Yet again, breaking headlines announce another new mass killing in Mexico by heavily armed men, presumably narco-traffickers.
Yesterday, thirteen people were killed(including at least 1 minor) and 20 injured when gunmen began firing upon a party being thrown in two houses in a Ciudad Juarez suburb.
One of the characteristics of the explosion of organized violence in Mexico is not just its brazen, open nature, but so often its disciplined, planned, para-military approach, from targeted assassinations of the political and military and police leaderships of a town attempting a crackdown to open shootouts with police and military, the systematic use of mass graves, and its distribution throughout the country, rather than just border states.
A report by Al-Jazeera on the findings of a US military scholar discloses that a number of the leaders of one of the organized, murderous, and seemingly unstoppable cartels -- the infamous 'Zetas' -- were trained at Fort Bragg in the early 1990s by US Special Forces.
The news reported by Al Jazeera focuses on the research by Craig Deare, a professor at the U.S. Defense University at its Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, following one of the largest massacres yet carried out by Mexican narco-paramilitaries.
It was a brutal massacre even by the gruesome standards of Mexico’s drug war: 72 migrant workers gunned down by the "Zetas" - arguably the country's most violent cartel - and left rotting in a pile outside a ranch in Tamaulipas state near the US border in late August.
The Zetas have a fearsome reputation, but the real surprise comes not in their ruthless use of violence, but in the origins of where they learned the tricks of their bloody trade.
Some of the cartel's initial members were elite Mexican troops, trained in the early 1990s by America’s 7th Special Forces Group or "snake eaters" at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, a former US special operations commander has told Al Jazeera.
"They were given map reading courses, communications, standard special forces training, light to heavy weapons, machine guns and automatic weapons," says Craig Deare, the former special forces commander who is now a professor at the US National Defence University.
"I had some visibility on what was happening, because this [issue] was related to things I was doing in the Pentagon in the 1990s," Deare, who also served as country director in the office of the US Secretary of Defence, says...
...About 29,000 people have died since Felipe Calderon, Mexico’s [conservative PAN party] president, declared war on the drug cartels in 2006.
The pattern of some of Latin America's most notorious murderous military, death squad, and coup leaders being trained by US military schools and programs continues. (Often referred to by the most notorious location of such training of murderous thugs, the WHISCformerly known as the "School of the Americas" in Fort Benning, GA, whose graduates are famed for their body count -- though of course such trainings have been more widespread and are also conducted in-country.)
This sort of finding isn't suggesting the training as the source of the industry and its related violence -- but in helping to explain the rapid escalation from what used to be powerful but much more familiar 'mafia' like organizations to near armies conducting practically open campaigns.
The Mexican personnel who received US training and later formed the Zetas came from the Airmobile Special Forces Group (GAFE), which is considered an elite division of the Mexican military.
Their US training was designed to prepare them for counter-insurgency and, ironically, counter-narcotics operations, although Deare says they were not taught the most advanced commando techniques available at Ft. Bragg...
...Deare estimates "probably more than 500" GAFE personnel received special forces training. He is unsure exactly how long the programme lasted. The Zetas came to the attention of Mexico’s Attorney General’s office in 1999.
After US training, GAFE operatives defected from the Mexican military to become hired guns, providing security to the Gulf cartel, a well established trafficking organisation, according to Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas program of the International Relations Center.
"They split from the Gulf cartel and formed as a cartel in their own right," Carlsen, based in Mexico City, told Al Jazeera...
...The GAFE’s desertion rate of an estimated 25 per cent is high, even by the low standards of Mexico’s security forces. Between 2000 and 2005 more than 1,300 of the elite troops defected, La Journada newspaper reported.
Please read the report in full.
One point made by NACLA scholar Kristen Bricker was that the Zeta's weren't just trained by the US, but also by Guatemala's Kaibiles, a particularly famed violent elite group of the military. Not too long ago, this was the Guatemalan death squad unit specifically cited by the UN's post-civil war genocide inquiry, and, of course, part of the US training and support program for the Guatemalan death squad government, one which could boast of more shockingly brutal and raw techniques of demonic cruelty and massacrethan even its death squad peers in El Salvador. The Kaibiles have been rededicated to anti-narcotics and anti-crime training, even by the new liberalish President Alvaro Colom, but the continuity hasn't suddenly vanished, either.
I -- like others -- have seen not just a Northern component (the US market and the recent revelation of the trained Zeta leaders), but a Southern one as well, given the increasing contacts between Mexican cartels and their Colombian and Central American paramilitary analogues. Particularly given that the brutally poor and heavily indigenous Pacific coast of Southwestern Mexico is now a major drugs port, which is why Acapulco has suddenly gone from tourist destination to a city with open warfare between police and narco-traffickers.
Most of the time when people compare the situation in Mexico's narco-trafficking money and violence, they think of Colombia's 1980s cartels (Pablo Escobar, etc.) in their heydays. And that's certainly in part an apt comparison -- hugely financed, well-armed, and for a long time untouchable narco-trafficking empires. Increasingly, though I think of a much more recent model.
In Colombia, illegal armed groups called 'paramilitaries' began as government-supported and promoted anti-guerrilla private forces and soon became the death squad wing of the Colombian army and government's strategy of not just clearing out leftist guerrillas but assassinating thousands of leftist politicians, massacring communities in support of the land expansion desires of rich landholders, the extorted elections of US ally and recently retired President Alvaro Uribe's coalition, threatening and assassinating union organizers and journalists and human and civil rights leaders and so forth.
However, the main specialty of Colombia's narco-paramilitaries recently (though they do keep up the government-allied threats, assassinations, peasant intimidations etc.) has been to use their organizational skills in violence, connections, rural domination, and heavy arms to assume leadership of Colombia's narco-trafficking.
And, in turn, Colombian drug lords have learned to reach out to and incorporate the right wing narco-paramilitariesinto their own organizational drives for expansion and protection from government forces.
After decades of US anti-drug sponsorship, Colombia is still by far the largest producer of cocaine in Latin America.
If the Mexican narco-paramilitaries begin truly learning from their Colombian peers, then they will move from buying off or threatening (and/or assassinating) this or that military officer or mayor or police chief etc., but systematically creating a connection with government, perhaps regional, perhaps national.
The Worst is Yet to Come in Mexican Drug War
Analysts talk of the "Colombianization" of drug-trafficking in Mexico. If that’s the case, what we’ve seen so far is only the beginning
[A]fter 30 years of battling the state, Colombian drug-traffickers have learned that infiltrating, co-opting and using the state is more beneficial than fighting it. This last development marks the most sophisticated and complex phase for Colombian drug-trafficking —- one that the nation is still going through. The Mexican cartels will very soon learn that confrontation with the state can’t last forever, and that the best thing to do is strike a deal. The more "legal" those agreements look, the more useful they will be to them...
...In Colombia during the mid-1990s paramilitary drug traffickers took advantage of this. They supported the election of congressmen, mayors and governors, not only through bribery, sending suitcases filled with cash to candidates’ and officials’ homes, but fundamentally by establishing agreements, sometimes even in writing.
In 2001, 36 individuals, among them paramilitary drug trafficking leaders, candidates, mayors, governors, congressmen and business owners, signed a secret document -— the Ralito Agreement -— in which they agreed to "remake the state" in Colombia...
...In Colombia, the nation has gradually learned to live with illegality. A number of institutions, rules and regulations have been transformed as a result. Still worse, in Colombia many elected congressmen backed by drug-trafficking paramilitaries have legislated and promoted laws that must be obeyed and enforced, but whose legitimacy and social benefits remain questionable. Fortunately, the Colombian Supreme Court is judging severely the indicted congressmen, developing a new international jurisprudence and reinforcing the rule of law.
About a year ago, 1/3rd of the Colombian Congress was either under arrest and/or convicted, under declared Court investigation, or indicted for collaborating with right wing death squad narco-paramilitaries -- every single one of them, by the way, supporters of then-President Uribe's conservative coalition.
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After generations of anti-narcotics operations by Colombian and US forces, the overall production of narcotics from Colombia and supplying the hemisphere hasn't reduced. The most recent report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime assessed the value of cocaine flowing from the Andean region of South America at about $73 billion.
The majority of that is produced in Colombia, and the absolutely overwhelming portion of that (90% in 2007) enters the US via Mexico.
Marijuana is the center of Mexican narcotics (I'm embarrassed to even use the term 'narcotics' when talking about weed) production. Somewhere around 8,000 tons are produced there annually, and at best police forces seize 1,000 to 1,500 or so tons of it per year.
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An increased police or military response will not succeed. A $100 billion plus market of demand by US consumers is not going to be deterred by a few more police or military or border patrol agents or any of the like.
Besides simply being too ineffective and inadequate, narco-traffickers have that other great weapon in their arsenal against law enforcement: cash.
The federal police [in Ciudad Juarez] are hardly setting an example either. In August, some 450 federal agents held a public protest to denounce their superiors that they say force them on pain of death into the drug trade. "They sell as foot soldiers to the drug gangs. Why isn’t the violence stopping? Just take a look at our bosses," an agent told Reuters who declined to be named.
I don't see any significant hope of stopping Mexico from being torn apart and even more murderous crime being visited upon Mexicans and US residents unless we can remove the unbelievable profitability of the US narcotics market. Criminal organizations are simply not going to walk away from $100 billion dollars or more in trade, not ever.
[I'll allow that I also may be being too cynical in not seeing any significant prospects for the other necessary wing of reform to reduce narcotics trade and violence: economic programs and reforms in Mexico which can reverse the widespread devastation which has been visited upon Mexico's majority poor and large minority of severely impoverished, another huge factor in contributing to the sort of disorder which enhances crime organizations' ability to proliferate. It would really, really help, but the policy direction over the past couple of decades has been much more about favoring international trade and investors and privatizing state resources than improving the lot of the population.]
Unless we can move toward a sane policy of decriminalization -- and I can only hope that some combination of clear analysis of the catastrophe to our South and changing public opinion toward legal reform -- then the disaster will continue. With hope, pressures on decriminalizing marijuana will begin to diminish the threat and profitability of illegal marijuana trade. (FWIW, I see zero chance whatsoever for legalization -- the legal use, sale, and production of a drug or various drugs, versus decriminalization which allows small amounts for personal use but keeps dealing and production illegal -- of narcotics outside possibly marijuana.)
It's not impossible, though. Scientific American reviewing a variety of reports on the results of decriminalization in Portugal:
5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results
Street drug-related deaths from overdoses drop and the rate of HIV cases crashes
In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs...
...Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank...
..."Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination."
Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal "appears to be working." He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, "because it smacks of legalization."
Yeah, well, such shallow opposition "smacks of" supporting completely ineffective and devastatingly harmful policies because you would rather keep wishing that the criminalization strategy might one day work. It will not. Even so, results are results, and credit to Kemp for recognizing them.
Would a systematic decriminalization of narcotics in the US drastically affect the form and value and type of illegal narcotics trade to the US from, say, Mexico? I don't know. I don't know of a clear model upon which to argue.
Maybe it's the wrong conclusion for me to make that the reduction in harm for users might reduce profit incentives for the large narco-trafficking trade; doing so makes sense to me. At the moment, I see few other options for the position in which the US and Mexico find themselves in this matter.
In the meantime, as the Mexican cartels increase the organization of their paramilitary forces and the penetration of their organizations into political and state power structures, both sides of the border may be set to endure more shocking developments, and not just the grisly murders, massacres, and shootouts, but the systemic undermining of local governance.