{"id":13964,"date":"2011-08-08T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=13964"},"modified":"2011-08-07T21:18:06","modified_gmt":"2011-08-07T20:18:06","slug":"us-expands-its-presence-in-mexico-ramping-up-drug-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/08\/us-expands-its-presence-in-mexico-ramping-up-drug-war\/","title":{"rendered":"US Expands Its Presence in Mexico, Ramping Up Drug War"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States is expanding its role in\u00a0Mexico<\/a>\u2019s bloody fight against\u00a0drug trafficking<\/a>\u00a0organizations, sending new\u00a0C.I.A.<\/a>\u00a0operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of \u00a0turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results.<\/p>\n

In recent weeks, small numbers of C.I.A. operatives and American civilian military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, where, for the first time, security officials from both countries work side by side in collecting information about drug cartels and helping plan operations. Officials are also looking into embedding a team of American contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit.<\/p>\n

Officials on both sides of the border say the new efforts have been devised to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil, and to prevent advanced American surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of corruption.<\/p>\n

\u201cA sea change has occurred over the past years in how effective Mexico and U.S. intelligence exchanges have become,\u201d said Arturo Sarukh\u00e1n, Mexico\u2019s ambassador to the United States. \u201cIt is underpinned by the understanding that transnational organized crime can only be successfully confronted by working hand in hand, and that the outcome is as simple as it is compelling:\u00a0 we will together succeed or together fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latest steps come three years after the United States began increasing its security assistance to Mexico with the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative and tens of millions of dollars from the Defense Department. They also come a year before elections in both countries, when\u00a0President Obama<\/a>may confront questions about the threat of violence spilling over the border, and President\u00a0Felipe Calder\u00f3n<\/a>\u2019s political party faces a Mexican electorate that is almost certainly going to ask why it should stick with a fight that has left nearly 45,000 people dead.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pressure is going to be especially strong in Mexico, where I expect there will be a lot more raids, a lot more arrests and a lot more parading drug traffickers in front of cameras,\u201d said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution. \u201cBut I would also expect a lot of questioning of Merida, and some people asking about the way the money is spent, or demanding that the government send it back to the gringos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mexico has become ground zero in the American counternarcotics fight since its cartels have cornered the market and are responsible for more than 80 percent of the drugs that enter the United States. American counternarcotics assistance there has grown faster in recent years than to Afghanistan and Colombia. And in the last three years, officials said, exchanges of intelligence between the United States and Mexico have helped security forces there capture or kill some 30 mid- to high-level drug traffickers, compared with just two such arrests in the previous five years.<\/p>\n

The United States has trained nearly 4,500 new federal police agents and assisted in conducting wiretaps, running informants and interrogating suspects. The Pentagon has provided sophisticated equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters, and in recent months it has begun flying unarmed surveillance drones over Mexican soil to track drug kingpins.<\/p>\n

Still, it is hard to say much real progress has been made in crippling the brutal cartels or stemming the flow of drugs and guns across the border. Mexico\u2019s justice system remains so weakened by corruption that even the most notorious criminals have not been successfully prosecuted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government has argued that the number of deaths in Mexico is proof positive that the strategy is working and that the cartels are being weakened,\u201d said Nik Steinberg, a specialist on Mexico at Human Rights Watch. \u201cBut the data is indisputable \u2014 the violence is increasing, human rights abuses have skyrocketed and accountability both for officials who commit abuses and alleged criminals is at rock bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mexican and American officials involved in the fight against organized crime do not see it that way. They say the efforts begun under President Obama are only a few years old, and that it is too soon for final judgments. Dan Restrepo, Mr. Obama\u2019s senior Latin American adviser, refused to talk about operational changes in the security relationship, but said, \u201cI think we are in a fundamentally different place than we were three years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

A senior Mexican official, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed. \u201cThis is the game-changer in degrading transnational organized crime,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cIt can\u2019t be a two-, three-, four-, five- or six-year policy. For this policy investment to work, it has to be sustained long-term.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several Mexican and American security analysts compared the challenges of helping Mexico rebuild its security forces and civil institutions \u2014 crippled by more than seven decades under authoritarian rule \u2014 to similar tests in Afghanistan. They see the United States fighting alongside a partner it needs but does not completely trust.<\/p>\n

Though the new United States ambassador to Mexico was plucked from an assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Obama administration bristles at such comparisons, saying Mexico\u2019s growing economy and functioning, though fragile, institutions put it far ahead of Afghanistan. Instead, administration officials more frequently compare Mexico\u2019s struggle to the one Colombia began some 15 years ago.<\/p>\n

Among the most important lessons they have learned, they say, is that in almost any fight against organized crime, things tend to get worse before they get better.<\/p>\n

When violence spiked last year around Mexico\u2019s industrial capital, Monterrey,\u00a0Mr. Calder\u00f3n\u2019s government asked the United States for more access to sophisticated surveillance technology and expertise. After months of negotiations, the United States established an intelligence post on a northern Mexican military base, moving Washington beyond its traditional role of sharing information to being more directly involved in gathering it.<\/p>\n

American officials declined to provide details about the work being done by the American team of fewer than two dozen Drug Enforcement Administration agents, C.I.A. officials and retired military personnel members from the Pentagon\u2019s Northern Command. For security reasons, they asked The New York Times not to disclose the location of the compound.<\/p>\n

But the officials said the compound had been modeled after \u201cfusion intelligence centers\u201d that the United States operates in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups, and that the United States would strictly play a supporting role.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Mexicans are in charge,” said one American military official. \u201cIt\u2019s their show. We\u2019re all about technical support.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two countries have worked in lock step on numerous high-profile operations, including the continuing investigation of the February murder of Jaime J. Zapata, an American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.<\/p>\n

Mexico\u2019s federal police chief, Genaro Garc\u00eda Luna, put a helicopter in the air within five minutes after receiving a call for help from Mr. Zapata\u2019s partner, the authorities said. Then he invited American officials to the police intelligence center \u2014 an underground location known as \u201cthe bunker\u201d \u2014 to work directly with Mexican security forces in tracking down the suspects.<\/p>\n

Mexican officials hand-carried shell casings recovered from the scene of the shooting to Washington for forensics tests, allowed American officials to conduct their own autopsy of the agent\u2019s body and shipped the agent\u2019s bullet-battered car to the United States for inspection.<\/p>\n

In another operation last week, the Drug Enforcement Administration and a Mexican counternarcotics police unit collaborated on an operation that led to the arrest of Jos\u00e9 Antonio Hern\u00e1ndez Acosta, a suspected drug trafficker. The authorities believe he is responsible for hundreds of deaths in the border city of Ciudad Ju\u00e1rez, Mexico, including the murders of two Americans employed at the United States Consulate there.<\/p>\n

While D.E.A. field officers were not on the scene \u2014 the Mexicans still draw the line at that \u2014 the Americans helped develop tips and were in contact with the Mexican unit almost every minute of the five-hour manhunt, according to a senior American official in Mexico. The unit, of about 50 officers, is the focus of another potentially ground-breaking plan that has not yet won approval. Several former D.E.A. officials said the two countries were considering a proposal to embed a group of private security contractors \u2014 including retired D.E.A. agents and former Special Forces officers \u2014 inside the unit to conduct an on-the-job training academy that would offer guidance in conducting operations so that suspects can be successfully taken to court. Mexican prosecutors would also work with the unit, the Americans said.<\/p>\n

But a former American law enforcement official familiar with the unit described it as one good apple in a barrel of bad ones. He said it was based on a compound with dozens of other nonvetted officers, who provided a window on the challenges that the Mexican police continue to face.<\/p>\n

Some of the officers had not been issued weapons, and those who had guns had not been properly trained to use them. They were required to pay for their helmets and bulletproof vests out of their own pockets. And during an intense gun battle against one of Mexico\u2019s most vicious cartels, they had to communicate with one another on their cellphones because they had not been issued police radios. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of shocking,\u201d said Eric Olson of the Woodrow Wilson Center. \u201cMexico is just now learning how to fight crime in the midst of a major crime wave. It\u2019s like trying to saddle your horse while running the Kentucky Derby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 truth-out.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United States is expanding its role in Mexico\u2019s bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}