The Border Crisis Is Bad, But In Mexico A Larger Crisis Looms
Most Americans don’t realize it but the Mexican state is in serious trouble, and we won’t be able to ignore it for much longer.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/18/the-border-crisis-is-bad-but-in-mexico-a-larger-crisis-looms/
Excerpt:
Video footage recently surfaced on Twitter showing C4 explosives being dropped by a drone near a town in Michoacán, Mexico, reportedly by members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, following hours of clashes between armed groups.
In the video, a small explosion hits a woodland camp, a cluster of tents amid dense trees and dirt roads. Men scatter, running for cover. Another volley of explosives is released. When it hits, the camp erupts in flames. The drone lingers, its camera darting around, zooming in and out over the camp as it burns, like it’s looking for something. Seconds later, the drone is shot out of the sky.
It’s the kind of video clip that surfaces on social media now and then, offering a glimpse of outlandish happenings in Mexico. Most Americans have no way of making sense of these videos, or imagining what they portend.
....In this particular case, narco-drones are being deployed in a turf war in and around the city of Tepalcatepec, which sits on the border of the states of Michoacán and Jalisco, about 350 miles west of Mexico City. Local news reports indicate the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, commonly known by its Mexican acronym, CJNG, has launched multiple drone strikes in the area in recent weeks, escalating months of intermittent gunfights and ambushes.
CJNG is one of the most powerful and ambitious cartels in Mexico, and it appears determined to take control of the state of Michoacán. Since 2019, the cartel has been battling a loose confederation of other armed groups collectively known as the United Cartels, as well as the Mexican National Guard.
Many of these other groups began as autodefensas, or self-defense militias, whose purpose was to resist the encroachment of cartels like CJNG. But many of them, including those in Tepalcatepec, eventually got involved in drug trafficking. They became little cartels.
It’s Not Cartels vs. The Government
This is just one of many ongoing narco conflicts in Mexico. In America, awareness of it amounts to a disturbing 35-second clip on Twitter of a drone bombing a camp. But that one clip represents a depth of violence and corruption in the state of Michoacán that’s endemic to nearly all of Mexico, from rural backwaters to the heart of Mexico City.
And it’s not as simple as cartels versus the government because the two groups often overlap. Last March, a former mayor of the town of Aguililla, about 50 miles south of Tepalcatepec, was arrested in Guatemala on a U.S. warrant for allegedly brokering a $4 million deal on behalf of the United Cartels. The plan was to ship a half-ton of methamphetamine to Florida, hidden in concrete tiles and house paint.
....Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office at the end of 2018, promised an end to the violent drug wars of earlier administrations. His policy toward the cartels, he said, would be, “abrazos, no balazos” — hugs, not bullets.
It has not worked out very well. The homicide rate has been steadily rising in Mexico since 2014, but under López Obrador it has spiked. The last two years have seen a record number of murders, and this year is already off to a bad start. On Jan. 6 in Zacatecas, an SUV with ten beaten, murdered corpses inside was dumped next to a Christmas tree outside the governor’s office. The mostly rural state of Zacatecas has Mexico’s highest murder rate thanks to CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel, which are battling for control of the area and its numerous fentanyl labs.
The Sinaloa Cartel is of course the other major criminal organization in Mexico, and, at least among ordinary Mexicans, has come to be loosely associated with López Obrador himself. Why? For several reasons. There is the conspicuous fact that he has never breathed a word against the country’s most powerful and notorious cartel, even as he inveighs against his political opponents in the most militant terms.
There is also, more concretely, the Battle of Culiacan. In October 2019, Mexican National Guard troops arrested Ovidio Guzmán López, the 29-year-old son of former Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. In response, teams of Sinaloa gunmen, outfitted with armored vehicles and heavy weaponry, besieged the city and trapped the guardsmen. The standoff ended on a direct order from López Obrador himself, who told the troops to release their prisoner and stand down to avoid more bloodshed.
Five months later, López Obrador traveled to Badiraguato, a mountainous marijuana- and poppy-growing region of Sinaloa long associated with Mexico’s drug trade — and the birthplace of El Chapo. Defying his own pandemic protocols, the Mexican president was filmed shaking hands with El Chapo’s 92-year-old mother, María Consuelo Loera Pérez, and embracing a Guzmán family representative.
And then there is the still-unreported story of local and legislative elections held last January. Just before the polls opened in Sinaloa, cartel gunmen rounded up every campaign volunteer and poll worker for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, as well as those of every other party except López Obrador’s MORENA party. The cartel held them in secure locations until after the polls closed, then released them unharmed.
That is, the Sinaloa Cartel effectively shut down the entire get-out-the-vote effort of every party statewide, except MORENA. The result? MORENA won the election, wresting control of Sinaloa from the PRI. The story remains untold because no one in Sinaloa, out of hundreds of people across the state who were allegedly detained that day, will go on record.
Mexico’s Institutions Are Collapsing
Under López Obrador, at the same time the cartels seem to be operating with impunity, the military’s role in civil society has been expanding.
The National Guard was formed in 2019 shortly after López Obrador took office, the idea being that it would replace the Federal Police as the chief law enforcement arm of the government. Although ostensibly under civilian control, the National Guard is led and trained by military officers, and its ranks consist largely of soldiers.
Yet since its inception, López Obrador has mobilized the Guard for a vast array of civilian and domestic law enforcement purposes. That is, he has put what are traditionally civilian tasks under the remit of what is effectively a military force.
He has also not tried to hide this. A recent report from Human Rights Watch noted what any recent visitor to Mexico City would surely see: the National Guard is everywhere. It runs the Mexico City airport, it’s in charge of a large number of civilian construction and development projects, and it has become the enforcement arm of the National Institute of Immigration, or INM.
The INM is the federal agency charged with caring for migrants and managing their transit through Mexico to the United States. But in recent years it has become, together with the National Guard, an active participant in migrant trafficking, with all its attendant abuses and violence. Indeed, the industrialization of illegal immigration — imposing “taxes” on migrants has become a significant source of income for the cartels and gangs that control northern Mexico — made this development all but inevitable.
When López Obrador agreed in May 2019, at the behest of the Trump administration, to stem the flow of illegal immigration from Central America, he charged the INM and the National Guard with this mission. By then, migrants were paying smugglers and cartels thousands of dollars per person to travel to the border and cross illegally into the United States. A black market was already well established. The INM and the National Guard, authorized to “enforce” Mexican immigration laws, are now active players in that black market.
....Elsewhere in Mexico, the government’s tolerance for cartel violence is seemingly limitless. Even when cartels target local police officers — as CJNG has been doing in the state of Guanajuato since 2018, hunting down and killing hundreds of cops in their homes — the National Guard does nothing.
The Crisis In Mexico Will Not Stay There
The reason all this should matter to Americans is that U.S. policymakers, in both parties, are captive to the increasingly dangerous delusion that Mexico is a competent and trusted partner, and that our two countries can and should work together to solve problems like organized crime, drug trafficking, and illegal immigration. The animating idea, decades old now and woefully out of date, is that Mexico is a peer nation, acting in good faith, and that we all want the same things.
This gauzy conception of Mexico is how the Biden administration was able to come up with a framework for a U.S.-Mexico security relationship that’s utterly divorced from reality. A joint statement released back in October after a meeting between President Joe Biden and López Obrador outlines what’s supposed to be an update to the George W. Bush-era Merida Initiative, which was focused on helping Mexico wage war on powerful drug cartels.
The new initiative, dubbed the U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health and Safe Communities, seeks to address not just “transborder crime” but also things like substance abuse, “root causes” of violence, and efforts to improve education and economic opportunity — all while “ensuring racial equity,” of course.
Given the stakes, however, all it amounts to is a series of exhausted platitudes. The reality is that the Mexican state is collapsing, and rather than having a partner to address the “root causes” of violence, we don’t even have a partner to address what might well become a humanitarian catastrophe on our border this spring.
Make no mistake: as things deteriorate in Mexico, they will also deteriorate on our southwest border. Federal border authorities made more than 173,600 arrests at the southwest border in November, up from 164,300 in October (December’s numbers, as of this writing, are still unreported for some reason). Reporting on these figures recently, the Washington Post framed them as no big deal. “Border arrests ticked up 5 percent in November, first increase since summer,” the headline ran.
In fact, we’re still in the midst of an historic surge in illegal immigration. After an unprecedented 1.7 million apprehensions at the border in fiscal year 2021, Biden’s border crisis continues to roll along, month after month, shattering records with huge, ongoing surges in illegal crossings at a time of the year when they would have normally dropped off. At this rate, we’ll easily see more than 2 million border arrests in fiscal year 2022, breaking the all-time record for a second straight year.
Amid this ongoing crisis, though, a worse one is brewing far south of the border, in the heart of Mexico. If we don’t start paying attention to that crisis, if we refuse even to acknowledge it, we’ll eventually look back on our current border troubles as a simpler, easier time.
****
Many similarities with the demo-fascist here in the US, thugs reeking havoc, criminals confiscating voting so their candidate wins, the national guard (Meixco’s version of our FBI, CIA, DOJ) is crooked and does the policing at all levels but only when given the green light by Obrador. Worse is we have an incompetent government in the US applying outdated policy to the situation because they don’t want to know the truth or are letting the DS dictate an outdated policy that is 50 years old. Mexico is not an equal partner they are a third world country whose citizens are living in a civil war.
These cartels sound a lot like democRATS to me.
ThankQ for a great insight. It is as suspected...Mexico is really the creme de la creme of the smuggling food chain.
but hey, Brandon and Kamel toes got it all under control. It’s all the fault of climate change, and you know Whinney is in charge of finding the root cause. She’s so damn busy looking for, finding, and then telling other countries about all the root causes, she must secretly be a dentist. And that explains her cackle...too much nitrous oxide. She been hittin’ the gas pipe too hard.
Let’s go Brandon!
IRS Will Require Facial Recognition Scans to Access Your Taxes Online
You will have to submit sensitive government documents, your credit history, social security number and face scan to ID.me, a third-party company.
https://gizmodo.com/irs-will-require-facial-recognition-scans-to-access-you-1848387715
Excerpt:
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that you can still file and pay taxes without logging into an IRS account or providing biometric data. This contradicts information an IRS spokesperson previously provided to Gizmodo. See the full details in the frustrating correction below.
.....So here’s how accessing IRS online accounts will work for most people later this year. Users attempting to log in to their accounts using ID.me will have to create an account with the company by uploading either a driver’s license, passport, or passport card. Users are then told to use a cellphone camera or their computer’s webcam to take a selfie. According to ID.me’s website, the company uses a face match facial recognition system to verify the selfie matches the provided government document. If approved in ID.me’s system, users can then use these credentials to verify their identity across any of ID.me’s partners.
If ID.me’s system fails to verify a selfie or flags other issues that could be considered fraud, the user may then join a recorded video call with an ID.me representative called a “Trusted Referee.” ID.me claims it has verified more than 2.8 million people through these referees and has begun implementing some in-person identity verification options across the country.
“ID.me offers multiple relief valves or escape hatches to ensure there is always a path forward for everyone,” the company said. “We are committed to a policy of ‘No identity left behind.’”
At least as of this writing, ID.me’s verification process does not work perfectly either. One member of Gizmodo’s staff was unable to verify their image due the quality of their webcam. Unable to resolve the issue, that person opted to ditch the digital system entirely and file their payment by mail.
I went through the first stages of completing an ID.me application to see what it was like. The process required me to submit a photocopy of my driver’s license as well as a face scan using my phone’s front camera. ID.me then required I submit my Social Security number and it requested permission to see information in my credit profile. Feeling sufficiently creeped out, I stopped short at that final stage but had I continued I would have given up a treasure trove of personal identifying information including government documents, credit history, and detailed biometric data.
In a white paper shared with Gizmodo by ID.me, the company was quick to draw a distinction between its face match system and lesser facial recognition verification systems.
“Face match is equivalent to an airport agent comparing your face to the photo on your government ID card,” ID.me said. “Facial recognition is equivalent to giving your picture to the same agent, putting him on stage at a rock concert, and asking him to pick your face out of the crowd.”
The key difference here is that, unlike some algorithms, like those used by Clearview AI, which scans images against a wide trove of potential matches, ID.me’s service compares the face scan to a single provided government document. Despite the distinction, digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have nonetheless expressed serious concerns over the use of face-matching technology. Speaking to the widely known issue of racial bias in facial recognition algorithms, ID.me claimed its internal research had shown “no detectable bias tied to skin type.” According to the company, the face-match step has a 98.9% pass rate per user.
ID.me assures users signing up for an account that it doesn’t trade, sell, or lease data to any third parties, though it does share some data with “select partners.” Prior to submitting one’s government documents, users are required to accept ID.me’s biometric consent policy. The company’s policy says it collects both facial biometrics and voiceprints. In addition to using these biometric identifiers to verify a user’s identity and protect against fraudulent behavior, the company’s policies state they may also be used to “comply with a request from law enforcement or government entities where not prohibited by law.”
....The IRS formally announced ID.me had become a “trusted technology provider” last November, but the company itself has been around for over a decade. Formed in 2010 ID.me has become a leader in identity verification, particularly among government agencies. The company gained attention last year when Reuters reported that at least 27 U.S. states spread out across the country were using its service to vet jobless claims applicants during the pandemic. States reportedly introduced the technology to combat a supposed increase in fraud. However, in some cases, filers said the additional layer of verification was creating a layer of hassle in accessing benefits particularly among those less accustomed to modern technology.
In New York, News10NBC detailed numerous accounts of residents struggling to navigate through the verifications system, including one woman who claimed she had waited 19 weeks for her unemployment benefits.
“Every week I call and I’m getting nowhere, it’s about $3,000, it’s only $168 a week but that $168 a week covers groceries, medical, and gas you know,” the woman told News10. “I’m at a loss here, I try to call to talk to somebody and ask what am I doing wrong here and I can’t get through to a real person.”
While these individual cases are anecdotal, they offer a potential warning sign for what may happen when all online U.S. tax fillers are encouraged to use biometric-based verification systems to complete a practice both fundamental and required of them by law.
CORRECTION: When Gizmodo reached out to the IRS with a series of questions for this story, a spokesperson told us, “Taxpayers can still get information from IRS.gov without logging on, but to do the following actions, you would need to access your online account.” The spokesperson then listed a series of bullet pointed actions that include: “View or Create Payment Plans,” “Make and View Payments,” “Manage Communication Preferences,” “Access Tax Records,” and “View Tax Pro Authorizations.”
On Thursday, the same spokesperson informed Gizmodo that this is not accurate. They told us that taxpayers can still pay or e-file their taxes online without setting up an account. When we asked for documentation that explains that users can file without creating an account, the IRS did not provide a link but sent the following statement:
“There have been some wildly inaccurate statements regarding the use of selfies relating to paying and filing taxes. The IRS emphasizes taxpayers can pay or file their taxes without submitting a selfie or other information to a third-party identity verification company. Tax payments can be made from a bank account, by credit card or by other means without the use of facial recognition technology or registering for an account. To help protect the security of taxpayers, the IRS uses an identity verification process for accessing IRS’ self-help tools such as checking your account online and getting a transcript online.”
The fact that the IRS site repeatedly directs users to sign up for and/or log into their IRS.gov account while not emphasizing that doing so is unnecessary for e-filing or paying their taxes is disconcerting.
*****
Big gov. contracting with third party to gather information it can’t legally acquire itself then trying to confuse online users to provide the data when they currently aren’t legally required to to access their IRS accounts.
Every thing government touches turns to sh*t IMO.