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August 11, 2009
Exclusive: Alternatives for the U.S. Should Mexico Face the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ (Part Two of Five)
Violations of American Sovereignty
A U.S. National Guard Corps of Engineer officer tells of a conversation he once had with a lieutenant from the Mexican Army while working on the road that runs along the border in California. The lieutenant drove by on his side of the line and the two struck up a conversation “uniform to uniform” as the American officer put it. When the American asked the Mexican lieutenant about armed Mexican troops crossing the border, the lieutenant answered, “I send them out. When they get back, I don’t ask what they did while they were gone.”
Border Patrol agents and border sheriffs know all too well what some of them do. In 2000, 16 Mexican soldiers in two humvees chased a Border Patrol agent near Santa Teresa, New Mexico, while another agent came under gunfire. Backup arrived and the soldiers were detained. The Mexican government said the soldiers got lost. The U.S. State Department ordered them sent back to Mexico along with their weapons.
Other incursions by Mexican troops are well known to the U.S. government. For example, a Department of Homeland Security document, with an accompanying map, identifies over 216 incursions over a nine year period between 1997 and 2006. Also, the U.S. Border Patrol issued plastic wallet-sized cards to its agents in its Tucson Sector with instructions on what to do if they encounter Mexican army units on the U.S. side of the border. The card advised that intrusive Mexican soldiers are trained, heavily armed and dangerous and in essence that agents should stay out of their way.
Texas border sheriffs are also very well aware of the problem. Sheriffs Leo Sameniego of El Paso County, Arvin West, Hudspeth County, Rick Flores, Webb County and Sigifredo Gonzales, Zapata County have told the press and the U.S. Congress of numerous incidents in which their deputies have been confronted, and in some cases even fired upon, by Mexican military personnel. Mexican soldiers perform “flanking maneuvers” says Sheriff Sameniego, forcing deputies into defensive positions when they try to interdict drug smugglers.
Sheriff West said in a congressional hearing that Mexican troops forced his deputies to break off a pursuit of drug smugglers and Sheriff Gonzalez told the press that in July 2005 some 300 to 400 rounds were fired across the border from the Mexican side in neighboring Hidalgo County. The National Guard has also encountered Mexican troops on U.S. soil in Starr County, Texas and in June 2005 two Border Patrol agents were ambushed and wounded on the US side of the line near Nogales, Arizona by what to all appearances was a military style ambush. The wounded agents had to be evacuated by Blackhawk helicopter.
A Border Patrol agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Inland Daily Bulletin (January 15, 2006), “We’ve had showdowns with the Mexican army. These aren’t just ex-military guys. These are Mexican army officials assisting drug smugglers.” T. J. Bonner, president of the Border Patrol Counsel, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, said in reference to the Santa Teresa incident, “If [Mexico] is going to put military across our border to threaten our guys, and if their own government can’t control it, then we should be treating this as an act of war.”
That is only a small sample of news accounts about military incursions into the United States from Mexico. Notice of such incursions is also on record in official documents. A report on security threats on the southwest border by the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations refers to a growing nexus of criminal gangs, drug cartels and the Mexican army. Also, members of the House of Representatives have made their own investigations and have spoken about the results to the press and on the floor of Congress. By simply going along the border and talking to the people who live there, one can collect numerous stories about similar, previously unreported incidents. When asked about military incursions, Mexican government spokesmen say that the armed men encountered are not Mexican soldiers. Some spokesmen say they are mercenaries dressed like soldiers and others claim they are criminals in fake army dress.
Military incursions are increasing, as is border violence in general, according to a United States Customs and Border Protection report titled “BorderStat Violence, FY 2008 Year in Review.” The report was obtained and posted on its website by a watchdog group, Judicial Watch, after that organization filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for its release. Incursions, says the government report, went from 37 in FY (fiscal year) 2007 to 147 in FY 2008 an increase of 359%, along with increased attacks on US Customs and Border Patrol personnel. This matches the pattern of violence within the Mexican interior, and further indicates that the grip of the Mexican government on its military and law enforcement agencies, and on its territory, is slipping further away.
Acording to Mexican congressman Robert Badillo some 150,000 soldiers have deserted the Mexican Army over the last six years. How many of them have enlisted as mercenaries for the cartels, is unknown. The best known case is that of the Zetas, a unit originally trained at Fort Bragg North Carolina to combat drug trafficking. The Zetas went over to the other side, becoming an enforcement branch of the Gulf Cartel, some says they have set up business on their own. Whatever the case may be, whether active duty military and police are working for the cartels, or whether those armed and uniformed men are military-trained mercenaries, or more likely both, whichever, the Mexican government has a serious problem of control.
Heavily Armed Challenge to the Mexican State
The problem of control of personnel also holds for arms and ammunition, for it appears that weapons are leaking from the Mexican Army and police and into the hands of the drug cartels a result of corruption and the vast sums of cartel money in circulation. In that regard an October 2007 report from the non-profit global intelligence group Stratfor states, “As in other criminal enterprises in Mexico, such as drug smuggling and kidnapping, it is not unusual to find police officers and military personnel involved in the illegal arms trade.”
The Los Angeles Times reports that Mexican “traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and anti-tank rockets far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.” Such firepower, along with the abundance of ammunition at the disposal of the cartels, indicate that the importance of American small arms smuggled into Mexico, billed by the Mexican government as the cause of violence, is exaggerated. In fact, only 17 percent of the weapons recovered by Mexican authorities at crime scenes from 2007 to 2008 could be traced to the United States. Sixty eight percent of the recovered arms were not even sent to the United States for checking since it is obvious by their markings that they came from somewhere else. In all, some 83 percent of such weapons were not traceable to this country (Foxnews.com 4/02/09).
The ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) says that weapons may also have gotten into the hands of the cartel through the international weapons black market, for weapons manufactured in South Africa, Spain, Russia, China, and elsewhere have been found at the scenes of clashes with the Mexican authorities. If many of the weapons and ammunition used by the cartels come from the international black market, the points of entry into Mexico are numerous; the same routes across Mexico’s southern border used to bring drugs through the country on their way north to the United States, the same route as stolen cars and other goods, or enter through small ports along Mexico’s long coast lines or through major ports in bulk, with the collaboration of corrupt Mexican officials.
The very abundance and nature of the weapons and ammunition used against the Mexican state indicate that the state does not control its borders and coastline well enough to prevent entry of the kind of firepower that has made the war against it so lethal. Blaming the flood of weapons on the United States, therefore, is a diversion.
Crime, the Economy and Civil Society
Rumors work to the advantage of the forces of disruption. Thus accurate and honest coverage of the facts by a free press is an essential element in the fight against the enemies of order and the rule of law. Also, a free press is a vital part of a democratic civil society. The press in Mexico is also under attack, for not only are police and soldiers targets of cartel violence but journalists are as well. Mexico is the most dangerous country on earth for journalists according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Since 2000, 25 have been murdered and since 2005, seven have disappeared. Many reporters refuse to put their bylines on their stories and many newspapers have simply stopped reporting on the gangs and cartels, which of course is what the cartels want. The forces that are laying siege to the Mexican state, are thus also laying siege to Mexican civil society.
As law enforcement is stretched to meet the challenge of drug cartel violence, fewer resources are available to deal with other kinds of crime. As a result crime is on the rise across the country. This includes kidnappings for ransom throughout the country targeting anyone with money. In August 2008 Fernando Martí, 14-year-old son of a Mexican sporting goods chain, was kidnapped and murdered after his father had paid $500,000 ransom to the abductors. Citizens took to the streets when authorities arrested the alleged ring leader, a former Mexico City police detective. The number of abductions and the fear of being next is driving a growing number of middle class and wealthy Mexicans into the United States, many leaving their businesses behind and opening up new ones on this side of the border. That is not always a help, though, for Marco Polo Cortéz, president of the San Diego Hispanic Chamber of Commerce says that there are instances of people snatched and driven back to Mexico in the trunk of a car (Forbes October 2008).
Truck high jacking and fear of assaults on remote facilities, such as mines, are also on the increase. One tactic is to target critical employees for information on the movement of valuable goods. Criminal organizations also post spotters at loading docks to discover which trucks are transporting valuable items then swarm them on the road with pick-up trucks filled with armed men. The drivers are dragged from the cabs of their vehicles and beaten and their cargos stolen. Some trucking companies have installed GPS to monitor the movement of their vehicles as well as installing “panic” buttons that drivers can push if attacked. Many companies have begun sending their trucks out in convoys.
One of the many installations affected is a mine which belongs to the Couer d’Alene Mines Corp. The mine is located in the northwest Mexican state of Chihuahua near the state of Sinaloa. Mine personnel have been waylaid, robbed and beaten by heavily armed assailants and the mine has been turned into an armed camp. The compound is described as resembling a military outpost in Iraq with spools of Cortina wire atop 10 foot fences, with 15 guards each 12 hour shift in camouflage and armed with R-15 assault rifles at a cost $536,000 a year – more than all the other operations combined (Forbes 5/25/09).
In sum, white and blue collar workers, the wealthy, journalists, police, soldiers and unlucky people on the streets are all potential victims of the increasing criminal violence in Mexico that the Mexican state is unable to contain. George Friedman who heads Stratford, the global intelligence firm, says that “we are still throwing cops at the problem that is well beyond that.” Now it is “a major geopolitical problem. We’ve been moving into a situation where the Mexican government is no longer the most powerful force in Mexico.”
A Lucrative and Diversified Industry
At the center of the non-state forces challenging the Mexican state is a diverse, flexible and brutal set of parallel, overlapping and interpenetrating illegal enterprises that have grown into a thriving transnational industry. This industry is involved in money-laundering and in the smuggling not only of drugs and guns but of people as well, anything that brings a profit. In 2007 a Congressional Research Service report said that cartels now operating in the United States “maintain some level of co-operation among their various operating areas, moving labor and materials to various sites, even across the country as needed.”
In Arizona in 2008 the cartels grossed roughly two billion dollars in human trafficking alone. In this regard Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said in a Senate hearing that smuggling into his state “is really a four-part trade, and it has caused crime throughout the United States” (3/23/LA Times).
The operation of this transnational industry along the border had part of its beginning with human trafficking. As the migratory flow increased, so did the need for guides to lead illegal migrants through unfamiliar territory. Soon, transportation networks and safe houses developed on the U.S. side of the line to facilitate the flow and to maximize the profits. Some reluctant, and often terrified migrants, have been forced to act as “mules” to transport drugs illegally across the border. One border resident in Arizona tells of a frantic knock on his door at night. An Argentine illegal border crosser asked that he call the police. He was afraid of the people he had hired to smuggle him across the border when they demanded he carry a load of illegal drugs.
When it became apparent that the southern border was an easy entryway into the United States, people from other Latin American countries, mainly from Central America, but also from as far away as Brazil began to take advantage of the possibility as did people from elsewhere around the world. The Border Patrol reports the apprehension of OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) illegally crossing the border from Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East as well as from Latin America.
As the international drug trade, with its main entry point in Miami, was brought under control in that city, Mexican organizations took over the drug trade using the border as its entryway into the United States. The narco-traffickers followed the lead of the human trafficking business, absorbing much of it in their own enterprises to create a sophisticated, well organized and flexible criminal industry. This lucrative and powerful industry is by now so well established and so wealthy that it can afford to resist any attempts to put it out of business, to the point of threatening the viability of the Mexican state.
An Open Door to the North
The borderlands on both sides of the line have become dangerous for both Americans living there and for illegal migrants passing through it, a state of affairs created by the lawlessness that has resulted from both the sheer volume of illegal migrants and the criminal elements that use the migrants as cover for movement back and forth across the border. Multitudes of migrants tramp across the countryside on the American side damaging environmentally fragile regions, often walking past the front doors of isolated homes, leaving gates open for livestock to stray, leaving water spigots running with a loss of valuable water in an arid land and in some cases, breaking into houses when the owners are not at home. There have also been carjacking and murders as a result of criminals moving with the unregulated flow of migrants. Overall crime has increased as a result of the northward trek, and many rural dwellers go about their daily activities armed. Back roads have become dangerous, as smugglers drive at night without lights, and sometimes the wrong way on freeways.
Migrants, known in the trade as pollos, “chickens,”often find themselves victims of predatory Mexican police and some on both sides of the line are forced into servitude and prostitution by the criminals who exploit the illegal migration in any way they can. The “chickens” are also often victimized by their guides, called coyotes, who sometimes rape and rob them and in some cases abandon them in the desert without water, provisions and adequate clothing and with no idea where they are.
As the tide of illegal migration rises, so too does the number of criminals swimming like sharks in the migratory stream. In the calendar year 2005 the General Accounting Office showed a 15 percent rise in the number of incarcerated criminal aliens in federal custody since 2001. State figures show increases as well. In 2008 the National Research Council published The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration 2007-2008 by Edwin Rubenstein. According to the statistics reported there 46,000 criminals who entered the country illegally were incarcerated in federal facilities. There were 74,000 in state prisons and another 147,000 in local detention centers. These “criminal aliens,” says the report “are not casual law-breakers. Most are recidivists or career criminals.” Relying on General Accounting Office analysis of 55,000 arrest records of convicted criminal aliens, Rubenstein reports that the average criminal alien has had 13 prior arrests, that 12 percent were arrested for major crimes such as murder, assault, robbery and sexually related offenses and that only 21 percent were arrested for immigration violations. The numbers are rising. The GAO reports that 81 percent of the arrests of criminal illegal aliens occurred after 1990.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement service ICE initiated a special project, Operation Community Shield to root out such elements in the immigrant population. Between 2005 and 2008 they arrested 8,000 gang members from 700 gangs concentrated mainly in the South and the East as far north as New England. The numbers of immigrant gang members is also growing, swelling in numbers to nearly a million, up 200,000 since 2005, with 900,000 “within local communities across the country”, and another 147,000 in prison. Those gangs, says a report from Department of Justice’s National Gang Intelligence Center, account for 80% of the crime reported.
The report says that the gangs operate as “primary retail-level distributors of most illicit drugs” and that some are competitive with well established drug traffickers. Moreover, gangs are “seemingly intent on developing working relationships” with Mexican drug dealers and other criminal enterprises. The report also says that gangs of all kinds are spreading. Fifty-eight percent of local law enforcement agencies report an increase in gang activity in their jurisdictions in 2008, up 45 percent from 2004. Gang activity is also beginning to appear on the campuses of both rural and suburban schools. It is also expanding geographically to almost every state and into Canada. United States and Canadian authorities, says the DOJ report, are beginning to co-operate in an effort to deal with the problem.
Bruce Ferrell, chairman of the Midwest Gangs Investigations Association, an organization that monitors gang activity in ten states, told USA Today (1/30/09) that he believes the number of gang members is even higher than that reported by the DOJ. He also says that gangs are growing in numbers. “We have seen an expansion for the last 10 years” he said and “Each year the numbers are moving forward.”
Especially disturbing are violent gangs like MS-13, Surenos-13 and the 18th Street gang that have embedded themselves in immigrant enclave communities, and that have been described as “shockingly brutal.” MS-13, according to the FBI, is more brutal than the old Mafia ever was. Law enforcement officials say that it is this brutality that makes it difficult for them to penetrate and crack MS-13.
The MS-13 is transnational in nature and to a degree in its operation as well with chapters in nearly all the states and in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, Canada, in Mexico and in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The gang deals in all kinds of crime and is becoming increasingly well organized. It is also associated with the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, providing retailing operations in the drug trafficking network in the United States, and as it grows it is becoming increasingly competitive with the other smuggling organizations.
The National Youth Gang Survey 1999-2001, published by the Department of Justice, says that half of the gang members at the time of their study were Latinos. Among the criminal aliens arrested by ICE in Operation Community Shield 60 percent were Mexican, 17 percent were from El Salvador and 5 percent from Honduras. Also immigrant enclaves provide cover for the operation of Latino gangs where they can hide “in plain sight,” communities from which they also seek new recruits. Law abiding members of immigrant communities are among the most proximate victims of those predatory elements. Immigrants suffer extortion, home invasions, robbery and rape at the hands of the gangs.
The size of such gangs has exploded, say law enforcement officials, partly because of gaps in border security, which permit gang members to move freely back and forth across the border, and partly because of a shift in focus on the part of law enforcement away from gangs to terrorism. Local authorities also play an important role in fostering the growth of gangs by shielding them from federal immigration authorities through official sanctuary policies, policies that not only help illegal immigrants violate federal law, but which also creates a comfortable zone for criminals in which they exploit the very people the sanctuary policies are designed to shield.
The cartels are also expanding their operations into cities like Atlanta and Houston, St. Louis and Milwaukee. An Associated Press story of March 29, 2009 cites a Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center document reporting that cartels have established distribution hubs or suppliers to local distributors in 230 American cities such as Twin Falls, Idaho, Billings, Montana, Wichita, Kansas, etc.
Also kidnappings are on the rise on this side of the border associated with drug cartels. In 2006 armed men attacked a ranch near Laredo, Texas and abducted customs broker Librado Piña, Jr. and his son together with David Mueller, whose family owns a sheet metal company in Ballinger, Texas. They were released soon afterwards. In July 2008 two American citizens, Javier Francisco and Pedro Vargas, were kidnapped in Austin, Texas and moved to Dallas where they were moved to Dallas by men who authorities believe were members of the Zetas. Dallas police were able to rescue the victims. And in Phoenix, the nation’s fifth largest city, have risen to 1,000 over the three year period between 2006 and 2009 related to border smuggling. In July 2008
As the Latino population increases in the United States drug dealers find it easier to “blend in” and expand their trade inside ethnic enclaves, says the AP, in such places as Memphis, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia and Birmingham, Alabama where the cartel members “don’t stand out” as they once would have.
Cartel business is also expanding, and with this expansion the United States is taking on a more central geographic position in the illegal international trade. According to the Justice Department’s latest Drug Threat Assessment, Italian crime syndicates, after a lull in activity, are once again operating in the United States. According to the assessment, Italian syndicates are found now in nineteen American cities and in partnership with Mexican drug distributors and Colombian drug producers. According to the Dallas Morning News (4/20/09) the cities of Dallas and Houston are becoming logistic centers for coordinating operations from Mexico and Central America on the one hand and the Italian syndicates on the other, to feed the growing European demand for drugs where the price of cocaine is three times higher than in North Texas.
Part Three will continue with a discussion of expanding corruption in the United States.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Glynn Custred is professor emeritus at California State University East Bay (formerly Hayward), a member of the American Anthropological Association and the Association of Borderland Studies.
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