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History > 2011 > USA / Mexico > Drugs war (I)
Raids Don’t Keep Tunnel City
From Humming Underground
December 1,
2011
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE
TIJUANA,
Mexico — Squatting and sweating inside the latest drug tunnel found here in this
Pacific border city, it was easy to understand the amazement expressed by
Mexican and American officials. This one was a stunner.
The tunnel ran for almost half a mile, with wooden planks holding off the earth
on all sides. Energy-saving light bulbs illuminated the route. A motorized cart
on metal rails ensured quick passage, while a steel elevator hidden beneath the
floor tiles in a warehouse made the 40-foot descent to the tunnel’s entrance
feel like the slow drop into an unregulated mine shaft.
And yet, here is the simple fact obscured by superlatives like “the most
elaborate” and “the most sophisticated,” which officials seem to lather on each
new find.
Tunnels are Tijuana. They have become an inevitable, always-under-construction
or always-operating part of city life, as entrenched as cheap pharmacies and
strip clubs.
Residents now shrug them off. “If you have a lot of money, you can do anything,”
said Blanca Samaniego, 36, as she walked by the warehouse where Mexican
officials unveiled the tunnel on Wednesday. “It will never change. It will never
stop.”
The ground beneath her neighborhood in the hills — near the airport and the
upgraded, shimmering border fence patrolled 24/7 by American agents — has been
punched full of holes for years. Almost every kind of building has been used to
hide a logistical operation that is as much about the American taste for a high
as it is about the low-down removal of dirt.
Just a few weeks ago, below a more rudimentary warehouse nearby, the authorities
found a different tunnel with an elaborate ventilation system. A few blocks from
that, there sits an empty flophouse, where thick concrete now caps a passageway
discovered by the authorities last year. Farther east, residents note a tunnel
found in 2008, and just past the next major intersection, there are two more:
one under a small home and the other below a bodega across from a factory.
Other tunnels have been found downtown, near the main border crossing. Wherever
there is a border fence climbing high, there seems to have been an attempt to
burrow below, usually to a parking lot in California where drugs can be hauled
through a manhole cover, or to a business that almost looks legitimate.
In the latest case, the tunnel ran to Hernandez Produce Warehouse, a fruit and
vegetable company in California whose only product seemed to be green and best
when smoked.
Luis Ituarte, 69, an artist who runs a gallery here called La Casa del Túnel —
where a tunnel was found about decade ago — said that Tijuana officials would be
smart to move beyond publicizing their subterranean finds and then shutting them
down. He argued that Tijuana should capitalize on its historic identity as a
city that has been serving up vice since 1907, when President Porfirio Díaz
legalized gambling, or 1920, when the United States made alcohol illegal.
“Las Vegas, Tijuana and Havana were all built by the same kind of people,” Mr.
Ituarte said. “Only Vegas has taken on its bad reputation.”
Not that this is the direction things are heading. The mayor here recently
rejected demands from cultural groups asking to take over La Ocho, a notorious
prison that had been decommissioned.
Mexican Army officials, during a tour of this week’s elaborate tunnel, mostly
focused on the triumph of the discovery.
“These are achievements that increase public security,” said Gen. Gilberto
Landeros, standing at the tunnel entrance as local reporters took snapshots of
one another in front of the long, dim hole. “We’re pounding at the economy of
narcotrafficking.”
At the very least, he had a lot of marijuana to point to. Hefty bricks of the
stuff, wrapped tightly in orange and green plastic, surrounded him when he
announced the discovery of the tunnel inside the empty warehouse here in
Tijuana. The total haul, from both sides and a truck driven from the site in San
Diego, was 32.4 tons, with a street value of about $65 million — a new record
for a tunnel-related seizure, according to American officials.
Harder to see, unmentioned, but easy to imagine: how many tons moved across
before that load was found.
The evidence around the tunnel — worn-out soccer cleats, dusty oscillating fans,
empty water bottles — suggested that the operation had been going for months, a
supposition Mexican officials did not deny. At that rate, hundreds of tons of
marijuana worth hundreds of millions of dollars would have moved through this
one tunnel during its life span.
Most likely somewhere nearby, in another tunnel, the flow continues. The next
announcement and news tour may be only weeks away.
Raids Don’t Keep Tunnel City From Humming Underground, NYT, 1.12.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/world/americas/despite-raids-tijuana-tunnels-keep-humming-underground.html
D.E.A.
Squads Extend Reach of Drug War
November 6,
2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
WASHINGTON
— Late on a moonless night last March, a plane smuggling nearly half a ton of
cocaine touched down at a remote airstrip in Honduras. A heavily armed ground
crew was waiting for it — as were Honduran security forces. After a 20-minute
firefight, a Honduran officer was wounded and two drug traffickers lay dead.
Several news outlets briefly reported the episode, mentioning that a Honduran
official said the United States Drug Enforcement Administration had provided
support. But none of the reports included a striking detail: that support
consisted of an elite detachment of military-trained D.E.A. special agents who
joined in the shootout, according to a person familiar with the episode.
The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for
the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including Haiti,
Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize — that are battling drug
cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.
The program — called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — was
created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked
drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under
President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.
“You have got to have special skills and equipment to be able to operate
effectively and safely in environments like this,” said Michael A. Braun, a
former head of operations for the drug agency who helped design the program.
“The D.E.A. is working shoulder-to-shoulder in harm’s way with host-nation
counterparts.”
The evolution of the program into a global enforcement arm reflects the United
States’ growing reach in combating drug cartels and how policy makers
increasingly are blurring the line between law enforcement and military
activities, fusing elements of the “war on drugs” with the “war on terrorism.”
Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami professor who specializes in Latin America
and counternarcotics, said the commando program carries potential benefits: the
American teams could help arrest kingpins, seize stockpiles, disrupt smuggling
routes and professionalize security forces in small countries through which
traffickers pass drugs headed to the United States.
But there are also potential dangers.
“It could lead to a nationalist backlash in the countries involved,” he said.
“If an American is killed, the administration and the D.E.A. could get mired in
Congressional oversight hearings. Taking out kingpins could fragment the
organization and lead to more violence. And it won’t permanently stop
trafficking unless a country also has capable institutions, which often don’t
exist in Central America.”
Because the presence of armed Americans on their soil raises sensitivities about
sovereignty, some countries that have sought the assistance of the United States
will not acknowledge it, and the D.E.A. is reluctant to disclose the details of
the commando teams’ deployments. Others — like Mexico, which has accepted
American help, including surveillance drones — have not wanted the commando
squads.
Federal law prohibits the drug agency from directly carrying out arrests
overseas, but agents are permitted to accompany their foreign counterparts on
operations. The Americans work with specially vetted units of local security
forces that they train and mentor. In “exigent circumstances,” they may open
fire to protect themselves or partners.
The firefight in Honduras last March, described by officials of both countries,
illustrates the flexibility of such rules. The Honduran minister of public
security at the time, Oscar Álvarez, said that under the agreement with the
D.E.A., the Americans normally did not go on missions.
But in that case, he said, a training exercise went live: an American squad was
working with a Honduran police unit in La Mosquitia rainforest when they
received word that a suspicious plane from Venezuela was being tracked to a
clandestine landing strip nearby.
After the plane landed, the Honduran police identified themselves and the
traffickers opened fire, officials of both countries said. After a 20-minute
gunfight, the Hondurans and Americans seized the cocaine and withdrew to
evacuate the wounded officer.
“I don’t want to say it was Vietnam-style, but it was typical of war action,”
said Mr. Álvarez; he declined to say whether the Americans took part in the
shooting, but another person familiar with the episode said they did.
The FAST program is similar to a D.E.A. operation in the late 1980s and early
1990s in which drug enforcement agents received military training and entered
into partnerships with local forces in places like Peru and Bolivia, targeting
smuggling airstrips and jungle labs.
The Reagan-era initiative, though, drew criticism from agency supervisors who
disliked the disruption of supplying agents for temporary rotations, and
questioned whether its benefits outweighed the risks and cost. The Clinton
administration was moving to shut down the operation when five agents died in a
plane crash in Peru in 1994, sealing its fate.
In 2000, when the United States expanded assistance to Colombia in its battle
against the narcotics-financed insurgent group called FARC, the trainers were
military, not D.E.A. But after the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush
administration assigned Mr. Braun, a veteran of the earlier effort, to design a
new program.
Begun in 2005, the program has five squads, each with 10 agents. Many are
military veterans, and the section is overseen by a former member of the Navy
Seals, Richard Dobrich. The Pentagon has provided most of their training and
equipment, and they routinely fly on military aircraft.
The deployments to Afghanistan have resulted in large seizures of drugs, and
some tragedy: two of the three D.E.A. agents who died in a helicopter crash in
October 2009 were with FAST. Last week, an agent was shot in the head when his
squad came under fire while leaving a bazaar where they had just seized 3,000
kilograms, about 6,600 pounds, of poppy seeds and 50 kilograms, about 110
pounds, of opium. Airlifted to Germany in critical condition, he is expected to
survive, an official said.
The commandos have also been deployed at least 15 times to Latin America. The
D.E.A. said some of those missions involved only training, but officials
declined to provide details. Still, glimpses of the program emerged in
interviews with current and former American and foreign officials, briefing
files, budget documents and several State Department cables released by
WikiLeaks.
For example, an American team assisted Guatemalan forces in the March 2011
arrest of Juan Alberto Ortiz-López, whom the D.E.A. considered a top cocaine
smuggler for the Sinaloa cartel, an official said. Videos of the raid show
masked men in black tactical garb; it is unclear if any are Americans.
A diplomatic cable describes another mission in Guatemala. On July 21, 2009,
seven American military helicopters carrying D.E.A. and Guatemalan security
forces flew to the compound of a wealthy family, the Lorenzanas — four of whom
were wanted in the United States on drug trafficking charges.
After a “small firefight” in which a bullet grazed a Lorenzana family member,
agents found “large numbers of weapons and amounts of cash” but not the targets,
who may have been tipped off, according to the cable. The Guatemalan news media
documented the failure, portraying the joint operation as a “D.E.A. raid.”
A former head of Guatemala’s national security council, Francisco Jiménez, said
in an interview that American participation in such operations was an “open
secret” but rarely acknowledged.
In October 2009, another official said, the agency deployed a squad aboard a
Navy amphibious assault ship, the Wasp, off the coast of Haiti and the Dominican
Republic, where it focused on planes used for smuggling.
Cables also show the agency has twice come close to deploying one of its units
to the Darién region of Panama, where FARC incursions have established cocaine
smuggling routes. But both missions were aborted, for fears that it was too
unsafe for the Americans or that their involvement could escalate the conflict.
FAST has repeatedly deployed squads to Haiti, helping to arrest three fugitives
this year and train 100 Haitian counternarcotics officers this fall. Mario
Andresol, the Haitian police chief, says he needs such help. “We know the
smuggling routes,” he said, “but the problem is we don’t have enough people to
go after them.”
Randal C.
Archibold contributed reporting from Honduras and Haiti,
and Ginger
Thompson from Washington.
D.E.A. Squads Extend Reach of Drug War, NYT, 6.11.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/world/
americas/united-states-drug-enforcement-agency-squads-extend-reach-of-drug-war.html
76
Arrested as Officials Break Up
Mexico-to-Arizona Drug-Smuggling Ring
October 31,
2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY
PHOENIX —
Law enforcement officials on Monday announced the breakup of a large
drug-smuggling ring that used lookouts on hilltops in southern Arizona to move
huge quantities of marijuana and other drugs across the Mexican border to users
throughout the United States.
Over the last month and a half, federal, state and local officials have arrested
76 people, from organizational bosses to stash-house guards to those who
transported the drugs in backpacks and in vehicles, the authorities said. All
were linked to the Sinaloa cartel run by Joaquín Guzmán, Mexico’s richest and
most wanted outlaw, who goes by the nickname El Chapo, officials said.
Speaking at a news conference on Monday, Arizona officials estimated that the
ring had been in operation for at least five years and had generated more than
$2 billion in profits by smuggling more than three million pounds of marijuana,
20,000 pounds of cocaine and 10,000 pounds of heroin into the United States.
Such large smuggling rings usually use tractor-trailers to get their contraband
across, the authorities said, but this operation relied mostly on migrants on
foot straining under their loads.
The authorities acknowledged that the huge smuggling ring operated under their
noses, in rugged terrain that is difficult to patrol. The drugs would be carried
across the border in relatively small quantities and then transported north to a
network of stash houses in the Phoenix area. From there, the contraband would be
sold to distributors nationwide.
The route was through the most desolate desert areas of southern Arizona, from
Yuma to just east of the border community of Sells, including the sprawling
Tohono O’odham Indian reservation. Spotters with radios or cellphones were used
to point out the presence of law enforcement and divert loads, the authorities
said.
The investigation began in June of last year with a traffic stop in Pinal County
of a suspect who later provided details of the operation, said Sheriff Paul
Babeu. Sheriff Babeu, who is considering a run for Congress, cited the arrests
to buttress his argument that the border remains porous, despite the Obama
administration’s insistence that it was more secure than ever. About half of
those arrested were illegal immigrants and the other half were American citizens
or holders of valid visas, officials said.
While calling the arrests a blow to the smugglers, the authorities were cautious
in declaring victory.
“I expect there will be a shift,” said Matthew Allen, special agent in charge of
Arizona for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security
Investigations. “One investigation is not going to put them out of business. We
have to continually adapt.”
Last month, the authorities were reminded of how challenging the drug war had
become when they arrested a Homeland Security official stationed at the border,
charging him with leading the police on a chase through the desert during which
he hurled packages of marijuana from his government vehicle.
Last week, a federal grand jury in Tucson handed up an indictment charging a
Border Patrol agent with accepting a bribe to let a truck that he believed was
smuggling drugs and migrants past a checkpoint in southern Arizona, federal
officials said. When the agent asked the driver if he was a United States
citizen, the driver responded “buenos dias” and was waved through, officials
said.
Mr. Guzman has made buying off the Mexican authorities his trademark, which has
frustrated efforts to capture him from the mountain hamlets where he operates.
President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, who has been criticized for not catching
the country’s No. 1 drug lord, recently said he suspected that Mr. Guzman may be
hiding in the United States. American officials said they had no evidence to
back up that claim.
76 Arrested as Officials Break Up Mexico-to-Arizona Drug-Smuggling Ring, NYT,
31.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/us/officials-bust-drug-smuggling-ring-linked-to-mexican-cartel.html
U.S.
Widens Role in Mexican Fight
August 25,
2011
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and GINGER THOMPSON
WASHINGTON
— The Obama administration has expanded its role in Mexico’s fight against
organized crime by allowing the Mexican police to stage cross-border drug raids
from inside the United States, according to senior administration and military
officials.
Mexican commandos have discreetly traveled to the United States, assembled at
designated areas and dispatched helicopter missions back across the border aimed
at suspected drug traffickers. The Drug Enforcement Administration provides
logistical support on the American side of the border, officials said, arranging
staging areas and sharing intelligence that helps guide Mexico’s decisions about
targets and tactics.
Officials said these so-called boomerang operations were intended to evade the
surveillance — and corrupting influences — of the criminal organizations that
closely monitor the movements of security forces inside Mexico. And they said
the efforts were meant to provide settings with tight security for American and
Mexican law enforcement officers to collaborate in their pursuit of criminals
who operate on both sides of the border.
Although the operations remain rare, they are part of a broadening American
campaign aimed at blunting the power of Mexican cartels that have built criminal
networks spanning the world and have started a wave of violence in Mexico that
has left more than 35,000 people dead.
Many aspects of the campaign remain secret, because of legal and political
sensitivities. But in recent months, details have begun to emerge, revealing
efforts that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Mexico’s president,
Felipe Calderón, who was elected in 2006, has broken with his country’s historic
suspicion of the United States and has enlisted Washington’s help in defeating
the cartels, a central priority for his government.
American Predator and Global Hawk drones now fly deep over Mexico to capture
video of drug production facilities and smuggling routes. Manned American
aircraft fly over Mexican targets to eavesdrop on cellphone communications. And
the D.E.A. has set up an intelligence outpost — staffed by Central Intelligence
Agency operatives and retired American military personnel — on a Mexican
military base.
“There has always been a willingness and desire on the part of the United States
to play more of a role in Mexico’s efforts,” said Eric L. Olson, an expert on
Mexico at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “But there have been some groundbreaking
developments on the Mexican side where we’re seeing officials who are willing to
take some risks, even political risks, by working closely with the United States
to carry out very sensitive missions.”
Still, the cooperation remains a source of political tensions, especially in
Mexico where the political classes have been leery of the United States dating
from the Mexican-American War of 1846. Recent disclosures about the expanding
United States’ role in the country’s main national security efforts have set off
a storm of angry assertions that Mr. Calderón has put his own political
interests ahead of Mexican sovereignty. Mr. Calderón’s political party faces an
election next year that is viewed in part as a referendum on his decision to
roll out this campaign against drug traffickers.
Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns walked into that storm during a visit
to Mexico this month and strongly defended the partnership the two governments
had developed.
“I’ll simply repeat that there are clear limits to our role,” Mr. Burns said.
“Our role is not to conduct operations. It is not to engage in law enforcement
activities. That is the role of the Mexican authorities. And that’s the way it
should be.”
Officials said Mexico and the United States began discussing the possibility of
cross-border missions two years ago, when Mexico’s crime wave hit the important
industrial corridor between Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo. To avoid being detected,
the Mexican police traveled to the United States in plain clothes on commercial
flights, two military officials said. Later the officers were transported back
to Mexico on Mexican aircraft, which dropped the agents at or near their
targets.
“The cartels don’t expect Mexican police coming from the U.S.,” said one senior
military official. None of the officials interviewed about the boomerang
operations would speak publicly about them, and refused to provide details about
where they were conducted or what criminal organizations had been singled out.
They said that the operations had been carried out only a couple of times in the
last 18 months, and that they had not resulted in any significant arrests.
The officials insisted that the Pentagon is not involved in the cross-border
operations, and that no Americans take part in drug raids on Mexican territory.
“These are not joint operations,” said one senior administration official. “They
are self-contained Mexican operations where staging areas were provided by the
United States.”
Former American law enforcement officials who were once posted in Mexico
described the boomerang operations as a new take on an old strategy that was
briefly used in the late 1990s, when the D.E.A. helped Mexico crack down on the
Tijuana Cartel.
To avoid the risks of the cartel being tipped off to police movements by
lookouts or police officials themselves, the former officers said, the D.E.A.
arranged for specially vetted Mexican police to stage operations out of Camp
Pendleton in San Diego. The Mexican officers were not given the names of the
targets of their operations until they were securely sequestered on the base.
And they were not given the logistical details of the mission until shortly
before it was under way.
“They were a kind of rapid-reaction force,” said one former senior D.E.A.
official. “It was an effective strategy at the time.”
Another former D.E.A. official said that the older operations resulted in the
arrests of a handful of midlevel cartel leaders. But, he said, it was ended in
2000 when cartel leaders struck back by kidnapping, torturing and killing a
counternarcotics official in the Mexican attorney general’s office, along with
two fellow drug agents.
In recent months, Mexico agreed to post a team of D.E.A. agents, C.I.A.
operatives and retired American military officials on a Mexican military base to
help conduct intelligence operations, bolstering the work of a similar “fusion
cell” already in Mexico City.
Meanwhile the Pentagon is steadily overhauling the parts of the military
responsible for the drug fight, paying particular attention to some lessons of
nearly a decade of counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. At
Northern Command — the military’s Colorado Springs headquarters responsible for
North American operations — several top officers with years of experience in
fighting Al Qaeda and affiliated groups are poring over intelligence about
Mexican drug networks.
One officer said, “The military is trying to take what it did in Afghanistan and
do the same in Mexico.”
That’s exactly what some Mexicans are afraid of, said a Mexican political
scientist, Denise Dresser, who is an expert on that country’s relations with the
United States.
“I’m not necessarily opposed to greater American involvement,” Ms. Dresser said.
“But if that’s the way the Mexican government wants to go, it needs to come
clean about it. Just look at what we learned from Iraq. Secrecy led to
malfeasance. It led to corrupt contracting. It led to torture. It led to
instability. And who knows when those problems will be resolved.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting, and Barclay Walsh contributed research.
U.S. Widens Role in Mexican Fight, NYT, 25.8.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/world/americas/26drugs.html
U.S.
Widens Its Role in Battle Against Mexico’s Drug Cartels
August 6,
2011
The New York Times
By GINGER THOMPSON
WASHINGTON
— The United States is expanding its role in Mexico’s bloody fight against drug
trafficking organizations, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military
personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security
contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far
has shown few results.
In recent weeks, small numbers of C.I.A. operatives and American civilian
military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, where, for the
first time, security officials from both countries work side by side in
collecting information about drug cartels and helping plan operations. Officials
are also looking into embedding a team of American contractors inside a
specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit.
Officials on both sides of the border say the new efforts have been devised to
get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating
on its soil, and to prevent advanced American surveillance technology from
falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of
corruption.
“A sea change has occurred over the past years in how effective Mexico and U.S.
intelligence exchanges have become,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador
to the United States. “It is underpinned by the understanding that transnational
organized crime can only be successfully confronted by working hand in hand, and
that the outcome is as simple as it is compelling: we will together succeed or
together fail.”
The latest steps come three years after the United States began increasing its
security assistance to Mexico with the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative and tens
of millions of dollars from the Defense Department. They also come a year before
elections in both countries, when President Obama may confront questions about
the threat of violence spilling over the border, and President Felipe Calderón’s
political party faces a Mexican electorate that is almost certainly going to ask
why it should stick with a fight that has left nearly 45,000 people dead.
“The pressure is going to be especially strong in Mexico, where I expect there
will be a lot more raids, a lot more arrests and a lot more parading drug
traffickers in front of cameras,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics
expert at the Brookings Institution. “But I would also expect a lot of
questioning of Merida, and some people asking about the way the money is spent,
or demanding that the government send it back to the gringos.”
Mexico has become ground zero in the American counternarcotics fight since its
cartels have cornered the market and are responsible for more than 80 percent of
the drugs that enter the United States. American counternarcotics assistance
there has grown faster in recent years than to Afghanistan and Colombia. And in
the last three years, officials said, exchanges of intelligence between the
United States and Mexico have helped security forces there capture or kill some
30 mid- to high-level drug traffickers, compared with just two such arrests in
the previous five years.
The United States has trained nearly 4,500 new federal police agents and
assisted in conducting wiretaps, running informants and interrogating suspects.
The Pentagon has provided sophisticated equipment, including Black Hawk
helicopters, and in recent months it has begun flying unarmed surveillance
drones over Mexican soil to track drug kingpins.
Still, it is hard to say much real progress has been made in crippling the
brutal cartels or stemming the flow of drugs and guns across the border.
Mexico’s justice system remains so weakened by corruption that even the most
notorious criminals have not been successfully prosecuted.
“The government has argued that the number of deaths in Mexico is proof positive
that the strategy is working and that the cartels are being weakened,” said Nik
Steinberg, a specialist on Mexico at Human Rights Watch. “But the data is
indisputable — the violence is increasing, human rights abuses have skyrocketed
and accountability both for officials who commit abuses and alleged criminals is
at rock bottom.”
Mexican and American officials involved in the fight against organized crime do
not see it that way. They say the efforts begun under President Obama are only a
few years old, and that it is too soon for final judgments. Dan Restrepo, Mr.
Obama’s senior Latin American adviser, refused to talk about operational changes
in the security relationship, but said, “I think we are in a fundamentally
different place than we were three years ago.”
A senior Mexican official, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed. “This is
the game-changer in degrading transnational organized crime,” he said, adding:
“It can’t be a two-, three-, four-, five- or six-year policy. For this policy
investment to work, it has to be sustained long-term.”
Several Mexican and American security analysts compared the challenges of
helping Mexico rebuild its security forces and civil institutions — crippled by
more than seven decades under authoritarian rule — to similar tests in
Afghanistan. They see the United States fighting alongside a partner it needs
but does not completely trust.
Though the new United States ambassador to Mexico was plucked from an assignment
in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Obama administration bristles at such comparisons,
saying Mexico’s growing economy and functioning, though fragile, institutions
put it far ahead of Afghanistan. Instead, administration officials more
frequently compare Mexico’s struggle to the one Colombia began some 15 years
ago.
Among the most important lessons they have learned, they say, is that in almost
any fight against organized crime, things tend to get worse before they get
better.
When violence spiked last year around Mexico’s industrial capital, Monterrey,
Mr. Calderón’s government asked the United States for more access to
sophisticated surveillance technology and expertise. After months of
negotiations, the United States established an intelligence post on a northern
Mexican military base, moving Washington beyond its traditional role of sharing
information to being more directly involved in gathering it.
American officials declined to provide details about the work being done by the
American team of fewer than two dozen Drug Enforcement Administration agents,
C.I.A. officials and retired military personnel members from the Pentagon’s
Northern Command. For security reasons, they asked The New York Times not to
disclose the location of the compound.
But the officials said the compound had been modeled after “fusion intelligence
centers” that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor
insurgent groups, and that the United States would strictly play a supporting
role.
“The Mexicans are in charge," said one American military official. “It’s their
show. We’re all about technical support.”
The two countries have worked in lock step on numerous high-profile operations,
including the continuing investigation of the February murder of Jaime J.
Zapata, an American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
Mexico’s federal police chief, Genaro García Luna, put a helicopter in the air
within five minutes after receiving a call for help from Mr. Zapata’s partner,
the authorities said. Then he invited American officials to the police
intelligence center — an underground location known as “the bunker” — to work
directly with Mexican security forces in tracking down the suspects.
Mexican officials hand-carried shell casings recovered from the scene of the
shooting to Washington for forensics tests, allowed American officials to
conduct their own autopsy of the agent’s body and shipped the agent’s
bullet-battered car to the United States for inspection.
In another operation last week, the Drug Enforcement Administration and a
Mexican counternarcotics police unit collaborated on an operation that led to
the arrest of José Antonio Hernández Acosta, a suspected drug trafficker. The
authorities believe he is responsible for hundreds of deaths in the border city
of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, including the murders of two Americans employed at the
United States Consulate there.
While D.E.A. field officers were not on the scene — the Mexicans still draw the
line at that — the Americans helped develop tips and were in contact with the
Mexican unit almost every minute of the five-hour manhunt, according to a senior
American official in Mexico. The unit, of about 50 officers, is the focus of
another potentially ground-breaking plan that has not yet won approval. Several
former D.E.A. officials said the two countries were considering a proposal to
embed a group of private security contractors — including retired D.E.A. agents
and former Special Forces officers — inside the unit to conduct an on-the-job
training academy that would offer guidance in conducting operations so that
suspects can be successfully taken to court. Mexican prosecutors would also work
with the unit, the Americans said.
But a former American law enforcement official familiar with the unit described
it as one good apple in a barrel of bad ones. He said it was based on a compound
with dozens of other nonvetted officers, who provided a window on the challenges
that the Mexican police continue to face.
Some of the officers had not been issued weapons, and those who had guns had not
been properly trained to use them. They were required to pay for their helmets
and bulletproof vests out of their own pockets. And during an intense gun battle
against one of Mexico’s most vicious cartels, they had to communicate with one
another on their cellphones because they had not been issued police radios.
“It’s sort of shocking,” said Eric Olson of the Woodrow Wilson Center. “Mexico
is just now learning how to fight crime in the midst of a major crime wave. It’s
like trying to saddle your horse while running the Kentucky Derby.”
Eric Schmitt
contributed reporting.
U.S. Widens Its Role in Battle Against Mexico’s Drug Cartels, 6.8.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/world/07drugs.html
Analysis: Drugs war ignites Mexican fury at U.S. indifference
MEXICO CITY
| Fri Apr 29, 2011
10:32am EDT
Reuters
By Dave Graham
MEXICO CITY
(Reuters) - The United States has spent over $1 trillion promoting democracy in
far-flung Iraq and Afghanistan while friendly neighbor Mexico gets a fraction of
that to fight drug gangs and prevent a slide into chaos.
Mexico's frustration with the priority Washington grants to a shared crackdown
on drug gangs has plunged ties between the two allies to their lowest ebb in
years.
Last year alone, the U.S.-backed campaign launched in late 2006 by President
Felipe Calderon claimed the lives of over 15,000 people in Mexico. That was more
than double the combined civilian deaths reported in Afghanistan and Iraq, where
the United States has spent over $1.2 trillion in the past decade.
In contrast, Washington has pledged just $1.3 billion under the so-called Merida
Initiative to help Mexico fight the traffickers.
"The Merida Initiative is almost an insult," leading Mexican historian Enrique
Krauze told Reuters. "America spends a trillion dollars in Iraq and a hundred
million or so on Merida: Beautiful."
"Things aren't moving forward and I have no hope they will. We're looking at ten
years of war in Mexico. On our own. The Obama administration has been a huge
disappointment for us."
Despite quickly growing ties over the past two decades, investment and bilateral
trade worth some $400 billion a year could suffer if the two sides cannot end
the disputes that have dogged joint efforts to manage a conflict that some U.S.
lawmakers compare to the Iraq war.
Mexico's leaders argue the oil-rich nation is footing the bill for illegal U.S.
arms sales and the presence of the world's biggest market for illicit drugs
across the border.
U.S. attempts to set traps for arms traffickers and money launderers have
backfired and Washington has treated Mexico like a "laboratory" for experiments
in law-enforcement strategies, former foreign minister Rosario Green wrote in a
newspaper column recently.
U.S. officials counter such broadsides by saying Mexico has failed to address
rampant corruption in the police and the judiciary, hampering efforts to improve
on intelligence sharing.
The fight against the cartels will be under the spotlight again when U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets her Mexican counterpart Patricia
Espinosa in Washington on Friday.
THIRD FRONT
Tensions over the conflict, which has claimed over 37,000 lives in Mexico in the
past four years, boiled over last month when U.S. ambassador Carlos Pascual said
he would step down after weeks of pressure from the Mexican government.
"That a Mexican president can pick off the U.S. ambassador is something new."
said Jonathan Fox, a political scientist and Mexico expert at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. "That does suggest the U.S. needed to throw Calderon a
bone."
Mindful of its sovereignty, Mexico has resisted U.S. intervention on its turf,
but Calderon insists Washington is not trying hard enough to fight demand for
narcotics at home.
White House data shows U.S. federal spending on narcotics control dipped
slightly last year to just over $15 billion, even as drug war deaths surged to a
record high in Mexico. Texas Republican congressman Ted Poe refers to Mexico as
the United States' "third front" after Afghanistan and Iraq.
There is little to suggest the situation is improving.
This month, the worst mass graves of the drugs war have been found in the
northern border state of Tamaulipas.
The killing tide has bogged Calderon down in a war of words with Washington over
drug demand and exposed him to fire from domestic rivals who say he has
compromised national sovereignty by letting U.S. spy planes track cartels on
Mexican territory.
Calderon's conservative National Action Party has also taken a hit, and its lags
behind the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party in polls ahead of the
next presidential election in 2012.
The elections could make it even harder to repair Mexico's ties with the United
States, said Mexico expert George W. Grayson at the College of William and Mary
in Virginia.
"There's too much electoral capital to gain by bashing Uncle Sam in the run-up
to a presidential contest," said Grayson. "I think they will deteriorate until
then."
After humiliating defeats and land losses to its neighbor in the 1800s, Mexico's
politicians have long fed a myth that the United States is a "hungry wolf" bent
on evil, said Krauze.
In reality, years of cross-border migration, close business ties and the export
of U.S. popular culture had created strong bonds between the people of both
nations, he added.
Ordinary Mexicans are quick to criticize their own government for failing to
work better with the United States.
"If you ask me, they're preventing the Americans from doing more here," said
Mexico City resident Hector Lopez, 41.
Critics say the United States is loathe to do more in the drugs war unless it
feels pain directly. After suspected drug hitmen killed a U.S. customs agent in
Mexico in February, officials sprang into action, making a string of arrests of
traffickers in the United States.
Since then, the U.S. government has warned its citizens to avoid parts of
Mexico, to the frustration of Mexican officials worried about a drop in tourism
and investment.
(Additional
reporting by Tim Gaynor)
Analysis: Drugs war ignites Mexican fury at U.S.
indifference, R, 29.4.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/29/us-mexico-usa-idUSTRE73S3TY20110429
Mexico
extradites once-powerful drug lord to U.S.
MEXICO CITY
| Fri Apr 29, 2011
10:23pm EDT
Reuters
MEXICO CITY
(Reuters) - Mexico extradited once-powerful drug lord Benjamin Arellano Felix to
the United States on Friday in a renewed sign of U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the
drug fight.
Arellano Felix was head of the powerful Tijuana cartel and operated on the
Mexico-U.S. border near San Diego until his capture in Mexico in early 2002.
He faces charges in the United States of smuggling tons of cocaine into
California in the 1990s.
Serving a sentence in Mexico on organized crime charges, he was due to be
extradited in 2008, but a Mexican federal judge blocked that ruling. The
injunction was overturned in April last year.
Mexico's attorney general's office said in a statement that Arellano Felix was
handed over to U.S. agents at an airport outside Mexico City on Friday.
It was not immediately clear what sentence Arellano Felix might face if
convicted in the United States, but a U.S. official thanked Mexico for the
extradition.
"The extradition ... reflects our close collaboration with our Mexican law
enforcement partners to dismantle violent criminal organizations," said Lanny
Breuer, assistant attorney general of the criminal division.
Former Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cardenas, extradited to the United States by
Mexico in 2007, is serving a 25-year sentence in Texas without chance of parole.
The Tijuana cartel, also known as the Arellano Felix gang, is a shadow of its
former self after the deaths and capture of many of its leaders over the past
decade.
The Sinaloa cartel run by Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, has
largely taken over its turf.
A nephew of the brothers, Fernando Sanchez Arellano, has emerged as the Tijuana
cartel's leader, but his power is limited to collaborating with the Sinaloans,
U.S. and Mexican drug trade experts say.
Friday's extradition is not expected to influence the drug war raging in Mexico,
in which 37,000 people have died since late 2006, but reflects Mexican and U.S.
efforts to keep working together.
Tensions over the conflict boiled over last month when U.S. Ambassador Carlos
Pascual said he would step down after weeks of pressure from the Mexican
government.
President Felipe Calderon, under pressure in Mexico over his security strategy,
has become embroiled in a war of words with Washington over U.S. demand for
narcotics.
U.S. officials have said the Mexican government is not doing enough to clean up
endemic corruption in its police and courts that helps feed the violence.
(Reporting by
Miguel Angel Gutierrez; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Mexico extradites once-powerful drug lord to U.S., R, 29.4.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/30/us-mexico-drugs-idUSTRE73S68T20110430
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