
circumstances of Felipe Calderón as, “a state of great political weakness.”
He adds, in a clearly interventionist tone: “We risk stagnation on our highest-profile
issues unless we can send a strong signal of support, prompt the Calderón team
into a vigorous transition, and reinforce Calderón's agenda and leadership.”
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
La Jornada is one of the world's six newspapers that WikiLeaks
has provided cables, in what can be considered the most important disclosure of
transcendent political information in the history of journalism. The other five
newspapers are The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The
New York Times and El País.
The original
material disclosed by WikiLeaks contains some 300,000,000 words. The Bible has
about 780,000 words. To manage such a large volume of information, search it,
organize it, put it in context, and find relevant and compelling stories is a major
challenge. To begin with, it demonstrates that those who asserted that social media
journalism had lost its raison
d'être were profoundly mistaken. Only journalism can make sense
of information so complex and extensive.
The documents on Mexico
disclosed by WikiLeaks and edited and published by La Jornada offer a
devastating image of the country and its president. They show that warnings about
the loss of national sovereignty made by the most apocalyptic critics were not
exaggerated. And they remind us that the struggle for national liberation is
not the outdated nostalgia of nationalists, but a necessity that is the order
of the day.
