Monday, December 28, 2009

Mexico's Cartel Criminals Manipulate Police Intelligence

By Jerry Brewer

Proactive security and organized crime interdiction in Mexico is being seriously compromised in at least three critical facets of national security.  Those being military, diplomatic and police intelligence capabilities.  The main issue that prevents the use and deployment of sound intelligence initiatives in Mexico is simply trust.

The murders of government officials, police, and military throughout Mexico are not an exaggeration of an ungovernable situation nationwide or along the U.S. border.  The use of strategic and tactical intelligence as a prelude to decision and action within Mexican enforcement circles is often challenged by unauthorized disclosure.  Expected damage from such leaks is resulting in rivers of blood and associated carnage.  Much of this attributed to the execution of clandestine sources of narco-trafficker informers.

Twelve bodies of off-duty military intelligence officers dumped in Michoacan state, ambushed and executed by the La Familia cartel in July of this year, are graphic examples of the cartel’s reach through compromised intelligence elements.  Politicians of several Michoacan cities that included seven mayors and a state prosecutor were arrested and jailed on charges that included their protection of the cartel.  An arrest warrant for federal lawmaker Julio Godoy, of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the half-brother of Michoacan state Governor Leonel Godoy, was also issued.

These arrests resulted in a string of attacks on federal officers by cartel soldiers utilizing grenades and automatic weapons.  These attacks not only occurred at police stations, but too at hotels where many were staying in three states.  Mexican intelligence sources revealed that personnel in more than 80 of ”Michoacan’s 113 municipalities are mixed up at some level with narcos.”

Intelligence-led policing, albeit with the inadequacies and barriers that impede information flows, intelligence sharing, and potential comprise of the product, is a necessary component of enforcement-oriented interdiction. This especially true in the infiltration and dismantling of organized criminal hierarchies. Sources of information to include clandestine, as well as open source information, that euphemistically includes “snitches” for profit, are critical components of the intelligence cycle.  Once compromised, most sensitive source human elements become pursued targets by the cartel’s assassins.  This is also true of the corrupt politicians and other officials that have been threatened, bought, or otherwise induced to assist the cartels.  They are expendable when they become a threat, or when their purpose lapses the needs of the cartel.

Much of the retaliation has been directed at Mexican journalists exposing the massive reaches of the cartels with government officials, their movements, and other aspects of their identities and modus operandi.

Further examples of their strategic information acquisition recently resulted in gunmen attacking a Mexican State Attorney General and the Mayor of Eagle Pass, Texas, Chad Foster, outside of Piedras Negras.  Gunman sprayed bullets at a restaurant where they were dining.  Only a woman leaving the building was killed.  Last April, the police chief of Piedras Negras was killed.

Mexican narco-traffickers are continuing to push their influence south into Central and South America with their threats, intimidation, and other not so subtle attempts at public corruption.  This in an apparent effort, in part at least, to get closer to the sources of drug supply, and to better control transport routes.

Guatemalan and other Central American drug bosses have been summoned and approached by Mexican traffickers in proposed partnerships.  In fact, the Mexican cartels' tentacles of expansion by force have branched throughout Latin America.  The U.S. DEA recently announced that “there are more Mexican drug traffickers in South America today than at any time ever, period."

The massive weaponry of the ZETAS alone is convincing enough to most Latin American nations that do not possess the resources to interdict, that their bribes and superior profit margins are good reasons to look the other way and not interfere.  When a ZETA’S training camp a few miles south of the Mexican border, in Ixtcan, Guatemala, was discovered by police recently they found 500 grenades and thousands of bullets believed to be previously stolen from the Guatemalan Army. 

Law enforcement intelligence, irrespective of being compromised, must direct their collection and analytical efforts in the basic fundamentals of assessing threat to their respective homeland.  Cartels must work to survive and build support, as well as to enforce their position and will, regardless of opposition.  A variety of subversive strategies will be used to psychologically induce voluntary compliance with their criminal agendas. 

They must recruit, organize and train; as well as infiltrate key government organizations.  Too, they must establish their own cellular intelligence operations and support networks.  In a sense, they must establish a counter-state that parallels established authority.  Intelligence is clearly in the eyes of the beholder.

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Jerry Brewer is C.E.O. of Criminal Justice International Associates, a global risk mitigation firm headquartered in Miami, Florida.  His website is located at www.cjiausa.org.