The purpose of violence (Zeta Edition)
I like Borderland Beat, they provide a great round-up in English about the drug violence in Mexico. However, one of their recent posts concerning both a massacre of migrants and the execution of a Monterrey area mayor posits nihilism or boredom as a motivator of violence.
Los Zetas have also been implicated in the kidnapping and murder of Mayor Edelmiro Cavasos Leal (Noticieros Televisa).
What could Los Zetas possibly gain from both tragedies?
The answer is very simple, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or an expert criminologist to figure them out: They don’t gain or lose anything and it’s obvious that they couldn’t care less about it.
Mayor Cavasos Leal, from Santiago, Nuevo Leon, was simply doing his job (something most politicians in Mexico don’t do), he chastised local police officers and cut their salary, unfortunately, what the mayor did not know is that these officers were also working for Los Zetas. So they kidnapped an innocent man, who clearly had an enormous amount of potential and whose presence would have contributed to a brighter future for Mexico (given the fact that he refused to get involved with any criminal organization), and executed him.
Let us assume that Mayor Leal was clean and non-corrupt. What would the point of the killing him be? Purely boredom and or nihilism?
Hell no. It is a violent form of messaging aimed at multiple audiences. The first audience is an internal audience of Zeta foot soldiers. The message is simple; the Zetas take care of their own and solve problems that are caused by being a loyal foot soldier. The local cops were operating as look-outs, spotters and low level couriers for the Zetas as well as a rich vein of local intelligence. The mayor was punishing them for that, and the Zetas took care of the problem.
The second and broader audience is the local political and governmental elite. It is a very simple message; Don’t fuck with us. Don’t do your job (at least don’t do it against Zetas.) Don’t be clean, don’t be non-corrupt. The state can not protect you or your family.
Indeed, the state’s guardians were involved in the plot against the mayor so it increases the fear, uncertainty and decision paralysis of other local officials who have to make daily decisions to do their job or to look the other way. The downside risk to this message is that it could provoke a fear reaction from fence-sitters into banding together against the Zetas for their own self-protection, but that is a low probability event over any one assassination.
Violence is being used strategically to isolate and hollow out the state. The Zetas, and other cartels, want a hollow state composed of local officials who are either completely co-opted or who know that they should only do their jobs on certain days against certain factions.
Comments are closed.
Got any explanation for the migrant massacre? That one really has me scratching my head.
Apparently it does take a “rocket scientist”, because BB got it wrong and Dave didn’t. It wouldn’t have taken me too long to figure it out, either, I suspect. This is like a war. Violence is a means of persuasion, and I doubt that very many public officials in that area failed to get the message.
You know what’s an even more interesting question? Why do we have a failed state on our border and yet there is no mention of this in our media?
From the perspective of the rulers, maybe Mexico isn’t a “failed state”, only one that requires a more visible form of violence to run it. The base industry — drugs — and the political corollary — corruption — hey, we’re fine with that!
ok, let me be ignorant but at least aware of it and say, “things aren’t really so different here.” ever been to Detroit? real Detroit, not the burbs? narcostate realities exist all over this country, in many cities and increasingly in our burbs and rural areas. the underground economy and the people who rule it are and have been real for a very long time.
i have no idea what’s happening in Mexico. i’m trying to understand as i can see it’s getting to be very important. but our government is pretty damn predatory too, and our security forces gun down people fairly regularly, in case you haven’t noticed. right here in the us of a, i mean. most of those folks are poor and brown, so the media ignores it. but it is happening. the war on terra has only expanded that here in the us to include more white people getting thrown into the grinder of Security Theatre.
ian’s not wrong. violence “works.” i have strong feelings about it and i’m not really sure i should even comment. i’ll say this much: liberals and progressives in the US are about to lose the one thing that truly separates them from their peers in the vast majority of the world. that is: the illusion that violence cannot touch them, personally. because we’re “special” aka “rich.” we’ve been that. but we’re losing it. it’s time to think, really use those pretty, well fed brains of ours, and *think* about the real nature of humanity and what our future holds for everyone, including those with sexy zip codes.
This is Dave’s post, not mine, though I agree with him. The response, of course, is that scale matters, and the scale in Mexico is much higher right now.