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By Scott Stewart, Stratfor

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approach to combating Mexican drug cartels has been a much-discussed topic since well before he was elected. Indeed, in June 2011 — more than a year before the July 2012 Mexican presidential election — I wrote an analysis discussing rumors that, if elected, Peña Nieto was going to attempt to reach some sort of accommodation with Mexico’s drug cartels in order to bring down the level of violence.

Such rumors were certainly understandable, given the arrangement that had existed for many years between some senior members of Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party and some powerful cartel figures during the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s long reign in Mexico prior to the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party in 2000. However, as we argued in 2011 and repeated in March 2013, much has changed in Mexico since 2000, and the new reality in Mexico means that it would be impossible for the Pena Nieto administration to reach any sort of deal with the cartels even if it made an attempt.

But the rumors of the Peña Nieto government reaching an accommodation with some cartel figures such as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera have persisted, even as the Mexican government arrests key operatives in Guzman’s network, such as Ines Coronel Barreras, Guzman’s father-in-law, who was arrested May 1 in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Indeed, on April 27, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest published a detailed article outlining how U.S. authorities were fearful that the Mexican government was restructuring its security relationship with the U.S. government so that it could more easily reach an unofficial truce with cartel leaders. Yet four days later, Coronel — a significant cartel figure — was arrested in a joint operation between the Mexicans and Americans.

Clearly, there is some confusion on the U.S. side about the approach the Peññna Nieto government is taking, but conversations with both U.S. and Mexican officials reveal that these changes in Mexico’s approach do not appear to be as drastic as some have feared. There will need to be adjustments on both sides of the border while organizational changes are underway in Mexico, but this does not mean that bilateral U.S.-Mexico cooperation will decline in the long term.

Opportunities and Challenges

Despite the violence that has wracked Mexico over the past decade, the Mexican economy is booming. Arguably, the economy would be doing even better if potential investors were not concerned about cartel violence and street crime — and if such criminal activity did not have such a significant impact on businesses operating in Mexico.

Because of this, the Pena Nieto administration believes that it is critical to reduce the overall level of violence in the country. Essentially it wants to transform the cartel issue into a law enforcement problem, something handled by the Interior Ministry and the national police, rather than a national security problem handled by the Mexican military and the Center for Research and National Security (Mexico’s national-level intelligence agency). In many ways the Pena Nieto administration wants to follow the model of the government of Colombia, which has never been able to stop trafficking in its territory but was able to defeat the powerful Medellin and Cali cartels and relegate their successor organizations to a law enforcement problem.

The Mexicans also believe that if they can attenuate cartel violence, they will be able to free up law enforcement forces to tackle common crime instead of focusing nearly all their resources on containing the cartel wars.

Although the cartels have not yet been taken down to the point of being a law enforcement problem, the Pena Nieto administration wants to continue to signal this shift in approach by moving the focus of its efforts against the cartels to the Interior Ministry. Unlike former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who was seen leading the charge against the cartels during his administration, Pena Nieto wants to maintain some distance from the struggle against the cartels (at least publicly). Pena Nieto seeks to portray the cartels as a secondary issue that does not demand his personal leadership and attention. He can then publicly focus his efforts on issues he deems critically important to Mexico’s future, like education reform, banking reform, energy reform and fostering the Mexican economy. This is the most significant difference between the Calderon and Pena Nieto administrations.

Of course it is one thing to say that the cartels have become a secondary issue, and it is quite another to make it happen. The Mexican government still faces some real challenges in reducing the threat posed by the cartels. However, it is becoming clear that the Pena Nieto administration seeks to implement a holistic approach in an attempt to address the problems at the root of the violence that in some ways is quite reminiscent of counterinsurgency policy. The Mexicans view these underlying economic, cultural and sociological problems as issues that cannot be solved with force alone.

Mexican officials in the current government say that the approach the Calderon administration took to fighting the cartels was wrong in that it sought to solve the problem of cartel violence by simply killing or arresting cartel figures. They claim that Calderon’s approach did nothing to treat the underlying causes of the violence and that the cartels were able to recruit gunmen faster than the government could kill or capture them. (In some ways this is parallel to the U.S. government’s approach in Yemen, where increases in missile strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles have increased, rather than reduced, the number of jihadists there.) In Mexico, when the cartels experienced trouble in recruiting enough gunmen, they were able to readily import them from Central America.

However — and this is very significant — this holistic approach does not mean that the Pena Nieto administration wants to totally abandon kinetic operations against the cartels. An important pillar of any counterinsurgency campaign is providing security for the population. But rather than provoke random firefights with cartel gunmen by sending military patrols into cartel hot spots, the Pena Nieto team wants to be more targeted and intentional in its application of force. It seeks to take out the networks that hire and supply the gunmen, not just the gunmen themselves, and this will require all the tools in its counternarcotics portfolio — not only force, but also things like intelligence, financial action (to target cartel finances), public health, institution building and anti-corruption efforts.

The theory is that by providing security, stability and economic opportunity the government can undercut the cartels’ ability to recruit youth who currently see little other options in life but to join the cartels.

To truly succeed, especially in the most lawless areas, the Mexican government is going to have to begin to build institutions — and public trust in those institutions — from the ground up. The officials we have talked to hold Juarez up as an example they hope to follow in other locations, though they say they learned a lot of lessons in Juarez that will allow them to streamline their efforts elsewhere. Obviously, before they can begin building, they recognize that they will have to seize, consolidate and hold territory, and this is the role they envision for the newly created gendarmerie, or paramilitary police.

The gendarmerie is important to this rebuilding effort because the military is incapable of serving in an investigative law enforcement role. They are deployed to pursue active shooters and target members of the cartels, but much of the crime affecting Mexico’s citizens and companies falls outside the military’s purview. The military also has a tendency to be heavy-handed, and reports of human rights abuses are quite common. Transforming from a national security to a law enforcement approach requires the formation of an effective police force that is able to conduct community policing while pursuing car thieves, extortionists, kidnappers and street gangs in addition to cartel gunmen.

Certainly the U.S. government was very involved in the Calderon administration’s kinetic approach to the cartel problem, as shown by the very heavy collaboration between the two governments. The collaboration was so heavy, in fact, that some incoming Pena Nieto administration figures were shocked by how integrated the Americans had become. The U.S. officials who told Dana Priest they were uncomfortable with the new Mexican government’s approach to cartel violence were undoubtedly among those deeply involved in this process — perhaps so deeply involved that they could not recognize that in the big picture, their approach was failing to reduce the violence in Mexico. Indeed, from the Mexican perspective, the U.S. efforts have been focused on reducing the flow of narcotics into the United States regardless of the impact of those efforts on Mexico’s security environment.

However, as seen by the May 1 arrest of Coronel, which a Mexican official described as a classic joint operation involving the U.S Drug Enforcement Administration and Mexican Federal Police, the Mexican authorities do intend to continue to work very closely with their American counterparts. But that cooperation must occur within the new framework established for the anti-cartel efforts. That means that plans for cooperation must be presented through the Mexican Interior Ministry so that the efforts can be centrally coordinated. Much of the current peer-to-peer cooperation can continue, but within that structure.

Consolidation and Coordination

As in the United States, the law enforcement and intelligence agencies in Mexico have terrible problems with coordination and information sharing. The current administration is attempting to correct this by centralizing the anti-cartel efforts at the federal level and by creating coordination centers to oversee operations in the various regions. These regional centers will collect information at the state and regional level and send it up to the national center. However, one huge factor inhibiting information sharing in Mexico — and between the Americans and Mexicans — is the longstanding problem of corruption in the Mexican government. In the past, drug czars, senior police officials and very senior politicians have been accused of being on cartel payrolls. This makes trust critical, and lack of trust has caused some Mexican and most American agencies to restrict the sharing of intelligence to only select, trusted contacts. Centralizing coordination will interfere with this selective information flow in the short term, and it is going to take time for this new coordination effort to earn the trust of both Mexican and American agencies. There remains fear that consolidation will also centralize corruption and make it easier for the cartels to gather intelligence.

Another attempt at command control and coordination is in the Pena Nieto administration’s current efforts to implement police consolidation at the state level. While corruption has reached into all levels of the Mexican government, it is unquestionably the most pervasive at the municipal level, and in past government operations entire municipal police departments have been fired for corruption. The idea is that if all police were brought under a unified state command, called “Mando Unico” in Spanish, the police would be better screened, trained and paid and therefore the force would be more professional.

This concept of police consolidation at the state level is not a new idea; indeed, Calderon sought to do so under his administration, but it appears that Pena Nieto might have the political capital to make this happen, along with some other changes that Calderon wanted to implement but could not quite pull off. To date, Pena Nieto has had a great deal of success in garnering political support for his proposals, but the establishment of Mando Unico in each of Mexico’s 31 states may perhaps be the toughest political struggle he has faced yet. If realized, Mando Unico will be an important step — but only one step — in the long process of institution building for the police at the state level.

Aside from the political struggles, the Mexican government still faces very real challenges on the streets as it attempts to quell violence, reassert control over lawless areas and gain the trust of the public. The holistic plan laid out by the Pena Nieto administration sounds good on paper, but it will still require a great deal of leadership by Pena Nieto and his team to bring Mexico through the challenges it faces. They will obviously need to cooperate with the United States to succeed, but it has become clear that this cooperation will need to be on Mexico’s terms and in accordance with the administration’s new, holistic approach. 

This article was first published in Stratfor.

Scott Stewart supervises the day-to-day operations of Stratfor’s intelligence team and plays a central role in coordinating the company’s analytical process with its business goals. Before joining Stratfor, he was a special agent with the U.S. State Department for 10 years and was involved in hundreds of terrorism investigations.

[Photo by  United States Government Work]

Por Maria Lourdes Pallais, Reporte Índigo

Cerramos la semana pasada con la noticia de que dos jóvenes hijos de David Páramo, un periodista experto en finanzas, y de Martha González Nicholson, directora de El Peso, filial de corte policíaco de El Diario de Chihuahua, fueron asesinados por sicarios en Ciudad Juárez.

Estadística fría que se suma a la de miles de víctimas de la violencia en México, situación que no ha disminuido pero que sí ha dejado de ser tema del gobierno de Enrique Peña Nieto y por ende, ha desaparecido de la agenda de la mayoría de los medios de comunicación.

Las autoridades no han negado que el crimen sea parte de la tendencia de la última década, cuando el Banco Mundial registró que poco más de 38% de jóvenes han sido víctimas de homicidios en México. Lo que sí hicieron de inmediato fue tratar de deslindar el crimen de la actividad periodística de los padres. El vocero de la Fiscalía de Chihuahua, Carlos González, fue el primero. Pero nunca explicó en qué basaba sus dichos. Aunque el trabajo de la madre de los jóvenes asesinados trajo a colación el tema de una posible venganza, las autoridades lo descartaron.

Tras la orden de Peña Nieto de que la Procuraduría General de la República investigara los homicidios, ésta también deslindó la labor periodística del doble crimen.

Sorprende la celeridad de los resultados de las investigaciones, considerando que México ocupa el octavo lugar en casos de impunidad en crímenes y agresiones contra periodistas.

Como afirmó, no sin un toque de ironía, el director del Comité para la Protección de Periodistas (CPJ) Mike O’Connor a esta columnista, “las autoridades fueron tan eficaces que, en esta etapa inicial de lainvestigación, ya saben quienes no fueron, pero no quienes sí fueron”.

El asesinato sucedió horas después de la celebración del Día Mundial de la Libertad de Prensa en el mundo.

Y México no tiene nada que celebrar.

El CPJ asegura que entre diciembre de 2006 y diciembre de 2012, al menos 14 periodistas fueron asesinados en represalia directa por su labor. Hace un par de semanas, la oficina en México de Artículo 19, una organización internacional cuyo mandato es la defensa y promoción de la libertad de expresión, también recibió una carta con amenazas.

A un año del asesinato de la periodista Regina Martínez, en Veracruz, que sigue impune, y un par de días antes del de los jóvenes en Chihuahua, un comunicador fue baleado mientras comía en un restaurante en el mismo estado.

No lo dirán muchos medios, pero sucede que las agresiones contra periodistas se han duplicado en los cuatro meses de gobierno de Peña Nieto, asegura la CDHDF.

Al margen de los dichos de las autoridades sobre quienes no mataron a los dos hermanos, desde el 2000 hasta hoy, 84 periodistas han sido asesinados en México, según la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Y los culpables siguen impunes…

Desde 2012, México se mantiene como uno de los países más violentos en cuanto a asesinatos a periodistas, solo por debajo de Siria, Somalia y Pakistán, de acuerdo con la Relatoría para la Libertad de Expresión de la CDHDF. Y 53% de las agresiones contra periodistas en 2011 fueron cometidas por alguna autoridad, según la misma fuente.

Mientras la mayoría de los casos de comunicadores asesinados se encuentre empantanado en la impunidad, las autoridades carecen de autoridad moral para descartar culpables en el caso de los jóvenes asesinados a fines de la semana pasada. Es así de simple y sencillo, y así de trágico.

Este artículo fué publicado originalmente en Reporte Índigo.

Periodista y autora Maria Lourdes Pallais es colaboradora de Reporte Indigo. 

[Foto por Knight Foundation]

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

The violence in Mexico, seen from the U.S. perspective, has an “over there, to ‘those people’” quality that’s hard to break down. This short video, produced by the people at visual.ly,  does a pretty good job of sifting through the complex layers of what’s happening south of the border and draws a straight line to some of the causes on the northern side.

The video is a bit “light” on the graphic side, but it’s the kind of thing you may want to share – it’s portable, if such a thing can be said about videos on the internet.

[Photo by Knight Foundation]

Have you read an article you’d like to suggest for the NewsTaco community? Let us know at: tips@newstaco.com

By Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer

This story was produced in partnership with the Guardian, where a version of this story also appears.

In 2010, the birth year of the popular and controversial website Blog del Narco, Mexico’s tumultuous drug war reached a turning point. Monterrey, an economic engine of the country and once famously known as the safest city in Latin America, was engulfed by narco blockades and gun battles. In the neighboring state of Tamaulipas, the leading gubernatorial candidate was assassinated, and the border cities of Camargo and Mier became ghost towns.

In the first two months of 2010, eight journalists were kidnapped in the border city of Reynosa. The offices of news organizations across northern Mexico were attacked with grenades and strafed with gunfire. Only two of the kidnapped reporters survived. When the reporters returned to their newsroom at El Milenio in Mexico City, their editor Ciro Gomez Lleyva wrote what was essentially the obituary for press freedom in his country. “In more and more regions of Mexico, it is impossible to do journalism. Journalism is dead in Reynosa, and I have nothing more to say.”

As Mexico’s media outlets stopped reporting on the cartels and the government remained silent, Blog del Narco, launched in March 2010, began to fill the void (Read Rory Carroll’s exclusive interview with Blog del Narco’s founder). The blog featured raw photos and videos of executions, and gun battles uploaded by anonymous contributors. Within months Blog del Narco was one of the most visited websites in Mexico with three million monthly visitors. The blog documented the drug war in all its horror: photos of decapitated heads, mutilated torsos and other stomach-jarring acts of violence committed by organized crime to induce terror among the population.

Frightened and curious Mexicans read Blog del Narco to understand what was happening to their country “We were living in some kind of low intensity war,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who studies organized crime in her native Mexico. “We had never seen houses burnt, people massacred like this before. It was deeply frightening.”

Anonymity became the only safeguard for freedom of expression. Blog del Narco posted every grim corpse photo and every gory account of assassination without attribution. It was unclear whether the stories were ripped from other websites or were original reporting. And it seemed like no moderator existed. “The site was a mess,” Correa-Cabrera said.

But everyone read it anyway. It was gruesome, but the violence needed to be documented, because it was happening. “If anything, Blog del Narco is an account of the facts. Proof that it happened. Because if we do not acknowledge what is happening in our country, then we can never change it,” Correa-Cabrera said.

The cartels tried to dispatch Blog del Narco much like they had Mexico’s other media outlets. The blog suffered hundreds of cyber attacks. Anonymous and unsubstantiated rumors began to circulate that the site favored one cartel over another. In 2011, the website suffered a debilitating cyber attack and was offline several days before it switched servers. Then a man and woman were killed and hung from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo with a sign warning that they had been killed for working on anonymous websites like Blog del Narco. “This is what will happen to all the Internet snitches. Be warned, we are watching you, Sincerely Z [Los Zetas].”

Since the dark days of 2011 and the crippling cyber attack, Blog del Narco has redoubled its efforts. This week the website’s moderators released their first book “Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War,” published by Feral House. In the book, written in Spanish and English, the anonymous authors of the blog document the dissolution of their country in 2010 by starting with an apology, “We are well educated and don’t tend to curse, but we’re going to say this because it’s the way it is: Our country is fucked. It has been for a long time.”

The book is divided into short chapters that report month by month the bloody battle for territory by organized crime during 2010 and the first two months of 2011. The photos are as gruesome and as graphic as they are on the website. The text gives concise explanations of events, including transcriptions of narco messages left behind on the bodies.

Nothing in the book is attributed. Some of the chapters are remarkably detailed. In one chapter titled “Gubernatorial Candidate is Murdered with His Team Members,” the authors explain how Rodolfo Torre Cantú, Tamaulipas’ leading gubernatorial candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was ambushed in June 2010 by Los Zetas cartel outside the state’s capital. The chapter describes how the hit men slept in a motel near the ambush site and how the cartel’s leader at the time, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, personally supervised the massacre of Torres and his campaign team. Three graphic photographs in the book document the massacre.

Three years later, the gubernatorial candidate’s murder, like thousands of others in the last six years, has yet to be investigated by Mexican authorities. The country’s new president Enrique Peña Nieto, anxious to suppress the growing conflict, is increasingly adopting a policy of silence. Gone are the press conferences touting the deployment of more troops or the capture of a drug kingpin that were common under the previous president, Felipe Calderon. Attacks against the press are once again on the rise and recent gun battles raging across northern Mexico are scarcely reported by the media.

Someday, when the violence ends, historians won’t have much information to help explain the bloodiest era in the country’s history since the Mexican Revolution. What they will have is Blog del Narco.

This story was first published in The Texas Observer.

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Image courtesy Blog del Narco]

By Louis Nevaer, New America Media

MADRID – The economic crisis in Spain, with a crippling jobless rate at 26 percent and labor strikes growing violent, has unleashed a brutal turf war between rival Latin American drug cartels. Spain’s rapid economic and social collapse in the second half of 2012 created compelling opportunities for drug cartels from Mexico to “relocate” their operations.

The challenge, however, is that since the 1980s the Colombian drug cartels dominated the multi-billion dollar drug industry in Spain, which is the entry point to the rest of Europe. This conflict between rival Colombian and Mexican drug cartels for domination of Spain is producing an unprecedented “turf” war – precisely at time when Spanish law enforcement agencies on a national and regional level are experiencing crippling budget cutbacks.

Exodus of cartels from Mexico

Mexican drug cartels, whose leadership and organizational structures were decimated by former Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s six year campaign, are now confronting the reality that the “war” against them has escalated under Calderon’s successor Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office in last December.

Although Peña Nieto campaigned on the promise to “change course” in Mexico’s six-year war on the drug cartels that has claimed more than 60,000 lives, his own strategy promises an escalation, but in a different manner. Peña Nieto has promised that the army will “return to the barracks” and the role of local police forces – easily corrupted and not trained to engage in high-level armed combat—will be limited. Instead, he has announced the creation of a Gendarmerie, an armed force that will operate on a nationwide level.

Last month, France promised to dispatch advisors to assist Mexico in creating and training this elite force.

Mexico’s political class is now debating whether the Gendarmerie will incorporate U.S. drones for strategic attacks on drug cartel leaders along the U.S.-Mexico border region. Mexico has allowed U.S. drones to operate in its territory since the spring of 2011.

That Nieto appointed General Óscar Naranjo, former national chief of Colombia’s police, as his advisor on national security matters – and that he traveled to Colombia last September – sent powerful signals to Mexican cartels that there would be continuity in Mexico’s drug war.

The “Battle for Spain”

That fact makes Spain an appealing place for drug cartels. The “Battle for Spain” began in 2007, when the Sinaloa drug cartel first began to move into Madrid, setting up operations. The most audacious interception occurred late last summer, when Spanish National Police seized hundreds of kilos of cocaine.

The Spanish National Police issued a statement that read in part: “Thanks to the exchange of information with the FBI, one knew that the suspects planned to initiate important shipments of cocaine by ship, hidden in containers with legal, declared cargo. They adopted great measures of security to ensure the success of the operations, and sent various containers without any type of drug. Finally, they sent their first shipment in a boat from Brazil. The container, which was intercepted in late July in the Port of Algeciras, concealed 373 kilos of cocaine.”

This spoke as much about Spain’s reliance on the FBI for intelligence, as to the already-established network among Mexico’s drug cartels to use Brazil as their base for operations to Africa and Europe.

Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, estimated that the net profit per shipment — $1.5 million USD– was to be used to establish headquarters in Madrid. Law enforcement officials believe the Sinaloa cartel had budgeted almost $20 million to buy real estate, vehicles and safe houses to establish their operations.

That was not to be: during the drug bust four top officials of the Sinaloa cartel were arrestedAugust 2012. As the BBC reported, “Jesus Gutierrez Guzman and the three others – named as Rafael Humberto Celaya Valenzuela, Samuel Zazueta Valenzuela and Jesus Gonzalo Palazuelos Soto – are all wanted in America over allegations of drug-trafficking and money-laundering.”

It is the relentless war on drugs against the Mexican drug cartels that cause them to act out of desperation. Spain’s anti-drug czar, Eloy Quirós, who runs the Drugs and Organized Crime Unit (known as Udyco), believes the Mexican drug cartels have set out to “conquer” Spain – and not forge an alliance with Colombian drug organizations already present in the Iberian Peninsula. He points out that, since 2007, Mexican drug cartels have set up operations in the Portuguese ports of Leixoes and Lisbon.

“It is evident that they want to pursue the same strategy that they have implemented in Latin America,” he told El Pais, referring to the vast network that Mexican drug cartels have built in Central America and Brazil in recent years.

With the promise of an intensified – if perhaps less violent – approach to the war on drugs in the coming months in Mexico, Mexican drug organizations are setting their sights on Spain with a renewed sense of urgency. “There is no doubt that the incoming Mexican administration wants to move decisively against the cartels in the first year of Enrique Peña Nieto’s term,” an intelligence officer working for the U.S. in the Mexican capital said in confidence. “Mexico has no choice.”

Spain vulnerable in economic crisis

Mexico’s confidence – and success – bodes ill for Spain. At a time when this nation is in the throes of an existential crisis – several regions have scheduled elections to decide if they want to withdraw from Spain and become independent countries – efforts by Mexican drug cartels to “take over” Spain intensify.

Late last summer, in addressing the National Audience, Spain’s equivalent of Congress, José Ramón Noreña, chief prosecutor of Spain’s Special Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s office warned that, “Obviously, the panorama is disturbing, but I know that the Security Forces are working to prevent this [Mexican drug cartel invasion.”

Some observers see this as wishful thinking. Mexican drug cartels have already used their base in Madrid to shuttle to Rome to establish a working relationship with Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta mafia organization for the joint takeover of the Australian cocaine market.

“Spain is the gateway to Europe for the Mexican drug cartels,” said one official in Rome on condition of anonymity. “But once they are in Europe, they can reach the entire world.” 

This article was first published in New America Media.

NAM contributor Louis Nevaer is a New York-based author and economist. His books include New Business Opportunities in Mexico (Quorum Books, 1995), New Business Opportunities in Latin America (Quorum Books, 1996), NAFTA'S Second Decade: Assessing Opportunities in the Mexican and Canadian Markets (South-Western Publishing, 2004).  

[Image courtesy New America Media]

By Sam Quiñones, A Reporter’s Blog

Mexico’s new president, Enrique Pena Nieto, has begun a new strategy intended to coordinate federal, state and local police forces in the fight against the rampant criminality of kidnapping, robbery, exortion, murder that is the detritus of cartel wars.

Michoacan has been horribly affected by all this — with some areas controlled by squads of roving criminal bands against which the local police are powerless. In one town I visited often, residents tell me a cell from one of the groups disputing control in the state with what amounts to a roadblock at the entrance to town inquiring who is coming through and what their business is.

The state is among the first to receive funds, and federal attention, in EPN’s new plan, which will also include funding for help to the 68 municipios with the highest homicide rates — Tijuana, Culiacan, Juarez, Acapulco, and others.

Michoacan is a great state. I spent dozens of trips wandering through the state, looking for stories about, in those years, mostly immigrants, as so many Michoacanos have migrated to the US.

Those kinds of trips are now impossible due to the spread of the violence.

The idea of combining and coordinating police forces has some appeal — instead of the use of the military, as ex-president Felipe Calderon resorted to. Soldiers aren’t trained or prepared for police work, after all.

Problem is, that many police forces aren’t either.  I’m wondering whether local police forces can be effectively used at all. Or state forces, for that matter. They are not just corrupt in many cases. They are poorly funded, equipped, trained, educated.

This is why, after all, Calderon resorted to the military — something for which he was widely criticized. He had no other weapon at his disposal but soldiers.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had recently with a man in Los Angeles who is from a rancho near Apatzingan. He told me that he returned home and on two corners he saw headless bodies. Whenever a police issue arose, officers sent citizens to the cartel gunmen to get them resolved, as they were the real power.

It’s possible when this new strategy plays itself out, we all may understand better why Calderon acted in the way that he did.

This article was first published in A Reporter’s Blog.

[Photo courtesy A Reporter's Blog]

By Vanessa Alvarez, Being Latino

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has pushed the drug wars in northern Mexico to the top of his priority list and the U.S. military is stepping in to help.

In recent documents and interviews obtained by the Associated Press, the Pentagon has authorized a U.S. military special unit to train Mexican security forces in much the same way the U.S. trained special operations teams to target Osama-bin-Laden and al-Qaida.

The move would help Mexico’s military better handle the powerful drug cartels that have plagued the country and taken the lives of nearly 70,000 people between 2006 and 2012, Mexican officials say.

Already in place at the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado, Mexican military and intelligence teams will be trained by Special Operations Command-North – whom will focus on showing them the same counterterrorist operations troops used against Osama-bin-Laden and his followers.

And much in the likeness of centers set up in war zones, the program has also already set up an intelligence center in Mexico City to help target criminal networks there, two U.S. officials said.

The new headquaters will also serve to help carry out other special operations, like the rescuing of survivors after natural disasters, as well as a partnership with the U.S. Coast Guard in helping to identify and detain ships carrying suspect cargo just outside U.S. waters.

An outgrowth of the Merida Initiative, these special operations missions were signed into effect in 2008; allowing the U.S. to provision Mexico with extensive military assistance.

However, expertise sharing does not mean that the U.S. military will be entering Mexico any time soon. Mexico forbids U.S. military and law enforcement personnel from carrying guns inside their borders, two current and one former U.S. military official told Fox News on condition of anonymity.

The article further states that the creation of the new command also marks the expansion of Adm. Bill McRaven’s special operations empire, with him seeking new missions outside a decade in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This article was first published in Being Latino.

[Photo by eeliuth]

By Stratfor

(Stratfor Editor’s Note: This is a summary of our annual Mexico drug cartel report, in which we assess the most significant developments of 2012 and provide updated profiles of the country’s powerful criminal cartels as well as a forecast for 2013. The report is a product of the coverage we maintain through our Mexico Security Memo, quarterly updates and other analyses that we produce throughout the year as part of the Mexico Security Monitor service.)

In 2013, violence in Mexico likely will remain a significant threat nationwide to bystanders, law enforcement, military and local businesses. Overall levels of violence decreased during 2011, but cartel operations and competition continued to afflict several regions of Mexico throughout 2012. These dangers combined with continued fracturing among cartels, such as Los Zetas, could cause overall violence to increase this year.

A New President

2013 will be the first full year in office for Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, who campaigned on promises to stem cartel violence. The most significant of his initiatives is his plan to consolidate and restructure federal law enforcement in Mexico. Pena Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party has introduced legislation that would switch oversight of the federal police, among other entities, away from the Public Security Secretariat to the Interior Ministry. The president also announced plans to bring the state police from each of Mexico’s 31 states under a unified federal command. Pena Nieto has frequently stated his plans to create a national gendarmerie that would serve as a supplemental paramilitary force for tackling violent organized criminal groups. During a Dec. 17 conference, he announced that this new organization initially would have 10,000 personnel trained by the Mexican army.

But 2013 is not likely to see any significant changes as a direct result of Pena Nieto’s domestic security policies since they will take time to produce results. For example, the gendarmerie would not likely become an effective operational force until after 2013, because training requires time. Even after such a gendarmerie is up and running, it would face many of the same issues encountered after previous efforts to create new law enforcement bodies. And restructuring law enforcement at the federal level does nothing to address one of the main factors driving Mexico’s cartel violence, namely the continual fracturing of organized criminal groups. After his Dec. 1 inauguration, Pena Nieto indicated that the almost 50,000 military troops conducting operations against organized crime will continue in their current role in the near term, reinforcing our forecast that there will not be observable changes as a result of his new policies in the first quarter of 2013.

Overall Violence

Homicides and other violent activity in Mexico including kidnappings, extortion, assaults and robberies linked to cartels did not increase in 2012, ending a trend of increasing annual homicides since 2006. But the drop does not indicate any significant shift toward peace among Mexican cartels. Inter-cartel turf wars in Ciudad Juarez, once one of the most violent areas of Mexico, have continued to decline in violence since 2010. Similarly, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas states have also seen reductions in violence.

Other forms of cartel-related violence, including kidnappings, extortion and open conflicts with authorities, remained high during 2012 and are likely to increase. Inter-cartel violence thus remains a significant security threat to many of Mexico’s urban areas, specifically in the states of Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Jalisco, Coahuila and Michoacan.

Status of Mexico’s Major Cartels

Los Zetas

Los Zetas remained the most active, widely operating criminal organization in Mexico in 2012. While the group did not expand its area of operations in 2012, the organization did solidify its operations in states where it had a significant presence, such as Jalisco, and demonstrated notable violent acts in other states, such as Sinaloa.

Perhaps the most significant shift within Los Zetas involved a transition in its top leadership. It became apparent in 2012 that No. 2 leader Miguel “Z-40″ Trevino Morales had gradually surpassed his former boss, Zetas leader and founding member Heriberto “El Lazca” Lazcano Lazcano, for control of the group.

Although Los Zetas have been resilient in the face of previous leadership losses, this does not mean the transition to Trevino will happen without a struggle in 2013.

Los Zetas consist of semi-autonomous cells operating throughout their area of operations, with high-level leaders like Trevino coordinating the cells. Should any of these cells question Trevino’s leadership, violent rifts within the organization could emerge. For example, in the summer of 2012, Zetas leader in north-central Mexico Ivan “El Taliban” Velazquez Caballero went to war with Lazcano and Trevino. Despite his arrest, Velazquez’s network is still at war with Los Zetas, posing an increased threat to their control over Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi and Coahuila states.

Trevino must ensure that no similar betrayal by his plaza bosses occurs again, since such defections offer Zetas rivals, such as the Gulf cartel or Sinaloa Federation, a potential ally against Los Zetas. Should a new rift form during 2013, violence likely would increase substantially in any area where Los Zetas are confronted by those former Zetas. But if the leadership can maintain cohesion, Los Zetas will remain one of the two dominant criminal organizations in Mexico during 2013.

Gulf Cartel

By the beginning of 2012, the Gulf cartel had been reduced to operating in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon states, where violence between the Gulf cartel and Los Zetas continued. The Gulf cartel also continued to suffer significant losses from targeted military operations and to suffer from an internal divide between two factions, Los Rojos and Los Metros. But violence between the factions apparently has been minimal, and the Gulf cartel has continued to function as a single organization.

Supporting the Gulf cartel against Los Zetas is a strategic necessity for the Sinaloa Federation and the Knights Templar, allowing them to bolster their hold over their lucrative trafficking routes and counter the aggressive expansion of Los Zetas. It also forces the Zetas into a two-front war, disrupting their offensives against Sinaloa and the Knights Templar in the west.

The Gulf cartel received another significant boost to its war with Los Zetas when former Zetas plaza boss Velazquez declared war on Los Zetas, confirmed in August 2012.

On the downside, whoever has assumed control over Gulf cartel operations is likely dependent on the group’s main allies to maintain control. For the time being, this has likely turned the Gulf cartel into an operational arm of its much stronger allies, and the Gulf cartel can remain viable only as long as the Knights Templar or Sinaloa Federation continue to back it. Unless Los Zetas suffer substantial losses, whether due to rival incursions, another organizational split or military operations, the Gulf cartel will not likely regain independence in its operational capabilities during 2013.

Sinaloa Federation

The Sinaloa Federation retained its areas of operation again in 2012. Through alliances with smaller criminal organizations, such as the Gulf cartel, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (although a divide between it and the Sinaloa Federation may have developed in the second half of 2012) and the Knights Templar, the Sinaloa Federation continued its assault on its principal rival nationwide, Los Zetas.

In addition to maintaining its areas of operation, the Sinaloa Federation continued to solidify control over the highly lucrative plazas of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua city, Chihuahua state, after pushing out its principal rival in the region, the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization, also known as the Juarez cartel. The Sinaloa Federation’s success correlated with a substantial drop in homicides in the two cities.

Although 2012 saw continued Sinaloa successes in Ciudad Juarez and sustained assaults against Los Zetas via proxy groups, the group did experience intensified regional conflicts in its strongholds. During the summer of 2012, Los Mazatlecos — a group with ties to the former Beltran Leyva Organization — demonstrated substantial and increasing influence in northern Sinaloa state. Meanwhile, as the Sinaloa Federation pushed the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization and La Linea, its allied enforcer arm, out of Ciudad Juarez, La Linea revived its hope of surviving as a criminal organization by focusing on control of transportation routes and areas of illicit drug production in the Sierra Madre Occidental in western Chihuahua state. While the Sinaloa Federation has not been able to eject La Linea from western Chihuahua state, it can maintain its organization through its control of a substantial percentage of the drug trade throughout Mexico.

Indicators also emerged of new challenges to Sinaloa control in northern Sonora state. Cities such as Puerto Penasco, Agua Prieta and Sonoyta saw increased executions and shootouts indicative of inter-cartel violence during 2012, suggesting a rival of the Sinaloa Federation is contesting drug trafficking routes into the United States through northern Sonora state. It is uncertain who this rival is, though La Linea and Los Mazatlecos are possible suspects.

Despite the regional conflicts within the Sinaloa Federation’s areas of operation, nothing suggests the criminal organization’s trafficking operations are under any significant threat. Violence in its regional conflicts with smaller organizations such as La Linea in western Chihuahua state and Los Mazatlecos in northern Sinaloa state will likely persist through 2013. The rural nature of the contested regions means that violence should not become as intense as that seen in urban turf wars throughout Mexico.

Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion

2012 saw a continued expansion of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion into several Mexican states, including Morelos, Colima, Michoacan, Guerrero and Quintana Roo. As a byproduct of its acquired geographic reach, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion began taking control of drug trafficking routes for itself and local criminal enterprises like extortion and retail drug sales in areas such as Veracruz city or Colima state.

This expansion brought the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion and another Sinaloa Federation ally, the Knights Templar, into the same operational spaces, such as Michoacan, Guerrero and Guanajuato states. By April 2012, it had become apparent that the Knights Templar and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion had begun a war with each other. It is unclear what role, if any, the Sinaloa Federation may have had with the conflict between its two allies.

Several factors suggest the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion splintered from the Sinaloa Federation in 2012. The organization rapidly expanded in 2012 into a prominent cartel — and thus a possible future rival for other criminal groups. Its conflict with another Sinaloa Federation ally as well as several narcomantas in Jalisco state and statements by a rival criminal leader of La Resistencia also contribute to the splinter theory. But there are no indications so far that a rivalry has formed between the two groups.

Nothing suggests the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion’s areas of operation have been reduced or that the group’s ability to traffic drugs has been hindered. If in addition to its current geographic reach in Mexico, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion is capable of delivering illicit drugs into the United States, the group essentially would have access to the same levels of the supply chain as Mexico’s dominant cartels.

Knights Templar

During 2012, the Knights Templar solidified itself as the successor to La Familia Michoacana, from which it split in 2011. The Knights Templar now operates as the dominant criminal organization of Michoacan state and as a significant criminal actor in states such as Morelos, Guanajuato, Queretaro and Guerrero and southeastern Jalisco. It is unclear in what capacity and where La Familia Michoacana continues to exist. Although sporadic violence between the Knights Templar and La Familia Michoacana may occur in 2013, it is unlikely that La Familia Michoacana will regain any of its footholds in a battle against the Knights Templar without substantial help from another major criminal organization, such as Los Zetas. The Knights Templar might even absorb the remainder of La Familia Michoacana in 2013.

The Knights Templar has become increasingly public about its conflict with Los Zetas. While there have been no explicit indications of expanding violence between the two organizations, it is certainly possible that the Knights Templar will begin assaulting Los Zetas in the latter’s strongholds during 2013. Even without a direct conflict between Knights Templar gunmen and Zetas gunmen in Zetas-controlled territories, it is likely the Knights Templar is supporting the Gulf cartel in its conflict against Los Zetas by sending gunmen to the northeast to support Gulf cartel efforts.

Authorities have targeted lower-level Knights Templar members in response to brazen acts of coordinated violence by the group. But arrests so far will likely have a minimal impact on the group due to the low-level status of those detained.

Since there are currently no indicators that the operational capabilities of the Knights Templar are under threat by a rival organization, the group will likely continue its heavy propaganda campaign in multiple states of Mexico in 2013. Additionally, should the Knights Templar confront Los Zetas in a more direct manner than supporting an allies’ conflict, such as by attempting to take control of territory itself, violence would likely increase more in the northeastern states. Furthermore, retaliatory attacks conducted by Los Zetas against the Knights Templar in the Michoacan area could be expected.

Mexico’s Drug War: Persisting Violence and a New President is republished with permission of Stratfor.”

Read more: Mexico’s Drug War: Persisting Violence and a New President | Stratfor.

[Image courtesy Stratfor]

By Gustavo Aguirre, Borderzine

Click on picture to read story.

[Photo by uteart]

By Phillippe Diederich, Voxxi

Now that Marijuana is supposed to turn legal in both Washington State and Colorado, it will be interesting to see how supply and demand, violence, arrests and tax revenues change in both states. It will also be interesting to see how Mexican drug cartels deal with this new set up.

According to the New York Times, the main issue with states having such laws, is that they clash with Federal laws. One of the impediments of the new laws legalizing marijuana in these states is that they can be blocked by lawsuits. So we’ll have to wait and see how things develop.

According to the new laws, it will be legal to carry up to an ounce of pot and smoke recreationally, but not in public. People will be allowed to grow up to six plants. You will also have to be over 21-years old to smoke, and it will be against the law to drive while under the influence. Proponents of the law believe thousands of small-scale arrests for possession of marijuana will stop, and that taxing marijuana will bring in millions in revenue to the cash strapped states.

But how will the Mexican drug cartels, which supply millions of tons of marijuana to U.S. consumers every year, deal with Washington and Colorado? Well, according a study by the Mexican Institute of Competitiveness (IMCO) and reported by In Sight Crime, profits could go down by 30 percent for the Mexican drug cartels. IMCO estimates the loss at almost $3 billion, and that the Sinaloa Cartel would be hardest hit by the new laws, with profits down by 50 percent.

Other states may follow Washington and Colorado’s example

If other states see the experiment of legalized pot working to the benefit of Washington and Colorado, they just might follow suit in the next few years. Too much effort and too much money goes into keeping marijuana illegal. According to reports, it will be cheaper to buy home-grown pot than marijuana smuggled into the state by drug cartels.

But the cartels run like real companies. They have always adapted to market changes to continue to make astronomical profits. When the U.S. cracked down on methamphetamine labs in this country, the cartels jumped at the opportunity to profit. They now produce and smuggle most of the meth consumed in the U.S. They also smuggle coke and heroin into the U.S. According to the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Marijuana is the most commonly used drug in the U.S. with 17 million users, far ahead of the curve of cocaine, heroin and meth.

The Mexican drug cartels still have to satisfy the demand for marijuana from the other 48 states where marijuana is illegal, and they will use all methods possible: smuggling pot via underground tunnels, driving jeeps over the border, or as it was discovered recently in Agua Prieta, using a catapult to propel packages of pot across the border to Arizona.

Just a few days ago, U.S. Border Patrol agents discovered 33 cans packed with marijuana in a field in San Luis, Arizona near the U.S.-Mexico border, with a total weight of 38.5 kilos. It turns out the cans had been shot from a pneumatic canon from Mexicali, Baja California. Drug smugglers are quite ingenious, and as long as we continue to have a demand for illegal marijuana in the U.S., we’ll keep seeing these peculiar methods of smuggling pot across the border.

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Phillippe Diederich is a bilingual writer and photographer born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Mexico City and Miami. His photography has appeared in The New York Times, Timemagazine, U.S. News and World Report and other national publications. His non-fiction has been published in the Traveler’s Tales Anthology, Cuba; Cigar Aficionado; The Miami New Times and The Dallas Morning News. He blogs about Latino issues for VOXXI. Diederich is based in Southwest Florida.

[Photo by  Coleen Danger]

By Jose Gonzalez, NewsTaco

The “War on Drugs” and specifically the “Mexican Drug War” are not new themes to readers following news stories. But two recent stories revisit and highlight another way in which the “Drug War” affects Latinos, particularly in relation to conservation and the environment.

First, there is a Washington Post story about a Mexican environmental activist, Juventina Villa Mojica, murdered by drug traffickers. As the story notes:

“Drug gangs began targeting Villa, her husband and their extended family after they refused to allow drug traffickers to cut down trees near their village, according to Manuel Olivares, a human rights activist. ‘It’s a virgin area with rich forest areas, and the main interest of drug traffickers is cutting down the trees so that once it is deforested they can expand their drug fields,’ Olivares said.”

There was also this High Country News story revisiting the ongoing issue of the US-Mexico border and drug trafficking as a conservation and recreational concern. The story notes how Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agents routinely “find trash bags of marijuana stashed beneath mesquite and paloverde trees, piles of muddy, discarded clothes and Dumpsters-worth of empty water bottles, painted black to make them less visible in the sun.”

In addition, the BLM “placed signs outside Sonoran Desert National Monument warning visitors to stay away from abandoned cars and backpacks, and informing them they may encounter criminals and smuggling vehicles speeding through the desert”, as well as “discouraging visitors from going to the southern portion of the monument, a popular rendezvous for drug smugglers and people hiking marijuana up from the border.”

The bigger story of how the War on Drugs affects the environment is not necessarily new. The effect of the “War on Drugs” on the environment occurs on a global scale, regionally across Latin America or in country-specific cases like Colombia. But it is important to follow this issue close to home with “our” “Drug War” and note how it affects Latinos—especially given how this was a big election year for US and Mexican elections, and what that means for shared issues of immigration and drug trafficking.

The Washington Post story points out how despite the many other issues and challenges Latinos face, the environment still matters, in the US and in Mexico—to the point of standing up with ones’ life. Although a tragic story, the story of Villa provides a clear example of the many heroes fighting for environmental and conservation issues—stories and issues that can easily take a back seat to a focus on other social and economic impacts of the “Drug War”.

The High Country News story can provide an example relating to the framing of Latinos. Latinos already carry negative connotations in several issues—being seen as responsible for negative ecological impact and curtailing access in public lands should not be added to the list. This is important given a certain lack of diversity in the use of public lands and a need to increase Latino participation in public lands. We need the association between Latinos and public lands to have more positive framing, rather than serving as examples of adverse effects on the conservation and ecological health of public lands—as well as reasons to limit public access. The challenge lies in needing to report and address these conservation issues in relation to issues like immigration and drug trafficking.

As we see how the “Drug War” changes with a new administration in Mexico, and how immigration is handled in the US, it will be interesting to see what associated environmental issues arise, how they will be reported, and the role Latinos play in such issues, positive or negative.

By Hispanically Speaking News

Investigators are trying to determine whether model and beauty queen Maria Susana Flores, who died in a shootout with the Mexican army over the weekend, was involved with a drug cartel, Sinaloa state Attorney General Marco Antonio Higuera Gomez said.

The 22-year-old Flores was killed in the shootout early Saturday in Mocorito, a city in the northwestern state of Sinaloa.

The beauty queen was with her boyfriend, who officials said may have been one of the subjects who attacked an army patrol.

“The information we have is that she was with a group of criminals who clashed with army troops,” Higuera Gomez said.

Two soldiers died in the shootout and four suspected gunmen were arrested and handed over to federal prosecutors, Higuera Gomez said.

“At the site where the young woman’s body was found, an AK-47 was found very close to her, so it will be the Attorney General’s Office that determines the extent of her participation in this criminal act,” the state AG said.

Flores won the Sinaloa Woman contest and competed in the Our Sinaloa Beauty contest, which she did not win.

The funeral home where Flores’s body was taken is being guarded by army troops.

This is not the first time that a Mexican beauty queen has been linked to drug traffickers.

Laura Elena Zuñiga, who won Our Sinaloa Beauty in 2008, was arrested along with seven men on firearms and money laundering charges on Dec. 23, 2008, in Zapopan, a city in the western state of Jalisco.

The beauty queen was released a few weeks later because prosecutors could not find sufficient evidence to put her on trial.

Zuñiga’s story inspired director Gerardo Naranjo’s 2011 film “Miss Bala.”

Sinaloa is home to the drug cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman, but other criminal organizations, including the Los Zetas and Beltran Leyva cartels, also operate in the area.

The Sinaloa cartel, sometimes referred to by officials as the Pacific cartel, is the oldest drug cartel in Mexico.

This article was first published in Hispanically Speaking News.

[Photo courtesy Hispanically Spesking News]

By Melissa del Bosque, Texas Observer

Mexico’s drug war is enriching Texas border communities in more ways than one. Not only have wealthy Mexican business owners invested in the region, local law enforcement is benefiting from millions in assets seized from drug traffickers.

Texas has some of the country’s broadest asset-forfeiture rules. The law allows personal assets to be seized by officers during the investigation of possible felonies and misdemeanors. Funds from seized assets are distributed by federal agencies to local law enforcement agencies after joint investigations.

Increasingly, such money is being used to build surveillance networks and militarize the border, which is already bristling with predator drones, armored gun boats, the National Guard and a border fence. Civil liberties advocates like the ACLU want to ensure that privacy laws and First Amendment rights in border communities keep pace with security measures. “With drones and other surveillance technology, our concern is always, what kind of data are they collecting, how is it kept, and what other entities are they sharing it with?” says ACLU of Texas policy strategist Matt Simpson. “Communities need to have a say in how their communities are being policed.”

In September, the Mission Police Department installed a surveillance network of 32 cameras in Mission for an estimated $395,000, according to McAllen newspaper The Monitor. The network is already equipped with automated license plate readers, which can scan and process thousands of license plates per hour. Civil libertarians are concerned that there are virtually no rules or guidelines about how the data can be used and shared.

The department could afford the state-of-the-art technology because it received $1.18 million this year from the seized assets of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, former boss of the Gulf Cartel, who is serving a life sentence in the United States.

More money is on the way. Four decades into America’s war on drugs, asset forfeiture funds at the state and federal level are ballooning. In 2011, the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture fund was $1.8 billion, more than three times the $500 million balance in 2003.

Defense contractors are following the money. It’s estimated that the state and local law enforcement market for homeland security expenditures will reach $19.2 billion by 2014, up from approximately $15.8 billion in 2009, according to a recent report by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Now, even the border’s smallest police departments have SWAT units, armored carriers and other military-grade equipment. In August, the Laredo Morning Times reported that the Webb County Sheriff’s office is considering buying a drone helicopter for surveillance. No doubt Webb County can afford it. In September, Sheriff Martin Cuellar received a check for more than $800,000 from the federal government for his department’s role in busting a drug smuggling ring.

This article was first published in The Texas Observer.

Melissa del Bosque joined The Texas Observer staff in 2008. She specializes in reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Her work has been published in national and international publications including TIME magazine and the Mexico City-basedNexos magazine. She has a master’s in public health from Texas A&M University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

[Photo By DEA]

By Latino Rebels

Dear Average American Who Has No Clue:

As the summer wound down and you were distracted with tales of staged conventions, private fundraising videos, Honey Boo Boos, Dance Moms, negative ads, and talking heads saying the same points over and over again, something very amazing happened in the United States. Yes, in places such as San Diego, Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, El Paso, Laredo, McAllen, San Antonio, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Jackson, Montgomery, Atlanta, Louisville, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Washington, DC. You probably didn’t catch it, since none of the major networks took the time to cover it, but that doesn’t matter. It happened, and we are all better for it.

What was it? The highly successful Caravan for Peace, a journey that raised awareness about the victims of a failed drug war and gave those victims a human face. Every day, we followed the Caravan and shared it with our Facebook community (BTW, 15% of all of Facebook likes are from Mexico). It led to thoughtful andinsightful discussions from people all over the world about how we can get real about the drug war, a war we have been losing since the Nixon administration.

Social media was the outlet. We were thankful to all those who shared pictures, stories, and videos. Our favorite was one where the Caravan showed up on the banks of the “river of death” between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. One part of Caravan was on the US side, while another delegation was across the river in Mexico. They were so close to each other, yet it felt so distant. We knew right there that the Caravan was doing all it could to literally break down the barriers in our minds. That one hit home.

Even though we didn’t need the mainstream to follow the Caravan’s progress, several stories did appear in outlets such as Democracy Now!, The Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, Univision News, The Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.

So, dear Average American, take a moment with us to say GRACIAS MIL for what the Caravan accomplished. They were truth seekers who spread grace, love, and divinity.

The Caravan inspires us each and every day. Here’s hoping it has woken you up. Finally.

Con mucho cariño,

Los Rebeldes

You can learn more about the Caravan here.

This article was first published in Latino Rebels.