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

people daily, but no serious combat against the drug mafias’ political or economic structures had been waged.
    And what can be done?
    “The mafia is not going to disappear,” Bojórquez said. “Drug trafficking is not going to disappear. But the intelligent objective I think would be to reduce it to a more or less tolerable level. Reducing the levels of violence, but also reducing the levels of contamination in the state. Now the state is totally contaminated by the drug mafias. All the institutions of the damn state, even the departments of social development that support the narcos through livestock programs, agricultural equipment, subsidies, fertilizers and through the treasury, through the communications departments that give them flight permits for their small planes. Everything is contaminated, man, and that’s not to mention the army.”
    I asked if when he said “reduce it to a tolerable level” he meant negotiate.
    “I’m not talking about negotiating,” he said. “I don’t think that the government should negotiate with the narcos; I don’t believe in that strategy. In the short term it might solve problems with the violence, but I see it as an illusion. I think negotiations with the drug mafias will give them oxygen, will give them more strength to grow larger. I say such strategies should be discarded. I think that is what the government is doing and that it is going about it all wrong. I think the government is negotiating with a fraction of the drug traffickers, those from Sinaloa. But I think it is mistaken and that in the end it will not bring peace, because the organizations they are fighting like the Gulf Cartel, Carrillo Fuentes, Beltrán Leyva, are too big, too strong. They won’t eliminate them. They won’t bring peace to the country; on the contrary, they are letting the Sinaloa Cartel do their business.
    “The government is making a mistake in that I think they are making agreements with the Sinaloa Cartel. And that is because we see signals, like how El Chapo goes off to conquer Juárez and receives support there. So I think the government’s strategy is to ally itself with the Sinaloa Cartel to strike against the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, the Carrillos, and the Beltráns. And the government is doing this not only by providing protection through the army, but in joint operations. Indeed, I can confirm that there have been joint operations in the sense that soldiers and police officers together with cartel gunmen carry out some operations against the other cartels; we have detected that here. I think the government is wrong in this strategy because they work from the idea that the Sinaloans are pure narcos, that they are narcos that only traffic in drugs without getting involved in the other areas like extortion, charging protection money, and so on. And I think they are mistaken, because they are giving greater strength to what is perhaps the strongest drug-trafficking group in Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel.”
    IT IS SIX O’CLOCK in the morning on August 31, 2009, when Salomón Monárrez hears the first shot. Sinaloa is a hot place to be in late August, and a shirtless Salomón Monárrez had opened the front door of his house to let in the morning breeze and walked back inside when the shot rang out. He turns back to the doorway, feeling the burn in his ear and drops of blood falling over his collarbone. He faces his killer, a dark, thick man of average height wearing camouflage pants, a black baseball cap, and black sunglasses. Salomón Monárrez looks from the gun barrel to his killer’s dark glasses and thinks, “Coward.”
    The killer grips the pistol in both of his hands, chest high, and walks forward as he fires. Salomón Monárrez jumps back and to the side, back and to the other side, like a football player evading tackle. With each step a bullet catches him in midair and throws him back—one in his left arm, one in his right arm, and then two in his left side. He repeats this