Will Mexico need ‘Los Pepes’?
Last Saturday, Mexico’s federal police and army paid the price for arresting Arnold Rueda Medina, a lieutenant in Mexico’s La Familia drug cartel. La Familia gunmen first attempted to spring Medina from custody. After that failed, they went on a revenge spree against federal police and soldiers that the Washington Post described this way:
The ambushes by La Familia in eight cities spread across the western state of Michoacan on Saturday were carried out with disciplined force by small but bold units of cartel gunmen, backed with military-grade assault rifles and grenades.
The offensive began in the capital, Morelia, and lasted 10 hours. The attacks, in which convoys of gunmen sprung surprise attacks on government positions, occurred near sites popular with tourists, including the arts-and-crafts town of Patzcuaro and nearby Zitacuaro, famous for its migrating monarch butterflies. Much of the fighting took place in and around cities where the federal government arrested 10 mayors last month on suspicion of colluding with La Familia. Mexican media reported two more attacks Sunday.
According to the article, five were killed and a dozen wounded.
President Felipe Calderon has had to send in the army and federal police because in most cases the local police, prosecutors, city governments, judges, and jailers have been either bought by the cartels or intimidated into passivity. La Familia’s weekend counterattack is an indicator of the force one of Mexico’s smaller drug cartels is able to muster.
The urgent question is whether Mexico’s institutions will be able to enforce the rule of law through accepted civil procedures. Once the police, public administrators, courts, and prison system effectively become subsidiaries of the cartels, the rule of law slips out of grasp.
Twenty years ago, during the reign of Pablo Escobar, Colombia plunged into this chasm. In his brilliant book Killing Pablo, Mark Bowden described what measures became necessary to save Colombia from Escobar.
At the depth of the Escobar crisis, Los Pepes appeared. According to Bowden, this secretive vigilante death squad, obviously enjoying access to the full intelligence database on Escobar’s organization, proceeded to murder or chase into exile the various rings of Escobar’s support structure. When the police finally gunned him down, Los Pepes had reduced Escobar’s imperial entourage to a couple bodyguards holed up with the boss in a downscale apartment.
Who were Los Pepes? Loyal Colombian police or special forces soldiers? Cartel rivals of Escobar, quietly assisted by police intelligence? Or foreign mercenaries?
Los Pepes were ruthless killers, even terrorists and in no way represented the rule of law. But in Bowden’s reckoning they saved Colombia when there was no other way to stop Escobar. Will Mexico require the same salvation?
