Monday, August 16, 2010

Will Gunboat Diplomacy lead Mexico to Legalize Drugs?

By Jerry Brewer

Mexican drug trafficking organizations and other Latin American criminal insurgents, who have emphatically defied Mexico’s rule of law and enforcement efforts against their barbaric onslaught, have done so by confronting enforcement and interdiction efforts with grenades, automatic weapons and now bombs.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon made his proposal to debate legalizing drugs on Aug. 3. He later clarified he did not favor legalization, but that he is “open to the debate.”

Mexico decriminalized the possession of small quantities of drugs in 2009, in an effort to focus enforcement activities on detaining drug dealers instead of drug users.

Two Mexican cardinals endorsed Calderon’s effort to open a debate on the merits of drug legalization, this as the month of July’s statistics indicated the most violent month of Calderon's term, “with 1,234 recorded deaths attributed to organized crime.”

Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for the Mexican populace that includes law enforcement, military, government officials, and journalists.  An estimated 28,000 people have been killed in Mexico since President Calderon launched an aggressive enforcement initiative in late 2006 against organized crime in their homeland.

The naiveté and absurdity, of those who simply knee-jerk the answer as “legalize it,” misses some of the basic principles of the rule of law in a democracy that so eludes too many nations in Latin America that are influenced by “leftist revolution,” and that also face the challenges of counter-drugs, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism efforts.  Let’s be clear on the facts of which some will point the finger at Calderon for the death and violence that includes many families — women and children.  Too, it has “spilled over” into the United States regardless of how anyone chooses to sugarcoat it.

As far back as 2005, “Out-and-out terrorism on the border near Laredo” in the Houston Chronicle (http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2005_3895397) manifested itself for a world audience to clearly see for the first time. 

On July 28, 2005 a brutal gun battle in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico between armed criminal groups “included unusually advanced weapons." The combatants used an arsenal that combined automatic weapons, bazookas and hand grenades in the attack on an apparent safe house of one drug trafficking organization (DTO) by those of another.

Actually, hundreds of different caliber shells were subsequently found at the war zone-like scene, along with AK-47 rifles, handguns and ski masks. And if that is not disturbing enough, a state policeman who asked not to be identified said that investigators found numerous photographs of municipal police officers at the residence — an apparent hit list of officials sentenced to death. Further intelligence revealed that each of the photographs listed the officer's name and assigned location, along with maps to their homes.

The erosion of local Mexican police jurisdiction had just begun. It even forced the temporary closing of the U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo.

Immediately following the shootout in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico's presidential spokesman at the time, Ruben Aguilar, said that federal efforts to stop the violence in Nuevo Laredo "have been successful." But to those without rose-colored glasses, the attacks and the death toll continued to mount at an alarming rate, as did the sophistication and firepower of the DTOs.

Officials in 2005 were quick to call this a war between rival drug cartels (as most still do in 2010), and they brazenly stated that “Americans are not targets of the violence.”  Yet U.S. Border Patrol agents were being fired upon, and U.S. border area police officials were witnessing Mexican paramilitary types escorting drug shipments north onto U.S. soil.  The targeting of law enforcement officials on both sides of the border, and specifically the planning and routine execution of Nuevo Laredo police officers and city officials, was clearly showing that the specter of terrorism was hiding out in the open along our national border with Mexico (http://www.thewhatsupradioprogram.com/audio/050824JB.mp3).

Two U.S. Border Patrol agents had recently been wounded near Nogales, Arizona — ambushed and shot by assailants dressed in black commando-type clothing.  More than 50 rounds were fired at the agents.  To aid the perpetrators escape, one apparently remained behind and used a portable radio to pinpoint the agents' location for snipers hidden nearby.  Authorities said the gunmen fled using military-style cover and concealment tactics, while investigators later found commando clothing and other "sophisticated equipment" at the sneak attack site.

This shooting was just another in a rising number of assaults on Border Patrol agents in the Tucson-Nogales sector.  Since October 1, 2004, 196 assaults on agents, including 24 shootings, have been recorded.  Making things worse, there was a reported US$50,000 bounty on Border Patrol agents, and state and local police officers.

In addition to the concerns of attacks on law enforcement officers, members of the “Texas Border Sheriffs' Coalition” feared that terrorists could easily slip across the U.S.-Mexico border and carry out deadly attacks.  Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez at the time was quoted as saying, "If drug traffickers can take 3,000 or 4,000 pounds of marijuana across our bridges imagine a load of bombs.”

Rick Flores, then Webb County Sheriff, said, "Staging a terrorist attack in Laredo (Texas), America's largest inland port, would be very simple. We've got 7,000 trucks crossing on a daily basis. What's to say that someone won't stick something underneath one of the trucks and have it blow up right in the middle of the bridges?  Or terrorists could smuggle across a small dirty bomb, which would spread radioactive material across South Texas."

These Texas officials, in 2005, were expressing real fear about being outmanned and outgunned — and rightfully so.

Those 2005 attacks on Mexican and U.S. soil, along with the paramilitary sightings, should have convinced U.S. and Mexican officials, as well as the public at large, that those were terrorist-style attacks clearly designed to threaten and intimidate anyone who dare challenge them. Must there be suicide-homicide and related bombers to convince us that these were terrorist acts?  Car bombings would follow in 2010.

In Nuevo Laredo nearly 200 people were murdered in 2005, and other victims simply vanished.  The statistics for 2006 were already mounting.  What was just as appalling is that nearly 20 police officers, including a chief of police, plus a Nuevo Laredo city councilman, had been gunned down in a city of around 335,000 people (http://mexidata.info/id790.html).  Omar Pimentel had been selected as Nuevo Laredo’s new police chief, replacing Alejandro Dominguez who was killed in a hail of gunfire on his first day on the job.  Pimentel brought to his new position an experienced administrative background, but a lack of initiative to confront the inherent problems of the city. 

Pimentel stated that he himself was “not looking for bad guys to fight, nights on patrol, (or) raids” — and no crime scenes for him.  “I have simply come here as a political figure for the Mayor.  The Mayor told me I was not going to get directly involved in any police matters,” he stated.

The handwriting on the wall of fear itself by enforcement officials in the Mexican nation had been born.  And almost in humor of such carnage, many officials of Mexico and the U.S. refused to use the term “narcoterrorism.”

In all fairness to local Mexican police, there could be no reasonable expectation of any police force in Mexico having, or acquiring on its own, the resources necessary to effectively fight these narcoterrorist gangs and groups that were so well armed, trained and financed.  They posed an immediate threat to anyone who attempted to stop or control them. They had clearly and often demonstrated that they were bold and resourceful and would intimidate, kidnap, torture and kill anyone who was in conflict with them.

Misdiagnosing and ignoring the symptoms of this plague in 2005 would continue to prove disastrous, for the organized criminals and wannabes-to-follow would exploit every weakness perceived in pursuit of their goals.

To those of us that have seen and experienced some of the mountains of graphic crime scene photos of these murderous terror representatives, the human eviscerations, dismemberment, inhumane torture deaths, and beheadings in which human heads were posed in serial killer modus operandi on fence posts and similar displayed locations — drug legalization is simply not an option.

Attempting to stem or interrupt major sources of profits through drug legalization, or a way to improve perceived tarnished and failing anti-drug strategies, will not end the culture of lawlessness, death, and impunity, nor will it bring about the rule of law.  The lack of respect for the law will simply continue, with the law and its enforcers seen as things that can be challenged by superior weapons and savagery — regardless of the illegal contraband of choice that must continue to flow for illicit profit.

Debating the pros and cons of drug legalization in Mexico, the U.S., and other Latin American nations does not address the terrorist nature and ritual murder and attacks on government, police, military, and innocent victims.  The world history of plain and simple anarchy is far more complex than the greed for massive drug revenue by organized criminals.  Latin America, as well as the world in total must unite and stand firm on respect for human life and dignity of all.

Mexico must not surrender to the drug war, or allow the hedonistic values of a drug-use culture, valued at a modest US$30 billion (estimated) alone, to surrender their moral principles at gunpoint.  The tens of thousands of victims of the carnage, as well as the valiant and dedicated efforts by those enforcing laws and those that have lost their lives in doing so, must not be in vain to simply disrupt profits.

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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.