Desperation Route - investigative series on the border

In March, I traveled to Arizona and Sonora to research a series on border culture for the International Relations and Security Network.

We've completed the piece, christened Desperation Route, and it is now available on the ISN Special Reports site.

There are four parts: Drugs and Vengeance; Armed for Corruption; Getting Across; and, Meeting the Smugglers. Each piece is a stand alone but considered a four-part investigation.

Thank you to the editors at ISN for your hard work!

Now, back to the MS-13 blog...

The Locals of Douglas/Agua Prieta

Agua Prieta, Sonora - just across the border from Douglas, Az - is perhaps the only Mexican border town that hasn't seen astronomical violence.

Even in the next town over, in Naco, men find time to corner one another and spray pick ups with hundreds of bullets.

But not in Agua Prieta. This is a town where everyone knows the name "El Chapo" - the head of the so-called Sinaloa Cartel - and no one knows the name "Calderón" - the president of Mexico.

El Chapo keeps a strong grip on Agua Prieta, preventing all but what many consider a normal level of violence.

About a year and a half ago, there were a few days when local cops found bodies here and there, but that was soon over. It was more of a message to anyone even thinking about trying to take over Agua Prieta: just keep thinking.

The locals in Douglas don't know much about gun smuggling. And they don't know much about the violence that rages across Mexico. Many of them get on with their daily lives, interestingly unaware of what's going on just to the east in El Paso/Juarez, or to the west in Nogales.

There is one local, however, who knows more about gun smuggling across the Douglas border than anyone else. He owns the only gun store in town.

"I get five thousand dollar bribes every week," he told me yesterday as an opening statement to what turned out to be a 45 minute monologue on why he keeps to the law and how the guys at the ATF - Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms - won't leave him alone.

And with good reason. While staying well within the law, he can sell all the ammunition he wants to corrupt Mexican cops. Its such a large loophole that the ATF has asked him nicely not to sell to the Mexican cops.

Within the law, he can sell as many "long guns" as he wants. These are the so-called "weapons of choice" - the AR-15 variations and AK-47s.

About a year ago, he sold between five and ten long guns to a couple guys - nothing illegal about it - and some of the guns were used in Naco at a shoot out. When the guns traced back to his shop, the ATF agents on the case could only get the name and information of the men who bought the guns, but not the men who smuggled them across the border. This gray area - called the gray market - is where the legal trail ends, and the black market begins. Again, the gun dealer is just running a business.

If a guy comes into the store, obviously a gang banger or an otherwise sketchy individual, and wants to buy a gun, there's nothing the gun dealer can do if the guy checks out. Refusing a sale might get the gun dealer into trouble, especially if the customer wants to start talking about discrimination.

Back at the Border Mart, there is no talk of guns or drugs, really. People come and go, and "coyotes", known as "polleros" or chicken herders, often come in for a quick stop after a long day of smuggling people into the US.

Today, I'm heading back into Agua Prieta to learn more about how and why this town has managed through the recent trying times of violence, the economy, and a new feeling from the gringos who don't seem to want them any more.

Maybe I'll find someone who knows the president's name, not Obama (everyone knows him) but Calderón.

Juarez: Calderon's Big Bet

According to the Mexican government, nearly 8,000 soldiers will take on at least three mexican DTOs fighting for control of Juarez: Sinaloa, La Familia, and the Juarez Cartel.

As of this blog post, some 800 have already arrived, and the rest are on the way.

What a way to begin March: a month that could possibly be the bloodiest we've seen on record for Juarez.

This border city has registered the highest number of so-called "narco-executions" in the country, with 2,750 in the past 14 months.

Nearly 8,000 soldiers will be used to not only secure one city, but completely remove all presence of any drug trafficking organization from Juarez, said president Calderon. That's a big bet.

This is the first time he's poured this size of a force into one city. As we watch the fall out, I think it will be interesting to consider the outcome if Calderon does not succeed.

Borrowed from the idea of a failed state, the idea of a failed city could be one that has descended into anarchy, where most law abiding citizens leave, and those that remain are willing to work within a new system, full of criminals, vigilante gangs, the wretched, and run by one drug overlord.

This is a worst-case scenario. Best-case: Juarez becomes a city where the Mexican government tried and failed to exercise sovereignty within its own territory.

Unfortunately, the path to either conclusion above, or one where Calderon's bet pays off, and Juarez becomes a peaceful place, is one littered with bodies.

At some point, someone has to win. If it's not Calderon, then one DTO will have to triumph over the rest. And it's hard to see how three or more of these groups could come to some sort of time-share scheme for the plaza, or some sort of compromise. There's simply too much money at stake, and the nature of Mexican organized crime is that alliances never last as long as conflict.

If the Mexican military cannot save Juarez, we will watch as the various DTOs, vying for control, slowly and steadily rip the city apart, along the way rendering it ungovernable, insecure, and ultimately a black hole of death and violence just south of the US border.

Calderon has thrown down the gauntlet, making Juarez the new focus of his own personal War on Drugs.

On one hand, it is a very risky maneuver. And if he loses, he loses big. Mexican organized crime will have won one of the biggest battles to date in the war Calderon has waged since he entered office.

On the other hand, he's knocking on Obama's back door with the realities of violence in Mexico.

Calderon knows that bloodshed on the border will be a headline story for mainstream media in the US.

I can already see Lou Dobbs, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, O'Reily, and others invite a cadre of "experts" who will all weigh on on Calderon's big bet, and who will either admonish or support Obama for not getting more involved.

Calderon has repeatedly asked Washington for help. To date, his requests have been answered with some small results: the Merida Iniative, Project Reckoning, and Operation Xcellerator, to name a few. Obama is also slowly moving towards banning assault rifles again.

But even when we put all this together, it still is not enough.

How many more bodies will have to pile up before Washington realizes that Mexico can't do it alone? Calderon is determined to win, but if he loses, Obama will have no choice but to get involved and make bets of his own.

Citizen Command of Juarez - update

Update 20/1: The Mexican army has declared an alert in the state of Chihuahua due to the formation of what it calls a "new criminal group." The army assumes that this group may turn into something similiar to "La Familia" a civil justice group in Michoacan that eventually fell into the services of one drug trafficking organization, used to wipe out members of a rival criminal group. If the Citizen Command of Juarez does begin working with a DTO, it will be very interesting to see how that plays out. Either way, the future does not bode well for Juarez.

Citizen Command of Juarez

Over the weekend, a militia group in Juarez popped out of nowhere. They call themselves the Citizen Command of Juarez (CCJ), and through a number of emails sent to newspapers and other media, this group claims it will kill one criminal every 24 hours until there is peace again in Juarez.

This group is allegedly supported by local business men who are “tired” of the impunity for criminals in Juarez.

Leaders in the local business community have negated any connection to this popular militia.

As many know, Juarez suffered some of the worst violence in Mexico in 2008, and it’s likely to experience a similar stretch of murder and mayhem in 2009.

The birth of this militia may not take the group farther than a couple killings and maybe some more media play before they are stopped. Cleary, the men this group wants to target are untouchable – too powerful to worry about a bunch of civilians with (American) guns.

There is one significant point to make, however. When citizens have enough evidence to support the idea that the cops and the military can’t contain crime and violence, the argument to take justice into one’s own hands becomes stronger. Given what Mexico faces in 2009, groups like CCJ will spread, if they haven’t already…

A new map for the US?

The FBI recently released information (see Washington Times article) that their agents in Texas believe Los Zetas have extended their operational control to north of the Mexico-Texas border. Zetas operating in Texas each operate in distinct areas, organized and divided to reflect the various border crossings or "plazas" at Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros, and others.

In light of this not-very-surprising-information, I thought I would post here a new map of the US, sent over by a friend in Texas.

Pictures are worth a thousand words...

The Other Border

With so much focus on the US-Mexico border, it is easy to forget about Mexico’s border with Guatemala. It is one that in the coming months and years will likely become a concern and a serious problem if Mexico is forced to fight a two-front war against organized crime.

Two problematic areas have been established.

One is in southern Guatemala where the Suchiate river largely defines the Guatemala-Mexico border. This is an illegal immigrant corridor through which hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans pass into the Mexican state of Chiapas.

And it is not just Latinos. On 3 April, six adult male Iraqis were apprehended after having crossed the Suchiate river on a raft holding falsified Dutch and Greek passports purchased in Guatemala. A total of 29 Iraquis were arrested in Chiapas in 2007.

Those who help Central Americans and other cross Mexico’s two borders are called “polleros” or sometimes “coyotes”. From 2000 to 2005, some 15,000 polleros were arrested in Mexico, and according to the Mexican National Migration Institute, 3,739 were prosecuted. The gap between arrests and prosecutions indicates a high level of complicity between polleros and the authorities tasked with stopping them.

A similar high number of arrests and low number of prosecutions continues through today, indicating the reports published concerning arrests of polleros or illegal migrants should be taken lightly as it is likely arresting officers will take a bribe. This system if catch and release then has served to enrich corrupt police officers more than it has to stop illegal border crossings into Mexico.

The other problematic area is in northern Guatemala in the department of Peten, where a largely lawless border area facilitates the ongoing construction of clandestine airstrips and the resulting movement of illicit cargo across the border into Mexico. It is an ideal smuggling route as there is relatively little government presence in the Peten and even less on the border.

Five principle border crossing routes have been identified by Guatemalan authorities: Pipiles, Santa Rosita, Bonanza, crossing into Chiapas, and El Repasto and El Sacrificio crossing into Campeche state. Near these border crossings in Guatemala are any number of landing strips, where men connected with Mexican trucking companies arrive at prescheduled times to pick up the cargo and transport to distribution centers further inside Mexico.

The Guatemalan government believes the Sinaloa Federation, the Gulf Cartel, and the Juarez Cartel all have agents working in the Peten region to move drugs into Mexico. These groups and others have worked in the Peten with near impunity for nearly a decade. So far, the Guatemalan government is powerless to stop them and help from the United States and Mexico is not on the horizon.

Together, both of these corridors represent the number one reason why Guatemala is a magnet for drug trafficking and illegal immigration. The combined result is more than the state of Chiapas, historically one of the most poor Mexican states, can handle.

With all eyes fixated to the north where President Calderón has focused the might of the Mexican military to combat organized crime, there is little help coming from the federal level to assist with what is clearly another major national problem in Mexico. It is one that has a clear spillover effect in the United States, the ultimate destination of both the drugs and humans that pass from Central America across Mexico’s other border to ultimately arrive on the northern shores of the Rio Grande.

Barrio Azteca borderland gang

Five leaders of the Barrio Azteca gang were arrested on 10 January in a sting operation organized on intelligence gathered from a four-year long operation to unravel prison gangs on the US-Mexico border. The Barrio Azteca gang started in the southwest Texas prison system and quickly spread to the streets of El Paso and the prison system in Ciudad Juarez, across the border. Linked to the Carrillo-Fuentes drug trafficking organization, also known as the Juarez Cartel, this gang is exemplary of how powerful organized criminal groups in Mexico outsource their security and dirty work to local gangs.

But the Barrio Azteca is not exactly small time. It was founded in 1986 within the US prison system and quickly spread to the Segundo Barrio neighborhood of El Paso, where it boosted membership among the Mexican immigrant community there before moving into the prison system in Ciudad Juarez, where it may have up to 2,000 members by now.

After making a link with the Carrillo-Fuentes DTO, based in Ciudad Juarez, the Barrio Azteca gang negotiated a deal to receive drugs at a discounted rate and the right to charge a fee to any retail-level dealer working on their turf in exchange for providing security services for the Mexican DTO as well as helping with north-south movement of drugs, people, guns, etc as the DTO needed.

Through the Carrillo-Fuentes DTO, the Barrio Azteca gang is loosely connected with the Sinaloa Federation, a grouping of a number of powerful drug trafficking organizations, making its role in El Paso all the more important. Much of the black tar heroin coming out of Mexico is smuggled through El Paso and on to Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, and Chicago.

Considering Barrio Azteca’s ties with the Sinaloa Federation in El Paso, it is not a jump to consider how other street gangs in other border towns, such as San Diego, or Laredo, have become options for outsourcing security and local-level drug dealing as well as intelligence gathering. The Mara Salvatrucha in Texas and the L-Street gang in Los Angeles come to mind.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Arizona, any illegal immigrants caught in the ArizonaMexico will be subjected to due process and could receive up to 180 days in prison for their efforts before being deported. The minimum is fifteen days. This program, called “Streamline” by the Border Patrol, seems to already be headed toward the realm of unintended consequences. desert on the border with

Already underway in the Yuma region of Arizona and the Del Rio region of Texas, this program feeds illegal immigrants into the local prison populations may serve best to offer gangs like the Barrio Aztecas a buffet of menu options for new recruits. In Arizona alone, this program and others placed 378,000 illegal immigrants in prison between 30 September 2006 and 30 September 2007. After 180 days, converted deportees will likely cross the border again, this time not to find a low wage job, but as mules for crossing drugs into the United States.

Digging into Blackwater USA

Hugo Chavez has lost the referendum to vote his reform package into law. And some news has surfaced that a group out of Serbia might have had something to do with the “no” vote, but more on that next week. We’re also looking in why the RC-26B aircraft is not part of the Merida Initiative package and why it should play a central role.

But for now, we're digging into Blackwater USA...

When two US government inspectors were asked by a US Border Patrol Agent if they were US citizens, they replied, “yes.” It was all they needed to enter the country at a land crossing between US and Mexico. No government issued form of identification was requested. The Border Patrol Agent never even got up from his seat, located some 10 feet away.

The agent obviously didn’t know that the two investigators were working for the Government Accountability Office on a report requested by the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security. The report, entitled, “Despite Progress, Weaknesses in Traveler Inspections Exist at Our Nation’s Ports of Entry,” found that both the Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol had some serious issues to overcome, including communication between field offices and headquarters, and training.

Training is an expensive process the US government would rather outsource. It has been well documented that contracts awarded by the Department of Defense (DOD) have focused on training Iraqi policemen and others in the Middle East, but what about training US agents inside the United States?

Such considerations have been on the books for Blackwater USA since at least 2005, when the company’s president at the time, Gary Jackson, testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security in May of that year. “Just as the private sector has responded in moving mail and packages around the world more efficiently, so too can Blackwater respond to the customs’ and Border Patrol’s emerging and compelling training needs,” Jackson told Committee members.

Since early 2007, Blackwater has worked hard to lobby the right politicians in San Diego County for a license to operate a new training facility located in Potrero, California. A number of news stories have outlined the battle between Blackwater and local residents, numbering around 850 in the rural border town community, who don’t want the so-called “mercenary training camp” installed in their backyard.

What’s more, the training camp would be located less than ten miles from the US-Mexico border. The selection of the site, according to Blackwater, has nothing to do with the company’s interest in increased involvement in border patrol and the United States’ efforts to combat narco-trafficking on the US-Mexico border.

But this base’s location become more interesting given the results of a recent DOD bidding process for a US$15 billion dollar contract to combat narcoterrorism.

On 14 September, Blackwater USA, along with four other government contractors received slices of a multi-billion dollar contract awarded by the Pentagons’ Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office. Presumably, Blackwater will help with the development of surveillance technology used to stop “narcoterrorists” crossing into the United States from Mexico.

These facts, when considered together with the news that military contractors will be used to train Mexican law enforcement officials as part of the Merida Initiative, or Plan Mexico, draws a narrow bead on Blackwater as a likely candidate for a bidding process that will award the contract to train Mexicans how to fly the surveillance helicopters used to patrol the Mexican side of the border.

If this is the case, we should consider two more questions. First, how will the Mexican government react to Blackwater's presence so close to their border and on Mexican soil to train Mexican law enforcement officials. Second, in the long run, how involved will companies such as Blackwater become in protecting the US-Mexico border? As we've seen in Iraq, mission creep is tough to avoid.