Mexico: Failed State?

If it is not there already, it's getting there. [Link]

Many who knew Monterrey as one of Latin America's safest cities wonder how things got so bad so fast.

Part of the answer lies in the drugged up eyes of 18-year-old gang member Alan, who spends his days bored and jobless wandering the city streets, and his nights getting high on glue and marijuana with his friends on the dirty concrete stairways of his parents' apartment block.

With his arms elaborately tattooed with the name of his gang, "Los Vatos Locos" (The Crazy Guys), Alan is part of Monterrey's rarely mentioned underclass that the Gulf and Zetas cartels have seized on to recruit dealers, smugglers and hitmen to fuel their bitter war.

Though drug violence is more associated with the infamous border towns of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, Monterrey has also seen a surge in gangs over the past decade after neglecting its poorer citizens, who see little future other than joining the cartels.

"School bored me. Now's there no work," Alan said, his face partly hidden under a tilted baseball cap.

Alan is not a hitman, but he soon could be.

On the street corners of Monterrey's poorest barrios and the region's neglected rural towns, the cartels recruit dropouts like Alan, often as young as 12 or 13, to sell drugs or diversify into other crimes like carjacking and burglaries, paying handsomely with "gifts" such as SUVs, cash or drugs.

That is a lifestyle that Monterrey's urban poor can only dream of on the factory wages paying $350 a month.

But the gifts come with strings attached.

If anyone decides they want out, they have to pay back the gifts -- an impossible task. So they keep going.

They are pushed into worse crimes until the street corner gangster becomes a fully-fledged cartel henchman, willing to torture a rival gang member, throw grenades at civilians or open fire in a crowded street.

"You get pushed into it because there's no work and you dropped out," said 26-year-old former gang member and addict Sergio Alvino, who sold crack for about $10 a hit for the cartels before finding a way out with the help of a Catholic shelter. "It is the perfect preparation for a career with the cartels, even if it is likely to be a short one," he said.

Monterrey's politicians and captains of industry are only now waking up to the reality that the city has huge pockets of poverty and about a third of all Nuevo Leon's residents live on $5.25 a day or less. Poor families barely get by on about $600 a month.

Despite a steady fall in the number of poor in Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and Tamaulipas between 1970 and 2000 as Mexico benefited from an oil and manufacturing boom, poverty on the border today is as high as it was a decade ago, according to government data. With a median age of roughly 27 years, Mexico should be at a huge advantage as developed nations struggle with aging populations. Over the last decade, Mexico's rate of jobless young has doubled to about 10 percent, according to a United Nations study.

Being poor does not make you a criminal, and certainly not a hitman. "But without a job, without your self esteem, you are easy prey for the cartels," said Catholic mother superior Guillermina Burciaga, who has worked for more than a decade with street gangs in Monterrey, seeking to help many leave drugs and the gangs behind.

Jaime Rodriguez, the mayor of Garcia municipality in Monterrey who survived two attempts on his life, is even more candid. "Ask yourself who is doing all this killing. It is our young people. We have failed our young," he said.

NEVER HEARD FROM AGAIN

More chillingly, when the cartels find they can't entice youngsters into the gangs with money, they abduct them and force them into the business, the CADHAC human rights group and U.S. anti-drug officials say.

CADHAC has logged 36 cases of forced disappearances in Nuevo Leon since 2007 but says the real figure is more than 1,000, as few victims' families come forward out of fear and state officials don't take them seriously.

"The crime of forced disappearances doesn't exist in the penal code and the government is in denial. The few parents who come forward are met by ridicule from authorities," said Carlos Trevino, a lawyer for CADHAC.

"The prosecutor's office says to the mothers: 'I'm sure your son's just out partying, he'll be home soon," he added. The state attorney general's office denied such accusations and said many cases are under investigation. But many law-abiding Monterrey residents have fallen into the habit of assuming that anyone who goes missing is a criminal, inhibiting proper investigation. "People want to be rid of this situation, so you see a lot of comments in chat rooms such as: 'kill them all' or 'that's one less bad guy,' but that is no way to deal with the problem," said CADHAC investigator Maria del Mar Alvarez.

Victims' families interviewed by CADHAC reported two cases of mass kidnappings of 40 to 50 young Mexicans during raids on working class districts in Monterrey in July 2010 and a string of individual cases over the past four years, often of men aged between 18 and 20 years old.

"I don't let my boys play on the street at night anymore because they are kidnapping the youngsters," housewife Berta Luna said in a poor area of the Guadalupe municipality in Monterrey. CADHAC believes the youngsters are taken to other states within Mexico to work as hitmen, to smuggle drugs or to pack marijuana in safe houses.

SOMETHING ROTTEN

For Monterrey, the biggest lesson of the drugs war is that, despite its entrepreneurial flare, it faces the same institutional crisis as the rest of the country. The drug war has ripped the skin off the illusion that it is different.

Its municipal and state police services have been infiltrated. Officials acknowledge its justice system fails to resolve most crimes. Its youngsters are caught up in the country's dysfunctional education system. Huge inequalities between rich and poor have created a festering underclass that is cannon fodder for the cartels.

If Monterrey could make even a little headway on these challenges, it could lead Mexico once again.

The signs that it is about to do so are mixed.

Monterrey's business elite appears determined to help. Both Cemex's Zambrano and FEMSA's Astaburuaga say they are taking a central role to support the state government by putting resources into social programs to help youngsters, backing campaigns that urge citizens to denounce more crimes and putting some of their executives into government.

The number two official in the state government, Javier Trevino, is a long-time Cemex man who joined the newly-elected administration in late 2009.

Jorge Domene, security spokesman for Nuevo Leon, reels off a list of achievements, including progress on firing hundreds of police officers suspected of working for the cartels over the past year, rolling police checkpoints across Monterrey, more collaboration with the military, and efforts to modernize the police with military personnel.

In the San Pedro Garza Garcia municipality, part of Monterrey and the richest in Mexico, Mayor Mauricio Fernandez, himself a wealthy businessman, is investing $65 million in security equipment, more modern police buildings and 2,000 cameras to monitor every street corner in the area.

But Nuevo Leon's efforts to reform its justice system have slipped badly after being the first state to introduce U.S.-style oral trials in 2004, making little progress adopting open court hearings where prosecutors and defense attorneys present their cases before a panel of judges.

A plan to build a new high security prison in Nuevo Leon has stalled and the CAINTRA business chamber feels the state government is slipping behind on flushing out corrupt cops.

Twelve of Nuevo Leon's rural towns are without any local police as cops have quit after brutal drug gang attacks.

U.S. officials admit privately that Monterrey's best hope is to contain the violence and get it off the front pages.

And there is still a lot of denial.

"Is there a problem? Yes there is, but it is a problem between the cartels, not against society," said Mayor Fernandez in his office, adorned with paintings, in San Pedro.

Unlike in Mexico City, wealthier residents seem reluctant to protest against the government, seeing it as vulgar.

"That's for a different class of people, no?" said Lorena, a young mother who declined to give her last name, struggling to explain why there is not more public outrage in Monterrey.

Many of the Monterrey diaspora admit they would like to go home. They are strangers in Texas, they miss friends. The enchiladas north of the border are terrible, they say.

But many, like businessman Ramos, say they are too afraid to return. "I don't see much progress. They've got to do something about the Zetas. They are the ones robbing Monterrey of its future."