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.
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