If Mexico Has ‘Lost Control’ of Entire regions, Is US Invasion Far Away?

[These are the fruits of the Bush/Cheney plan to destabilize Mexico in the name of fighting narcotics trafficking.  The "Merida Initiative" is a three-year, $1.4 billion aid program which has been implemented in Mexico since June 30, 2008.  It is a destabilization program in that it is the exact opposite strategy now being used to pacify Afghanistan and Pakistan, in that it wages war against the troops of the drug cartels and not the leadership itself.  In Afghanistan and Pakistan, where we are allegedly trying to pacify the region, American Special Forces are hunting the militant leaders to kill or capture them in their beds, seeking to decapitate the serpent.

In Mexico, they are hacking away at the tail, knowing that a tail can be easily regenerated.  By waging war against the cartel's peon armies, they have entered formerly safe enclaves and escalated the acceptable level of violence to unprecedented heights.  In their defense, the cartels have waged war just like the Army, using many of the same weapons.  The cartels have adopted the strategies and tactics used in Africa and Asia.  The fight has been enlarged into a massive dogfight to determine "top dog," while hunting spies within their own ranks and in the communities under their thumbs.  This accounts for a large portion of the killings.  That's the problem with this approach.

From this US Army analysis (Mexico's Narco-Insurgency and U.S. Counterdrug Policy), you can easily see that our military leaders understood that this approach was destined to fail from its inception.  They understood that Mexican violence would spin out of the Army's ability to quell it.  Even though the military knew that the violence would one day force military intervention, they allowed the plan to go forward anyway.  This can only be understood as the military abdicating its responsibility to not allow American servicemen to be used for immoral purposes, or to support actions that will endanger the homeland.  Giving the Mexican Army the training and capability to bring war to Juarez and the other drug-running regions is clearly crossing both of these red lines.]

Mexican State ‘lost control’ of entire regions, experts say

(SEE: Statistical Analysis and Visualization of the Drug War in Mexico)

MEXICO CITY, AUG 28 (Reuters) – The current levels of violence in Mexico, with at least 28 000 murders in three and a half years in a country whose government hangs a fight against drug trafficking, show that “the state has lost control entire regions to the crime, “local experts concluded today.

“The core of organized crime are daily and are seeing that the state is in serious difficulties to retain control in certain areas,” he said Elena Azaola of the Center for Investigations and Superior Studies in Social Anthropology (CIES).

An investigation of the body Evalue Mexico on the level of citizen insecurity and violence has put the state of Chihuahua, which borders the United States, as the entity most insecure in the country. It is there that is located in Ciudad Juárez, regarded as one of the most dangerous places in the world.

“Four years ago, has the highest number of homicides in the country and also has the highest number of murders linked to organized criminal activity,” said Azaola, speaking of the state, which borders the U.S. and Texas accounted for a level of violence of 68.5%.

The report says that there are others in intense conflicts regarding illegal organizations are Baja California, Durango, Sinaloa, Michoacan and Guerrero, with rates of insecurity of 54.6%, 54.08%, 50.6%, 46.95% and 44% respectively.

An analysis of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) reported that the increase in violence shown by the ‘loss of control “in areas of different states, and military strategy to fight drug trafficking, adopted by President Felipe Calderon takes office, in December 2006, “is wrong.”

The report notes that “the problem is not confined to the northern border, because in Michoacan and Guerrero [the Pacific] there are entire regions in which neither the army nor the police have access, and are under the control of organized crime that operates in full impunity. It is a fact, the state has lost territories for these groups. “

Researchers from the UNAM said that after years of operations promoted by federal troops in order to recover the controlled areas and decrease the grassroots support of illegal organizations, the results are “weak and partial.”

The discovery of the corpses of 72 Latin American immigrants killed on Tuesday in Tamaulipas – including at least one Brazilian – “confirms what we knew: that drug traffickers are embedded in other crimes such as trafficking in persons , kidnapping, extortion, but what is not said is that it also expanded the legal activities of trade, industry and services. “

The Collective Security Analysis with Democracy, based on figures from the U.S. think-tank Brookings Institution, reported that “in Mexico is the total bid to control the drug market and, in consequence, large areas of territory and routes land and sea. “

“To have a size of the territories lost by the state over the past ten years between 20 000 and 25 000 hectares were planted with poppy from which opium is obtained, which matches the country of Burma [Myanmar] and overcomes the most cultivated in Thailand in the 1970s, “the study said, adding that in the case of marijuana,” the numbers are higher, from 30 000 to 40 000 hectares a year. “

The Executive Secretary of the National System of Public Security, Juan Miguel Alcantara, said yesterday that the crimes of kidnapping, extortion and robbery with violence in Mexico increased by 400% in recent years. Between January and June last year and the same period of 2010, the rate of kidnappings rose 14.7%, and grew 200% compared with the last four years.

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