We are about to leave for our now annual stay in Mexico to
spend a month with our son in Bucerías, state of Nayarit. Mexico is much
changed, but the sights and sounds, and the rhythms of Mexican Spanish, remind
me of my carefree days almost 50 years ago wandering around the country, in
particular in the state of Guerrero where I researched my PhD. I have not been
back to Guerrero for many years, and recent events there do not encourage me to
pay another visit.
In 1975 I visited a doctor in Mexico City. He asked what I
was doing in his country. When I replied that I was there to study the
Revolution in the state of Guerrero he became alarmed. Guerrero was notorious
for its violence, and a group of armed rebels led by a rural schoolteacher,
Lucio Cabañas, was holding the governor-elect captive in the state’s mountains.
The doctor called my landlady to tell her I must not go to Guerrero because I would
die. I ignored the good doctor’s concerns and travelled round the state on
local bus services. My bus was occasionally stopped by soldiers who checked the
documents of all those on board, but they showed no interest in me.
Later that year I spent a few weeks in Chilpancingo, capital
of Guerrero, living in an inexpensive hotel close to the main square, to
consult documents in the state archives.
The (as I would discover) sparse archives were housed in the
Palacio de Gobierno, which occupied one side of the square. Chilpancingo
was a dull, unimpressive small town served by two bus lines owned by the
Figueroa family (the first-class Estrella de Oro and the second class Flecha
Roja). Unless you were a native of the city there were not many good reasons to
stay in Chilpancingo. Politicians and officials of the state government took up
most of the spare housing, and students of the Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero
(UAG:Autonomous University of Guerrero) also needed a place to live. So
temporary visitors, such as those who had business with the state government,
or the very rare wandering historian, had no option other than a room in one of
the cheap, and fortunately clean, hotels. There were two cinemas, distinguished
by the locals as the one with rats and the one without rats. The city had a
café on the square for breakfast, an inexpensive restaurant that served a
sustaining bowl of pozole blanco (a stew of meat and hominy maize), and
on Thursdays specialist restaurants served the local speciality, pozole
verde, flavoured green with chiles and tomatillos. Chilpancingo is flanked
by high mountains that form the valley of Chilpancingo. In the rainy season,
clouds loom over the mountains in the afternoon and then descend to drench the
town for a while.
When I was not reading dusty papers in the archive, or watching
spaghetti westerns in the cinema without rats, I was trying to meet members of
the Figueroa family, whose forebears had been prominent in the 1910-1920
Mexican Revolution. The Figueroas were then (and probably still) powerful
figures. Rubén Figueroa Figueroa, the state governor when I arrived in
Chilpancingo, a gun-toting old-style politician, was the governor-elect who had
been held prisoner by Lucio Cabañas until the army caught up with the rebel
band and freed Figueroa in a shoot-out. Lucio and his companions died.
While Rubén was waiting to take office, the incumbent
governor was Israel Noguera Otero, one of his political enemies. Either because
he did not want to risk Nogueda somehow preventing him from taking office, or
because he did not wish to receive the gubernatorial sash from an enemy,
Figueroa was determined that Nogueda would not finish his term of office. Rubén
suggested to the Rector of UAG that he provoke a student strike, which Nogueda
would put down by cracking a few student skulls, which would create a scandal
and the governor would be removed from office. The Rector refused and a few
days later a bomb was thrown at his home. Then in January 1975 (two months
before leaving office) a group of rural workers from Acapulco accused Nogueda
of fraudulently selling their land. The federal congress promptly removed
Nogueda.
This kind of manouevring had form in Guerrero. On 22 March 1933
supporters of the outgoing governor, Adrián Castrejón, stationed on the roof of
his home, a few yards from my 1975 hotel room, opened fire on politicians who
supported the newly elected governor elect, Rafael Guevara, a friend of the
Figueroa family. Two dead and one wounded opponent were sufficient to terminate
Castrejón’s term early. Guevara’s own term came to a similarly premature end in
September 1935 after a shootout in the bullring of Coyuca de Catalán, in the
Tierra Caliente region, between his supporters and those of a federal
congressman and landowner,
Rubén Figueroa’s son, Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, became
governor in 1993, but was removed from office when his administration was found
to have been responsible for a massacre of peasant protesters. For many decades
after the Revolution the basics of Guerrero’s politics can be summarized as a
tussle between powerful families in different regions of the state. The people
of the state deserved much better, but rarely benefited from good government. The
Guerrero which I bussed around in the 1970s was violent and governed
(literally) by factional and personal passions, rather than by the will, or in
the interests of, the people. But it was a haven of tranquillity compared to recent
decades when organized crime has added a very nasty extra dimension to state
politics and the lives of the people of Guerrero.
In 2015, the Year of Mexico in the United Kingdom, I had
lunch with the young woman at the Mexican Embassy in London who was responsible
for the year of cultural events. She was also, she told me, the Human Rights
Attaché, a very hot potato, since in 2014 43 student teachers from the teacher
training school in Ayotzinapa (to the west of Chilpancingo and where Lucio Cabañas
had studied) had been killed by organized crime gunmen. The scale of the
massacre, the fact that the bodies were rapidly disposed of (the remains of only
two have been found), and the courage and persistence of their parents who
still demand the truth, made international headlines. The government of
President Enrique Peña Nieto initiated an investigation which succeeded in its
goal of obscuring any scraps of truth, but also allowed an international panel
of experts to conduct its own enquiry. The exact truth is still not known, but
it is clear that municipal and state officials and the state police knew what
had happened to the students, and some had a hand in their murder. The army was
also involved in the murky affair
The attaché told me that she was born in Pungarabato in the
Tierra Caliente (Hot Country) region, and was most surprised when I told her I
know exactly where that town is. Her father was a cattle rancher there, but
life had become so dangerous that he had been forced to abandon his business
and move with his wife to Mexico City. I suspect that the attaché avoided
mentioning these personal details when addressing UK human rights groups. When
Jan and I were in Zamora, Michoacán, in 2018 I met a fish farmer who sourced
his tilapia from Guerrero. He assured that if I went back to my old haunts, I
would be dead. When he travelled to Guerrero to collect more fish, he was met
at the state’s border by his suppliers who escorted him while he collected his
fish. I had ignored the solicitous advice of my doctor in 1975, but I did not
feel inclined to ignore the fish farmer.
But back to Chilpancingo.
Chilpancingo derives its name from the Nahuatl chilpan
(wasp or wasp’s nest herb) and the suffix tsin, meaning small. The site
has been occupied, archaeologists tell us, since at least 1000BC, probably
earlier. It sits on transport routes from the coast and east-west into the
mountains. This location has long been the key to Chilpancingo’s modestly
prosperous economy. In the 16th century the town was of no great
importance: its elite was subordinate to the ruler of Oapan to the northeast on
the great Balsas river. But in the 16th and 17th
centuries Chilpancingo grew rapidly as a convenient place to rest and top up
supplies on the way to Acapulco, home to the Spanish empire’s trade with Asia
from 1565-1815.
Chilpancingo’s position on the Acapulco road and other
routes, and its elevation to state capital in the 19th century, mean
that it has frequently been the target of political upheavals. Mexico’s first
Constituent Congress met here in 1813 and declared Mexico’s independence (not
accomplished until 1821), although the menace of Royalist forces drove the
insurgents out of town to complete their constitutional labours in Apatzingán,
in the neighbouring state of Michoacán, several hundred kilometres away. The
rivalry between the Bravo family, from whom Chilpancingo gets its full modern
name, Chilpancingo de los Bravo, who were prominent local insurgents and
landowners, and Juan Álvarez, the dominant insurgent on the coast, was the
source of regular turmoil in the decades following freedom from Spain. In the
20th century the forces of Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the
peasant rebels of the state of Morelos besieged Chilpancingo during the Mexican
Revolution. And in the current century a favourite tactic of anybody with a
grievance has been to seize the Chilpancingo toll booth plaza on the motorway
that carries traffic to Acapulco.
However, on 11 July 2023 a siege of a different order, sadly
indicative of the state of politics, and of the absence of law and order in
Guerrero, took place. More than 2,000 residents of nearby towns fell on
Chilpancingo, stoned local police, troops of the National Guard, taxi drivers
and reporters, and took thirteen public officials hostage. They also seized a
bullet -proof vehicle of the state police and used it as a battering ram to
break down the doors of the Palacio de Gobierno. The state government then
opened negotiations with the spokepersons of the protesters, two men who it
seems are members of one of the organized crime/drug cartels that operate in Guerrero,
Los Ardillos (“The Squirrels”). An agreement was reached and the
hostages released.
It seems that the roots of this episode lay in the struggles
between different organized crime cartels to control the production and
shipment of drugs. Apparently, the bishop of Chilpancingo had negotiated an
agreement between Los Ardillos and another gang known as Los Tlacos (a
tlaco, a Nahuatl word meaning ‘half’, was a low value coin in Spanish
colonial days). The bishop persuaded both gangs to divide control of local bus
routes (and their revenues) in and out of the state capital between themselves.
Los Ardillos, it seems, were protesting some breach of this agreement.
The governor of Guerrero since October 2021, who sanctioned
the negotiations and the agreement with Los Ardillos is Evelyn Salgado Pineda,
a member of the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA: Movement of
National Regeneration), the party of the current president of Mexico Andrés Manuel
López Obrador (AMLO). Evelyn’s former husband is the son of Joaquín Alonso
Pineda, who is rumoured to be the financial fixer of the wife of Héctor Beltrán
Leyva, a member of a powerful family of drug cartel leaders.
More to the point, Evelyn’s father is Félix Salgado
Macedonio, nicknamed El Toro (The Bull). Félix was born in the Tierra
Caliente of Guerrero in 1957. He began his political career in traditional
fashion as a federal congressman, then as a federal senator, followed by a
period once again as a congressman. Next, he was Presidente Municipal
(mayor) of Acapulco, the wealthiest municipality in the state. He is currently
once again a federal senator. Until 1987 he held office as a member of the Partido
de la Revolución Institucional (Party of the Institutional Revolution),
which controlled Mexican politics until 2000. Salgado ran for the governor’s
office three times. His first attempt in 1992 as a candidate for the Partido
de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution), resulted
in defeat by Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, candidate of the still-dominant PRI. Salgado ran again for the PRD in 1998, but
lost once again to the PRI.
His third attempt in 2021, ended under very murky
circumstances. This time he represented MORENA, which was stunningly successful
in elections that year. But then in January 2021 Salgado was accused of rape by
two women and by another four of sexual harassment. AMLO dismissed the
complaints as a media campaign orchestrated by his political opponents – the
president has been consistently hostile to feminist groups and dismissive of
campaigns to counter sexual violence. However, more than 100 MORENA
Congresswomen signed a letter demanding that Salgado withdraw his candidacy.
This letter was particularly significant because members of MORENA very rarely
contradict AMLO: this suggests that, as the saying goes, there was no smoke
without fire, in fact probably quite an inferno. In February the Commission of
Honour and Justice [sic] of Morena considered the matter and confirmed
Salgado’s candidacy by thee votes to two. Although feminist groups publicly
protested this decision in the main square of Mexico City on 8 March, MORENA
ratified Salgado’s candidacy. However, the Instituto Nacional Electoral (National
Electoral Instituto), an institution heartily loathed by AMLO and his
Morenistas, then declared that Salgado had failed to correctly report his
pre-campaign expenditure and expenses and declared him ineligible to stand. All
was not lost, however, since Morena anointed Evelyn as the replacement
candidate. Thus go Guerrero’s politics.
Reports in the press speak of Salgado’s links to organized
crime when he was mayor of Acapulco and of other links with drug cartels. At
this distance it is impossible to confirm whether these accusations are all
true, but it is most unlikely that a man with a long and well-connected career
in Guerrero’s politics is at least unaware of who is running organized crime
networks in the state, especially since Los Tlacos originated in his home
territory of Tierra Caliente. Guerrero’s politics, however, are a very perilous
and murky game: a number of Evelyn and Félix’s relatives and political allies have
been murdered. Recently, one of Félix Salgados’ nieces, Zulma Carbajal Salgado
and her husband were ambushed in Iguala, in northern Guerrero (site of the
student massacre of 2014). Zulma survived; her husband did not. Zulma’s brother
Justino was shot dead in Iguala in 2013. I spent a week or so in Iguala in
1976. It was known for the tamarind trees that lined its main plaza and was the
commercial hub of northern Guerrero. Otherwise, not a lot seemed to happen
there – if only it were like that now. In the last few weeks José Guadalupe
Fuentes Brito, a businessman and uncle of Evelyn’s chief of staff, was murdered
on the Acapulco motorway in Chilpancingo, along with his son and an unfortunate
mini-bus driver who happened to witness the crime.
I thought I had glimpsed plenty of dirty politics when I was
in Guerrero in the 1970s, but compared to the state of affairs now those were
positively tranquil times.
