By Robert S. Leiken.
INTRODUCTION
Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón staked his presidency on a military campaign against the country’s crime syndicates, deploying half of Mexico’s combat ready troops and tens of thousands of federal police in 18 states. The conflict has caused 50,000 deaths, more than five times what America has lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. In Washington, several high officials and political leaders assert that Mexico faces an insurgency that may require
American military assistance.
But is Mexico’s “war” a low intensity conflict or a high intensity crime scene? Does Mexico face a “criminal insurgency” or a turf war? Does the situation present a national security threat or a law enforcement crisis? Should it be addressed primarily by the military or the police? Should the U.S. be sending military or police advisors? Is the current death toll an inevitable by-product of strategic progress or a signal of failure
Background
Two years ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Council on Foreign Relations that in Mexico …we face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency, in Mexico and in Central America….And these drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency — you know, all of a sudden car bombs show up, which weren’t there before. So it’s becoming — it’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narco traffickers control…certain parts of the country…
The comment disconcerted many in Mexico including its president who reportedly communicated his concern to President Barack Obama. The latter promptly and publicly rejected the Colombia analogy, stating “Mexico is a vast and progressive democracy with a growing economy, and as a result you cannot compare what is happening in Mexico with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago.”
Both of these clashing appraisals are questionable, recognizes that Mexico matters for many reasons: our strategic stability to the south (and hence to freedom of action elsewhere), our border security, as an important market for our goods and capital, as a source of energy, a destination for tourists, a primary source of immigration, and for our narcotics control and domestic law enforcement. This common ground notwithstanding, Clinton remained steadfast in her original conviction, as she made clear a few weeks later at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club.
And the Secretary was by no means alone. Two weeks before the respected ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Richard Lugar called for increasing U.S. military assistance to combat Mexico’s “narco insurgency.”
The alarm registered by the foreign policy leaders of the two political parties reflects a disquiet in Washington that has spread as Mexico’s violence has escalated in both scope and scale. Mexican officials now speak of a “national security threat” while many in Washington talk of a “criminal insurgency.” This last formulation is especially popular in the Pentagon at a time when the United States is waging two counter-insurgencies overseas.
Those wars gave special currency to counterinsurgency doctrine or COIN. COIN offers a strategic doctrine that stresses the protection and mobilization of the local population, winning their support to “clear, hold and build.” The doctrine was born in counter-insurgency warfare in Malaysia and Vietnam, promptly forgotten in the era of high-tech bombardment of the Balkans and Iraq, and then resurrected by General David Petraeus for American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is a form of warfare with which the United States has become familiar as it confronts small wars and terrorism—loosely grouped as “insurgencies.” Thanks to the success of the Iraq “surge,” COIN advocates have built an influential network of support in Washington.
The doctrine has bi-partisan appeal. It has been embraced by Republicans in Iraq and by President Obama in Afghanistan. Conservatives like COIN because it projects U.S. power. Liberals, or at least “liberal internationalists,” like it because it promises to “win hearts and minds.” COIN’s foremost advocate is the Center for a New American Security [CNAS], whose funders include the Department of Defense, each of the military services, and many prominent defense contractors.
The think tank’s founders and alumni include former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michelle Flournoy, and current Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Kurt Campbell. In September CNAS released a study that described Leiken the conflict in Mexico as “no longer simply a crime problem, but a threat that is metastasizing into a new form of widespread, networked criminal insurgency.”
The report argues that Mexico’s “insurgent cartels…increasingly challenge the government directly.” In November Washington Post columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos, citing the CNAS report, complained that “the Mexican elite class and military remain too proud to do what they immediately should: Call in the Marines.”
Though the Mexican insurgency paradigm clearly enjoys support from influential Washington figures and institutions, not everyone shares this view. Asked to comment on the Secretary of State’s formulation, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, swiftly noted that the conflict in Mexico “is not a matter of a militarized group within society seeking to take control of the state for political reasons.”
7 At a meeting of The Center for the National Interest’s Mexico discussion group Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue called the Clinton-CNAS formulation “a misleading characterization,” albeit one “prompted by legitimate alarm at Mexico’s spiraling and spreading violence.” At the same meeting John Bailey, director of the Mexico Project at Georgetown University, suggested that what was occurring in Mexico was not “a low intensity conflict” but “a high intensity crime war.” Bailey suggested that Mexican blood is being shed not in an insurgency but in combat among drug cartels that is unprecedented in scope and arsenal.
Similarly, Luis Astorga and David Shirk argued in a paper for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars that the violence “reflects internecine conflicts between organized crime groups.”Two other informed observers reached the same conclusion that “most of the violence has been the result of competition and rivalries among the cartels….”
Mexican officials themselves estimate that “90% of the dead are involved in the drug trade, another 6% are police officers and soldiers,” the rest innocent by-standers. top government advisor and spokesperson, Joaquin Villalobos, asserted in January 2010 that “of the 25,000 deaths registered to date, 90% are from the cartels and the rest are civilians and members of the security forces.”
Those ratios bear no semblance to those of an insurgency—like in Vietnam, El Salvador, Colombia, or Iraq. Phillip Caputo noted in the fall of 2009 that of the many things Mexico lacks these days, …clarity is near the top of the list. It is dangerous to know the truth.
Finding it is frustrating. Statements by U.S. and Mexican government officials, repeated by a news media that prefers simple story lines, have fostered the impression in the United States that the conflict in Mexico is between Calderón’s white hats and the crime syndicates’ black hats.The reality is far more complicated, as suggested by this statistic: out of Mexico’s Drug War those 14,000 dead, fewer than 100 have been soldiers. Presumably, army casualties would be far higher if the war were as straightforward as it’s often made out to be.
What does appear clear-cut, if colossal, is the arsenal the crime syndicates deploy. They can attack with surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank rockets, grenade launchers, bazookas, armor-piercing munitions, not to mention military-grade assault rifles, and 50-caliber machine guns. They defend themselves in Kevlar ballistic helmets, body armor and night vision goggles. These sophisticated arms and the emergence of hierarchical cell structures are only some of the phenomena that has led a number of analysts and journalists to fashion the oxymoron “criminal insurgency.”
Mexican cartels have employed psychological operations, fomented anti-government protests, attacked both police and military in infantry style assaults, assassinated political officials [and] journalists, beheaded and maimed their victims, to amplify the strategic impact of their attacks, and co-opted and corrupted the military, police and political officials at all levels of government. The result is… a set of interlocking “criminal insurgencies” culminating in virtual civil war.
Drug smuggling from and through Mexico dates back to the prohibition era, when bootleggers smuggled rum across the country’s northern border. As the century progressed, criminals turned to marijuana, heroin, and, most recently, cocaine and methamphetamines for new sources of revenue. The ruling PRI chose to co-opt rather than confront these criminal groups, in line with a culture of corruption and impunity. But while organized crime organizations penetrated local state and even federal governments and drug “cartels” (a.k.a. Drug Trafficking Organizations or DTOs) proliferated, their presence seldom affected wider Mexican society.
This began to change under President Vicente Fox. In 2005, Fox announced “the mother of all battles” and, for the first time in history, deployed the military against Mexico’s transnational crime organizations (TCOs). His successor, Felipe Calderón, dramatically expanded this policy when he entered office in December 2006. Under his plan, the military targeted the TCOs’ logistical and financial networks. Troops would establish checkpoints, interdict drug shipments, fumigate marijuana and opium crops, and capture the most important leaders and strategists.
The military would also coordinate with local security forces to retake and secure territory. Over the next four years, this strategy would involve over 50,000 troops and 5,000 federal police…
To read more about this report please go to: http://cftni.org/42460_CNI_web.pdf
