Monday, September 12, 2011
Mexico's Formidable Battle against Lawlessness and Mayhem
By Jerry Brewer
Mexico remains in war-like siege and continues to face a deadly enemy that aggressively confronts its police and military with paramilitary skills, and equal to superior armaments. This enemy viciously kills with impunity and clearly rivals and overwhelms virtually any enforcement-oriented action deployed to combat them.
President Felipe Calderon does not appear to have any difficulty in grasping the realities to be encountered in a sustained fight. Yet he faces growing skepticism of his continuing battle plan and many Mexicans are fleeing Mexican soil for safety. Adding pain to insult, he also faces those who want peace so badly; citizens that just want the government to leave the murdering organized criminals alone.
The defense of Mexico, by Mexican authorities, is clearly a necessity that poses significant future and additional challenges to defend a badly bruised and bloody homeland. The cell-like groups that move to areas of lesser control and resistance still maintain the ability to strike any region and inflict massive harm.
In Ciudad Juarez alone, just across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, nearly 10,000 people have been killed since 2008. Kidnapping, extortion, robbery, rape, and related violence rival drug trafficking.
Furthermore, Los Zetas, who are also pushing into and occupying regions of Guatemala and Honduras, are intricately involved in influencing elections by murder and intimidation.
And the U.S. is impacted by the hostile insurgencies with record numbers of asylum requests, as well as continuing and unknown numbers of illegal border crossings.
What does all of this mean to the U.S.?
There are those that wish to turn a blind eye to the massive carnage of human flesh along the southern border and beyond, into the northern triangle of Central America. The reality is that the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's most violent drug war city, recently warned that these organized assassins may be seeking U.S. targets in "a possible escalation of violence."
Recent and numerous captures of the drug trafficking principals (hierarchy) has prompted the rational concerns that retaliation may well in fact be the next order of business for this murdering and barbaric transnational conglomerate. This enemy without a flag has made it clear that they are just as capable as any international terrorist group of inflicting massive death and misery within a homeland.
One must wonder how much guidance or support they may have from rogue government regimes and their hostile intelligence services? These are those who spew anti U.S. rhetoric on a daily basis, and reject U.S. cooperation with Mexico in this valiant fight against hemispheric drug trafficking, insurgency, and organized crime.
Since 2005 Mexican organized criminals have unrelentingly been organizing and strengthening with a lampoonist-style of diplomatic immunity. And they have begun to clearly demonstrate their credentials as worldwide instruments of terror through their reign of assassinations, beheadings and massacres of innocent citizens as well as law enforcement, military and government personnel.
With all fairness to the Mexican government, they did not turn a blind eye to Nuevo Laredo as a precursor to what would eventually grow into a nation’s worst nightmare of lawlessness with huge losses of life and destruction.However, both Mexico and the U.S. graphically failed to identify the threat accurately, and they simply called it “local drug cartels fighting each other.”Moreover, this serious blunder continued as both sides labeled this elephant under a leaf as violence simply between rival drug gangs.
In Nuevo Laredo alone, local police, politicians and other enforcement officials that were not killed or kidnapped literally left their jobs and ran.
One police chief, Oscar Pimentel, hired in Nuevo Laredo after the massive firefight to replace the previous chief (Alejandro Dominguez) who was murdered just hours after taking office, showed his apprehension to be effective in enforcing the law. He stated that he was "not looking for bad guys to fight, nights on patrol, (or) raids" - and no crime scenes for him. "I have simply come here as a political figure for the mayor. The mayor told me I was not going to get directly involved in any police matters."
Mexico's government has been unceremoniously valiant in their efforts since this scourge reared its ugly and sinister head. U.S. support to identify, disrupt, and dismantle these killing machines has been steady and effective. Extensive and coordinated intelligence was one main ingredient necessary to fight this sophisticated enemy. It must be a sustained fight to restore the rule of law in Mexico.
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Jerry Brewer is C.E.O. of Criminal Justice International Associates, a global threat mitigation firm headquartered in northern Virginia. His website is located at https://www.cjiausa.org/.