New Drug Violence in Mexico Report Published
New Drug Violence in Mexico Report Published
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Not just a Mexican problem?
Given that such equipment is in extensive use, one must wonder how much is diverted or stolen in other countries, notably the USA and of course becomes a public matter.
Mexico's War is Hell and Getting Worse
Mexico’s War is Hell. It’s Next door. It’s Getting Worse. Why?
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Wars are not won by targeting the enemy’s generals and leaving their ground forces intact. That’s not a military campaign; it’s not even a serious strategy.
As Tolstoy notes in War and Peace, the French would still have gone on to invade Russia, even if someone had bumped off Napoleon.
This is one of the principle reasons our approach to counterterrorism is failing. Hundreds of intelligence amateurs drawing networks of terrorists, and telling their operators if you just remove this guy and that guy the network will collapse. It was an OK hypothesis to test in 2002, but 15 years after it failed us then we're pursuing it.
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So far, 2017 has been a very rough year for Mexican crime fighters. The regional security plan established by President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2013—which divided the country into five zones and included large-scale military deployments—seems to have backfired. Violence is up by as much as 60 percent in the region that includes Sinaloa, where the crime syndicate formerly run by Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán is based. And homicides have increased sharply in each of the other four security zones as well.
As opposed to previous spikes in violence, which tended to be localized, the first five months of this year have seen a nationwide rise in murders—putting it on track to be the worst year for drug war mayhem since such records started to be kept in 1997
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We remove the elements that control what we think we understand, and then acted surprised the situation morphed making it even worse.
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“You combine inequality with ineffective government,” says Wood, “and you have a very toxic situation where organized crime is an alternative for young men—but it’s also a force that very few governmental actors are willing to confront.”
Mexico is wealthy, but the Mexican people are poor. Always a bad combination for long term stability.
Why the Military Will Never Beat Mexico's Cartels
http://securityassistance.org/conten...exicos-cartels
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“Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war,” wrote Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night. That phrase, applied to Vietnam almost 50 years ago, has come back into my head any number of times during the eight months of the last year I’ve spent covering the Mexican drug war.
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Organized crime in Mexico, she says, is simply “too lucrative.” When a designated “kingpin” is arrested or killed by authorities, the flow of money from the drug trade ensures a former underling or rival will rise up to take his place. “Massive military deployment and attacks on cartels cannot defeat or eliminate them and invariably lead to greater levels of violence,” Carlsen says, because newly empowered factions do battle for the old crime lord’s turf. According to Carlsen, the flaw lies not just in tactical execution, but in the authorities’ very will to fight—despite Washington footing much of the bill. “In Mexico the problem is in the practice as well as the strategy itself. The military can’t defeat the drug cartels,” says Carlsen, “because it doesn’t want to. “Police and military are often complicit with drug traffickers,” she adds, in a follow-up email. “Huge quantities of drugs flow out of (and presumably cash flows into) areas where the military controls access.” The problem of corruption is not limited to individuals, she notes, it’s “a systemic re-purposing of state agencies” by the cartels.
The Zetas: Don’t mess with us. One town's tale
A Pro-Publica report:
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In March 2011 gunmen from the Zetas cartel, one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in the world, swept through Allende and nearby towns like a flash flood, demolishing homes and businesses and kidnapping and killing dozens, possibly hundreds, of men, women and children.
(Shortly after) But unlike most places in Mexico that have been ravaged by the drug war, what happened in Allende didn’t have its origins in Mexico. It began in the United States, when the Drug Enforcement Administration scored an unexpected coup. An agent persuaded a high-level Zetas operative to hand over the trackable cellphone identification numbers for two of the cartel’s most wanted kingpins, Miguel Ángel Treviño and his brother Omar. Then the DEA took a gamble. It shared the intelligence with a Mexican federal police unit that has long had problems with leaks — even though its members had been trained and vetted by the DEA. Almost immediately, the Treviños learned they’d been betrayed.
Link:https://www.propublica.org/article/a...and-the-us-dea
We have not gone away - the Zapatista rebels
I thought they had gone away, no and the title and sub-title to thi short article are:
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Mexico’s Zapatista rebels, 24 years on and defiant in mountain stronghold; The peasant rebels took up arms in 1994, and now number 300,000 in centres with their own doctors, teachers and currency, but rarely answer questions – until now
Link:https://www.theguardian.com/global-d...in-strongholds
Welcome to 21st Century Mexico
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Three Italian men who went missing in Mexico at the end of January were sold to a criminal gang for €43 ($53), their relatives have told Italian media.
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The reason for the Italians' trip to Mexico from their hometown of Naples is also unclear. Their family have said they were tourists, but Mexican prosecutors suspect the trio was part of a ring selling fake-brand power generators.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/italian-m...180101306.html
Rhetorically, what sort of profit margin is there on flogging fake-brand power generators?
We Can Reduce Gun Violence in Mexico, But We Have To Be Smart About It
A short RUSI report by two academic experts, who end with a familiar plea "more data". There maybe stuff here to note.
Link:https://shoc.rusi.org/informer/we-ca...smart-about-it