Photographs of Joaquín Guzmán, alias "El Chapo", on Interpol's web page.

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Feb 25 2014 (IPS)

The arrest of the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, will not affect drug trafficking in Mexico, but it presents an opportunity to change the country’s drug policy, experts told IPS.

The organisational hierarchy of the Sinaloa cartel “reflects the weakness of the Mexican state,” said Edgardo Buscaglia, head of the Instituto de Acción Ciudadana para la Justicia y la Democracia (Institute for Citizen Action for Justice and Democracy), an NGO.

Guzmán, the world’s most wanted drug trafficker until his capture in the early hours of Saturday Feb. 22, had his centre of operations in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa.

In Buscaglia’s view, the two previous governments of the rightwing National Action Party (PAN) “only dismantled networked power groups, without replacing them” with an adequate state presence.

To achieve that, it is necessary to “audit the assets” of the business and political network that allowed the expansion of the Sinaloa cartel in the first place, Buscaglia said.

The Sinaloa cartel is the most powerful in Mexico, and competes with at least seven other trafficking organisations for the production, transport and smuggling of illegal drugs to the lucrative U.S. market.

Mexican marines arrested the 56-year-old Guzmán in an apartment building in the tourist port city of Mazatlán, thanks to information shared by the U.S. Drug Enforcemant Administration (DEA).

Guzmán had been captured previously in Guatemala in 1993, but after his extradition and incarceration in a high-security prison in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, he escaped in January 2001, during the government of president Vicente Fox (2000-2006).

Since then Guzmán, with the support of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Juan José “El Azul” Esparragoza, built a narco-empire with a presence in 58 countries in Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to Buscaglia and other experts.

Its transnational links provide the organisation with supplies for manufacturing drugs, arms-buying and money-laundering facilities, and the means to create production, storage and distribution centres.

Guzmán’s re-arrest “was foreseeable, because (drug bosses) become targets to show that the rule of law exists in Mexico,” said Javier Oliva, an expert on national security and chair of a department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Faculty of Political Sciences.

Under former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) “there were rivalries in the cabinet. Now cohesiveness is much greater and there is (policy) continuity, because the armed forces are still on the front lines of the drug war,” Oliva said.

When President Enrique Peña Nieto, of the traditional Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) took office in December 2012, he promised a new approach to security, to distance himself from the legacy of Calderón, whose war on drugs left over 100,000 dead.

The difference has been one of nuances only, because Peña Nieto has kept the military in the forefront of the war against the cartels and the hunt for their leaders.

In July 2013, government forces apprehended Miguel Ángel Treviño “El Z-40”, one of the leaders of Los Zetas, a cartel founded in the early 2000s by former members of Mexican army special forces.

Violence abated a little. In 2013 a total of 34,648 homicides were reported, according to Mexico’s National System of Public Security, compared to 38,052 violent deaths in 2012.

Guzmán may be extradited to the United States, in order to avoid scandals such as his escape in 2001. The U.S. government offered five million dollars for his capture and he faces charges there for drug trafficking and money laundering.

Guzmán was apprehended only two days after the North American Leaders’ Summit, known as the “Three Amigos Summit,” between Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, U.S. President Barack Obama and Peña Nieto in the Mexican city of Toluca, marking the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“When the authoritarian state was dismantled, it created a vacuum in state power. This meant that organised crime acquired more power. Mexican criminal groups benefited from those vacuums,” Buscaglia said.

Buscaglia, the author of the book “Vacíos de poder en México” (Power Vacuums in Mexico), said “this transition is continuing and those vacuums remain unfilled. If the vacuums were filled, it would be harder for characters like Guzmán to emerge.”

In his view, the main challenge is to regulate drug production and eliminate incentives for the manufacture of narcotics, in an unbalanced situation: the over-regulated U.S. market, and the poorly regulated Mexican one.

“The solution is better regulation of the markets. If you remove the opportunity to make money, you eliminate the influence of the criminal groups,” he said, advocating decriminalisation of substances like marijuana.

Since the military war on drugs was launched in 2006, the armed forces have killed several drug trafficking leaders: Arturo Beltrán Leyva, in 2009, Ignacio Coronel, a person close to Guzmán, in 2010, and Antonio Cárdenas Guillén of the Gulf cartel, also in 2010.

Guzmán appeared on the U.S. Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires between 2009 and 2012, with a net worth of about three billion dollars.

According to Oliva, his recapture provides “an opportunity for prevention of drug use, and for raising awareness that those who go in for this activity end badly, either dead or in detention.”

The web site Historias del Narco (Drug Stories) speculates that Dámaso López Jr., nicknamed “El Mini Lic,” who is Guzmán’s godson, might take his place. Born in Sinaloa, and regarded by the U.S. Department of Justice as Guzmán’s “right hand,” he heads a youth gang known on social networks as “Los Ántrax”.

After Guzmán’s arrest, Phil Jordan, a former intelligence director for the DEA in El Paso, Texas, on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, expressed surprise, because according to him Guzmán had financed Peña Nieto’s election campaign.

The statement he made on the U.S. Univision television network implicated the DEA as having knowledge of alleged links between organised crime and leading Mexican politicians.

The contributions “are documented for past campaigns of the PRI. El Chapo, (Rafael) Caro (Quintero, of the disbanded Guadalajara cartel), all of them gave money to whoever was running for president. I don’t have the papers but there are intelligence reports which indicate that El Chapo’s cartel was very involved in politics,” he said.

Why, then, did the government of Peña Nieto arrest him? “Something bad happened between the PRI and El Chapo Guzmán,” he speculated. And he did not rule out that the drug trafficker may have negotiated his capture.

Neither government has yet responded officially to Jordan’s statements.

Earlier this month, Reuters revealed that a special division within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been using intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a mass database of telephone records to secretly identify targets for drug enforcement actions.

In the wake of these revelations, a former prosecutor tells IPS he believes he and his colleagues may have been unwitting pawns in the federal government’s effort to deceive defendants and the court system, thereby violating citizens’ constitutional rights.“This is changing the rules of the game so they can conceal the source and use tainted information." -- former prosecutor Patrick Nightingale

“None of us had any idea whatsoever there was a secret DEA programme that instructed DEA agents to conceal the source,” Patrick Nightingale, a former prosecutor for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told IPS.

“My oath as an attorney and as a prosecutor was as an officer of the constitution, and not to win at all costs. This [programme] is a win at all costs mentality: whether it’s constitutional or not we’re going to use it and we can conceal it,” he said.

Called the Special Operations Division (SOD), it is comprised of some two dozen federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency (NSA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Homeland Security.

Everything about the SOD is secret, including the size of its budget and the location of its offices.

Reuters has also identified the IRS as a recipient of the information, pointing to a former IRS training manual that referenced the SOD programme.

As a routine practice, the SOD secretly provides the information to local authorities across the U.S., allowing them to start investigations against U.S. citizens under false pretenses, in a practice known as “parallel construction”.

For example, under parallel construction, local law enforcement will be instructed to find a reason to stop a particular vehicle – for example, through a routine traffic stop – and then once the drugs are found, the government will falsely state the drugs were found in the traffic stop.

The IRS training document details how government officials are instructed to conceal – from prosecutors, defence attorneys, and even the courts – the methods by which a suspected drug criminal is identified and then targeted for apprehension.

“Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects,” the 2005 and 2006 IRS training manual says, according to Reuters.

“SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations,” the document states.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group that defends free speech and privacy issues, calls it “intelligence laundering“.

Since the revelations on Aug. 5, the Justice Department has said it is reviewing the programme, according to reports. But such a review does not address the constitutional violations that appear to have already occurred.

“Our criminal justice system is based on the presumption of innocence and our constitution demands fair play in criminal proceedings. It demands that prosecutors reveal to the defence both the good and the bad,” Nightingale said.

“If the source of this information is so sensitive that a law enforcement agency is told to keep the information from its own team [including federal and local prosecutors] because it knows members of its team are required to divulge it to the other side [the defence], then it’s a problem,” he said.

Nightingale told IPS he had no awareness of the programme as a prosecutor, even though he worked on many cases where he sought court approval for a Title 3 wiretap based on certain evidence. Now he does not know – nor does he have any way of knowing – how many of those cases originated from a secret SOD tip.

“This is changing the rules of the game so they can conceal the source and use tainted information, depriving… defence attorneys and defendants from being able to have a fair trial as defined by the Constitution,” he said.

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with EFF, told IPS, “The NSA data is being gathered on purpose, and then directed to a different purpose.” He said the information being gathered by the NSA “should” be something that the FISA Court has been approving, although there is no way to know.

“Those orders have a broad scope. The orders aren’t public, there isn’t insight into what the orders look like, or how the court operates really,” Fakhoury said.

“The big concern is they’re not being forthright about the fact that they’re using the information directed toward a purpose not related to national security, and they’re not telling the court or the defendants the true source of that information.

“It’s yet more proof what is being said publicly [by the NSA] is not all entirely accurate,” he said. “It’s another reason why we have to very carefully scrutinise the government’s justification for these types of programmes.”

Fakhouri says the SOD programme is unconstitutional because of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments combined.

Full and fair disclosure is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as part of the Sixth Amendment, which states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right… to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”

The Fifth Amendment provides, “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The revelations also raise the possibility that individuals who have been convicted over the last 20 years on drug charges, or perhaps IRS-related charges, will challenge those convictions in court on the basis that secret evidence may have been used in the investigative process.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of those types of arguments. How successful those will be – will be a tough sell. I think it will be an interesting thing to watch,” Fakhoury said.

The controversial topic of medical cannabis has been put under a microscope after the internationally known neurosurgeon Dr. Sanjay Gupta came out in support of its use this week.

An ounce of “Green Crack” bought from a dispensary in California. Credit: Coaster420/public domain

In a lengthy opinion piece on CNN, Gupta outlines the benefits of medical cannabis, claims that U.S. citizens have been misled by the government for years, and apologises for his role in that. This reversal of opinions occurred during the yearlong production of his documentary “Weed”, which premiers this Sunday on CNN.

“Gupta literally made a 12 or 13 year turn on this,” the executive director of the advocacy group NORML, Allen St. Pierre, told IPS. “But as a really genuine doctor who is a scientific minded person, he really did want to see the science and let it led him to a different standing.”

The benefits

Illinois is the most recent state to legalise medicinal marijuana, making a total of 20 U.S. states and the District of Columbia that allow its medical use. Approval conditions, regulations and quantity limits can vary from state to state.

The federal law enforcement agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), has classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug, meaning it has no medical benefit and has a high potential for abuse, with nine to 10 percent of its adult users becoming addicted.

Cocaine, according to the DEA, is less dangerous than marijuana and is a Schedule II drug even though 20 percent of its users become addicted.

“They didn’t have the science to support that claim [of marijuana as a Schedule I drug], and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true,” wrote Gupta in his CNN piece. “It doesn’t have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications.”

Gupta uses Charlotte Figi, a patient in Colorado, as an example of the benefits. She began having seizures soon after birth, and by age three she was having up to 300 a week despite being on seven different prescription medicines. Medicinal cannabis calmed her brain and limited her seizures to two to three times per month.

According to NORML, cannabis is specifically used to alleviate pain from nerve damage, nausea, spasticity, glaucoma and movement disorders. It is also a powerful appetite stimulant, which is beneficial for patients suffering from dementia, HIV and AIDS.

“The government and some of our opponents will say with a straight face that it [medical marijuana] has no utility,” St. Pierre told IPS. “It is cheaper than most pharmaceuticals and can be used for over a dozen aliments. The utility combined with the price makes it hard for them to make a convincing argument.”

A new survey done at the nonprofit organisation The Partnership at Drugfree.org found that 70 percent of respondents support the medical use of marijuana and 50 percent support decriminalisation. Forty percent of respondents supported the legalisation of marijuana altogether.

“Most frightening to me is that someone dies in the United States every 19 minutes from prescription drug overdose, mostly accidental,” Gupta wrote. “It’s a horrifying statistic. As much as I searched, I could not find a documented case of death from a marijuana overdose.”

The consequences

According to a study done in the United Kingdom, people who smoke marijuana regularly tend to produce less dopamine, a feel good chemical in the brain that plays a large role in reward-driven behaviour and motivation. Regular marijuana use can also lead to inflammation in the brain, according to the study, which can affect coordination and learning.

Gupta also admitted in his CNN piece that regular marijuana use in younger and developing brains can lead to a permanent decrease in IQ. There is also clear evidence that some users can experience withdrawal symptoms including insomnia, anxiety and nausea.

“Much in the same way that I wouldn’t let my own children drink alcohol, I wouldn’t permit marijuana until they are adults,” wrote Gupta. “If they are adamant about trying marijuana, I will urge them to wait until they’re in their mid-20s when their brains are fully developed.”

Project SAM, the nonprofit organisation advocating for the responsible use of medicinal cannabis, is urging Gupta to clarify what he is referring to when he says marijuana. According to the organisation, CBD is a non-intoxicating element found in medically used cannabis whereas street bought marijuana contains THC, which is specifically used to get a high.

“Dr. Gupta is a person Americans looks up to with high esteem. And for good reason – he is thoughtful, thorough and dispassionate about the science. That is why we are troubled by how people might interpret his comments,” Project SAM said in a press release.

Despite the highly documented consequences and concerns, marijuana is the third most popular recreational drug in the United States, behind alcohol and tobacco. About 100 million citizens use it, and about 14 million do so regularly.

Some 50,000 people each year die from alcohol poisoning and 400,000 people die from tobacco each year, but marijuana is a non-toxic drug that cannot cause death by overdose.

“The fact that this guy [Gupta] enjoys a really wonderful national reputation, and now he is saying ‘my bad’ in a culture where alpha males don’t usually admit that they are wrong, will…affirm that we are in an era of change,” St. Pierre told IPS.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces “don’t fight drug traffickers”, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead “they try to manage the drug trade”.

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico’s most violent states – one which directly borders Texas – going on the record with such accusations is unique.

“It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told Al Jazeera last month at his office in Juarez. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.”

A spokesman for the CIA in Washington wouldn’t comment on the accusations directly, instead he referred Al Jazeera to an official website.

Accusations are ‘baloney’

Villanueva is not a high-ranking official and his views do not represent Mexico’s foreign policy establishment. Other more senior officials in Chihuahua State, including the mayor of Juarez, dismissed the claims as “baloney”.

“I think the CIA and DEA (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) are on the same side as us in fighting drug gangs,” Hector Murguia, the mayor of Juarez, told Al Jazeera during an interview inside his SUV. “We have excellent collaboration with the U.S.”

Under the Merida Initiative, the U.S. Congress has approved more than 1.4 billion dollars in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges.

More than 55,000 people have died in drug related violence in Mexico since December 2006. Privately, residents and officials across Mexico’s political spectrum often blame the lethal cocktail of U.S. drug consumption and the flow of high-powered weapons smuggled south of the border for causing much of the carnage.

Drug war ‘illusions’

“The war on drugs is an illusion,” Hugo Almada Mireles, professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez and author of several books, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a reason to intervene in Latin America.”

“The CIA wants to control the population; they don’t want to stop arms trafficking to Mexico, look at (Operation) Fast and Furious,” he said, referencing a botched U.S. exercise where automatic weapons were sold to criminals in the hope that security forces could trace where the guns ended up.

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms lost track of 1,700 guns as part of the operation, including an AK-47 used in 2010 the murder of Brian Terry, a Customs and Border Protection Agent.

Blaming the gringos for Mexico’s problems has been a popular sport south of the Rio Grande ever since the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, when the U.S. conquered most of present day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico from its southern neighbour.

But operations such as Fast and Furious show that reality can be stranger than fiction when it comes to the drug war and relations between the U.S. and Mexico. If the case hadn’t been proven, the idea that U.S. agents were actively putting weapons into the hands of Mexican gangsters would sound absurd to many.

‘Conspiracy theories’

“I think it’s easy to become cynical about American and other countries’ involvement in Latin America around drugs,” Kevin Sabet, a former senior adviser to the White House on drug control policy, told Al Jazeera. “Statements (accusing the CIA of managing the drug trade) should be backed up with evidence… I don’t put much stake in it.”

Villanueva’s accusations “might be a way to get some attention to his region, which is understandable but not productive or grounded in reality”, Sabet said. “We have sort of ‘been there done that’ with CIA conspiracy theories.”

In 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published Dark Alliance, a series of investigative reports linking CIA missions in Nicaragua with the explosion of crack cocaine consumption in America’s ghettos.

In order to fund Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua’s socialist government, the CIA partnered with Colombian cartels to move drugs into Los Angeles, sending profits back to Central America, the series alleged.

“There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking,” U.S. Senator John Kerry said at the time, in response to the series.

Other newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, slammed Dark Alliance, and the editor of the Mercury News eventually wrote that the paper had overstated some elements in the story and made mistakes in the journalistic process, but that he stood by many of the key conclusions.

Widespread rumours

“It’s true, they want to control it,” a mid-level official with the Secretariat Gobernacion in Juarez, Mexico’s equivalent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA’s policing of the drug trade. The officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he knew the allegations to be correct, based on discussions he had with U.S. officials working in Juarez.

Acceptance of these claims within some elements of Mexico’s government and security services shows the difficulty in pursuing effective international action against the drug trade.

Jesús Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution.

“Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of (Jesus Zambada’s) father, Ismael Zambada and ‘Chapo’ Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs… into… the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels,” Zambada’s lawyers wrote as part of his defence. “Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico’s oldest and most powerful trafficking organisation, and some analysts believe security forces in the U.S. and Mexico favour the group over its rivals.

Joaquin “El Chapo”, the cartel’s billionaire leader and one of the world’s most wanted men, escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 by sneaking into a laundry truck – likely with collaboration from guards – further stoking rumours that leading traffickers have complicit friends in high places.

“It would be easy for the Mexican army to capture El Chapo,” Mireles said. “But this is not the objective.”

He thinks the authorities on both sides of the border are happy to have El Chapo on the loose, as his cartel is easier to manage and his drug money is recycled back into the broader economy. Other analysts consider this viewpoint a conspiracy theory and blame ineptitude and low level corruption for El Chapo’s escape, rather than a broader plan from government agencies.

Political changes

After an election hit by reported irregularities, Enrique Pena Nieto from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is set to be sworn in as Mexico’s president on Dec. 1.

He wants to open a high-level dialogue with the U.S. about the drug war, but has said legalisation of some drugs is not an option. Some hardliners in the U.S. worry that Nieto will make a deal with some cartels, in order to reduce violence.

“I am hopeful that he will not return to the PRI party of the past which was corrupt and had a history of turning a blind eye to the drug cartels,” said Michael McCaul, a Republican Congressman from Texas.

Regardless of what position a new administration takes in order to calm the violence and restore order, it is likely many Mexicans – including government officials such as Chihuahua spokesman Guillermo Villanueva – will believe outside forces want the drug trade to continue.

The widespread view linking the CIA to the drug trade – whether or not the allegations are true – speaks volumes about officials’ mutual mistrust amid ongoing killings and the destruction of civic life in Mexico.

“We have good soldiers and policemen,” Villanueva said. “But you won’t resolve this problem with bullets. We need education and jobs.”

*Follow Chris Arsenault on Twitter: @AJEchris

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.