Mexico: Drug war has led to 26,121 disappearances

Πηγή: CBSNews
Feb 26 2013

Mexico's new administration says an official count shows at least 26,121 people were reported missing during the term of former President Felipe Calderon, who launched the country's offensive against drug cartels.

Lia Limon, the Interior Department's subsecretary for human rights, says the list used data from local prosecutors across Mexico, and includes people reported missing for any reason during the previous administration. It doesn't include information collected after November 2012.

The list has been a subject of controversy in Mexico for weeks. After Limon said last week that some 27,000 were missing, a member of Calderon's administration disputed the figure, saying the only registry on disappeared people contains 5,319 names. Limon said the government would work to compare the official list with others assembled by government agencies and rights groups.

Just last week, a new Human Rights Watch report called Mexico's anti-drug offensive "disastrous" and cites 249 cases of disappearances, about 149 of which include evidence of being carried out by the military or law enforcement.

The report says the forced disappearances follow a pattern of security forces detaining people without warrants at checkpoints, homes, workplaces or in public. When families ask about their relatives, security forces deny the detentions or instruct them to look elsewhere.

"Virtually none of the victims have been found or those responsible brought to justice, exacerbating the suffering of families of the disappeared," Human Rights Watch said in a press release.

The report accused former President Felipe Calderon of ignoring the problem, calling it "the most severe crisis of enforced disappearances in Latin America in decades."

Mexico's Interior Department oversees domestic security and it declined to make an immediate comment about the report.

The newspaper Reforma, one of several media outlets that count murders linked to organized crime, said that in December, the first month of the new government, there were 755 drug-related killings, compared to 699 in November. In Calderon's six-year term, some 70,000 people lost their lives to drug violence, the newspaper reported, with at least 20,000 believed missing.

It's difficult to say if drug violence has risen in Mexico under the new regime of President Enrique Pena Nieto, because the government no longer provides numbers, something that started under Calderon, who last released drug-war death statistics in September 2011.

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 US War on Drug Cartels in Mexico Is a Deadly Failure

Πηγή: Truthout
By Mark Karlin
April 8 2012

This is the third article in a Truthout series on viewing US immigration and Mexican border policies through a social justice lens, focusing on the lower Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville, Texas, area. Mark Karlin, editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout, visited the region recently to file these reports. The first two installments in the series are, "The Border Wall: The Last Stand at Making the US a White Gated Community" and "Murder Incorporated: Guns, the NRA and the Politics of Violence on the Mexican Border."

The Official Story From the US State Department

On March 29, 2012, William R. Brownfield, US assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (in other words, Hillary Clinton's point person on drug issues), testified before the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs. His subject was the war on drugs in the Western Hemisphere outside of the United States and Canada. Few, if any, reporters from the US press attended.

Approximately 50,000 or more Mexicans have been killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a so-called war on drug cartels. (In a recent appearance in Toronto, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claimed 150,000 people have died in the drug war in Mexico, but the timeline Panetta was referring to was unclear, as was the origin of the figure he cited.) Given that five Juarez police officers were gunned down at a party the night before Brownfield's testimony, the Spanish-language press, unlike the American media, took an interest in his remarks.

You see, Juarez is kind of a sore spot for Mexicans. In 2010, more than 3,000 homicides took place in the city where killings are committed with general impunity, making it the murder capital of the world that year. Although Juarez's murder rate has now lowered slightly, the city's mayor - who lives across the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas - indignantly denies that Juarez is the deadliest city on earth, even though it almost certainly remains close to being just that. Borderland writer Charles Bowden writes in "Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields": "The violence is everywhere. It is like the dust in the air, part of life itself."

In his statement, Brownfield provided the US House of Representatives with the usual litany of claimed successes, but he also made a few observations that say much about the failure of the US war on drugs south of the border. (Brownfield argues that the Merida Initiative, as the US drug war's counterpart in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean was named by its US funders, is having a positive impact.)

As in the United States, Widespread Poverty and Unemployment Create a Fertile Marketplace for Illicit Drugs

In the subcommittee hearing, Brownfield admitted right off: "The persistently high homicide and crime rates throughout Central America, the Caribbean and the horrific reports of violence inside Mexico are symptoms of a broader climate of insecurity throughout the region. Crime and violence are exacerbated by widespread poverty and unemployment. This is brought into greater focus as criminal organizations react to the increasing pressure placed on their operations by governments in the region with support from the United States."

The high poverty rate is also the major reason why so many Mexicans try to migrate to the United States, but several hundred thousand of them a year are turned back, and an unknown number of them become victims of the hyperviolence brought on by the US/Calderon war on drugs.

Playing a Game of Deadly "Whack-a-Mole"

Next, Brownfield acknowledged that the US war on drugs in many of the southern nations of the Western Hemisphere is basically a bloody game of whack-a-mole. "In 2008, anticipating that Mexico's efforts to challenge cartels would result in the movement of trafficking routes elsewhere," said Brownfield, "the US government formed a partnership with Central American nations to enhance their security capacity."

The top US State Department official on drugs boasted that some drug kingpins - due to US-backed military and police action - were forced to move their operations to Mexico from Colombia and are now moving some of them to Central America. Then, Brownfield predicted that they will start using the Caribbean as a base. But what is lost in his testimony is that there is no measurable indicator that the supply of illicit drugs into the United States is decreasing as a result.

So, there is no end game here. The United States is using all its vast powers to do what urban police do in American cities: chase the corner drug dealers out of one area and into another, through the use of temporary intensive "enforcement" - and then chase them back again at a later date.

In a recent BuzzFlash at Truthout commentary, Bowden was quoted as writing: "There is a second Mexico, where the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and military fight for their share - where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters - and feast on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed."

In the question-and-answer period after his testimony to Congress, Brownfield (as reported in the Spanish press and translated by Truthout) "emphasized that the infiltration of the crime organizations and of the narco-trafficking in the Mexican police is 'a very, very grave problem,' above all at the local and state level, now that the federal level of law enforcement corruption has diminished."

In Nearly Half of Mexico's States, Less Than 1 Percent of Crimes Resulted in Sentencing: 80-96 Percent of Killings Go Unpunished

The New York Times recently reported that, "in 14 of Mexico's 31 states, the chance of a crime's leading to trial and sentencing was less than 1 percent in 2010, according to government figures analyzed by a Mexican research institute known as Cidac. And since then, experts say, attempts at reform have stalled as crime and impunity have become cozy partners." According to Fox News Latino, 80-96 percent of the killings in Mexico go unpunished.

A Drug-Trafficking Free Market Paul Ryan Can Love

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), a devotee of Ayn Rand, can only love the tenacious entrepreneurialism of the government, military, law enforcement and cartel traffickers in Mexico. This is what supply-side economics is all about.

In an interview with Truthout, Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the influential Drug Policy Alliance, explained the futility of launching a war via the joint forces of military and law enforcement (particularly, Truthout independently maintains, given the endemic corruption in Mexico.)

"A law enforcement strategy cannot defeat a dynamic global commodities market," said Nadelmann. "The illegal drug market is very much the same as alcohol, food, etc. So as long as there is demand, there will be a supply. Attempts at interdiction just moves the drug trafficking around, wreaking havoc in its wake."

Promoting Legalization Can Make for Strange Bedfellows

Yes, Ryan would be pleased - were he forthright - to know that the late Milton Friedman advocated for the legalization of drugs that are currently contraband. In an interview in the early 90s, Friedman was eager to talk about the topic:

"The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating," said Friedman. "We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it's in principle okay for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they'll do you harm, why isn't it all right to say you must not eat too much because you'll do harm?"

Friedman also noted that by not legalizing drugs, the United States is enabling massive corruption and the control of narcotics into the hands of more or less monopolistic entities: in the case of Mexico, a sort of battle for the marketplace among the cartels, the government, law enforcement and the military.

Supporters argue that Calderon, a member of the National Action Party (known by its Spanish initials, PAN), has continued an incremental break from the corrupting, single-party rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known by its Spanish initials, PRI), in which the cartels, the government, the military and law enforcement had agreements on who would take which cuts of the drug money; as a result, argue Calderon's backers, there was less rampant violence. Such advocates of the Mexican president contend that he is breaking through decades of PRI corruption and slowly reforming basic state institutions, including a corrupt and inflexible judiciary and law enforcement system, which is detailed in the documentary film "Presumed Guilty."

But what does one then say about Noe Ramirez Mandujano, for instance? He served as Calderon's top anti-drug official for two years. Eventually, Ramirez was arrested, "on charges he accepted $450,000 a month in bribes from drug traffickers," according to CNN. "Ramirez was accused of meeting with members of a drug cartel while he was in office and providing information on investigations in exchange for the bribes."

The Tentative Revolt of South-of-the-Border Presidents Against the War on Drugs

The Washington Post reported that at a December meeting in Mexico City:

Latin American leaders have joined together to condemn the US government for soaring drug violence in their countries, blaming the United States for the transnational cartels that have grown rich and powerful smuggling dope north and guns south.

Alongside official declarations, Latin American governments have expressed growing disgust for US drug consumers - both the addict and the weekend recreational user heedless of the misery and destruction stemming from their pleasures.

Calderon has been tepidly testing the waters in challenging the United States (whether for domestic Mexican public relations purposes or as a real ultimatum to Washington DC is not clear) to address US domestic demand. "We are next to the largest illegal drug market in the world," Calderon said in September at a public dinner held in his honor by the Council of the Americas in Washington. "We are living in the same building, and our neighbor is the largest consumer of drugs in the world and everyone wants to sell him drugs through our door and our window."

Another group of Latin American leaders (from Guatemala, Panama and Costa Rica) recently held a mini-summit. The goal was to look for reducing the demand side in the United States as an alternative to the violence visited upon their nations by massive armed interdiction.

But the Central American leaders are treading cautiously because of their economic, political and military relationships with the United States. David Bacon, a regular author for Truthout on Mexican and Central American issues, notes that it is also important to see the US war on drugs as an extension of its foreign policy, particularly in the military arena.

Indeed, in 2011, The New York Times reported, "The United States is expanding its role in Mexico's bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new CIA operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results."

For years, the United States has held the marionette strings on Latin American armies, moving their puppets via military aid, training armed forces leaders through what was then named the School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), the backing of right-wing death squads (often affiliated with national armies) and the provision of counterinsurgency advisers, to name a few methods of asserting military hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, apart from Canada.

That brings us back to the so-called war on drugs in Mexico.

In an article in The Nation, Bowden and borderland researcher-expert Molly Molloy explain what they believe is happening in Mexico as thousands die and disappear while the US press all but ignores the situation:

Calderón's war, assisted by the United States, terrorizes the Mexican people, generates thousands of documented human rights abuses by the police and Mexican Army and inspires lies told by American politicians that violence is spilling across the border (in fact, it has been declining on the US side of the border for years).

...

We are told the Mexican Army is incorruptible, when the Mexican government's own human rights office has collected thousands of complaints that the army robs, kidnaps, steals, tortures, rapes and kills innocent citizens. We are told repeatedly that it is a war between cartels or that it is a war by the Mexican government against cartels, yet no evidence is presented to back up these claims. The evidence we do have is that the killings are not investigated, that the military suffers almost no casualties and that thousands of Mexicans have filed affidavits claiming abuse, often lethal, by the Mexican army.

Here is the US policy in a nutshell: we pay Mexicans to kill Mexicans, and this slaughter has no effect on drug shipments or prices.

There is an exception to this last point, as CNN notes, because the shipments and profits increase, even as the quality of the drugs go up and wholesale price per kilo decreases - the free market at work.

Molloy is a librarian at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces who has taken it upon herself to chronicle the endless ledger of the dead in Juarez in her Frontera listserv. In Mexico, there is a celebration in November called Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, to honor the spirits of the dead. For years, by highlighting news articles and commentaries about their deaths, Molloy has ensured that those who are killed in Juarez are listed on her project, that they are remembered, so that their souls are not lost in the purgatory of the forgotten. Yet many escape Molloy's chronicles because they are killed anonymously and buried in the desert or in houses turned into clandestine cemeteries. These victims are the vanished.

Molloy's is a grim task, but it is an act of mercy to the memories of those who are brutally killed - and an effort to help create, by bearing witness to a killing field, an end to the horror.

Meanwhile, in the United States, controlling the demand side appears to be interpreted as throwing people - particularly minority men - in jail for drug offenses, leading to the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Yet, the consumer market for illegal drugs continues unabated in the United States, as does the supply. Ryan might - were he ideologically honest - be the first to tell you that, when there is a $50 billion demand (perhaps as high as $100 billion or more in North America as a whole), the product will make its way to market one way or another.

As it does.

Russia Thwarts U.S. Central Asian Counterdrug Program

Πηγή: Eurasianet
By Joshua Kucera
Feb 18 2012

Russia has reportedly convinced its allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization not to participate in a new U.S. counterdrug program in Central Asia, apparently concerned that it would give the U.S. too much leverage over the regional governments. The program, called the Central Asia Counternarcotics Initiative, would promote regional cooperation in countering drug trafficking by setting up task forces in all five Central Asian countries and hooking them up with similar task forces in Afghanistan and Russia.

But Russia has apparently taken a dim view of the proposal, reports the Russian newspaper Kommersant:

Moscow is convinced that the main objective of this initiative is strengthening the military and political presence in a region that Moscow regards as its area of ​​special interests. As a result, Russia has managed to persuade the CSTO members to not participate in it.

The key problem, according to Kommersant's sources:

As planned by the United States, the task forces must have very wide powers, and most importantly, full access to secret operational information supplied to law enforcement agencies and intelligence services of the Central Asian countries. Moscow feared that this would give the U.S. an opportunity to gather sensitive information and then use these data to blackmail the governments in the region.

RFE/RL spoke with American diplomats involved in the effort, who confirmed that it was blocked:

A U.S. official familiar with the matter confirmed that Washington's delegation was unable to reach a final agreement at the meeting but said the plan has not been rejected.

Still, the official described the outcome as "a big surprise."

Susan Pittman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told RFE/RL that bilateral consultations with the Central Asian states would continue.

"We continue to discuss with Central Asian officials the establishment of vetted units and other types of counternarcotics assistance that the U.S. is prepared to provide," she said.

Take a step back here. Recall that Russia has for years been angry that the U.S. isn't doing more to combat drugs in Afghanistan, but the U.S. doesn't want to get more heavily involved there because it would alienate the populations whose hearts and minds the U.S. and NATO troops are trying to win. And now Russia is blocking a U.S. effort to counter drug trafficking in Central Asia. So, the U.S. wants to fight trafficking in Central Asia but not Afghanistan, and Russia wants to fight it in Afghanistan but not in Central Asia. Both countries are relegating the fight against opium trafficking to a secondary priority: for the U.S., outweighed by the desire to win in Afghanistan; for Russia, by the desire to keep the U.S. out of Central Asia. Is it any wonder, then, that the drug trade continues to flourish?

2 powerful cartels dominate in Mexico drug war

Πηγή: AP
By E. EDUARDO CASTILLO and KATHERINE CORCORAN

Oct 1 2011

VERACRUZ, Mexico (AP) -- Five years after President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against Mexico's five main drug cartels, the nation is now dominated by two powerful organizations that appear poised for a one-on-one battle to control drug markets and trafficking routes.

The government's success in killing or arresting some cartel leaders has fractured most of the other gangs to such an extent that they have devolved into quarreling bands, or been forced to operate as subsidiaries of the two main cartels. That has often meant expanded territory and business opportunities for the hyper-violent Zetas and drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's Sinaloa cartel.

"They are the two most successful cartels, or at least they have been able to expand in recent years," said drug trade and security expert Jorge Chabat.

Mexican federal authorities, who asked not to be named for security reasons, told The Associated Press that the Zeta and Sinaloa cartels are now the nation's two dominant drug traffickers. One or the other is present almost everywhere in Mexico, but officials are braced to see what happens next in a drug war that has already claimed an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 lives. So far, the signs are not hopeful.

In the Gulf coast seaport of Veracruz, 35 bound, tortured bodies were dumped onto a main thoroughfare during the height of rush hour on Sept. 20. The killers are presumed to be aligned with the Sinaloa cartel, while the victims were apparently linked to the Zetas, who took hold of the important seaport in 2010. In a clash in May, more than two dozen people, most of them Zetas, were killed when they tried to infiltrate the Sinaloa's territory in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit.

When Calderon took office in December 2006, he said the drug cartels were trying to take over the country. He launched the government's first broad attempt to fight the gangs, deploying thousands of soldiers to capture cartel members and dismantle the organizations.

At the time, the Zetas were not even a separate cartel, but rather an armed enforcement wing of the Gulf cartel, a role created in the late 1990s when they were recruited from an elite army unit. Sometime around 2010, after a falling-out between Gulf and Zeta gunmen, the Zetas split off, ushering in what is possibly the bloodiest chapter of Mexico's narco wars. Within less than two years, the Zetas had taken control of the seaport and most of the Gulf's former territory.

According to Chabat, the two have survived the government crackdown because they have been more skilled than their weaker counterparts. He said the new alignment may make it easier for government forces to target the two big cartels, as opposed to fighting half a dozen of them.

"The question is whether the Sinaloa cartel and Zetas are going to break at some point or not," said Chabat.

"Right now they are very strong, but if in two or three years these cartels are pulverized, they may say that (the drug war) was a success."

Both the "mega" cartels want to control seaports for shipping drugs from South and Central America, and border towns, for getting the drugs into the United States.

Sinaloa has long been based on the country's northwest Pacific coast, with occasional incursions farther east along the border. In recent years, it has spread both east and south, reaching into Central America.

The Zetas, once confined to a stretch of the northern Gulf coast, have grown the most, pushing into central Mexico, and as far south as Guatemala.

Strategies differ. While the Sinaloa cartel is known for forging temporary alliances, officials have said the Zetas are believed to scorn them, preferring direct control of territory. There appears little chance the two groups will ever agree to split their turf; instead, Mexico may be headed into a battle between the two cartels, with each seeking to exterminate the other.

"I see the Sinaloa Federation and the Zetas as being the two polarizing forces in the Mexican criminal system ... and between the two, an array of other smaller groups aligned with one or the other, " said Samuel Logan, director of Southern Pulse, a security consulting firm.

Their operations differ too. The Zetas are involved in human trafficking and other illegal businesses, as well as the drug trade. They have committed some of the worst massacres in the Mexican drug wars and engage in a violence so brutal authorities have called the cartel "irrational." The Sinaloan hit men, on the other hand, appear to be more focused on the drug business and are less randomly violent.

Zetas often dress in fake military gear, and have erected military-style training camps. Sinaloa gunmen, like other narcotics gangs, are more discreet, favoring ski masks and black clothing.

"Sinaloa has done well by flying under the radar. They're comparatively less violent, though they're no saints," said Andrew Selee, director of the Washington-based Mexico Institute. "The Zetas have certainly gotten bigger since they split with the Gulf, but whether that will amount to a long-term ability to control and defend the territories where they have a presence is a little less clear.

"In reality, they're much thinner, where Sinaloa is hierarchical and compact."

Both the big cartels have also been known to launch "spoiler" attacks, aimed at making trouble on an opponent's turf, even though they have little chance of truly encroaching on it. They have sometimes even launched "poison" attacks on civilians on an opponent's turf, hoping the rival will be blamed.

In between the two giants, smaller, fragmented remains of vanquished cartels fight their own bloody battles.

On the outskirts of Mexico City, the Knights Templar cartel appears to be fighting remnants of the Beltran-Leyva gang, and the same two forces - plus the Zetas - have been battling for Acapulco, terrorizing the Pacific coast resort.

Battles among various cartels proliferate in Mexico's most violent cities, including Monterrey, where the Gulf cartel is fighting the Zetas.

But Selee notes that the Veracruz fighting may represent a new stage in which the two big gangs take each other head-on as they move deeper into each other's territory. The battle may have opened in May, when the Zetas apparently sent a convoy of fighters into Sinaloa territory in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit.

For all of the Zetas' bloody reputation - they have been known to massacre the families of police or soldiers who had already died fighting them - the incursion didn't go well: Twenty-eight presumed Zetas were found slaughtered by the side of a highway.

Soon after, in July, a group of two dozen armed men posted a video on the Internet, identifying themselves as "Mata Zetas" - literally, "Zeta Killers" - and said they were from a group allied with Sinaloa to hunt Zetas.

A Mexican military official who could not be quoted by name for security reasons said that besides the tit-for-tat aspect of the Veracruz killings, Sinaloa may also want control of the port as a link in the shipping route from Central America.

But Logan sees another reason for a group aligned with Sinaloa to attack deep into Zeta territory in Veracruz - to distract the Zetas from their next target: Guadalajara.

Mexico's second-largest city also has seen a rise in drug violence in the past year. It was long the home of Sinaloa's methamphetamine-trafficking arm run by Guzman lieutenant Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel, who was killed in a shootout with federal police in July 2010. Since then, factions of Coronel's operation have been fighting for control, including the New Generation and another group known as the Resistance.

The Zetas have taken over neighboring Zacatecas state in their push west, and are eyeing Guadalajara both for the meth trade and for extortion potential.

"The Zetas aren't good for business. They do what they have to because they don't have the distribution networks of the Gulf or Sinaloa. So they have to diversify into kidnapping and extortion," said a U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico, who couldn't be identified for security reasons.

Logan said there are rumors that some factions fighting the New Generation are ready to join with the Zetas.

"That's got to concern El Chapo," he said, of the Sinaloan leader. "Guadalajara has been a huge part of the meth trade for years, El Chapo's bread and butter. If the Zetas take that, it won't be good for El Chapo."

Both big cartels are trying to cover their actions with public relations campaigns, as is now customary. The Zetas hung banners in several Veracruz towns, accusing the military of rights abuses and favoring Sinaloa.

The Mata Zetas have come out with another video, in which they claim to have moved into Veracruz to protect the public from Zeta kidnappings and extortion. The men's demeanor and language evoked a military style more than that of a gang foot soldier, raising a specter of a paramilitary response.

"We are the armed wing of the people, and for the people," says a man with a ski mask, who is seen in the video sitting at a table reading from a prepared statement. He is flanked by four other masked associates, each with a full water bottle placed on the tablecloth. "We are anonymous warriors, faceless, but proudly Mexican."

Two Killed in Mexico over Gang-Related Social Media Posts

Πηγή: Techland
By Graeme McMillan

Sep. 16 2011

Watch what you say on the Internet, because it really could get you killed.

Two dead bodies were discovered hanging from a bridge in the Mexican town of Nuevo Laredo this week, accompanied by a placard with the message, "This is going to happen to all Internet snitches. Pay attention, I'm watching you." It's believed the two were murdered after speaking out about drug gang activity on a social media site.

While threats and violence against journalists is sadly not uncommon for those covering the Mexican drug war—more than 80 journalists have been murdered as a result of their coverage since 2000, according to Reporters Without Borders—this may be the first time that "civilians" have been murdered specifically for what they'd written online, a horrifying new development in an already terrible situation.

Myths and Realities of U.S.-Mexico Border Spillover Effects

Πηγή: CFR

By Shannon K. O'Neil

August 24, 2011

The U.S. debates over Mexico’s drug war increasingly focus on spillover violence. Border state governors Rick Perry and Jan Brewer insist that Mexican cartels are hitting their states hard, portraying the border as a lawless “war zone” in which the drug cartels and illegal Mexicans incite “terror and mayhem” on a daily basis. In stark contrast, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Alan Bersin and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano contend that the border has never been safer.

The statistics bear out the latter position. A recent study based on FBI figures shows that violent crime in cities within 50 miles of the border is consistently lower than state and national averages. The robbery rate in the Texas border region, for example, remained at least 30 percent lower than the state average for every year in the past decade. The data also show that the number of kidnapping cases in border areas dropped by more than half since 2009. This doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen – they do. But they happen less frequently along the border, on average, than in other parts of the United States. Despite local politicians’ concerns and rhetoric, the border is more secure than in the past, and in fact safer than the rest of the country.

But the downward trend in border violence does not mean that the Mexican drug war hasn’t had spillover effects on the United States. Among the most troubling is corruption. Local newspapers recount the stories of public officials engaged in foul play; from the South Texas county Sheriff Conrado Cantú, who took bribes from drug traffickers, to Columbus, New Mexico Mayor Eddie Espinoza, charged with operating a gun smuggling ring in connection with Mexican cartels. Available data also show a rise in corruption within the ranks of the border patrol. Since the reopening of the Homeland Security Bureau’s internal affairs unit in 2003 – in and of itself a reflection of the increased risk of corruption within the agency – cases of corruption against law enforcement officials on the border have more than doubled. Tales of CBP agents turning a blind eye to, and sometimes actively aiding drug traffickers smuggling narcotics, arms and migrants across the border abound.

The increase in corruption reflects the lure of drug money and the CBP’s institutional weaknesses. Doubling the border patrol’s numbers in less than a decade made it more vulnerable to corruption, diluting the once highly disciplined force with less experienced and committed newcomers. The border patrol administers lie detector tests to only 10 percent of applicants, more than half of which fail — raising serious concerns about the capability, and even intentions, of many of its new hires.

Other spillover effects are positive for the United States – namely increasing economic activity. Seemingly every day new restaurants, stores, and private schools are opening in border towns, serving clients that once traveled further south. Many attribute Texas’ strong real estate market to the influx of Mexican citizens eager for greater peace and stability. In the spring of 2008, when foreclosures hit record highs across the United States, real estate agents in El Paso reported steady sales of houses and apartments worth more than $100,000. The President of the Greater El Paso Association of Realtors, Dan Olivas, attributed the stability of the El Paso market to “a substantial number of people from Juarez coming over to buy properties for security reasons, for fear of kidnappings, extortion, and cartel violence.” This El Paso trend has continued, and spread more broadly.

Not only do Mexicans buy homes, but many are bringing their businesses north. Immigration consultants say inquiries from Mexicans for EB-5 investor visas – which cost $500,000, and require that applicants’ create at least 10 jobs in the U.S. within two years – have doubled in recent years. Mexico has quickly risen the ranks to become one of the top recipients of these visas.

Mexico’s drug war is indeed affecting the United States – but mostly in ways that politicians overlook, misunderstand, or (more cynically) choose not to recognize. The current policy prescriptions – a higher and longer border wall, more boots on the ground and predator drones overhead – won’t slow seeping corruption, nor bolster the beneficial economic ties. Unfortunately, the wrong diagnosis means also the wrong policy prescriptions, hurting both countries in the process.

Obama's 2011 National Drug Policy Unveiled: Hype v. Reality

Πηγή: TalkLeft
By Jeralyn, Posted on Tue Jul 12, 2011 at 01:22:24 PM EST

On Saturday, I wrote about the Obama Administration's new Southwest Border Drug Control Policy. Here is the 2011 National Drug Control Policy. The Administration wants us to believe it is focused on prevention and treatment. And Sections 1-4 of the Action List do address treatment and prevention. The devil is in the details.

Obama has no intention of reducing the crack/powder disparity further than the 18:1 ratio passed by Congress. Or reducing any other mandatory minimums for drug crimes. Or reducing any current federal drug penalties. Under the action section, "4.2.D. Foster Equitable Drug Sentencing", in red letters, is the word "Complete." [More...]

Some assorted action items:
Zero tolerance for driving with a controlled substance in your system:
Fifteen states have passed laws clarifying that the presence of any illegal drug in a driver's body is per se evidence of impaired driving. ONDCP will work to expand the use of this standard to other states and explore other ways to increase the enforcement of existing DUID laws.

Allow probation officers (without a judicial hearing or order) to send a probationer to jail for failing a drug test.
NIJ recently funded an evaluation of the Delaware Department of Correction's new "Decide Your Time" program, which is also based on these principles. Potentially, similar results may also be accomplished administratively if probation and parole agencies were given limited authority to impose brief sanctions such as short stints of incarceration. These initiatives have the potential to sharply reduce drug use, crime, and probation revocation, in addition to being able to distinguish those who truly need drug treatment from those who can be induced to stop their drug-taking through other means. (my emphasis)
Make pseudoephedrine (whose sales are now monitored) a prescription drug again like it was in 1976.
Treat cash the same as illegal drugs.
Bulk seizures of currency, regardless of who makes the seizure or where it is made, should be treated, to the extent allowable by law, as drugs or other contraband are treated.
More snooping into your mail and packages:
There is little doubt that a significant amount of illegal drugs moves through our public and private mail systems. This is a particular problem with prescription drugs, which are easily mixed in with large-scale legitimate mailings. Considering the huge volume of packages, domestic and international, that are transited throughout the 50 States, this threat poses a difficult challenge and overwhelms the limited manpower now focused on examining these packages. Nonetheless, new technologies combined with investigatory efforts hold promise to curtail this problem.

Is a plan in the works to take kids away from parents who use drugs? Smoke a joint, lose your kids? Sounds like it's in the nascent phase of development, with the "Establish Interagency Task Force on Drug Endangered Children " section.
Expand our global efforts -- all around the world
Increased use of military in war on drugs:
The Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATFS), a DOD component of U.S. Southern Command, coordinates and directs detection and monitoring of all illicit drug-trafficking activities in the Transit Zone. Bringing together partners from the military, law enforcement, and intelligence communities, along with our international allies, JIATFS has contributed to impressive interdiction results and disruptions of trafficking organizations by United States law enforcement agencies and our international partners, allowing us to "work smarter." This has largely been accomplished through the consistent employment of Maritime Bilateral Counter-Drug Agreements and Operational Procedures, improvements in the exchange of information among our partners, better detection technology, development of more and better actionable intelligence, and improvements in the ability of transit zone partner countries to conduct interdiction endgame operations on their own
Work towards drug tests for all arrestees, even those not arrested for drug crimes. "Individuals who are arrested and/or convicted of crimes demonstrate substantially higher rates of drug use-especially chronic or hardcore use-than the general population."
Determine new ways to find out who is using drugs via a "Community Early Warning and Monitoring System." Will this involve our health insurance companies demanding information from us and providing it to the feds?

How much are we spending on this drug policy? $26.2 billion. (Full budget here.)

U.S. can't justify its drug war spending, reports say

 Πηγή: Los Angeles Times

By Brian Bennett, June 09, 2011

Government reports say the Obama administration is unable to show that billions of dollars spent in the anti-drug efforts in Latin America have made a significant difference.

Reporting from Washington— As drug cartels wreak murderous havoc from Mexico to Panama, the Obama administration is unable to show that the billions of dollars spent in the war on drugs have significantly stemmed the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States, according to two government reports and outside experts.

The reports specifically criticize the government's growing use of U.S. contractors, which were paid more than $3 billion to train local prosecutors and police, help eradicate fields of coca, operate surveillance equipment and otherwise battle the widening drug trade in Latin America over the last five years.