Somebody’s watching me?

Wednesday, for the second time, I stopped at Sanborns to see if Proceso had FINALLY show up here in Mazatlán.  The Sanborn clerks know me… I’m the only foreigner who regularly buys El Chamuca, and thinks its the best Mexican opinion journal around. I just buy it for the pictures… but then, it’s a comic book –sort of a Mexican version of The Nation is it was put together by the “usual gang of idiots” over at MAD Magazine.

Proceso hadn’t shown up Monday, and was told it would be in the next day, when the clerk told me and the other guy looking for it Proceso was expected in by Wednesday.  On Wednesday, the magazine counter manager and the four or five other customers  who were all equally anxious to read Julio Scherer’s interview with Sinaola’s second-most notorious exporter, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada,  kind of appreciated it when I was quoted the famous line Andres Manuel López Obradór used when faced with frustrating out-of-his-hands situations:  “¡Es un complot!”  It was a joke, but the Sanborns manager said he thought it was plausible.

We may not have been wearing tin-foil hats:

When I asked Malcolm Beith (who had the common sense to read  the article from the on-line version), who has a good overview of the El Mayo interview for those who can’t read Spanish if he was able to pick up a copy, he said there were problems getting the magazine elsewhere in Mexico.  Still, with armed commandos walking into the Sinaloa distributor and buying up the entire state supply, you wonder what’s going on.  Who ever heard of “rmed buyery”?

El Mayo doesn’t say anything all that damning — or even surprising — in his interview (except maybe that his friend, Chapo Guzman, is nowhere near as rich as Forbes Magazine seems to think) : he basically thinks of himself as a businessman and family guy (with five wives!) and, like a lot of other Sinaloans, thinks the “drug war” is unwinnable. If he and Chapo aren’t running things, someone else will pick up the slack.  Like I said earlier this week, he seems to think the narco leaders could just be bought out.

Clikity-click to read

But, I’m the guy with the weird accent asking about it, here.  And who walks home from Sanborns via a short-cut through the fraccionimento where the mid-level “powers-that-be” — local politicos and gangsters — are said to live.   And is known to write about Mexican affairs.  So finding the letter at the left under shoved under my gate yesterday would set off at least a twitch of paranoia.

It’s a copy of a letter dated 6 April 2010 from Mauricio Razo Sánchez writing on behalf of CISEN (el Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional), the Mexican national security agency (i.e., the secret police and spy agency) to Jesus Vizcarra Calderón. Vizcarra, presently the Presidente Municipal of Culiacán, is the only pre-candidate for the PRI nomination for this year’s governor’s election in Sinaloa.

Which makes one wonder if the Proceso readers with guns weren’t more interested in ANOTHER article in the same issue, Jorge Carrasco Araizaga’s Narcopolitica en Sinaloa (“Narco Politics in Sinaloa”), the lead translated by me as:

Cisen has been investigating links going back more than twenty years between businesses run by Jesus Vizcarra Calderon, the PRI gubenatorial candidate in Sinaloa, and  major drug lords. Vizcarra, associated politically with Enrique Peña Nieto and Elba Esther Gordillo, was paradoxically fostered by  Vicente Fox and former Secretary of Agriculture Javier Usabiaga. He now defends Felipe Calderon’s war and endorses the militarization of the fight against organized crime.

I assume that the letter — in which the CISEN bureaucrat says the Proceso article is based on open records — is being distributed by opponents (or potential opponents — the official campaign not having stated yet) of Vizcarra’s run for the governorship.   But that raises two more questions… first, how did the opponents get the letter, and second… who slipped it under my front gate?