Narcos Over the Border

Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries

Robert J Bunker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317987802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

The book takes a hard hitting look at the drug wars taking place in Mexico between competing gangs, cartels, and mercenary factions; their insurgency against the Mexican state; the narco-violence and terrorism that is increasingly coming over the border into the United States, and its interrelationship with domestic prison and street gangs. Analysis and response strategies are provided by leading writers on 3GEN gang theory, counterterrorism, transnational organized crime, and homeland security.

Narcos Over the Border is divided into three sections: narco-opposing force (NARCO OPFOR) organization and technology use; patterns of violence and corruption and the illicit economy; and United States response strategies. The work also includes short introductory essays, a strategic threat overview, an afterword and selected references. Specific topics covered include: advanced weaponry, internet use, kidnappings and assassinations, torture, beheadings, and occultism, cartel and gang evolutionary patterns, drug trafficking, street taxation, corruption, and border firefights.

This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.

Strategic threat: narcos and narcotics overview

Robert J. Bunker

Counter-OPFOR Corporation, Claremont, CA, USA

This introductory essay provides a strategic overview of the threat posed by the largest Mexican drug cartels (The Federation, Gulf, Juárez, and Tijuana), and affiliated mercenary groups and street and prison gangs, to the United States. Cartel areas of operation in both Mexico and the United States are highlighted along with linkages to affiliated enforcers and gangs such as Los Zetas, the Mexican Mafia (La Eme), and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). The illegal economies of these threat groups – ranging from narcotics trafficking through commodities smuggling and theft, extortion and kidnapping, weapons trafficking, and street taxation – is discussed. The trans-operational environments involving US engagement with the Mexican cartels, mercenaries, and their Sureños affiliates is then characterized. Lastly, individual contributions to this work are summarized.

Over the last few years, the drug war in Mexico has gained increasing attention in both the mass media and in scholarly and policy publications in the United States. The implications of this `narco-insurgency’ for Mexico, the United States, and even for the various Central and South American states where spillover from this conflict continues to wreak havoc should not be understated.¹ Much of the dialogue focuses on the health of the Mexican state and its potential for failure. This author and a colleague have in the past commented on that concern:

Full scale Mexican state failure would result in even greater levels of criminalization and lawlessness than are already evident in that state. Simply put, if Mexico dies, we will be trapped in a room with a rotting corpse.²

Currently, two schools of thought exist on Mexican state failure potentials with each drawing upon well researched and analyzed information sources such as interviews, investigative and intelligence sources, and the Mexican press. In retrospect, quite possibly this ‘either/or’ debate as to whether or not Mexico is heading towards collapse is the wrong one to focus upon. This is because the actual threat being faced by the US is so alien to modern perceptions of national security that very few scholars and analysts recognize or even understand it. What is proposed here is that Mexico is not on its way to becoming a ‘rotting corpse’ but potentially something far worse – akin to a body being permanently infected by a malicious virus. Already, wide swaths of Mexico have been lost to the corrupting forces and violence generated by local gangs, cartels, and mercenaries. Such narco-corruption faced few barriers given the fertile ground already existing in Mexico derived from endemic governmental corruption at all levels of society and, in some ways, it even further aided the ‘virus’ spreading through Mexican society from this new ‘infection’. Among its other symptoms, it spreads values at variance with traditional society, including those:

… conceivably derived from norms based on slave holding, illicit drug use, sexual activity with minors and their exploitation in prostitution, torture and beheadings, the farming of humans for body parts, the killing of innocents for political gain and personal gratification (as sport), and the desecration of the dead. Concepts such as due process, right to a jury trial, individual privacy concerns, the right to vote, women’s rights to literacy, and self-determination, and the personal freedoms that so many Americans take for granted (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) do not exist.³

To these above ‘symptoms’ of this diseased state can also be added a move in affected sectors toward cult-like religions that worship ‘saints’ and occult figures who validate these values and which promote engaging in blood and ritual sacrifice of one’s enemies and their families. While the power and influence of such religions are still relatively weak within this emergent value system, they are beginning to fill a spiritual void for some of the criminal-soldiers of the gangs and para-states that have arisen. For some, dark deities offer protection, wealth, status, women, and a glorious death that others will praise, and, if fortune should have it, immortalize in song (the narcocorrido). For others, professing a twisted form of Christianity allows them to glorify the torture and murder of their enemies as ‘divine justice’.

The end result of all these trends is that Mexico is becoming an entity that is truly the antithesis of the modern nation-state. Parts of Mexico have already been taken over by the virus which courses through its veins and have embraced its narco-criminal value system. Beyond the pull of demand-side economics, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and the highly developed national highway system, especially the north–south routes, within the US have further helped those in the drug trade transmit this `narco virus’ well into Mexico’s neighbors. Territories of the Central and South American states have thereby fallen under its influence along with enclaves – streets, neighborhoods, urban zones, and prisons and jails – within the United States.

It would be both unfair and patently racist, however, to blame Mexico for all of these ills. The interplay between internal and domestic events throughout the Americas with the rise of the early Colombian cartels, the insatiable demand for illegal narcotics in the United States, the civil wars of El Salvador and Guatemala, illegal immigration from the south and the exploitation of cheap labor in the north, and the rise of such gangs as La Eme (The Mexican Mafia), 18th Street, and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) in the Los Angeles region, and the subsequent deportation of ‘LA style gangsters’ back to Mexico and Central America have all, along with numerous other events not mentioned, provided a rich contextual background for where we find ourselves today.

What we now have is a state in which the government is no longer able to govern entire sectors within its sovereign territory and, instead, these areas have been taken by a narco-insurgency and lost to the influence of criminal-based entities. This does not necessarily mean that all of the state will succumb and become that ‘rotting corpse’ as predicted earlier. Colombia, for example, has previously survived such onslaughts though it has never been the same and now, in many ways, resembles a narco-democracy. Nor, however, does the fact that the state government of Mexico has not succumbed necessarily mean that law, order, and state authority will be ultimately reestablished in these former territories, urban zones, villages, or neighborhoods. Indeed, that seems even more unlikely given this same insurgency has already crossed over the US–Mexican border and has probably been festering internally in the United States for decades with the rise and mass proliferation of street and prison gangs throughout the country. Not to overextend the analogy, but the upshot of this dynamic is that what has crossed over the border and what has arisen domestically are similar infections by the same virus – the Mexican strain is simply far more evolved, powerful, and violent.

Narcos over and gangs inside the border

Domestic US homeland security concerns from this threat have recently multiplied given the increasing levels of violence on the border along with a concurrent change in the orientation of the Mexican cartels towards their operations inside the United States. The earlier Mexican cartels’ policy of tempering overt violence north of the Rio Grande has been slowly eroding. In the past, those numerous incidents of violence that have taken place within, and at times between, the various narcotics distribution networks themselves have generally been discriminate and of little media interest. Offenses such as failure to make payments on money owed, skimming of profits, or shorting of loads have often resulted in the torture and deaths of cartel operatives and their individual prison and street gang contractors but it has been kept between individuals involved in the drug trade. In fact, on many occasions, these individuals are kidnapped inside the US and taken back to Mexico for elimination thus taking it further out of the US public eye.⁴

The cartels’ policy has since changed due both to a conscious decision on the part of cartel leadership and an inability to maintain control of the various contractors and freelancers that work for the cartel network. This changing orientation can be seen with an increase in firefights pertaining to drug loads coming over the border and ‘firebreak events’ such as the June 2008 Phoenix incident in which cartel operatives, dressed as tactical officers, assassinated a Jamaican drug dealer and, in their subsequent escape and evasion attempt, set up an ambush with the intent of killing responding US law enforcement officers. In May 2009, it was reported that Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, head of the Sinaloa Cartel (part of The Federation) had, back in March, given standing orders for cartel operatives to protect drug loads against both rival cartels and US law enforcement with deadly force if required.⁵ The inability to control parts of the narcotics distribution networks can be seen with the vast number of kidnappings now openly taking place in Phoenix, making it the kidnapping capital of the US. Kidnappings are based on the Sinaloan model which originated as a means to collect on drug debts but later expanded to include kidnappings of legitimate businessmen and merchants. These kidnappings, numbering over 700 in 2007 and 2008 according to police reports (though twice that number are thought to go unreported), appear still to be focus...