Mexican official: CIA 'manages' drug trade

The CIA refused to comment directly on the allegations of complicity made by a low-level Mexican official 

Πηγή: AlJazeera
By Chris Arsenault
July 24 2012


Spokesman for Chihuahua state says US agencies don't want to end drug trade, a claim denied by other Mexican officials.

Juarez, Mexico - The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers", a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead "they try to manage the drug trade".

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico's most violent states - one which directly borders Texas - going on the record with such accusations is unique.

A spokesman for the CIA in Washington wouldn't comment on the accusations directly, instead he referred Al Jazeera to an official website.

Accusations are 'baloney'

Villanueva is not a high ranking official and his views do not represent Mexico's foreign policy establishment. Other more senior officials in Chihuahua State, including the mayor of Juarez, dismissed the claims as "baloney".

"I think the CIA and DEA [US Drug Enforcement Agency] are on the same side as us in fighting drug gangs," Hector Murguia, the mayor of Juarez, told Al Jazeera during an interview inside his SUV. "We have excellent collaboration with the US."

Under the Merida Initiative, the US Congress has approved more than $1.4bn in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges.

More than 55,000 people have died in drug related violence in Mexico since December 2006. Privately, residents and officials across Mexico's political spectrum often blame the lethal cocktail of US drug consumption and the flow of high-powered weapons smuggled south of the border for causing much of the carnage.

Drug war 'illusions'

"The war on drugs is an illusion," Hugo Almada Mireles,professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez and author of several books, told Al Jazeera. "It's a reason to intervene in Latin America."

"The CIA wants to control the population; they don't want to stop arms trafficking to Mexico, look at [Operation] Fast and Furious,” he said, referencing a botched US exercise where automatic weapons were sold to criminals in the hope that security forces could trace where the guns ended up.

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms lost track of 1,700 guns as part of the operation, including an AK-47 used in 2010 the murder of Brian Terry, a Customs and Border Protection Agent.

Blaming the gringos for Mexico's problems has been a popular sport south of the Rio Grande ever since the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, when the US conquered most of present day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico from its southern neighbour. But operations such as Fast and Furious show that reality can be stranger than fiction when it comes to the drug war and relations between the US and Mexico. If the case hadn't been proven, the idea that US agents were actively putting weapons into the hands of Mexican gangsters would sound absurd to many.

'Conspiracy theories'

"I think it's easy to become cynical about American and other countries' involvement in Latin America around drugs," Kevin Sabet, a former senior adviser to the White House on drug control policy, told Al Jazeera. "Statements [accusing the CIA of managing the drug trade] should be backed up with evidence… I don’t put much stake in it."

Villanueva's accusations "might be a way to get some attention to his region, which is understandable but not productive or grounded in reality", Sabet said. "We have sort of 'been there done that' with CIA conspiracy theories."

In 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published Dark Alliance, a series of investigative reports linking CIA missions in Nicaragua with the explosion of crack cocaine consumption in America's ghettos.

In order to fund Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's socialist government, the CIA partnered with Colombian cartels to move drugs into Los Angeles, sending profits back to Central America, the series alleged.

"There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking," US Senator John Kerry said at the time, in response to the series.

Other newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, slammed Dark Alliance, and the editor of the Mercury News eventually wrote that the paper had over-stated some elements in the story and made mistakes in the journalistic process, but that he stood by many of the key conclusions.

Widespread rumours

US government has neglected border corruption

"It's true, they want to control it," a mid-level official with theSecretariat Gobernacion in Juarez, Mexico's equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA's policing of the drug trade. The officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he knew the allegations to be correct, based on discussions he had with US officials working in Juarez.

Acceptance of these claims within some elements of Mexico's government and security services shows the difficulty in pursuing effective international action against the drug trade.

Jesús Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution.

"Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of [Jesus Zambada's] father, Ismael Zambada and 'Chapo' Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs... into... the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels," Zambada's lawyers wrote as part of his defence. "Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel."

The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico's oldest and most powerful trafficking organisation, and some analysts believe security forces in the US and Mexico favour the group over its rivals.

Joaquin "El Chapo", the cartel's billionaire leader and one of the world's most wanted men, escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 by sneaking into a laundry truck - likely with collaboration from guards - further stoking rumours that leading traffickers have complicit friends in high places.

"It would be easy for the Mexican army to capture El Chapo," Mireles said. "But this is not the objective." He thinks the authorities on both sides of the border are happy to have El Chapo on the loose, as his cartel is easier to manage and his drug money is recycled back into the broader economy. Other analysts consider this viewpoint a conspiracy theory and blame ineptitude and low level corruption for El Chapo's escape, rather than a broader plan from government agencies.

Political changes

After an election hit by reported irregularities, Enrique Pena Nieto from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is set to be sworn in as Mexico's president on December 1.

He wants to open a high-level dialogue with the US about the drug war, but has said legalisation of some drugs is not an option. Some hardliners in the US worry that Nieto will make a deal with some cartels, in order to reduce violence.

"I am hopeful that he will not return to the PRI party of the past which was corrupt and had a history of turning a blind eye to the drug cartels," said Michael McCaul, a Republican Congressman from Texas.

Regardless of what position a new administration takes in order to calm the violence and restore order, it is likely many Mexicans - including government officials such as Chihuahua spokesman Guillermo Villanueva - will believe outside forces want the drug trade to continue.

The widespread view linking the CIA to the drug trade - whether or not the allegations are true - speaks volumes about officials' mutual mistrust amid ongoing killings and the destruction of civic life in Mexico.

"We have good soldiers and policemen," Villanueva said. "But you won't resolve this problem with bullets. We need education and jobs."

U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels

William R. Brownfield of the State Department is a leading architect of new antidrug strategies. 

Πηγή: New York TImes

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and THOM SHANKER
July 21 2012

WASHINGTON — In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.

The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

In both regions, American officials are responding to fears that crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling — like Mexico and Spain — have prompted traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further corrupting and destabilizing them.

The aggressive response by the United States is also a sign of how greater attention and resources have turned to efforts to fight drugs as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down.

“We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and counternarcotics issues,” said Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of the D.E.A.’s Europe, Asia and Africa section. “It’s a place that we need to get ahead of — we’re already behind the curve in some ways, and we need to catch up.”

The initiatives come amid a surge in successful interdictions in Honduras since May — but also as American officials have been forced to defend their new tactics after a commando-style team of D.E.A. agents participated in at least three lethal interdiction operations alongside a squad of Honduran police officers. In one of those operations, in May, the Honduran police killed four people near the village of Ahuas, and in two others in the past month American agents have shot and killed smuggling suspects.

To date, officials say, the D.E.A. commando team has not been deployed to work with the newly created elite police squads in Africa, where the effort to counter the drug traffickers is said to be about three years behind the one in Central America.

The officials said that if Western security forces did come to play a more direct operational role in Africa, for historical reasons they might be European and not American.

In May, William R. Brownfield, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, a leading architect of the strategy now on display in Honduras, traveled to Ghana and Liberia to put the finishing touches on a West Africa Cooperative Security Initiative, which will try to replicate across 15 nations the steps taken in battling trafficking groups operating in Central America and Mexico.

Mr. Brownfield said the vision for both regions was to improve the ability of nations to deal with drug trafficking, by building up their own institutions and getting them to cooperate with one another, sharing intelligence and running regional law enforcement training centers.

But because drug traffickers have already moved into Africa, he said, there is also a need for the immediate elite police units that have been trained and vetted.

“We have to be doing operational stuff right now because things are actually happening right now,” Mr. Brownfield said.

Some specialists have expressed skepticism about the approach. Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who focuses on Latin America and counternarcotics, said that what had happened in West Africa over the past few years was the latest example of the “Whac-A-Mole” problem, in which making trafficking more difficult in one place simply shifts it to another.

“As they put on the pressure, they are going to detour routes, but they are not going to stop the flow, because the institutions are incredibly weak — I don’t care how much vetting they do,” Professor Bagley said. “And there is always blowback to this. You start killing people in foreign countries — whether criminals or not — and there is going to be fallout.”

American government officials acknowledge the challenges, but they are not as pessimistic about the chances of at least pushing the trafficking organizations out of particular countries. And even if the intervention leads to an increase in violence as organizations that had operated with impunity are challenged, the alternative, they said, is worse.

“There is no such thing as a country that is simply a transit country, for the very simple reason that the drug trafficking organization first pays its network in product, not in cash, and is constantly looking to build a greater market,” Mr. Brownfield said. “Regardless of the name of the country, eventually the transit country becomes a major consumer nation, and at that point they have a more serious problem.”

The United Nations says that cocaine smuggling and consumption in West Africa have soared in recent years, contributing to instability in places like Guinea-Bissau. Several years ago, a South American drug gang tried to bribe the son of the Liberian president to allow it to use the country for smuggling. Instead, he cooperated with the D.E.A., and the case resulted in convictions in the United States.

Even more ominous, according to American officials, was a case in which a militant group called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb offered three of its operatives to help ship tons of cocaine through North Africa into Europe — all to raise money to finance terrorist attacks. The case ended this past March with conviction and sentencing in federal court in New York.

American counternarcotics assistance for West Africa has totaled about $50 million for each of the past two years — up from just $7.5 million in 2009, according to the State Department. The D.E.A. also is opening its first country office in Senegal, officials said, and the Pentagon has worked with Cape Verde to establish a regional center to detect drug-smuggling ships.

While the agency has not sponsored units in West Africa before, it has long worked with similar teams — which are given training, equipment and pay while being subjected to rigorous drug and polygraph testing — in countries around the world whose security forces are plagued by corruption, including the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama.

It is routine for D.E.A. agents who are assigned to mentor the specially trained and screened units to accompany them on raids, but it has been unusual for Americans to kill suspects. Several former agents said the recent cases in Honduras suggested that the D.E.A. had been at the vanguard of the operations there rather than merely serving as advisers in the background.

By contrast, the effort in West Africa is still at the beginning stages, officials say. But the problems there are the same — and growing. Officials described one instance in which a methamphetamine lab was discovered in Africa, with documents suggesting that it had been set up by a Mexican trafficking organization. William F. Wechsler, the Pentagon’s top counternarcotics officer, said that observing drug traffickers’ advances into West Africa, and the response from American and local authorities, was like watching a rerun of the drug war in this hemisphere in years past.

“West Africa is now facing a situation analogous to the Caribbean in the 1980s, where small, developing, vulnerable countries along major drug-trafficking routes toward rich consumers are vastly under-resourced to deal with the wave of dirty money coming their way,” he said.

The Other Consequences of Fast and Furious

Πηγή: Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
July 12 2012

On the night of Dec. 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot and killed while on patrol in an Arizona canyon near the U.S.-Mexico border. Two guns found at the scene were linked to an investigation being run by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) called "Operation Fast and Furious," sparking a congressional inquiry into the program and generating considerable criticism of the ATF and the Obama administration. Because of this criticism, in August 2011 ATF acting director Kenneth Melson was reassigned from his post and the U.S. attorney for Arizona was forced to resign.

Currently, the congressional inquiry is focused on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been accused of misleading Congress about what he knew about Fast and Furious and when he learned it. The Obama administration has invoked executive privilege to block the release of some of the Department of Justice emails and memos sought by Congress pertaining to the operation. The controversy escalated June 28 when the U.S. House of Representatives voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress for ignoring its subpoenas.

As all Second Amendment issues are political hot buttons, and with this being a presidential election year in the United States, the political wrangling over Fast and Furious is certain to increase in the coming months. The debate is also sure to become increasingly partisan and pointed. But, frankly, this political wrangling is not what we find to be the most interesting aspect of the operation's fallout. Rather, we are more interested in the way that criticism of Fast and Furious has altered law enforcement efforts to stem the flow of guns from the United States to Mexico and the way these changes will influence how Mexican cartels acquire weapons.

Law Enforcement Shifts

Several of these law enforcement changes already have been enacted. For example, the number of ATF inspectors has been increased due to additional funding for an inspection program through the U.S. Southwest Border Initiative. This means that there are more inspectors to audit the sales records of licensed gun dealers. In southern Arizona, for example, the number of inspectors was increased from three to eight. According to the ATF, these inspectors oversee the operations of some 430 federally licensed firearms dealers in six border counties.

These firearms dealers include gun store proprietors as well as independent dealers working the gun show circuit. The increase in ATF inspection staff and activity has sparked an outcry from gun show dealers who claim they are being unfairly harassed by inspectors. ATF sources have told Stratfor that they do not harass dealers, but that the staff increase has allowed the bureau to catch up on inspections it was not able to conduct in the past. The sources also said they believe that their increased presence at gun shows is scaring away cartel buyers, although, obviously, some gun show firearms are still finding their way into cartel hands.

Another procedural change occurred in August 2011, when the ATF began a new program in which licensed gun dealers in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California are required to report to the ATF bulk sales of certain types of rifles, namely semi-automatic rifles larger than .22 caliber with detachable magazines such as the semi-automatic AR-15 and AK-47 variants favored by the cartels. The new rule requires gun dealers to report people without federal firearms licenses who buy two or more of such rifles to the ATF within five working days. The rule has raised the ire of some Second Amendment activists, but the ATF notes that it has had a similar reporting regimen for multiple sales of handguns in place since 1975.

The attention that Fast and Furious attracted to the gun smuggling problem also has led to an increase in interdiction efforts by other U.S. federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Furthermore, weapons cases have reportedly been given increased prosecutorial priority by U.S. attorneys -- meaning they are now less likely to decline prosecution of a gun case than before the controversy emerged. This has led to increased pressure on lower-level violators such as straw purchasers -- people paid by arms traffickers to buy guns from dealers. Greed will ensure that people continue to work as straw purchasers, but considering the increased risk of prosecution and the new reporting requirements, straw purchasers and the traffickers who employ them will be more exposed.

In May 2012, the ATF claimed that the reporting requirements have led to a decrease in large-volume sales of semi-automatic rifles (10 or more in a single purchase). The ATF also said that traffickers are adapting their weapons procurement methods to the new regulations.

Arms Smugglers Adapt

Despite their impact, the law enforcement and reporting changes cannot stem the tide of weapons entirely. In the same way that drug flows adapt to law enforcement interdiction efforts, weapons flows will also adjust. Previous federal investigations have shown that Mexican cartels have contacts in many different parts of the United States, including cities such as Chicago and Atlanta, far from the border. One way to bypass the increase in ATF inspections and the border state reporting requirements is to buy guns in states located farther from the border. Of course, this would require the weapons to be transported longer distances to get to Mexico, increasing transportation costs as well as exposure to interdiction efforts. A shift in the points of purchase would also almost certainly result in the expansion of the new reporting requirements to other states.

Although it will never be possible to completely cut off the flow of guns to Mexico from the United States, it can be reduced. This would force the cartels to search for new sources of weapons.

One significant emerging source of AR-15/M16 variants is something called an 80 percent lower receiver. (The lower receiver is the part of the AR-15/M16/M4 that carries a manufacturer's serial number. These 80 percent lower receivers do not have any serial numbers.) Under U.S. federal firearms law, the unfinished lower receiver is not considered a firearm and thus can be shipped anywhere and sold to anyone without a license. Once the remaining machining on the lower receiver is completed, one can build an AR-15, M16 or M4 carbine by purchasing the additional required parts -- such as the bolt assembly, trigger assembly and barrel -- which also are not considered firearms. Once the weapon is fully assembled, it is then considered a firearm and subject to federal firearms law.

While the 80 percent lower receivers are intended for do-it-yourself gun enthusiasts, according to the ATF, these guns have also begun to show up in increasing numbers in Mexico.

Many if not most of the semi-automatic rifles purchased in the United States and smuggled into Mexico are converted to be capable of fully automatic fire by armorers working for various cartel groups. The same armorers are capable of finishing the machining on 80 percent lower receivers and assembling completed firearms from them. The finishing process is not difficult, and there are specialized jigs one can buy and instructional videos posted on the Internet to assist in the process. With experience, proper parts and equipment, a competent machinist can quickly and easily finish a lower receiver in an hour or less.

But acquiring 80 percent lower receivers is not the only alternative for cartels. As noted previously, the Mexican cartels obtain weapons from a variety of sources. The main reason they buy rifles and high-powered pistols from the United States is that such weapons are cheap and readily available. The United States is also nearby, so the guns do not have to be transported very far. Once in Mexico, such weapons can be sold to cartels or on the black market for three times their purchase price in the United States. This explains the difficulty of shutting down the flow of weapons between the two countries. The gun trade is almost as lucrative as the narcotics flowing north.

The premium prices Mexican cartels are paying for guns mean that even if the U.S.-Mexican border could somehow magically be sealed tomorrow, arms merchants from elsewhere would be able to fill the void. Indeed, there are some weapons that the cartels simply cannot buy from the United States due to a lack of availability. Such weapons include hand grenades, 40 mm grenades, M60 machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and M-72 anti-tank rockets. Instead, the cartels buy such items from members of the Mexican military, militaries in countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador, or international arms dealers. The cartels would go to these same sources to replace the weapons unavailable in the United States due to increased arms interdiction efforts. South American groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and Peru's Shining Path have demonstrated that it is not difficult for groups to arm themselves via the black arms market in the Western Hemisphere.

Rifles and other weapons are durable goods, and it is not unusual to find weapons in Mexico that were provided by the United States, the Soviets or the Cubans to various governments and insurgent groups during the Cold War. Weapons are also fungible, or easily substituted for each other. This means that an AK-47 rifle made in the Soviet Union in the 1950s could be replaced by a variant made in East Germany in the 1970s or in China or Romania today. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find assault rifles of various makes and ages in cartel possession. In videos published by groups such as the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, gunmen armed with FN-FAL rifles have appeared alongside comrades armed with various models of AKs, M16s and M4s. A cartel gunman does not care where his rifle comes from.

In recent years, Mexican cartels have begun to forge close relationships with Chinese organized crime groups that are helping the cartels obtain precursor chemicals for the manufacture of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs. These Chinese groups also are reportedly becoming increasingly important components of Mexican cartel money laundering efforts. Chinese criminal groups have close ties with the Chinese arms manufacturers, and it is possible that they could begin sending guns to their Mexican contacts with the other illicit cargo.

The Mexican cartels have also reportedly become progressively more involved in the transportation of cocaine to Europe via Africa -- a continent awash in black market assault rifles and other weapons. Some of the cocaine trafficked into Europe is handled by Balkan groups with access to large stockpiles of weapons in Eastern Europe.

These various connections ensure that the Mexican cartels will continue to have access to assault rifles and other military ordnance for the foreseeable future, regardless of how much progress U.S. authorities make in their efforts to stem the flow of guns to Mexico.

Commentary: Mexico's drug cartels have expanded beyond drugs and guns

Πηγή: McClatchy
By Mary Sanchez
Feb 8 2012

A bit of respect, please, for the drug cartels. For their ingenuity, technological shrewdness, and ability to adapt their products and services to a changing marketplace.

It's a perspective missed by both Democrats and Republicans. Politicians of both parties are too busy grandstanding about "securing" or "fixing" a border they fail fully to understand.

A series of position papers is being released by the nonprofit Immigration Policy Center detailing the failings at the U.S.-Mexico border in stark, necessary language. The author is former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, and his nuanced view is a corrective to the overheated rhetoric we usually hear on the subject.

Most Americans think the trouble at our southern border is just about guns, dope and meth. Goddard argues the Mexican drug cartels are more aptly described as “transnational criminal organizations.” They are branching to new lines of business like production and distribution of pirated music, movies and software, money laundering and hijacking.

“Rather than being just a line in the desert sand, the southwest border is a complex, multidimensional interrelationship of immigration laws, cyberspace money transfers, and international business connections,” Goddard writes.

His second in a series of three reports, “How to Fix a Broken Border: Disrupting Smuggling at Its Source,” was released days ago. In almost every paragraph you can read Goddard’s exasperation with our wrongheaded border policy.

Politicians earn brownie points from voters by pumping up the rhetoric about needing “more boots on the ground,” but they are unlikely to catch a Zeta that way. “If we are serious about stopping the threat on the border, we have to dismantle the criminal organizations that carry the contraband and take away the tools that make them so effective,” Goddard writes. “Anything less will fail.”

Clearly, the U.S. is stuck at fail. Goddard points out that “success” at the border is difficult to define, and he questions whether we should take comfort in statistics that show fewer illegal border crossings.

Current enforcement approaches typically focus on chasing the contraband and the humans being smuggled, rather than stopping the enterprises behind the work. Some law enforcement efforts have had the paradoxical effect of increasing demand for the cartel’s services, such as moving people across the border.

A major fault of U.S. policy is failing fully to understand the cartels’ motivations and methods. Despite their well-deserved reputation for grisly and indiscriminate murder, the cartels are not interested in bringing that mayhem north of the border. That would be bad for business.

Consider a typical occurrence: cartel operatives dumping large quantities of drugs in order to avoid a gunfight with U.S. agents. This tactic too often works as a pacifier. Drug enforcement officials pose for the predictable media photo op. “Look, what we got!”

Meanwhile, the smugglers are long gone, on to the next transaction. Such losses are a necessary component of their business model, Goddard points out. Dump the product to ensure the business remains profitable, one step ahead of the law.

The cartels are extremely sophisticated in their intel and operations. And their raison d’etre is not violence but making money. They are as committed to profit seeking as any Fortune 500 business. Indeed, they funnel an estimated $40 billion in revenue from U.S. operations back to Mexico annually, according to Goddard.

The key to defeating the cartels will be going after the vital aspects of their businesses.

“Their communication systems must be cracked, jammed, and shut down,” Goddard writes. “Their leaders must be identified, arrested and incarcerated. Most important, the illegal flow of funds across the border into cartel pockets must be disrupted, interrupted and stopped.”

During his time as Arizona attorney general, Goddard won a $94 million settlement with Western Union; he had charged that cartels had used the company extensively in highly complicated money transfers.

His instinct as a prosecutor has been to follow the money, and he argues that the U.S. Department of Treasury needs to collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican government in concerted, well-organized efforts as nimble as the cartels’ own. You don’t move $40 billion across a border every year without the help of some major financial intermediaries.

The violence in Mexico is horrific, but it also prompts overblown fears here in the U.S., with the result that our border policies are often ineffective and incoherent.

If we hope to see the cartels crumble, we have to change the way we understand them. Goddard’s reports are a step in the right direction.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/02/08/137789/commentary-mexicos-drug-cartels.html?#storylink=cpy

What I saw inside the Cali drug cartel

Four drug traffickers and members of the now-defunct Cali Cartel cover faces on January 15, 2009, in Bogota

Πηγή: CNN
By Jorge Salcedo
Jan 28 2012

Editor's note: Jorge Salcedo is a former member of the Cali drug cartel, and his work with authorities helped destroy the organization. He was relocated to the U.S. along with his wife and children in 1995 and taken into the federal witness protection program. Salcedo's story is told in the book, "At the Devil's Table -- The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel," by journalist William C. Rempel. Neither the author nor CNN know Mr. Salcedo's whereabouts or his new name.

(CNN) -- Drug cartels, whether in Colombia or Mexico, cannot function without massive assistance from compromised officials at all levels. Corruption is the oxygen that keeps organized crime alive.

I know something about corruption and organized crime. I spent more than six years in the biggest, richest syndicate in the history of crime -- the Cali cartel. And I know that Mexico, like Colombia, can't succeed against its drug gangs without choking off much of the bribery and intimidation that sustain them.

First, some background: I used to be Jorge Salcedo. I left my name in Colombia when I entered the U.S. witness protection program 16 years ago. I also left a home, a country, friends, family, even my past. But maybe my experience will help show the importance of fighting corruption as a way to fight the cartels.

My primary job in the Cali cartel was security for one of four godfathers, Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, the daily operations boss. Others were more directly involved in routine bribery, but I still managed to deliver nearly a million dollars in payoffs. And I witnessed many, many millions more.

The biggest bribe I ever handled personally was a half-million-dollar payoff to a Salvadoran air force colonel. I was buying four U.S.-made bombs -- 500-pounders -- that the bosses wanted to drop on Pablo Escobar. It was a very bad idea, but they sent me anyway. The cash was disguised as a birthday present, about the size of a large shoebox, wrapped in red paper with gold trim. I'd never seen so much money. I remember that it was surprisingly heavy.

Then there were the two checks signed by Miguel worth about $50,000. As instructed, I took those to a bank near the Cali airport and deposited one into the account of a sister and the other to the mother of a captain in the Colombian anti-narcotics task force. It was a bonus for the captain's help getting the boss away from a police raid.

In those days, hundreds of high-ranking and lower level police were on the cartel's secret payroll -- tens of thousands of dollars paid every month for inside tips or for looking the other way. The youngest boss, Pacho Herrera, sometimes liked to use local police as sentries at his home.

The cartel had important friends in the military, too -- from helicopter pilots to generals. One well-placed insider was the sergeant and chief of staff to the military commander of the anti-narcotics task force. He cost $20,000 a month.

Between sources like the army sergeant, the police captain and others, my bosses and I were kept informed about dates, times and places for raids and such things as which cartel cars were being followed and what phone numbers were being tapped. On one occasion, we knew that Miguel had time for lunch and a shower before the raiding party was scheduled to arrive. Both the sergeant and the captain were among hundreds of police and military officers fired for corruption.

Besides law enforcement, the cartel bought a piece of Colombia's justice system with payoffs to prosecutors who lost evidence, misplaced paperwork, blocked search warrants or released prisoners before they could be questioned. Some judges became overnight millionaires. I see police and judicial corruption as the biggest price of organized crime.

Politicians were considered a long-term investment. It seemed sometimes that they all had their hands out. The bosses handed out $20,000 checks like hospitality gifts. I was there when campaign officials for a presidential candidate came for help. Eventually, a total of $6 million in secret donations made Ernesto Samper our president. After top campaign aides acknowledged receiving cartel funds, Samper insisted that if such contributions were made, it was without his knowledge.

And I was there when Cali cartel lawyers were allowed to rewrite our national constitution to outlaw extraditions of Colombian traffickers to the United States. You may be skeptical when I tell you, but no true Colombian could have watched that spectacle of democracy for sale without suffering some heartache.

When I agreed to assist U.S. drug enforcement agents 16 years ago, the Cali cartel was making $7 billion a year. Cartel documents turned over to Colombian authorities exposed a vast network of corruption. There was public outrage. Widespread arrests and firings followed, and the grip of corruption was broken.

That's what brought down the Cali cartel, and it can make a difference in other countries where a culture of acceptance makes corruption especially stubborn. The Mexican public needs to express its outrage. And, then, Mexican leaders need to sweep out officials at all levels who have sold their souls to organized crime.

In Mexico, 12,000 killed in drug violence in 2011

Some 12,000 people died in Mexico’s spiraling drug violence last year, according to grim annual tallies reported Monday by the country’s leading media outlets.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By William Booth

Jan 3 2012

MEXICO CITY — About 12,000 people were slain last year in Mexico’s surging drug violence, according to grim tallies reported Monday by the country’s leading media outlets. Annual indexes of torture, beheadings and the killing of women all showed increases.

More than 50,000 people have been killed during President Felipe Calderon’s U.S.-backed military confrontation with organized crime and drug trafficking, which began in 2006.

The Calderon government, after promising to update figures regularly, has not reported its own death count, perhaps because the trend line does not look good. A government spokesman said new figures would be released later this month. The ruling party is facing national elections this summer, in which the main opposition party threatens to retake the presidency.

The daily newspaper Reforma, one of the nation’s most respected independent news outlets, reported 12,359 drug-related killings in 2011, a 6.3 percent increase compared with the previous year. There were 2,275 drug killings in 2007, Reforma said.

Other media reported similar numbers.

Daily Milenio recorded 12,284 drug-related deaths last year.

La Jornada counted 11,890 deaths in 2011, which it says is an 11 percent decrease from the previous year. Regardless, in its annual tally La Jornada featured a cartoon that showed Father Time 2011 lying in the desert with his head chopped off.

In the Reforma count, the number of bodies that showed signs of torture grew to 1,079. Beheadings reached almost 600, up from 389 the year before. Reforma also found that women increasingly were victims of drug violence, with more than 900 slain last year.

The newspaper did not offer a count of juveniles or children killed, but children increasingly have been caught in the crossfire or intentionally targeted to send a chilling message that the drug gangs will stop at nothing.

One of the few bright spots is that the homicide rate appears to be down by about a third in the border manufacturing hub Ciudad Juarez, once dubbed Murder City. Baja California and Tijuana also saw decreases in homicides.

Yet the violence has steadily spread across Mexico. The states that abut Texas — Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas — remain the most deadly. But new zones of conflict, such as the once-mellow gulf coast state of Veracruz, are now gripped by a wave of killing.

Government and Drug Cartels Both Threaten Freedom of Expression in Mexico

Πηγή: EFF
Nov 29 2011

Freedom of expression continues to come under attack in Mexico. This week, Mexican President Felipe Calderon announced that his government is exploring "all options to proceed legally against those who have denounced the government in international forums and in the courts." This announcement came in response to a complaint filed by Mexican activists and signed by over 23,000 Mexicans, in International Criminal Court last week, demanding that the court investigate alleged human rights violations by the army and the police as part of the state's war against the drug cartels. Reports indicate that the Calderon government is considering legal action not just against Netzei Sandaval, the human rights attorney who filed the complaint with the ICC in the Hague, but also against the 23,000 individuals who signed their names to the petition online. This is deeply troubling, as it could result in a profoundly chilling effect on political speech in Mexico.

In the meantime, Twitter users continue to face government harassment. Mareo Flores (@mareoflores) was detained by police earlier this month, based on a series of joking tweets he made shortly before Mexico's interior minister, Francisco Blake Mora, and seven other officials were killed in a helicopter crash. According to his father, Mareo was arrested two days after the crash when he was taken away by men in five unmarked black cars. He was released a few hours later after prosecutors interviewed him. Law enforcement officials have faced criticism stemming from the arrest, especially because the official investigation indicated that the crash was an accident rather than an assassination.

If the Mexican government seems overly sensitive about what its citizens are saying online, they pale in comparison to the Zeta drug cartel, which continues its campaign of terror against social media users in Nuevo Laredo. Earlier this month, the decapitated body of a man was found dumped one mile from the Texas border. A message written on a blanket found beneath the body read:

Hi, I am 'Rascatripas' and this happened to me because I didn't understand that I shouldn't post things to social networks.

"Rascaptripas" or "Fiddler" was the nickname of a moderator on social networking and news site Nuevo Laredo en Vivo. An editor for the website was confirmed murdered two months ago. Her decapitated body was dumped in the same location, along with a similar warning. Despite initial reports to the contrary, the identity of the newest murder victim remains unconfirmed. Nuevo Laredo En Vivo has announced on Twitter they have no connection to the man:

Negative, he was not our partner, he is confirmed to have been a scapegoat to scare others. The person executed is not a collaborator with our site, but this was without a doubt an attempt to silence the voices of Nuevo Laredo.

While the facts of this case are still unclear, there are a number of alarming possibilities. Nuevo Laredo en Vivo may be denying their connection to the murdered man in order protect themselves, in which case the Zetas may have used online surveillance to discover the identity behind Rascaptripas. If that is the case, social media users writing about drug violence in Mexico should be especially vigilant about maintaining their anonymity. Websites that host forums and chat rooms in which people discuss drug violence should review their security,enable HTTPS support, and encourage people to take stronger privacy precautions such as using Tor to connect to their site. Users must begin using pseudonyms and be very careful about reveal too much about themselves. If drug cartels have chosen to turn their considerable resources towards Internet surveillance, this murder could be the start of a very dangerous trend.

Another possibility is that the Zeta cartel has not made inroads into Internet surveillance at all--they actually don't have to. They could have murdered the wrong man, or they may not have made any effort at all to find the right man. The message that drug cartels are willing to mutilate and kill at random in order to silence criticism on social networks is just as much of a deterrent as the murder of real bloggers and moderators. Terror is the point. The Zetas don't have to be accurate, they just need to be brutal. Worse still, if the killings are random, then there are no concrete technical steps that social media users can take to protect themselves.

But social media users in Mexico will not be silenced. Shortly after the murder, a poster to Nuevo Laredo en Vivo wrote:

Let's continue denouncing them, now that we've seen that it burns them, hurts them...We have to continue. We can't give in.

For those that are still posting, taking steps to protect their security and anonymity are more important than ever. EFF will continue to provide the tools and knowledge to help Mexican citizens protect their privacy and anonymity in this confusing and potentially risky environment.

Mexican drug cartel tries to silence Internet

A medal of the Zetas drug cartel on display at the Museum of Drugs in Mexico City, Aug. 18, 2010.

Πηγή: AP
By MARK STEVENSON

Nov 10 2011

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexico's hyperviolent Zetas drug cartel appears to be launching what may be one of the first campaigns by an organized crime group to silence commentary on the Internet.

The cartel has already attacked rivals, journalists and other perceived enemies. Now, the target is an online chat room, Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, that allows users to comment on the activities of the Zetas and others in the city on the border with Texas.

Already, three apparent site users have been slain, and a fourth victim may have been discovered Wednesday, when a man's decapitated body was found with what residents said was a banner suggesting he was killed for posting on the site. Chat room users said they could not immediately confirm the victim's identity, because people all post under aliases.

Despite such precautions, users are highly vulnerable, and the Zetas could be tracking them from clues they leave online, experts said Thursday.

A female chat room user was found decapitated in September with a similar message as the one found Wednesday and at the exact same spot, with a message signed with the letter "Z," which refers to the Zetas. Residents couldn't fully read the latest message, because the dead man's body was laid on top of it, in what appeared to be a more hurried execution.

"I don't know of anything like this having happened anywhere else in the world," said Jorge Chabat, an expert in safety and drug trafficking at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico. "It is certainly new and worrisome ... it is a frontal confrontation against the public; it is not just a confrontation with the government anymore."

Drug cartels in Mexico have frequently attacked traditional print newspapers, by tossing explosives at their offices or killing, kidnapping or threatening reporters. Violence against journalists in Tamaulipas state, where Nuevo Laredo is located, has led local media to censor themselves, leaving residents on their own to separate fact from pervasive rumors spread on social networks.

Juan Carlos Romero, who helps lead the press freedom group Article 19, said local newspapers have often stopped publishing crime reports out of fear, leading residents to turn more to the Internet for information like that posted Thursday on Nuevo Laredo en Vivo: where gunshots have been heard, where vehicles suspected of carrying cartel lookouts have been seen, which streets are safe to travel.

"What are people doing in the face of the lack of information, the kind of information you need to make decisions: Where can I drive? Can I leave the house?" said Romero. "People are forging new channels of communication on the Internet, social networks, Twitter, blogs, Facebook."

Drug cartels appear to have learned that such Internet sites reach far more readers than northeastern Mexico's small regional newspapers and have adjusted their attacks accordingly.

"We are witnessing a new behavior of criminal forces in the country," said Erick Fernandez, a communications professor at the IberoAmerican University in Mexico City. "We are in a new phase."

Romero agreed. "It appears to me that organized crime is trying to get common citizens to stop real-time coverage of violence," he said, saying that "the intimidation is having a multiplier effect."

Some of the site users vowed to forge on despite the two decapitations and the September slayings of two other people whose bodies were found hanging from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo with a message threatening: "This is what will happen" to trouble-making Internet users. That message was also signed with a "Z."

"I am ready to lay down my life for the cause, if the soldiers take heed of my reports ... (if) the risk (serves) for something," said one user who posted under the tag "Anon5182."

Despite heightened security awareness among the site's users Thursday, with warnings not to share personal information with anyone, they remain tremendously vulnerable, said Matt Harrigan, chief executive of the San Diego, California-based security firm Critical Assets.

A trail of information like cookies, server addresses, login and account information was easy visible for some users.

"I know enough about (one user) that I'm uncomfortable with how much I know about (him) just from visiting the site," said Harrigan. "Just from having looked up information about him, the number of things I know about the guy is pretty staggering."

Harrigan said it would be relatively easy, with the money the Zetas have from running drugs, to track down posters.

"If you're a Mexican cartel with hundreds of millions of dollars, there certainly are security experts in Mexico or former hackers, or whoever they are, that I'm certain they're for hire," he said.

National Drug Intelligence Center: Mexican Drug Cartels Operating Within U.S. Cities

Πηγή: Public Intelligence
By US DJ
April 2010

Executive Summary

(LES) The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) assesses with high condence that in2009, Mexican drug trafcking organizations (DTOs) were operating in the United States in atleast 1,286 cities spanning all nine Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF)regions, based on law enforcement reporting. 

Moreover, NDIC assesses with high condencethat Mexican DTOs in at least 143 of these U.S. cities were linked to a specific Mexican Cartel or DTO based in Mexico—the Sinaloa Cartel (at least 75 cities), the Gulf Cartel/Los Zetas (at least 37 cities), the Juárez Cartel (at least 33 cities), the Beltrán-Leyva DTO (atleast 30 cities), La Familia Michoacán (at least 27 cities), or the Tijuana Cartel (at least 21 cities). 

NDIC assesses with high condence that Mexican DTOs will further expand their drug trafckingoperations in the United States in the near term, particularly in the New England, New York/NewJersey, Mid-Atlantic, and Florida/Caribbean Regions. 

NDIC also believes that Mexican DTOswill maintain the present high level of availability for heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine because the conditions in Mexico and in the United States that enabled and motivated the DTOsto increase production and availability of those drugs have not significantly changed.

NDIC Cartels in US Cities

Mexican Drug Cartels Using Increasingly Brutal Tactics to Shock Rivals and Authorities

A decapitated body found with a placard referring to drugs and crime at the Santa Fe neighbordhood in Mexico City, on August 26, 2011. Some 40,000 people have been killed in mostly drug-related violence in Mexico since 2006, when the government launched a massive military crackdown on the powerful cartels, which also battle each other over territory. AFP PHOTO

Πηγή: Public Intelligence
By AP
Oct 9 2011

Killings grow more gruesome as Mexican drug cartels try to out-shock (AP):


Masked gunmen dump the bodies of 35 murder victims during rush hour as terrified motorists watch and tweet friends to avoid the avenue in a coastal city. A couple of weeks later, 32 more corpses are found nearby in three houses.

A woman’s decapitated body is left at a border city’s monument to Columbus, the head atop a computer keyboard with a sign saying she was killed for blogging about drug traffickers.

The severed heads of five men are dumped outside an elementary school in Acapulco, and two more near a military base in Mexico City days later.

That was just in the past three weeks.

The brutal public killings that began about five years ago have worsened as Mexican drug cartels try to outdo each other in their quest to scare off rivals, authorities and would-be informers – and still stun Mexicans increasingly numbed to the gory spectacles.

Clark McCauley, a psychology professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and an expert on terrorism, said: “These gangs have to keep escalating because they want the shock value, but the shock value wears off. Now, to get a headline you have to get more heads, or more bodies or do something more horrific.”

Latin American drug lords have long turned to grisly killings and torture. At the height of its powers in the 1990s, the Juarez cartel used to cut off the fingers of snitches and shove them down their throats, a practice that other cartels soon followed.

The current show of savagery began in April 2006 when two police officers were decapitated; their heads dripping blood were left in Acapulco, where four alleged members of the Zetas drug cartel had been killed in a shoot-out with police. Along with the heads was a sign that warned, “So that you learn to respect”. The Zetas are a gang of drug smugglers and hit men led by deserters from a Mexican army unit, who for many years were assassins for the cartel.

Five months later, the La Familia cartel rolled five human heads purportedly belonging to Zetas across a dance floor in the state of Michoacán. An attached note said La Familia “doesn’t kill for money, doesn’t kill women, doesn’t kill innocents, just those who should die,” an apparent warning for the particularly violent group.

Since then, drug traffickers have plunged into even more gruesome tactics. They have tied victims to overpasses and shot them to death during rush hour as sickened motorists watched. Some have decapitated people and then posted videos of it on the internet.

Mexican drug gangs competing for 'cartel cred'

FILE - In this Oct. 2, 2011 file photo, relatives weep after gunmen opened fire on a taxi killing the driver and the passenger in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco, Mexico. The brutal public killings that began about five years ago have worsened as Mexican drug cartels try to one-up each other in their quest to scare off rivals, authorities and would-be informers _ and still shock Mexicans increasingly accustomed to the gory spectacles. (AP Photo/Bernandino Hernandez, 

Πηγή: AP
By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ

Oct 7 2011

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Masked gunmen dump the bodies of 35 slaying victims during rush hour as terrified motorists watch and tweet friends to avoid the avenue in a Gulf coast city. A couple of weeks later, 32 more corpses are found nearby in three houses.

A woman's decapitated body is left at a border city's monument to Columbus, the head atop a computer keyboard with a sign saying she was killed for blogging about drug traffickers.

The severed heads of five men are dumped outside an elementary school in Acapulco, and two more near a military base in Mexico City days later.

That was just in the last three weeks.

The brutal public killings that began about five years ago have worsened as Mexican drug cartels try to one-up each other in their quest to scare off rivals, authorities and would-be informers - and still stun Mexicans increasingly numbed to the gory spectacles.

"These gangs have to keep escalating because they want the shock value but the shock value wears off," said Clark McCauley, a psychology professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and an expert on terrorism. "Now, to get a headline you have to get more heads, or more bodies or do something more horrific."

Latin American drug lords have long turned to grisly killings and torture tactics. At the height of its powers in the 1990s, the Juarez cartel used to cut off the fingers of snitches and shove them down their throats, a practice that other cartels soon followed.

The current show of savagery began in April 2006 when two police officers were decapitated; their heads dripping blood were left in the resort city of Acapulco, where four alleged members of the Zetas drug cartel had been killed in a shootout with police. Along with the heads was a sign that warned, "So that you learn to respect."

The Zetas are a gang of drug smugglers and hit men led by deserters from an elite Mexican army unit, who for many years were assassins for the Gulf cartel.

Five months later, the La Familia cartel rolled five human heads purportedly belonging to Zetas across a dance floor in the western state of Michoacan. An attached note said La Familia "doesn't kill for money, doesn't kill women, doesn't kill innocents, just those who should die," an apparent retaliation warning for the particularly violent group.

Since then, drug traffickers have plunged into even more gruesome tactics. They have tied victims to overpasses and shot them to death during rush hour as sickened motorists watched. Some have decapitated people alive and then posted videos of it on the internet.

"In terms of the cruelty, it's the Zetanisation of the country because the Zetas were the first to introduce these ghastly tactics into Mexico," said George W. Grayson, a Mexico expert at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, who has written several books about the rapidly expanding drug cartel. The Zetas are the game-changers.

Officials blame a group calling itself the "Zeta Killers" for dumping 35 bodies on a busy boulevard in the Gulf coast city of Veracruz on Sept. 20. They say the group also killed 32 people whose bodies were found at three houses in the area on Thursday.

On Monday, police in Mexico City found two severed heads on a street near a major military base accompanied by a note referring to the "Mano con Ojos," or "Hand with Eyes," drug gang. Motorists called the police after spotting one of the heads on the hood of an SUV.

"If you want to have cartel cred," said Grayson, "you have to show you can carry off any act at any time and go as far as your enemy."

Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna has said Mexican drug traffickers copied the terror tactic from the al-Qaida in Iraq after it posted videos on the internet of the decapitations of Americans. He said the cartels are using al-Qaida's methods to pressure the government to halt its crackdown against drug traffickers, which has fractured many of the gangs.

Authorities have also said that in 2005, the Zetas began enlisting "Kaibiles," former members of an elite Guatemalan counterinsurgency unit, to train newly recruited foot soldiers. The Kaibiles were known for massacres during the Guatemalan civil war that ended in the mid-1990s.

Very few of the killings result in arrests or convictions, so the only deterrent is revenge by another cartel.

In the five years since the beheading of the two Acapulco police officers, decapitations have become almost weekly occurrences and a prime terror tactic.

The practice dates back at least 2,000 years, said Dr. Michelle Bonogofsky, an bioarchaeologist who edited two books on the significance of of the human head in different cultures, from skull collection to decapitations.

"One of the worst things you can do to the body, in some instances, is to desecrate or dismember it and historically, this has been used by kings and various other groups to establish control," Bonogofsky said. "This could be tied to the religious belief that you need your body intact to be resurrected."

Residents in some cities caught in the bloody turf battles are already adapting to living with violence, said Dr. Oscar Galicia, a psychology professor who specializes in violent behavior at Iberoamerican University in Mexico City.

In the northern city of Monterrey, where the Zetas are fighting the Gulf drug cartel, many people don't go out at night in certain neighborhoods, they avoid night clubs and bars and have added extra locks to their doors at home.

"What people are doing in Monterrey is adapting," he said.

More worrisome is that the prolonged violence is creating a sense of helplessness among Mexicans, who are becoming increasingly numb to what's happening, Galicia said.

"Now if it's not 20 bodies, it doesn't get our attention and that's terrible and really dangerous for our society because we're becoming as desensitized as the criminals," he said.

The Buffer Between Mexican Cartels and the U.S. Government

Πηγή: Stratfor
By Scott Stewart
August 17, 2011, 1913 GMT


It is summer in Juarez, and again this year we find the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization (VCF), also known as the Juarez cartel, under pressure and making threats. At this time in 2010, La Linea, the VCF’s enforcer arm, detonated a small improvised explosive device (IED) inside a car in Juarez and killed two federal agents, one municipal police officer and an emergency medical technician and wounded nine other people. La Linea threatened to employ a far larger IED (100 kilograms) if the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) did not investigate the head of Chihuahua State Police intelligence, whom the VCF claimed was working for the Sinaloa Federation.
La Linea did attempt to employ another IED on Sept. 10, 2010, but this device, which failed to detonate, contained only 16 kilograms of explosives, far less than the 100 kilograms that the group had threatened to use.
Fast-forward a year, and we see the VCF still under unrelenting pressure from the Sinaloa Federation and still making threats. On July 15, the U.S. Consulate in Juarez released a message warning that, according to intelligence it had in hand, a cartel may be targeting the consulate or points of entry into the United States. On July 27, “narcomantas” — banners inscribed with messages from drug cartels — appeared in Juarez and Chihuahua signed by La Linea and including explicit threats against the DEA and employees of the U.S. Consulate in Juarez. Two days after the narcomantas appeared, Jose Antonio “El Diego” Acosta Hernandez, a senior La Linea leader whose name was mentioned in the messages, was arrested by Mexican authorities aided by intelligence from the U.S. government. Acosta is also believed to have been responsible for planning La Linea’s past IED attacks.
As we have discussed in our coverage of the drug war in Mexico, Mexican cartels, including the VCF, clearly possess the capability to construct and employ large vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) — truck bombs — and yet they have chosen not to. These groups are not averse to bloodshed, or even outright barbarity, when they believe it is useful. Their decision to abstain from certain activities, such as employing truck bombs or targeting a U.S. Consulate, indicates that there must be compelling strategic reasons for doing so. After all, groups in Lebanon, Pakistan and Iraq have demonstrated that truck bombs are a very effective means of killing perceived enemies and of sending strong messages.
Perhaps the most compelling reason for the Mexican cartels to abstain from such activities is that they do not consider them to be in their best interest. One important part of their calculation is that such activities would remove the main buffer that is currently insulating them from the full force of the U.S. government: the Mexican government.

The Buffer

Despite their public manifestations of machismo, the cartel leaders clearly fear and respect the strength of the world’s only superpower. This is evidenced by the distinct change in cartel activities along the U.S.-Mexico border, where a certain operational downshift routinely occurs. In Mexico, the cartels have the freedom to operate far more brazenly than they can in the United States, in terms of both drug trafficking and acts of violence. Shipments of narcotics traveling through Mexico tend to be far larger than shipments moving into and through the United States. When these large shipments reach the border they are taken to stash houses on the Mexican side, where they are typically divided into smaller quantities for transport into and through the United States.
As for violence, while the cartels do kill people on the U.S. side of the border, their use of violence there tends to be far more discreet; it has certainly not yet incorporated the dramatic flair that is frequently seen on the Mexican side, where bodies are often dismembered or hung from pedestrian bridges over major thoroughfares. The cartels are also careful not to assassinate high-profile public figures such as police chiefs, mayors and reporters in the United States, as they frequently do in Mexico.
The border does more than just alter the activities of the cartels, however. It also constrains the activities of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. These agencies cannot pursue cartels on the Mexican side of the border with the same vigor that they exercise on the U.S. side. Occasionally, the U.S. government will succeed in luring a wanted Mexican cartel leader outside of Mexico, as it did in the August 2006 arrest of Javier Arellano Felix, or catch one operating in the United States like Javier’s oldest brother, Francisco Arellano Felix. By and large, however, most wanted cartel figures remain in Mexico, out of the reach of U.S. law.
One facet of this buffer is corruption, which is endemic in Mexico, reaching all the way from the lowest municipal police officer to the presidential palace. Over the years several senior Mexican anti-drug officials, including the nation’s drug czar, have been arrested and charged with corruption.
However, the money generated by the Mexican cartels has far greater effects than just promoting corruption. The billions of dollars that come into the Mexican economy via the drug trade are important to the Mexican banking sector and to the industries in which the funds are laundered, such as construction. Because of this, there are many powerful Mexican businessmen who profit either directly or indirectly from the narcotics trade, and it would not be in their best interest for the billions of drug dollars to stop flowing into Mexico. Such people can place heavy pressure on the political system by either supporting or withholding support from particular candidates or parties.
Because of this, sources in Mexico have been telling STRATFOR that they believe that Mexican politicians like President Filipe Calderon are far more interested in stopping drug violence than they are in stopping the flow of narcotics. This is a pragmatic approach. Clearly, as long as there is demand for drugs in the United States there will be people who will find ways to meet that demand. It is impossible to totally stop the flow of narcotics into the U.S. market.
In addition to corruption and the economic benefits Mexico realizes from the drug trade, there is another important element that causes the Mexican government to act as a buffer between the Mexican cartels and the U.S. government — geopolitics. The Mexico-U.S. relationship is a long one that has involved considerable competition and conflict. The United States has long meddled in the affairs of Mexico and other countries in Latin America. And from the Mexican perspective, American imperialist aggression, via the Texas War of Independence and the Mexican-American War, resulted in Mexico losing nearly half of its territory to its powerful northern neighbor. Less than a century ago, U.S. troops invaded northern Mexico in response to Pancho Villa’s incursions into the United States.
Because of this history, Mexico — as with most of the rest of Latin America — regards the United States as a threat to its sovereignty. The result of this perception is that the Mexican government and the Mexican people in general are very reluctant to allow the United States to become too involved in Mexican affairs. The idea of American troops or law enforcement agents with boots on the ground in Mexico is considered especially threatening from the Mexican perspective.

A Thin Barrier

While Mexican sovereignty and international law combine with corruption and economics to create a barrier to assertive U.S. intervention in Mexico’s drug war, this barrier is not inviolable. There are two distinct ways this type of barrier has been breached in the past: by force and by consent.
An example of the first was seen following the 1985 kidnapping, torture and murder of U.S. DEA special agent Enrique Camarena. The DEA was not able to get what it viewed as satisfactory assistance from the Mexican government in pursuing the case despite the tremendous pressure applied by the U.S. government. This prompted the DEA to unilaterally enter Mexico and snatch two Mexican citizens connected to the case. Because of his involvement in the Camarena case, Honduran drug kingpin Juan Matta-Ballesteros was also rendered from his home in Honduras by U.S. government agents.
As a result of the U.S. reaction to the Camarena murder, the Guadalajara Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful criminal organization at the time, was decapitated, its leaders — Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero — all arrested and convicted for their part in ordering the killing. The tremendous pressure applied to Mexican authorities by the U.S. government to arrest the trio, coupled with the fear that they too might be rendered, ultimately led to their detention, although they did maintain sufficient influence to ensure that they were not extradited to the United States.
The Guadalajara Cartel also lost its primary connection to the Medellin cartel (Matta-Ballesteros) as a result of the Camarena case, and the cartel was eventually fractured into smaller units that would become today’s Sinaloa, Juarez, Gulf and Tijuana cartels. The Camarena case taught the Mexican cartel bosses to be careful not to provoke the Americans to the point where it will bring the full power of the U.S. government to bear upon their organizations (a lesson recently demonstrated by the unilateral U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan).
But in addition to unilateral force, sometimes the U.S. government can be invited into a country despite concerns about sovereignty. This happens when the population has something it fears more than U.S. involvement, and this is what happened in Colombia in the late 1980s. In an effort to influence the Colombian government not to cooperate with the U.S. government and extradite him to the United States, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin Cartel, resorted to terrorism. In 1989 he launched a string of terrorist attacks that included the assassination of one presidential candidate, the bombing a civilian airliner in an attempt to kill a second presidential candidate and several large VBIED attacks, including the detonation of a 1,000-pound truck bomb in December 1989 targeting the Colombian Administrative Department of Security (DAS, Colombia’s primary national intelligence and security service) that caused massive damage in the area around the DAS building in downtown Bogota. These attacks had a powerful impact on the Colombian government and Colombian people and caused them to reach out to the United States for increased assistance despite their concern about U.S. power. The increased U.S. assistance eventually led to the death of Escobar and the systematic dismantling of his organization.
The lesson in the Escobar case was: Do not push your own government or population too far or they will turn on you and invite the Americans in.