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Last Updated: Jul 20, 2008 - 5:53:40 AM |
The number of murders related to organized crime in Mexico passed the
2,000 mark on 4 July. Since Mexican president Felipe Calderon entered
office, at least 4,867 such murders have been registered, at an average
of eight narco-related deaths a day according to Mexican daily El
Universal.
At this pace, Mexico will close out the year with over 4,000
narco-related murders, fomenting public uncertainty and raising doubts
about the president's hard-nosed, confrontational approach.
With some 20,000 soldiers in at least 11 Mexican states, Calderon has
tried to take the bull by the horns, but he's met heavy resistance.
Alarming spikes in violence have seen 10 people killed in under six
hours in Tijuana, Baja California and 12 people killed in broad
daylight in Culiacan, Sinaloa.
Controlling Mexico's cities
Edgardo Buscaglia, a UN adviser and economics and law professor in
Mexico City, recently reported to the Mexican attorney general's office
that up to 60 percent of Mexico's cities were controlled by organized
crime.
Criminal elements infiltrate local governments by financing political
campaigns and with bribes. Mexico ranks 6th in the world for the
highest presence of organized crime, Buscaglia's research reveals,
after Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea.
The Dallas Morning News reported recently of the formation of a Mexican
megacartel, and as such, the prospect of a failed state on the US'
southern border appears to be an unfortunate possibility.
Others would argue, however, that the nature of organized crime in
Mexico is based on the simple tenant of convenient arrangements that
are short-lived and end in violence.
It is an argument against the failure of Calderon's strategy and the
Mexican government that has been well supported by this year's dramatic
shifts in power from what used to be three major cartels into something
significantly new.
Yet the de facto erosion of government control in many pockets of the
country continues unabated, and as many in Mexico look north, they see
the Merida Initiative (the recently passed US aid package) as the only
way out of an unending cycle of violence.
Shifts in the sand
When Calderon entered office in December 2006 there were three
well-established drug smuggling organizations in Mexico.
The Arrellano-Felix Organization (AFO) controlled the Tijuana border
crossing market, or plaza.
The Sinaloa Federation, a conglomeration of the Carrillo-Fuentes
organization in Juarez, the Sinaloa Cartel, run by Joaquin "El Chapo"
Guzman, the Beltran-Leyva brothers and others, controlled plazas east
of Tijuana stretching to Nuevo Laredo.
The territory from Nuevo Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico was under the
control of the so-called Gulf Cartel, run by Osiel Cardenas Guillen and
his partners and enforcers Los Zetas - a band of former Mexican Special
Forces troops who defected to the drug trade.
Calderon made his presence felt when he immediately targeted the Gulf
Cartel by extraditing its leader, Cardenas, who had been running his
business from behind bars.
When Cardenas, along with a number of mid-level lieutenants in his
organization, were extradited to the US, the structure of Mexican
organized crime dramatically shifted.
Without a command and control structure in place, the Gulf Cartel,
which had long battled the Sinaloa Federation for control of the Nuevo
Laredo plaza and other areas in southern and central Mexico, was on its
heels.
Further destabilized by what appeared to be Calderon's singular focus,
the leadership within the Zetas structure took command of the Gulf
Cartel's functions, and rather than push to extend its territory deeper
into the Sinaloa Federation's traditional lands along the western
coast, the group stood its ground in Tamaulipas, in the northeast.
To date, Calderon's efforts have netted some 81 of the cartel's 157
high-level operators, according to El Universal.
Arguably, the Sinaloa Federation was able to gain some ground in 2007
as the Gulf Cartel fought to defend its turf from Calderon's offensive,
but the military's presence in the Federation's territory in Sonora,
Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Michoacan (among other states) prevented a rapid
expansion into the void and kept its leader, El Chapo, on the run.
As such, there was a relative impasse until the end of 2007, when a
clean break between El Chapo and the Carrillo-Fuentes organization in
Juarez precipitated further splintering within the Sinaloa Federation.
A spike in violence in Juarez marked the first few months of 2008 as El
Chapo fought for control of the lucrative Juarez plaza.
On the heels of the Carrillo-Fuentes departure, the Beltran-Leyva
brothers abandoned El Chapo in mid-May after, it is believed, the
brothers learned that El Chapo provided the intelligence that lead to
the January arrest of Alfredo Beltran in Culiacan, then a top operator
within the Sinaloa Federation.
The retaliation saw El Chapo's son gunned down outside a shopping mall
in Culiacan in May, an assassination ordered by the Beltran-Leyvas and
reportedly carried out by members of Los Zetas.
"You must always consider the nature of Mexican organized crime since
as far back as the 1980s," a security analyst in Mexico City, who asked
not to be identified, told ISN Security Watch.
"These relationships are built on mutual benefit, but when the
conditions change, the fallout is often violent, resulting in a
relationship limited in scope and short-lived," he added.
Los Zetas and the Beltran-Leyva organization had been working together
since mid-2007, but until the assassination of El Chapo's son in May
2008, many analysts did not consider this possibility, with most
assuming that the Beltran-Leyvas were still loyal to El Chapo.
Now it is believed that Los Zetas and the Beltran-Leyva brothers have
formed a new organization that controls access to the US and stretches
across nearly the entire US-Mexico border area. Only Tijuana remains,
and the considerably weakened Arrellano-Felix organization is not in a
strong position to defend its turf.
With the supply routes from the days of the Gulf Cartels' peak of power
still in place, the addition of the Beltran-Leyvas' control of the
Sonoroa-Arizona smuggling route, likely strong ties with the
Carrillo-Fuentes in Juarez; and the proven firepower of Los Zetas, this
new organization may prove to be powerful indeed.
The paradox
"When states focus their counter-organized crime ops by only going
after physical persons linked to large-scale organized crime without at
the same time dismantling the criminal-asset networks supporting
criminal enterprises, and without attacking high-level corruption that
is linked to the economic networks, and that is - in exchange -
providing protection to organized crime and benefiting from it,
criminal groups will act rationally by re-assigning more financial and
economic resources to protecting themselves through added corruption
and by increasing the levels and scale of 'organized violence,'" UN
adviser Edgardo Buscaglia told ISN Security Watch in a recent email
interview.
This situation is one Buscaglia calls "The Paradox of Expected
Punishment."
Supporting Buscaglia's argument is Guillermo Valdes, head of Mexico’s
intelligence organization, known as CISEN. Valdes recently told the
Financial Times in a frank admission that the cartels threatened
democracy in Mexico.
"Drug traffickers have become the principal threat because they are
trying to take over the power of the state," Valdes told the Financial
Times in a 13 July report.
>From the Mexican attorney general's office, reports have surfaced that
organized crime controls no less than 80 municipalities throughout the
country.
Both admissions point to one clear fact: Mexican organized crime works
diligently to control politicians and other political leaders from the
municipal level up to the national Congress. If Buscaglia's theory
holds true, then as Calderon pushes forward his offensive, now focused
on the Sinaloa Federation, criminal organizations will react with more
violence and more bribes.
"Unless the Mexicans start dismantling the financial [and] economic
networks supporting org[anized] crime operations, through money
laundering, high-level corruption, arms trafficking, human
traf[ficking], etc, the expressions of violence and instability will
keep growing and the paradox will impede an effective performance of
the State," Buscaglia said.
A way out?
Some consider the recent passage of the Merida Initiative, a
multi-million dollar anti-drug trafficking aid package approved in June
by US Congress, a way out of this paradox. (See Sam Logan, Mexico aid
package passed, for ISN Security Watch.
Others disagree. Bruce Bagley, chairman of the Department of
International Studies at the University of Miami, says the Merida
Initiative is not a way out for a number of reasons, including the need
for greater focus on police and judicial reform.
"Police reform and judicial reform need to make drug enforcement in
Mexico more a civilian rather than a military function, and they're not
very far down that line," Bagley told ISN Security Watch.
It is clear the Mexican government cannot outspend its opponents in
head-on combat. As Buscaglia points out, the criminal's financial
network must be targeted, but judicial reform and the
professionalization of Mexico's police forces are also fundamental but
have thus far received relatively little attention.
Files used to process criminal cases or in the investigation of these
cases have been found to have an 87 percent error rate, according to
Mexican daily La Reforma.
Would-be criminals run amuck. If they are arrested, chances are the
arresting officer is on the cartel payroll. If not, the chances are he
will make a mistake in the paperwork that will lead to the criminal's
release. Within this atmosphere, it is extremely difficult to
investigate, prosecute and imprison criminals inside Mexico.
"[The US has] a policy that is contradictory within itself on
migration, guns, drugs and trade and investment, and Mexico just has to
live with it because they are junior partners and they are trying to
deal with [their security] problems, but militarizing them is not going
to get rid of it," Bagley argued, adding, "drug trafficking will
continue and Mexico has to address its institutional problems itself
and those problems are not going to be solved from one day to the next."
The Merida Initiative does provide funding for judicial reform and the
professionalization of police forces, but not nearly enough. If it is
to be a way out, most argue, more focus should be placed on improving
the police so they may perform a job currently conducted by the Mexican
military.
Some 20,000 soldiers are on patrol in at least 11 Mexican states, but
Calderon has plans for a drawdown in 2009, according to a Jane's
Intelligence report. Local reports claim Calderon is focused on ramping
up the number of police on the job, but doubts remain about the
screening process. With a fast increase of police, will the government
prevent the entrance of more cartel-paid moles?
Either way, violence in Mexico will likely continue at record levels
through the end of the year. It is not clear if a megacartel is forming
along the northern border, but if one does surface, its life may be
short-lived, as history suggests.
Mexico depends on aid and assistance from the US. The situation is one
of national security in Mexico. Such a security threat on the US'
southern border is more than enough to shock US leaders into action. So
far, however, they have focused on the status quo policy of heavy
spending on military aid with less attention paid to the root causes of
corruption, judicial reform and police professionalization.
As one Mexican security analyst recently put it, the relationship
between Mexico and the US is one in which the US holds Mexico by the
throat over the edge of a cliff. Mexico is certainly in a bad
situation, but the US will never drop its southern neighbor. To do so
could very well mean state failure, and this is not a reality the US or
the region can accept.
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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