Mexican Cartels, the International Terrorist Organizations Next Door
Recent killing of students and other bloodshed related to human smuggling by Mexican drug cartels has once again raised awareness of the threats posed by the Cartels. The Cartels are full service criminals with an extensive product line of violent crimes including robbery, prostitution, murder, rape, home invasion, human smuggling, drug smuggling, and money laundering. Many now believe that the Cartels may cooperate with international terrorists to smuggle terrorists into the United States and constitute a threat to American national security.
While there is a significant “trust issue” between the US and Mexico, with the Mexicans being suspicious of “American imperialism” and the Americans believing that endemic corruption in Mexico compromises the ability of the Mexican government to successfully its implement policy commitments, one thing both governments agree on is that the Cartels represent a serious homeland and national security threat to both countries. While this shared view provides a basis for cooperation against the Cartels, “trust” will be critical to information sharing. This means knowing whom to trust, and the use of deception and denial with regards to the information that is reaching the Cartels.
Currently, the main current component of US-Mexican cooperation against the Cartels is the Merida Initiative, by which the US pledged $ 1.4 billion in assistance to break the Cartels, strengthen border, air and maritime controls, improve justice systems and curtail gang activity and demand for drugs. This effort considers Cartels to be a law enforcement problem, with the effort led by the FBI, DEA and other federal and local law enforcement agencies.
The Merida Initiative is already in place. It has political support in Mexico and the US and has provisions for the sharing of information and intelligence within and between countries. The effort is helping to grow new relationships and capabilities, and it seeks to address the issue of demand in the US for goods and services provided by the Cartels.
However, so far the Merida Initiative has not succeeded. Cartels have been able to adapt and evolve their tactics in response to the Initiative and stepped up Mexican government efforts. Regular law enforcement intelligence capabilities seem inferior to the capabilities of the Cartels.
A strong argument can be made that the Cartels are international terrorist organizations, and should be designated and prosecuted as such. They are certainly international in scope. They also employ terrorist tactics and weapons to intimidate their adversaries and the public such as decapitations, acid baths, skinning people alive, torture, and the use of improvised explosive devices. In Mexico, the Cartels are challenging the government directly by attacking the legitimate army and police forces. Cartel activities are not just criminal, but can also be seen as criminal insurgencies in which the Cartels use “fourth-generation warfare” tactics to weaken and supplant the legitimate government to promote their own interests. The skillful control of information is essential to the success of the Cartels — skills that they have learned, in part, from former Mexican special operations personnel and now Cartel, “Los Zetas.” The Cartels can fund and employ kenetic –tactical paramilitary operations and non-kinetic information based operations and use mature decision making processes that use sophisticated reconnaissance networks, social media, and social networking for command, control and communications, techniques and capabilities normally associated with military organizations such as communications intercepts, interrogations, trend analysis, secure communications, coordinated military style light infantry operations, GPS, and thermal imagery. The sophistication of Cartel financial expertise is also comparable with those of an international terrorist organization, as the Cartels have successfully laundered hundreds of billions of dollars through major US banks such as Wells Fargo. Cartel also have “branch offices”, in the form of street gangs, currently active in more than 230 US and Canadian cities.
Mexican Cartels are international in scope, pathologically terroristic in their methods, possess vast financial resources, and have intelligence and fighting capabilities on the level of recognized international terrorist organizations. The Cartels seek to destroy the capacity of the legitimate Mexican government to govern in order to promote their own criminal ends. Current policy approaches are not working, but rather are causing the Cartels to evolve into more virulent and capable structures — a process reminiscent of metastasizing cancer, destroying the health of an organism.
By designating major Mexican Cartels as the international terrorist organizations that they truly are, and bringing against to bear the full spectrum of US anti-terror capabilities, we have the opportunity remove a major homeland security and national security threat, and give the people of Mexico a chance to live in peace under rule of law. Failure to take decisive action will facilitate the development of the Cartels and facilitate their continued expansion into the US.
Designating Mexican Cartels as international terrorist organizations would bring the capabilities of DHS and DOD to bear on the Cartels, including the full power of NSA, CIA and other intelligence organs to counter the well- developed intelligence capabilities of the Cartels, and gain the intelligence needed to disrupt their operations on the ground, and perhaps more importantly, their financial operations. A new array human intelligence, signal intelligence, and analytical capabilities could be applied. More powerful legal implements could be used — among these would be new means and techniques to allow identification and confiscation of Cartel assets. New kinds of military and other resources could also be employed for a higher level of engagement with the Mexican and other governments against the Cartels. The Cartels could be overwhelmed.
The problem is that the political consequences of designating the Cartels as international terrorist organizations are unacceptable to many on both sides of the border. On the Mexican side, the idea that Mexico could become subject to the military and intelligence operations associated with the Global War on Terror would be seen as an affront to Mexican sovereignty, and is therefore unacceptable. Mexico does not want to be the new Pakistan. It should also be noted that the Cartels themselves may wield influence on the Mexican government to help to block the possibility designating the Cartels as international terrorist organizations.
On the American side, the law enforcement agencies currently working against the Cartels would lobby against the loss of control of these operations. There is also a large segment of the American population that engages in business, and least indirectly, with the Cartels. Designating the Cartels international terrorists would mean that these people — many of them non-violent, could be seen as providing material assistance to an international terrorist organization, and thereby be subject to an entirely different set of laws and essentially lose many of their civil rights. This would likely cause a severe domestic backlash and add to the prison population at a time when the political momentum in the US is to find ways of reducing the number of inmates in prisons, especially for non-violent offenses. Also, such a move would most likely be seen as disproportionately targeting the Hispanic population in the United States, which is expanding demographically and wielding increasing political power. Neither major US political party would dare to take make a move which would undoubtedly aleinate this crucial bloc of voters.
So the result is a quagmire. The current methods used against the Cartels are failing to eliminate them, and are allowing them adapt and become even more virulent. At the same time, politics on both sides of the border prevent the adoption of methods normally used against organiztions with the characteristics of the Cartels. Until this changes, the international terrorist organizations next door will remain a persistent threat to the homeland and national security on both sides of the border.
