"I Live Off Your Bolivar" (translation)

Originally posted at: El Tugurio de Luisana 22/06/2015

By Luisana Colomine

Angie is a young Colombian woman scarcely 26 years old. Every day she sets up her stall in a place called “La Parada”,1 Cúcuta, a few metres from the Simón Bolivar International Bridge and under the noses of Colombian customs. 

We found her smiling despite the heat in the area. Of course, she fans herself with a wad of Venezuelan notes...

Angie: The Bolívar is her business…

In context...
In San Antonio del Táchira² it is almost “Mission Impossible” to find businesses that use “points of sale” to pay with a credit or debit card. We could confirm during our stay in that city, as part of field work about Border Journalism, with students of Social Communication from the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

It was difficult to find any restaurant with this method of payment and after a lot of searching we found that only the fast food places have “EFTPOS”. In the rest, all over the place you read: “There's no EFTPOS. Only cash”. The reason?: our notes of 100 and 50 Bolivars (Bs) are really coveted to be traded in an illegal manner and to obtain juicy profits. A practice that has been perfected, and that in the first instance was common among Colombian citizens (I haven't lost my capacity to be amazed by their creativity), but that now, lamentably, it has generalised itself among Venezuelans also, that is to say, everybody is in that game. The important thing is to make easy money, without working too much and to do so safely and quickly. The other thing is that the notes manage to pass to the other side and in great quantities...

The question is why the National Banking Association or the Central Bank of Venezuelan doesn't intervene? Each time that we had to pay in cash for some food, the owner of the business would be making calculations of the profits that they expected from it. With each Bs. 100 note that they saw their eyes sparkled, like the gold tooth of Pedro Navaja.³

In that border crossing the Venezuelan banknotes serve to: 1) be sold in currency exchange offices in Cúcuta. The profit in bolivars is fast and they deposit it directly in your bank account. If it's with Banesco even better; 2) be sold by “pirate” money changers to Colombians that need to buy subsidised Venezuelan products. They sell them cheaper than the “legal” currency exchange offices that by the way fix their rates according to the guide of the Dólar Today⁴ website; 3) be exchanged in Colombia for Colombian pesos that later re-enter Venezuela to buy bolivars.

I live off your bolívar…

The phrase makes me shudder. I asked her permission to take the photo and she posed smiling. And I have to ask her..

What does your business consist of?

– The business is that I sell bolivars. On very good days I can sell up to one thousand bolivars and with that I can myself up to seven thousand pesos. During the week the profit is very good and sometimes take away some 60 thousand or 70 thousand pesos in the week.

A what rate do you sell them?

- It depends on how it is below (in Cúcuta) and on how we receive it, and bit by bit the profit is left over. On the weekends and at the ends of the month the bolivar goes up more because few currency exchange offices open and then we earn a little bit more.

And that is legal? I say the Colombian police are right there. They don't put you in jail?

– Legal, it isn't, of course, but they leave us alone and we always give something to them...

If you take away 60 thousand pesos a week, then a month...?

– Like 500 thousand pesos...This is my job, I live from this.

How do the notes arrive to you?

(…) She holds back a sly smile and doesn't respond…

Then that [idea] that the bolivar isn't worth anything? For you, it's worth something, isn't it?

– I live off your bolivar…

The interview is suspended because a Colombian lady arrives on a motorbike to buy bolivars. She has a boy behind her on the back of the bike. She wears a helmet, but he doesn't. She gives me a dirty look when I take her photo while Angie sells her the notes.


What are you buying notes for?, I ask her

– The thing is that I am going to the hairdresser, it works out cheaper in San Antonio...

How much is it going to buy?

– I need 600 bolivars. Don't take photos of me.

And why don't you buy them in a money exchange offices?

– Ah the thing is that she is my friend…

Don't take photos of me!

In two minutes, Angie earns herself 600 pesos. We can't keep talking because more customers arrived. Before that she told me that she studied Pharmaceutical Service and that selling bolivars not only pays for her studies, but that it helps her family.

The lines at the cash machines

The worst idea that occurred to the students, Ana Purroy and Héctor Serrano, was to take out cash from an automatic teller machine there in San Antonio of Táchira. They both located one from the Bank of Venezuela and they had to wait at least two hours in the line. From that experience Ana constructed the following account that closes (for now) the series of reports from the hottest border in Latin America:

“In plaza Bolívar de Cordero, in San Antonio del Táchira, you live daily a totally irregular situation due to long lines to get cash out of the automatic teller machines (ATMs). According to neighbours of the place, sometimes you can take up to six hours to make a transaction due to the tremendous demand for Venezuelan banknotes. We had to beg that they might let us take out some cash.


You deal with one of the modus operandi for the extraction of the Venezuelan currency to Colombia. Our currency is exchanged for pesos in Cúcuta and returns to San Antonio again to buy bolivars. The exchange is strange but is due to the fact that for every thousand pesos exchanged in Venezuela the percentage of profit is between 25 to 30%.

The practice in the ATMs is done in the following manner: from a personal account you can make up to three transactions and take out each time up to 600 Bs. Two of banks (Venezuela and Banesco) allow you to get out 20 thousand BS, but as it doesn't give it all at one time you have to put in your cards many times. One person goes to the ATM with more than one card from different banks and like that you can take out three times with each one. The other business is that there are people that offer to wait in the queue for you and they pay them 600 Bs per card, that is to say, if you have six cards from six different banks, they earn up to 3,600 Bs.⁵ There are people that live from that, from waiting in the line at ATMs in San Antonio del Táchira..

This was a practise that only Colombians used to carry out, but now Venezuelans have adopted it also and we wonder if the proper Venezuelan authorities are aware of this illegal procedure given that while we were in the line we noticed the presence of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) near the ATM, but they never intervened despite the fact that the irregularity was obvious.”

1“The Stop”

2 San Antonio del Táchira is a Venezuela city on the border with Colombia. A highway from San Cristóbal, the capital of state of Táchira, to Cúcuta, Colombia passes through the city and makes it an important transit point between the two countries.

3 Pedro Navaja, a fictional pimp from the song of the same name. See here.

4 website that publishes the black market exchange rates for Venezuela bolivar to U.S. dollars and other economic reporting

5 Originally article quotes BS 1.200,00, but from the maths of 6 cards and 600 Bs per cards, the total seems like it should be 3,600 Bs 

In Transit to Mexico

The Melbourne to Los Angeles leg of my trip went reasonably well, despite not sleeping for the entire flight. There was a wide array of in-flight entertainment available to keep me occupied for the 14 or so hours. I even managed to finally watch Citizen Kane. I was seated next to what appeared to be some indie skateboarder guys who were travelling around Central America. They didn't get too annoyed when I asked to get out and use the facilities.

I just made my connecting flight in LAX airport. I had to go through immigration and recheck my luggage again, although I wasn't stopping in L.A. There was even an express line for those boarding before 9am. But I didn't realise there was a time difference between Los Angeles and Mexico City. I only remembered the flight was 4 hours and I arrived there around 2pm, so I thought I had heaps of time to saunter over to the other side of the massive airport. But when I got through security I realised that it was leaving soon because there was another guy from the same flight with a Mexico football scarf looking very flustered about getting his connecting flight. I made a bit of a dash and fortunately took the right turn to go towards the boarding gate and they were in the middle of boarding.

The connecting flight to Mexico City was a bit more no frills style i.e. no food and no TV programs. I was sitting next two a couple of Latino kids who slept most of the time. I assumed that they were residents of Mexico, but when they flight attendant came to tell them to put their bag under the seat and I tried to help by saying it in Spanish. But they didn't seem to understand and started talking in English. I read for a while, but jet lag had finally caught up with me and I had to crash out for a while.

I finally touched down in Mexico City, but I spent another hour waiting in line to go through Mexican immigration. It seemed like all the planes had arrived at once. It was surprising how many of the people in the foreigners line seemed to be Latino families from the United States, although they didn't speak Spanish, especially not the kids. I think a lot of them might have been visiting relatives during the summer holidays. I had an annoying old white Seppo guy standing behind me complaining and making obvious statements to his Latina wife and son for the whole hour.

There wasn't any free wifi in the airport so I couldn't inform my girlfriend, Abril, about the delay in immigration. My bags had already been unloaded from the baggage carousel and put on the floor nearby. I picked them up and looked for the exit. In the customs area, the searches were random and decided by pressing a button. If you got the red light, you got searched, but if you got the green light you were allowed to go through without any hassle. Luck was with me and I got green, so I wasn't further delayed.

I got outside and found you couldn't take the baggage carts any further. So I saddled myself up while looking around for Abril, but I couldn't see her on the other side of the fence. I walked around the other side scanning the crowd and I saw her on phone trying to call me. She had been the airport since 1pm (an hour before the flight arrived) and had even made a sign on fluoro pink cardboard, but she had folded it due to the long wait.

We loaded my two big heavy bags into her car that she had driven to the airport for the first time: she usually took a taxi there. It didn't take long to reach her house, despite some traffic that wasn't bad for Mexico City standards. Upon arrival, I met her family with whom she lives which includes: her mum; an aunt, uncle and cousin; grandma; and two small white dogs. They were pretty friendly even the dogs and there wasn't any sign of an intense in-law vibe at all. We took my bags to the room Abril had cleaned, painted and furnished for me to stay in. I was quite surprised how big it was and also that it had it's own small bathroom. Abril and her family made me feel right at home! Due to the time difference and staying up for so much time during the trip I ended up crashing pretty early.

The historic embezzlement of the Mendoza family from Venezuela (translation)

Originally published at: http://misionverdad.com/la-guerra-en-venezuela/el-desfalco-historico-de-la-familia-mendoza-a-venezuela

August 4, 2015, 12:51 pm

The criminal record of a family that defrauded the nation

The historic embezzlement of the Mendoza family from Venezuela

The owner of the Polar companies, besides being a wealthy man with 2.7 billion dollars in his personal portfolio, wants to give economics and politics classes to the Bolivarian¹ government. He tries to hide his family's past, that took advantage of the economic resources of the country during almost all of the 20^th century to fill its pockets and take control of industries. But the truth always comes to light. Below, the criminal record of the Mendoza family.

The Mendoza coat of arms was cast in Basque lands. The Creole descendants of the noble house arrived in Venezuela territory settling between the uplands and the valleys of Trujillo.

Before Cristóbal Mendoza could impose his figure as the first republican president of Venezuela, installed in the inaugural leadership of the triumvirate that declared independence in 1810 with a flourish of the powerful creole elite, there were four generations previous to those installed in the the Valley of Caracas. The historic reliance of the Mendoza family on state institutions has reserved its private interests, without doubt, although with a low profile.


Until Eugenio Mendoza arrived, who during the government of Medina Angarita was named minister of Development, a position that he would return to hold in the Military Junta of 1958. This businessman said at one point that his emporium that he started without any capital, but among the papers you find his signature as “industrial partner” in Moisés Miranda & cía, whose shares he bought entirely in 1932 to convert it into Materiales Mendoza, S.A. The buying, selling and importing of construction materials was the first business. From there on he would climb the ladder until he obtained government posts to inject bolivars ²into his personal portfolio.

His brother, Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa, during the so-called Adeco³ triennium (1945 – 1948), was minister of Agriculture and Breeding, as well as, the Venezuela Institute for Immigration, assigned to the ministry that he headed, to bring European refugees and displaced people to put them to work: a cheap workforce wasn't looking for land in the countryside. It is calculated that 20,000 immigrants worked in the rice fields that they inaugurated due to the foundation of the Turén Agricultural Unit, in the state of Portuguesa, that devastated the small farmer towns of the zone in order to initiate the capitalist mechanisation of farmland which was so much the trend for the time.

It is worth highlighting his marriage to Hilda Coburn Velutini, this final last name associated with the family involved in the construction business, which made them rich, and later with banking speculation. His daughter, Antonieta Mendoza de López, is the mother of today's (non-)political prisoner Leopoldo López.

Together, Eduardo and Eugenio Mendoza founded Protinal, a company that produces food extracts for animals. In this way, the Grupo Empresas Mendoza, whose capital came from the Venezuelan state, started like good leeches on the Venezuelan economy.

Without scruples to negotiate

Marcos Pérez Jiménez, whose dictatorship was characterised economically by attracting North American capital in favour of the small military caste that sustained itself in state power, confessed to Blanco Muñoz the parasitic attitude of this faction of the Masters of the Valley:

"Eugenio Mendoza presented himself before me with a plan to develop the Matanzas Iron and Steel Plant, for 150 thousand tonnes. He asked in exchange that I might give him at once the Cerro of Parima, so that they might establish economic restrictions for the importation of steel. And practically he arrived at proposing that the government might give it to him to exercise it. The government had a more hierarchically-organised plan, that it is set down there and that is captured in the Matanzas Iron and Steel Plant. Then how were we going to give this to Eugenio Mendoza, with all the state property questions, for his benefit, in order that he might establish a minuscule plant that didn't satisfy the needs of the country? Here we were talking about three plants. Eugenio Mendoza couldn't carry that out and because of that the Venezuelan state dedicated to do it itself. If a company that might have been Eugenio Mendoza´s or another, had presented us with a plan of the magnitude that we had told them: go ahead. But what did Eugenio Mendoza do in the case of General Medina? Well, obtaining a licence to import smooth zinc sheets, and then put them in a small machine that corrugated them and for that the Venezuelan public had to pay extremely elevated prices. For the aluminium sheets that corrugated Eugenio Mendoza. And then he pocketed an extraordinary profit. And the Venezuelan customer, the consumer had to pay extremely high prices”.

The Mendozas didn't distinguish the actors of the negotiations, as long as their own bank account grew with less than the minimum of effort. Puntofijismo⁴ was the remaining piece to incorporate themselves fully in the key positions of the Venezuelan economy, due to the fact that Cisneros made itself into the lobby to bring themselves together with the US oligarchy of the Mills, creators of the biggest mill company in the world: Pillsbury Mills. In Venezuela it had its enclave with the names of Monaca (Robin Hood, Lassie, Juana, Mónica) and Molinos Caracas Maracaibo, S.A. (Milani, Suprema).

Thanks to this contact, the Mendoza part that entrusted itself with agribusiness and agroconfeti⁵ got to import the mills and today grind wheat and corn for the fabrication and distribution of Polar products and the other tasty snacks that pertain to the transnational network of Pepsico (Doritos, Ruffles, Gatorade, Frito Lays, etc.).

 

The migration to the financial sector

The new models of criminal accumulation of capital encoded themselves through the speculation on oil income through finance, the buying and selling of shares and bonds and banking. This migration made the traditional Masters of the Valley (Mendoza, Vollmer, Zuloaga) sometimes join together with the friends of Pedro Tinoco in the middle of the decade of 1970.
The Mendozas possessed half of Banco Provincial and important shares in Banco de Venezuela. They also took control of Banco Venezolano de Crédito and Banco La Guaira Internacional.
How did they manage to have so many shares and banks in their possession? Placing men of confidence in the puntofijist governments and in the business institutions.

 

A brief compendium of those connected to the Mendozas: Caldera I

• Lorenzo Fernández, COPEI party⁶ and minister of Interior Relations during the first government of Rafael Caldera, he was also the president of Productos EFE (today of Polar). The uncle of the brothers, Armando y Alberto Espinoza Fernández, both part of the Coordination Council of Empresas Mendoza. Alberto Espinoza, besides, was the first vice-president of C.A. Venezolana de Cementos, one of the most lucrative businesses of Eugenio Mendoza.
• Haydeé Castillo was a minister of Development and the Tax Office and director of the Department of Economic Investigations of the Grupo Empresas Mendoza.
• Andrés Germán Otero was designated the director of the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV). In 1974 served as the second vice-president of C.A. Venezolana de Cementos.
• Alfredo Lafee, president of BCV from 1971 until 1974. In 1978, active shareholder of Sherwin Williams, besides serving as the principal director of Cavaín Sociedad Financiera and president of Banco La Guaira Internacional.
• President of Compañía Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) between 1970 and 1973, the General (R) Rafael Alfonzo Ravard was a wealthy investor in the iron and steel plant, Sivensa, on whose board of directors generations of Mendozas have warmed seats. But the most important thing in Alfonzo Ravard's record, on top of legislating in favour of the grupo Alfonzo Rivas y compañía, is that he was the first president of Petróleos de Venezuela, that was born with the supposed nationalisation of oil. And here commences the list of Carlos Andrés Pérez (CAP) I.
  

 

A brief compendium of those connected to the Mendozas: CAP I

• Pedro Tinoco, the supreme operator of the Twelve Apostles of CAP, he was the acting director of Banco La Guaira Internacional.
• Gustavo Pinto Cohen, besides minister of Agriculture and Breeding, in 1978 appeared as the director of BCV. He was the acting director of Cavendes, a financial society in which the families Boulton, Blohm, Cervini, and of course Mendoza participate, amongst others.
• Carlos Romero Zuloaga, director of Meneven, even before its nationalisation, when it was called Mene Grande Oil Company. In 1978 he appeared registered as the principal director of Banco La Guaira Internacional and as president of Industria Eternit.
• César Mendoza passed from being the acting director of Siderúrgica del Orinoco (Sidor) to the de-facto director in 1975. President de Venalum (today Corporación Nacional de Aluminio) and of Adriática de Seguros, has capital invested in the private steel and iron industry.
• Luis Ignacio Mendoza was acting director of Aluminios del Caroní in 1975, a mixed enterprise with CVG, and with capital invested by the Reynold Metal Company. In 1978 he passed to be principal director of Siderúrgica Venezuela and of the previously mentioned Sivensa. He also served as director of Calanese de Venezuela and president of the company Cantonez de Venezuela.
  

Other companies of mixed capital in the Guayana region where CVG participated were:

• Cementos Guayana, company that had as president Eduardo Pantin in 1975, who by 1978 was the acting director of C.A. Venezolana de Cementos. Another person that was on the board of directors of Cementos Guayana was Gerardo Sansas, who in 1978 occupied the post of president of C.A. Venezolana de Cementos. Both loyal representatives of the Mendoza group.
• Fior de Venezuela had as president José Antonio Mayobre between 1975 and 1978, before having occupied the central office of the ministry of Tax during Betancourt government. Besides Mayobre appeared on the board of directors of Avensa and as a shareholder of Banco de Venezuela in 1978.
  

The key of the Mendoza group was placing representatives and family members in key posts of the economy, like the ministries of Tax, Development and the BCV, as we have already reviewed.

 

The foolish rich and the generation of replacement

Juan Carlos Zapata has qualified as “the foolish rich” those businesspeople that didn't know how to avoid the crisis that they themselves had created through the sacking of the state and financial speculation, and that by themselves saw all their monopolies turned to ashes in the midst of the hurricane. "Eugenio Antonio (Mendoza) hadn't learned the lesson from his father”, as Zapata says, of involving himself in politics during the the decades of 1980s and the start of the 1990s before the banking crisis in order to strengthen the industries and financial institutions that had passed on to the stupid son of the Mendozas.

The Mendoza family lost all the emporium that had developed in some decades of usufruct and speculation. Only once branch of the group (the Mendoza Fleury-Quintero-Pocaterra-Giménez) managed to escape from the debacle due the strengthening of the production and distribution branches that it possessed due to the embezzlement by the part of Mendoza Goiticoa lineage, besides always going around with its low business profile, media silence and little public attention.
In this way, Empresas Polar managed to function as the only Masters of the Valley that expanded with its litres of beer and tonnes of agroconfeti sold as national basic foods. By 1995, Grupo Polar had in its possession 2 billion dollars, when Oswaldo Cisneros and José Álvarez Stelling scarcely have 500 million dollars each in their bank accounts. The bear didn't sleep in its cave, it made use of the fall of the rest of the economic groups and erected itself as a lead actor in the development of plundered Venezuela.

Lorenzo Mendoza, today the leader of Polar, hasn't had to work but investing together with his financial friends what his daddy left him, Mendoza Quintero, well-loaded with money. It is this family that tries to return to power in order to run away with all the public resources possible in benefit of its private pocket. The role of torture for dollars while the economic war takes place in factories and distribution networks inside on behalf of Polar is the same role that its ancestors fulfilled from the comfortable office of some ministry.

Translator's notes:

1 current Venezuelan government whose policies are based on ideas of Simón Bolivar, 19th century Venezuelan general and liberator who led the struggle for independence throughout much of Hispanic America, and extolled by Hugo Chavez as: anti-imperialism; participative democracy; economic self-sufficiency; instilling in people a national ethic of patriotic service; quitable distribution natural resources; eliminating corruption

2Venezuelan currency

3government by the Acción Democrática party

4 Pact of Punto Fijo was agreed between representatives of Venezuela's three main political parties in 1958: Acción Democrática, COPEI and Unión Republicana Democrática. The pact bound the parties to limit Venezuela’s political system to an exclusive competition between two parties and the distribution of power between the two main political parties.

5 Food that has no nutritional value and doesn't constitute a staple of a healthy diet and is sprinkled around people´s food intake like confetti.

6 Copei

Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee, is a social christian party.

Armed Violence and Police in Mexico (translation)

Originally published at: http://www.animalpolitico.com/blogueros-seguridad-180/2015/08/03/violencia-armada-y-policia-en-mexico/
 
August 3, 2015

By: Paulina Arriaga Carrasco

Losing life is the most terrible consequence of armed violence. In 5 years (2009-2013) more than 80 thousand people died in Mexico from homicides with firearms. 44 per day. 66% of the homicides in the country were committed with this type of weapon, in Europe this percentage is only 13%, in Africa it is 28%, and the world average is 41%.[i]

The paradox is that Mexico has restrictive legislation in relation to the possession of arms and it is part of all the existing international organisations that monitor the control of them. We might say that, on the formal level, Mexico fulfills the requisites of the diligent and responsible State.

Even with all the legislative and international constraints, arms abound in our country. Academic estimations note that annually 250 thousand firearms enter in an illegal manner from the United States,[ii] other studies indicate that 24 million arms exist in our country.[iii] But where do these weapons come from? It is certain that 70% of those that are checked and verified by the Mexican government come from the US.[iv] Although illegal smuggling from the north is clearly a problem, not all the weapons “reach us from there”.

Institutional weakness, corruption and impunity in the country also make their contribution. Between 2006 and 2014, more than 17 thousand firearms were reported as lost or stolen by the police,[v] more than 150 per month. To put that into perspective, we can compare this figure with the number (officially accepted) of arms involved in the Operation Fast and Furious: in 5 years they dealt -with the consent of the US government- more than 2 thousand firearms.

The figure includes the arms lost or stolen from the state Ministries of Public Security and Attorney General's Offices, as well as the Attorney General's Office of the Republic (PGR), the Federal Police, Centre of Investigation and National Security (CISEN) and the Federal Protection Service. It's worth considering that the level of irresponsibility isn't uniform, just the Federal District, the state of Mexico, Guerrero, Durango and the federal institutions contribute 50% to the total of missing weapons. At the federal level the PGR and the Federal Police take the cake, they have lost 470 weapons each.

If we can't control the legal weapons, for which there exist registers and that came to Mexico under the supervision of Ministry of National Defense (Sedena), how will we be able to combat the illegal trade?

Sedena has the problem well identified. In 2014, the then director of the Federal Register of Firearms and Explosives, General Juan de Dios Bolaños, attacked the police in a public event in the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He commented that, in contrast to them -the army-, the police don't receive punishment for losing arms:

[…] sometimes we also as authorities, we are responsible for selling our own weapons. It is a problem that we have here lately with the police […] I don't know how they make it so easy to say “I lost 20 weapons, I can't find 150 weapons” but they make it very easy.[vi]

The weapons that enter legally to our country for the police aren't exempt from being used in a bad way (in the violation of human rights) or diverted to the black market. The diversion of weapons and the elements for the good management of arsenals are set out in various international organisations of which Mexico is not only a part, but has actively promoted. Lamentably the enthusiastic international participation hasn't seen itself reflected in every day life.

In 2008 Mexico hosted the second conference of States part of the Inter-american Convention against the Illicit Manufacture and Trade of Fire Arms (CIFTA), in 2010 the meeting of the Action Program for the prevention, combat and elimination of illicit trade of small and light arms in all its aspects (POA) and in a few weeks the first meeting of States part of the Treaty on Arms Trade (ATT) will be in Cancún.

The ATT seeks to reduce the suffering caused by armed violence, one of its fundamental aspects is preventing the diversion of legal arms to unauthorised users. Behind the optimism of the existence of this treaty, that without doubt is historic, Mexicans come up against an extremely complex reality to deal with. These diversions, I can assure it, won't be resolved with technical details of improvements in the security of warehouses or gun storehouses. The loss and robbery of weapons is a symptom more of what in this space (Animal Pólitico) has written Maru Suárez de Garay:

[…] the problem doesn't centre only on “diverted” behaviours -the thesis of the rotten apple- but on a series of institutionalised practices that are the results of the form in which the organisational structure of the police has been linked with political power, producing favourable conditions for corruption and the exercise of diverse illegal and extra-institutional forms of police conduct.[vii]

The presence of weapons that fall into the hands of unauthorised people doesn't only depend on corruption and impunity on our borders, but also on the that existing in the police stations, and that is one piece of the puzzle that is dealt with very little. This reality entails admitting internal responsibility and leaving behind the thinking that all the problem comes from abroad. Without doubt this theme is a point of convergence among those who strive to transform the police and those who wish to reduce armed violence in Mexico.

I invite them to follow here the work that [Des]arma México y Casede are carrying out about this and other issues in the National Observatory of Armed and Gender Violence. #OVAG.

* Paulina Arriaga Carrasco is founder and executive director of [Des]arma México. Facebook DesArmaMéxico Twitter @desarmamex Collaborated with Vania Ruiz and Dorena Estrada.




[i] Oficina de las Naciones Unidas contra la Droga y el Delito, Estudio mundial sobre el Homicidio 2013, p. 6.
[ii] David A. Shirk, et.al., The Way of the Gun: Estimating Firearms Traffic Across the U.S.-Mexico Border, Estados Unidos, Igarapé Institute y Transborder Institute de la Universidad de San Diego, 2013, p.15.
[iii] Eugenio Weigend, Íñigo Guevara, “How many illegal guns are there in Mexico? Probably more than you think”, El Daily Post, 3 de junio de 2014.
[iv] Department of Justice, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Mexico, Estados Unidos, 2015. Consulta aquí.
[v] Respuesta de Seden a solicitud de información, Folio 000700205114
[vi]  Bolaños, Juan de Dios, Mesa de Discusión Tráfico de Armas en México, Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, auditorio Guillermo Floris Margadant,  26 de junio 2014.
[vii] María Eugenia Suárez de Garay, “Del autoempleo en el mundo policial (Segunda Parte)”, Animal Político, 8 de junio de 2015.