#section: world

The 63 year old drug lord, who was imprisoned for nearly 15 years on drug charges between 1993 and 2008, was the eldest of the set of siblings who run the infamous AFO, which dominated much of Tijuana’s drug trade during the 1990s. The siblings inherited half of the Guadalajara Cartel from their uncle Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, which split into two factions after his incarceration in 1989. The other faction, the Sinaloa Cartel, also competes for control over Mexican drug trafficking. This has created a lot of bad blood and an extremely violent history between the two cartels, which has seen many people caught in the feuding drug gangs’ crossfire.

During the 1990s, the AFO was one of Mexico’s most feared drug cartels due to their two main leaders, Benjamín and Ramón. Benjamín, a gifted businessman and Ramón, who was undoubtedly one of the most ruthless men in Mexico, controlled the AFO along with their five other brothers and four sisters from 1989 to 2002.  Their list of offenses is long, from drug trafficking, to bribery of a large portion of the local police and government officials, and even extensive counts of murder. This enabled them to maintain an effective operation of smuggling drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin into America. The cartel’s smuggling methods utilised miles of long tunnels, boats and ultimatums of ‘silver or lead’, a method of controlling the police with bribes or bullets.

Benjamín reinforced their operations in the 1990s by recruiting gang members from America and made David Barron head of the cartel’s enforcement sector. This secured the AFO with Barron’s countless American enforcers and helped establish a strong distribution network in the United States. Despite their once strong position, however, it is questionable what the future holds for the high profile cartel.

Their problems started in 1993, during a catastrophic mix up, which resulted in Cardinal Posadas Ocampo being killed in an assassination attempt that was meant for the Sinaloa Cartel’s leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera. Ocampo’s murder resulted in a wave of hatred directed towards the AFO, who were now hated by most of Mexico as the stated Public Enemy Number One, thus becoming a priority of many government officials in Mexico. Things went from bad to worse for the AFO, following their involvement in the assassination of Presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994, which led to US President Clinton dispatching a task force in 1995 to specifically combat the AFO.  

With the death and incarceration in 2002 of Ramón and Benjamín respectively, and many other leading members being imprisoned or killed in the years that followed, the cartel has shown excellent resilience in its refusal to go down without a fight. To this day this is exemplified by the on-going drug war which has taken many lives and caused tens of thousands of Mexicans to give up on Tijuana and flee. The recent death of Francisco is therefore simply another casualty of war. Having endured the loss of leaders such as Benjamín and Ramón, the cartel has already proved that it is stronger than its individual parts. The centralised infrastructure of the AFO has proved many times now that it is a near impossible task for anyone to remove the influence of the cartels which plague Mexico’s streets, and this time it will be no different.

Mr Sweeney, a graduate of LSE himself, has earned a reputation as a journalist whose risk-taking has involved hiding in a car boot in Zimbabwe in order to meet with the leader of the opposition during the Robert Mugabe regime. His investigations have played a critical part in the acquittal of three women wrongly convicted of killing their children. In this case however, the stakes were higher. Although the full group was fortunate enough to depart from the country before North Korean authorities realised Mr Sweeney was in the country, critics are claiming he took investigative journalism too far, in that he knowingly jeopardized the safety of the students. Had Mr Sweeney and his cameraman’s identities been discovered whilst still in North Korea, it could have meant detention of the entire party in a country whose current environment is already uneasy due to renewed nuclear tensions.

The educational trip itself is thought to have been organised in the name of the prestigious Grimshaw Society (of the LSE International Relations Department), which is claimed to have circulated details of the trip to its members. This goes against claims from the LSE itself that the students were totally unaware of the trip. An LSE International Relations postgraduate student who prefers to remain anonymous told me that she “joined Grimshaw because it's a prestigious club and I was interested in attending their various discussions on current affairs. I wouldn't necessarily steer clear of the trips now but to me it reflects negatively on the club because they clearly don't know what their members are getting into”.

The credibility of the BBC’s recent mission is further brought into question when considering the novelty and quality of the information ultimately presented in the BBC’s Panorama programme on April 15th. The majority of existing documentaries are filmed at the North Korean-Chinese border, and feature stories from North Koreans fleeing their country, with very few exceptions. The most notable exception to this is perhaps the documentary Children of the Secret State (2000), which captured the lives of homeless North Korean orphans, shot in the country using ‘underground’ cameramen. Although Sweeney’s footage was of the few filmed within the country itself, his Twitter account has been bombarded with comments degrading the quality of his work. Whether Sweeney’s insight added value or not, it is such ‘episodes’ that threaten to cast a shadow on the validity and credibility of investigative journalism.