To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War by John Gibler Page A

job. Your work has to be that of a journalist. If the narcos clearly see that your work is journalistic and not in anyway confused with what the police do, that might help you somewhere down the line.”
    Two days later I went back to Ríodoce to speak again with Ismael Bojórquez. I asked him, “How would you define this war?”
    “I don’t think it is a war,” he said. “It is Calderón ’s war ; it is his war. It is not a traditional war, there aren’t two armies confronting each other. It is a biased war waged by Calderón. It is a bellicose struggle of shoot-outs and raids. But it is a totally incomplete struggle. Since it started we’ve seen that it is a war with too much circus. They called the journalists and took them off to a village in the mountains where all of a sudden planes flew overhead ejecting paratroopers. A lot of show, few results.
    “Calderón did not attack the narcopolítica [politicians collaborating with drug mafias]; he never attacked them. There is another aspect that Calderón has never attacked, and this is much more serious; he never went against the financial and economic structure of the drug mafias. There has not been any intelligence work done on the financial channels of the narcos. So, as I say, there are two things Calderón never attacked: the economy of the drug mafias and their political connections.
    “We live here. We’re from Sinaloa. We know how the iguana chews its food. We know how drug money moves here. In fact, we know which businesses the drug mafias own, and there are many more we don’t know about. And we know which politicians are in on this shit, too. And so you have to ask yourself, Well, if there is a war against drug trafficking, why doesn’t Calderón combat all this? Why doesn’t he investigate those people? And why doesn’t he investigate these businesses?”
    There is one case, mentioned briefly above, where some might be tempted to argue that Calderón’s administration did in fact go after what Bojórquez calls the narcopolítica . One should avoid the temptation. Consider this, on May 26, 2009, federal police and soldiers detained ten mayors, seventeen officials ranging from the governor’s aides to police officers, and also one judge in the state of Michoacán. In the following days they detained another mayor and six more officials, for a total of thirty-five arrested officials, an unprecedented sting operation in Mexico’s drug war. The television cameras were on the scene to capture the images of disgraced mayors and cops leaving their offices with their jackets pulled up over their faces, escorted by heavily armed, masked soldiers and federal police. Reports of the arrests dominated the nighttime news broadcasts and the next day’s headlines. The federal Attorney General’s office accused them all of participating in organized crime. All of those arrested were members of the opposition PRD party. The PRD controls the state government and most municipalities in Calderón’s home state of Michoacán. The arrests took place six weeks before the 2009 federal midterm elections in Mexico. A year and a half later, by late September 2010, thirty-four of the thirty-five Michoacán officials and police arrested back in May 2009 had been released for lack of evidence. The one mayor still being held had not yet been convicted of any crime. The national daily Milenio ran this front-page headline on September 29, 2010, “The Michoacán sting operation ended in ridicule” (“ Acabó en ridículo el michoacanazo ”). The story began thus: “The Attorney General’s office appeared ridiculous [yesterday when] the most important investigation of this presidential term, the michoacanazo , came tumbling down.”
    Bojórquez’s point stands. By fall of 2010 Calderón’s billion-dollar drug war had resulted in no high-level politicians or money launderers being arrested, no major businesses or banks closed down, no large accounts frozen. The army killed