Drugs & US Law Enforcement (2006-2017)

[SWJED]

8 July Washington Post - Calderón's Offensive Against Drug Cartels by Manuel Roig-Franzia.

... Calderón is betting his presidency on a surge of Mexican troops -- one of the country's largest deployments of the military in a crime-fighting role -- to wage street-by-street battles with drug cartels that are blamed for more than 3,000 execution-style killings in the past year and a half. Sending more than 20,000 federal troops and police officers to nine Mexican states has made Calderón extremely popular; his latest approval ratings hit 65 percent.

But as the campaign drags into its eighth month and the death toll mounts, Calderón is facing a growing cadre of critics, including the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights representative in Mexico, who opposes the use of the military in policing. Calderón is also contending with foes in Mexico's Congress who want to strip him of the authority to dispatch troops without congressional approval. The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization, has faulted him as quick to use the military but slow to reform Mexico's corrupt police...

[Jedburgh]

IHT, 17 Sep 07: Mexican Drug Gang Attacks Government Intelligence Network

....Natividad Gonzalez, governor of the northern state of Nuevo Leon, said federal intelligence officers were tipped off that alleged members of Mexico's Gulf drug cartel "wanted to kidnap two or three agents" prior to the attack last Tuesday in the state capital of Monterrey. Two officers were killed and two more wounded in the ensuing shootout.

Federal police rounded up about a dozen members of a family believed to work for the cartel in connection with the shootout. The clan, dubbed "The Pedraza Dynasty" by Mexican newspapers, may have learned of the agents' identities from local policemen, Gonzalez said.

Intelligence agents have been targeted for assassination before, but the attack showed that traffickers not only knew who the agents were but also wanted to take the heavily armed officers alive, Gonzalez said....

It appears their police anti-corruption drive isn't being too sucessful.....

“You can change the people and not change the institution,” said Ernesto López Portillo Vargas, executive director of the Institute for Security and Democracy, an independent group that studies police corruption issues. “This is the big risk.”

[Jedburgh]

From the Jan-Feb 08 Military Review:

Threat Analysis: Organized Crime and Narco-Terrorism in Northern Mexico

Organized crime syndicates are modern enemies of democracy that relentlessly engage in kidnapping and assassination of political figures, and traffic not only in addictive and lethal substances, but also increasingly in human beings. To create an environment conducive to success in their criminal interests, they engage in heinous acts intended to instill fear, promote corruption, and undermine democratic governance by undercutting confidence in government. They assassinate or intimidate political figures and pollute democratic processes through bribes and graft in cities along both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. In the long term, such actions erode individual civil liberties in America and Mexico by undermining both governments’ abilities to maintain societies in which the full exercise of civil liberties is possible. This danger is ominously evident on the Mexican side of the border, where 86 percent of those responding to a poll in Mexico City in 2004 said they would support government restrictions of their civil rights in order to dismantle organized crime, and another 67 percent said militarizing the police force would be the only way to accomplish this. These views suggest that an extremely unhealthy sociopolitical environment is evolving at America’s very doorstep. We should see this not as a collateral issue associated with the War on Terrorism, but as a national security issue deserving of the same level of interest, concern, and resourcing as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of narco-terrorism, narcocorruption, and human trafficking in the northern states of Mexico, and an overview of Mexican organized crime and its destabilizing effect on Mexico’s attempts to create a functioning, uncorrupt democracy.....

[Jedburgh]

NYT, 22 Jan 08: Mexico Hits Drug Gangs With Full Fury of War

These days, it is easy to form the impression that a war is going on in Mexico. Thousands of elite troops in battle gear stream toward border towns and snake through the streets in jeeps with .50-caliber machine guns mounted on top while fighter jets from the Mexican Navy fly reconnaissance missions overhead.

Gun battles between federal forces and drug-cartel members carrying rocket-propelled-grenade launchers have taken place over the past two weeks in border towns like Río Bravo and Tijuana, with deadly results.

Yet what is happening is less a war than a sustained federal intervention in states where for decades corrupt municipal police officers and drug gangs have worked together in relative peace, officials say. The federal forces are not only hunting cartel leaders, but also going after their crews of gunslingers, like Gulf Cartel guards known as the Zetas, who terrorize the towns they control.....

[Jedburgh]

ISN Security Watch, 29 Jan 08: Violence on the US-Mexico Border

Dozens of murders have resulted from battles between the Mexican security forces and armed criminals along the US-Mexico border since the beginning of this year. It is a spike in violence that has many in the US worried that gun fights may spill across the border, carrying all the reprisals that left a string of Mexican border towns without journalists, mayors, police chiefs and musicians in 2007.

In another bloody encounter for what has already been a violent year, on 7 January, a van full of gunmen ran a roadblock outside the border town of Reynosa, Mexico. Mexican soldiers and federal police chased the van to a small house across the street from the Reynosa police station. The gun battle began soon after. In the aftermath, 10 suspects were arrested and five policemen were dead. Along with the suspects, Mexican police seized three automatic rifles, an Uzi submachine gun, grenades and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

The US Border Patrol has not taken any extra precautions, but is keeping its agents in the field "abreast of the situation," according to Border Patrol spokesman Oscar Saldana.....

[bourbon]

Drug cartels operate training camps near Texas border just inside Mexico, By ALFREDO CORCHADO. The Dallas Morning News, March 30, 2008.

Mexican drug cartels have conducted military-style training camps in at least six such locations in northern Tamaulipas and Nuevo León states, some within a few miles of the Texas border, according to U.S. and Mexican authorities and the printed testimony of five protected witnesses who were trained in the camps.

The camps near the Texas border and at other locations in Mexico are used to train cartel recruits – ranging from Mexican army deserters to American teenagers – who then carry out killings and other cartel assignments on both sides of the border, authorities say.

[Surferbeetle]

From the April 19, 2008 edition of the LA Times

MEXICO CITY -- Mexicans are spending more on bribes than they were just a few years ago.

They paid the equivalent of about $2.6 billion in bribes last year, according to the nonprofit group Transparency Mexico. That's 42% more than two years earlier and an average of more than $24 for each of the country's 105 million people. Much of the money went to have garbage collected, parking tickets fixed or to get parking spots from the legions of informal attendants who block spaces, then charge for them.