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- Nearly every Mexican cartel has collapsed and fragmented so turf wars are inevitable
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AT: Law EnforcementCartels are resilient and diversified---they’ve adapted to a mafia model that isn’t dependent on drug traffickingElizabeth Dickinson 11, former Assistant Managing Editor at Foreign Policy and freelance journalist, 6/22/11, “Legalizing Drugs Won't Stop Mexico's Brutal Cartels,” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/22/legalizing_drugs_wont_stop_mexicos_brutal_cartels In other words, the war on drugs may be taking its toll on the narcotics trade, but it hasn't done anything to end the violence -- a stubborn fact that runs counter to an emerging consensus about the drug war. Across Latin America, intellectuals, scholars, and even policymakers are increasingly arguing that there is just one thing that can bring an end to the narco-troubles: the decriminalization of the drug trade in the United States. Legalize and regulate use, proponents argue, and prices would drop and the illicit trade would disappear overnight. Cartels would be starved of their piece of the global illicit drug pie, which the UNODC has estimated at some $320 billion per year.¶ But would legalization really work? With each day that passes, it looks like it wouldn't be enough, for one overarching reason: The cartels are becoming less like traffickers and more like mafias. Their currency is no longer just cocaine, methamphetamines, or heroin, though they earn revenue from each of these products. As they have grown in size and ambition, like so many big multinational corporations, they have diversified. The cartels are now active in all types of illicit markets, not just drugs.¶ "Mexico is experiencing a change with the emergence of criminal organizations that, rather than being product-oriented -- drug trafficking -- are territorial based," says Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the UNODC office in Mexico City. They now specialize in running protection rackets of all kinds, he says, which might explain why the violence has gotten so bad: Mafias enforce their territorial control by force, killing anyone who resists or gets in the way.¶ "Before, we had organized crime, but operating strictly in narcotrafficking," adds Eduardo Guerrero Gutiérrez, a consultant and former advisor to the Mexican presidency. "Now we have a type of mafia violence ... and they are extorting from the people at levels that are incredibly high -- from the rich, from businesses." For this reason, Mazzitelli says, legalization would have "little effect."¶ Cartels such as the Zetas and La Familia, long categorized as drug-trafficking organizations, have transformed themselves into territorial overlords. With distinctive zones of influence, complex organizations, and a wealth of manpower on which to draw, they act as shadow governments in the areas they control, collecting "taxes" on local establishments and taking a cut of the profits from illegal immigration to the United States. "This fight is not solely or primarily to stop drug trafficking," Mexican President Felipe Calderón told the U.S. Congress in May 2010. "The aim is to ensure the safety of Mexican families, who are under threat of abuse and wanton acts of criminals."¶ The cartels' expansion may have begun through their everyday narcotrafficking work -- namely through money laundering, one of the most discussed topics in Mexican politics today. Once upon a time, this was quite easy to do; cartels could wire the money in convoluted ways or open new accounts to which individuals would report earnings from businesses that existed only on paper.¶ But as the government cracked down in recent years, the cartels got more creative. In June 2010, Mexican authorities put strict limits on how much cash any individual could deposit into a bank on any given day or in any given month. They also limited the amount of cash one could use to buy things like airplanes or cars. So the cartels started engaging in actual trade, which helps them launder their drug profits, explains Shannon O'Neil, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. They buy consumer goods, such as televisions and perfumes, in the United States and sell them on the Mexican side at a loss. The revenues are "clean" money. And as a bonus, the cartels have a network of vendors ready and willing to sell illicit goods.¶ Other markets are entirely separate from the narcotics business. Perhaps the most dramatic example is oil, one of Mexico's largest exports and increasingly a vehicle for illicit trade. On June 1, the country's national oil company, Pemex, filed a lawsuit accusing nine U.S. companies of colluding with criminals linked to the drug trade to sell as estimated $300 million worth of stolen oil since 2006. That's an amount equal to the entire cocaine market in Mexico, says UNODC's Mazzitelli. In other words, if the cocaine trade dried up, the cartels would still have access to an equally large source of revenue.¶ Equally troubling is the firearms trade, which has a direct link both to the violence and to the sustainment of the criminal organizations working across this country of 107 million. There are no reliable estimates of just how big this market is, but according to a recent U.S. Senate investigation, some 87 percent of the weapons used by the cartels are sourced from the United States. "If this were Southeast Asia, they'd be bombing the gun stores in Arizona, as if that's the Ho Chi Minh trail," says Ted Lewis, head of the human rights program at Global Exchange.¶ Mexico's cartels have also infiltrated the government and security forces, though primarily at a local level. "Just going by all the reports -- academic and media -- we could safely assume that all municipal police departments are infiltrated," argues Walter McKay, a security consultant who has spent the last three years working in Mexico. "But it's not just the police. We focus on police and police corruption, but the entire apple is rotten." In the latest example of how high the rot goes, the ex-mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Hank Rhon, was recently arrested for gunrunning and alleged links to organized crime.¶ Then there is the cartels' sheer size. An estimated 468,000 people worked in the drug trade in 2008, making the cartels collectively among the biggest industries in Mexico. (By comparison, the state oil company, the largest firm in Mexico, has about 360,000 employees.) The cartels also now outnumber the police, estimated at just over 400,000 personnel nationwide in 2010. Nearly every Mexican cartel has collapsed and fragmented so turf wars are inevitableStratfor 1-22 [“In Mexico, the Delineation of Cartel Power Becomes More Complex” JANUARY 22, 2015, https://www.stratfor.com/image/mexico-delineation-cartel-power-becomes-more-complex, wyo-sc] Mexican organized crime became decidedly less organized in 2014. The regional challenges and leadership losses the Sinaloa Federation experienced in 2013 continued, particularly with the arrest of top leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera. Meanwhile, the lower-tier structures of the Sinaloa Federation, such as the subgroups operating in Chihuahua, Sonora and Baja California states, grew more independent from the cartel's remaining top-tier crime bosses.¶ Elsewhere, the remaining Gulf cartel factions in Tamaulipas state disintegrated further. Some cooperated in the same cities, while others waged particularly violent campaigns against one another. In Michoacan state, the Knights Templar were all but dismantled, leaving Servando "La Tuta" Gomez Martinez the sole remaining founding leader. Several crime groups, all based in the Tierra Caliente region of southwestern Mexico, from which the Knights Templar originated, filled the void left by the Knights Templar's absence.¶ Confusing as the devolution of organization crime groups is, three geographic centers of cartel activity exist at present: Tamaulipas state, Sinaloa state and the Tierra Caliente region. With the criminal landscape continuing to fracture, it is marked now by newly independent groups headed by leaders who previously had participated in the same criminal operations as their new rivals.¶ Though numerous turf wars between regional groups continued after 2012, Tierra Caliente-based organized crime expanded geographically thanks to the efforts of groups such as the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and the Knights Templar. Tierra Caliente, which means "hot lands," is a rural lowland area surrounded by mountainous terrain that was initially heavily valued by drug traffickers for marijuana cultivation, though for several years now it has produced primarily methamphetamines and heroin. The value of the region for organized crime increased along with the growth of the port of Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacan, making the state a key bridge between Mexico's coast and the interior and a key port for smuggling narcotics and chemical precursors. Turf wars that emerged or escalated within Tierra Caliente in 2012 — most notably the Knights Templar against the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and Guerreros Unidos against Los Rojos — have become some of the most violent disputes in Mexico and the source of what will be the Mexican government's greatest security concerns in 2015. cartels not involved with terrorism—their ev is politicizedKeating 8/25 [Joshua Keating, “El Qaida”: The Persistent, Baseless Claim That Terrorists Will Swarm the U.S. From Mexico, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/08/25/rick_perry_says_isis_could_sneak_into_the_u_s_from_mexico_the_el_qaida_meme.html, wyo-sc] The Mexican government is expressing some irritation with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who suggested last week that there’s a “very real possibility” that members of ISIS or other terrorist groups are entering the U.S. illegally via Mexico. As Perry acknowledged in his own remarks—and as the Pentagon confirmed—there’s “no clear evidence” that this is happening. But as is generally the case when fears of “El Qaida” periodically emerge, a lack of evidence is no barrier to bold sweeping claims.¶ Intelligence officials have warned for some time that there’s a possibility of terrorists entering the U.S. from Mexico, and there is indeed some evidence of groups like Hezbollah operating in South America. It would be foolish, then, to completely rule out the possibility that terrorists have crossed into the United States from down Mexico way. But the frequent claims that this is already a major problem are, well, ridiculous. ¶ Last year, for instance, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert declared on C-SPAN that "We know al-Qaida has camps over with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border” and that the group’s operatives are being trained to “act Hispanic.” This claim appears to have been based on essentially nothing.¶ Also last year, Deroy Murdock of National Review argued that “there are at least 7,518 reasons to get the U.S./Mexican border under control.” That figure refers to the number of citizens of State Department-listed “state sponsors of terrorism” arrested entering the U.S.—not just at the Mexican border—in fiscal 2011. More than half of those were from Cuba, a country which is still on the State Department’s list for a variety of reasons but whose immigrant population in the U.S. is not known as a hotbed of jihadist sentiment. (This isn’t to imply that those entering the U.S. from Syria or Afghanistan are likely terrorists. More likely, they’re fleeing terrorism.)¶ In 2012, Breitbart.com and a number of other conservative sites claimed that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had “admitted” that terrorists enter the U.S. from Mexico “from time to time.” The evidence for this supposed admission: what seems like a deliberate misreading of a garbled answer during congressional testimony. (Napolitano hasn’t always helped her own cause on this issue. In 2009 she had to walk back comments that seemed to suggest, falsely, that the 9/11 hijackers had entered the U.S. from Canada.)¶ The best-documented case of a connection between Middle Eastern terrorism and Mexican drug cartels was actually facilitated by the U.S. government. Mansour Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American car dealer in Texas, was arrested in 2011, and later convicted, after trying to recruit a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Obama administration’s allegations that senior Iranian officials were likely in on the plot were met with some skepticism at the time. Whether or not that part of it’s true, we do know that no actual Mexican gangs were involved: Arbabsiar’s contact was an undercover DEA agent.¶ The DEA also set up a 2009 bust involving a deal between alleged members of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and Colombia’s FARC to smuggle cocaine through West Africa to Europe. This was cited by the agency as evidence of the possibility of an “unholy alliance between South American narco-terrorists and Islamic extremists.” This despite the fact that there were never any actual South American narco-terrorists involved and DEA agents had set the whole thing up themselves. This case was also used in Congress to argue for tougher immigration rules—in this case, more scrutiny of travelers from Venezuela.¶ Again, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that someone planning an attack could sneak over the border. But the scant reports of terrorists trying to enter the U.S. illegally are far outnumbered by the numerous well-documented plots by native-born Americans, naturalized citizens, and foreigners entering the country with valid passports and visas.¶ Border security and counterterrorism are both important issues, but at this point the case for linking them seems pretty weak. No risk of nuclear terrorism---too many obstaclesJohn J. Mearsheimer 14, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, “America Unhinged”, January 2, nationalinterest.org/article/america-unhinged-9639?page=show Am I overlooking the obvious threat that strikes fear into the hearts of so many Americans, which is terrorism? Not at all. Sure, the United States has a terrorism problem. But it is a minor threat. There is no question we fell victim to a spectacular attack on September 11, but it did not cripple the United States in any meaningful way and another attack of that magnitude is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. Indeed, there has not been a single instance over the past twelve years of a terrorist organization exploding a primitive bomb on American soil, much less striking a major blow. Terrorism—most of it arising from domestic groups—was a much bigger problem in the United States during the 1970s than it has been since the Twin Towers were toppled.¶ What about the possibility that a terrorist group might obtain a nuclear weapon? Such an occurrence would be a game changer, but the chances of that happening are virtually nil. No nuclear-armed state is going to supply terrorists with a nuclear weapon because it would have no control over how the recipients might use that weapon. Political turmoil in a nuclear-armed state could in theory allow terrorists to grab a loose nuclear weapon, but the United States already has detailed plans to deal with that highly unlikely contingency.¶ Terrorists might also try to acquire fissile material and build their own bomb. But that scenario is extremely unlikely as well: there are significant obstacles to getting enough material and even bigger obstacles to building a bomb and then delivering it. More generally, virtually every country has a profound interest in making sure no terrorist group acquires a nuclear weapon, because they cannot be sure they will not be the target of a nuclear attack, either by the terrorists or another country the terrorists strike. Nuclear terrorism, in short, is not a serious threat. And to the extent that we should worry about it, the main remedy is to encourage and help other states to place nuclear materials in highly secure custody. Download 235.33 Kb. Share with your friends:
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