Posted on 09/26/2022 4:43:10 PM PDT by bitt
Executive Summary
In the decades since the 1971 inauguration of President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” successive Mexican presidencies have—until recently— sought to cast themselves as partners of the United States in the fight against criminal cartels and trafficking. Mexican officials have used high-profile arrests as evidence of their fight against organized crime (Smith, 2014). Yet, despite these efforts—often sincere, sometimes not—the intersection between Mexican state power at every level and Mexican criminal organizations broadened and deepened. The formal state’s oscillation between (secret) support and (overt) repression across decades introduced a profound ambiguity into the cooperative relationship with the United States.
From 2006 to 2012, Felipe Calderón’s presidency marks the inflection point at which the tension between the Mexican state’s desire to defeat its own criminal elements (likely sincere in Calderón’s case) and the complicity of that same state with those same elements (marked by, for example, his secretary of public security, presently awaiting trial for alleged cooperation with the Sinaloa Cartel) became increasingly untenable. Calderón militarized law enforcement, took the fight to a new level of intensity and violence, and inadvertently plunged the country into its present era of quasi-militarized violence. Calderón’s desire to win the fight against the Mexican cartels was stymied by a combination of cartel resistance and willingness of prominent elements of the Mexican state to cooperate with those cartels.
Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2012 to 2018 administration was marked by a noticeable decline in meaningful cooperation with U.S. law enforcement to curb cartel activity. (For example, Peña Nieto discontinued U.S.–Mexico cooperation in vetting senior personnel for corruption.) Peña Nieto wanted to turn the Mexicans toward economic transformation through a suite of structural reforms. He treated crime and violence as essentially a public-relations problem and turned a blind eye to human-rights abuses purportedly committed by his army (Feuer, 2019a; Goldman, 2018).
The current presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO), who was elected in 2018, has seen Mexican-state cooperation with the United States against criminal cartels descend to a new low. The optics of his abrazos no balazos campaign—“hugs not bullets”—offers a sense of passivity toward security threats rather than a serious plan. His administration’s insouciance in combating cartel activity is coupled with a curtailing of U.S.–Mexico law-enforcement liaison—for example, in effectively hampering several decades of Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) operations in Mexico. The unwillingness to work with the United States is paired with gestures of Mexican presidential sympathy toward particular criminal cartels and a chronic unwillingness to confront or even rhetorically condemn their activities. The AMLO administration, more than any of its predecessors, has labored to foster a distinct impression of persistent Mexican state-cartel collusion— sanctioned at the highest level of that state. Officially, López Obrador denies any suggestion of cartel collusion, calling such claims “vulgar” (Hernández, 2022).
This paper examines the extent to which the Mexican state may be complicit in cartel activities and operations. The case made is necessarily circumstantial, but given the subject matter, it must suffice.
long but good info..
bump
They can’t fight them without a declaration of war, and the willingness to go after politicians ruthlessly who fail to get on the right side of it after said declaration.
It has to be all or nothing, it has to be fast, and it will freak out the NGOs and the State Department. Not to mention the press. In a world where the gangs know where you live, and most of your judges are intimidated and bought, it’s the only way.
So, fat chance.
Is Jao getting his 10%?
The current campaign in El Salvador is a model of what you have to do to defeat the gangs when they know where you live and almost everyone is intimidated and bought by them, from prison guards and cops to judges and politicians.
They got essentially a declaration of war through their congress, and just started rounding them up. Guards, cops, soldiers, judges all in masks for security. No communication between prisoners and the outside world, complete lockdowns in the jails.
Membership in the gang is enough, and easily proven. They don’t have to catch them in a crime, they just check their tattoos (gangsters there helpfully tattoo themselves) and look at your cell phone contacts. Door to door, lift up your shirt please. Gone. Forty-five year sentence.
Judges that might be tempted to cut them slack risk being arrested and charged as complicit with the gangs.
In a couple of months they rounded up 50,000 to add to 16,000 already in jail. That, out of about 70,000 total. El Salvador has gone from murder capital of the world times 3 to a murder rate of zero. Businesses that were universally extorted now find no one shows up to extort them. And people are starting to move there to live, it being safer than any city in the US.
Obviously, the Soros NGOs are freaking out. But the citizens back the policy something like 90%. People are free for the first time ever. Because they were a democracy only on paper; in actual fact, the gangs ruled.
They could never do this without a declaration of war. Normal criminal processes were corrupted by fear and payoffs.
I wonder how many high profile DC law firms (rat by definition) are on the cartel payrolls?
[The current campaign in El Salvador is a model of what you have to do to defeat the gangs when they know where you live and almost everyone is intimidated and bought by them, from prison guards and cops to judges and politicians.]
Overall a fairly fair article, though some of it is spin for the opposition.
Every past government claimed to negotiate with the gangs, presumably to limit gang violence. This while murder rates went to the moon. Bukele is the one who stopped negotiating and just rounded them up.
Soros NGOs accuse him of being authoritarian because they cannot win an election against him. So they keep threatening a coup d’etat and a return to guerrilla warfare.
Notice the NGOs are silent about Nicaragua, where the dictator is arresting journalists, opposition leaders, and priests.
They accuse him of bankrupting the country when he is retiring debt ahead of time. How? They are no longer paying extortion money to the gangs. That, and investment is returning. He is auditing past projects and going after politicians who embezzled the money.
He isn’t really a leftist or a rightist. He is a pragmatist who doesn’t belong to anyone. His stated ambition is to make the country a place people will want to live. He seems to be succeeding.
[Overall a fairly fair article, though some of it is spin for the opposition.
Every past government claimed to negotiate with the gangs, presumably to limit gang violence. This while murder rates went to the moon. Bukele is the one who stopped negotiating and just rounded them up.
Soros NGOs accuse him of being authoritarian because they cannot win an election against him. So they keep threatening a coup d’etat and a return to guerrilla warfare.
Notice the NGOs are silent about Nicaragua, where the dictator is arresting journalists, opposition leaders, and priests.
They accuse him of bankrupting the country when he is retiring debt ahead of time. How? They are no longer paying extortion money to the gangs. That, and investment is returning. He is auditing past projects and going after politicians who embezzled the money.
He isn’t really a leftist or a rightist. He is a pragmatist who doesn’t belong to anyone. His stated ambition is to make the country a place people will want to live. He seems to be succeeding.]
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